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How to remove the tailgate trim on an MG5 EV

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I love my MG5 EV (2022, pre-facelift long-range) but the manual is a bit terrible - I suspect it had to be hastily translated from Chinese by someone who was not given enough time or money to do it properly.  When I needed to replace one of the bulbs for the rear number plate, it was both vague and occaisionally outright wrong! Hopefully this description of the process is both more accurate and a little more detailed. If anything is unclear here, do get in touch and I'll try and improve it. Tool list 10mm spanner or socket to disconnect the 12V battery. Trim removal tool (or improvise one, see instructions below). Phillips #3 screwdriver. Large flat-bladed screwdriver. Method Open the tailgate . It's tricky to do this after you've disconnected the battery, so get it open now. Note that you'll need to access the tailgate end at the open height, so if you're a little shorter having something to stand on might be useful. Disconnect the 12V battery at the negative ter
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How old are my drawers? Researching second-hand furniture.

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Over the time I spent living in furnished rented houses, I became very tired of cheap furniture. The kind of cheap furniture that only landlords buy. The kind of cheap furniture that IKEA makes for the sole purpose of making you buy the more expensive one because it suddenly seems like a good deal compared the the bottom-of-the-range model. In other words, new  cheap furniture.  I'm sure reasonable-value new furniture exists. I'm aware that there's a reason cheap furniture is the way it is: making furniture out of lightweight honeycomb materials or any of the wood-and-resin based particle boards is a more efficient use of materials, lighter to transport, and easier to manufacture than using traditional techniques. I'm sure that the wood resources of the world couldn't support the quantity of home furnishing we currently use if it was made from solid boards. But I'd had enough of drawer bottoms made from what appeared to be cereal boxes, and objects that had been
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Why I got lost - a personal history of navigation errors

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Another post about mountaineering, but this time I'm admitting some failures: times where I became what is sometimes referred to as "navigationally challenged".  This is a phrase used by mapreading types to avoid saying that they're lost. 'Lost' is a word that's bleak in an outdoor context. Lost is the thing where you can't work out which side of the map you should be looking at. Lost is when you realise you haven't been paying attention for an hour. In a mountaineering context, lost is when people call Mountain Rescue to get them off the hill. And it's ok to call MR for help - that's what they're for. But in the UK at least, they're volunteers and I don't want to use them if I don't need to. An unexpected injury or medical emergency can happen to anyone - but having to navigate is not unexpected. If you're going out to the mountains, you will have to navigate. Do it enough, and you'll navigate wrong. The important t
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How to defeat the forgetting curve - a practical guide to revising for your exams

In total, I spent something like 18 years in formal education. That's a lot of time, and over those years, I learned many things, working all the way up from the alphabet to writing a master's thesis. One thing that I don't exactly remember being taught is how to organise one's work effectively. Certainly, there were versions of this along the way: being given a homework planner at secondary, and project management lectures at university - but these never quite laid out a system for organisation, and especially revision, that stuck with me. In various 'how to revise' sessions at secondary school. Invariably, these involved some external speaker (presumably charging cash-strapped schools a healthy fee for the privilege) where they showed you this diagram: image/svg+xml
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