David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
My first experience with a computer wasn’t with a desktop machine or a game console. It was with an orange handheld device called a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. Many Gen Xers born in the early 70s can probably say the same thing.
A common problem with peel and stick vinyl tiles is separating. If you experience vinyl floor tiles separating, here’s how to keep it from happening again. And you may be able to fix it. If you can still get tiles to match, you even have several options for fixing it, depending on what you’re comfortable with.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?
You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, not retro enough to be cool again, isn’t its future. And it knows it.
K-Line was a manufacturer of O gauge electric trains and accessories from approximately 1980 to 2010. Its scrappy, value-oriented approach to the hobby endeared K-Line trains to many of its customers.
K-Line Electric Trains and Lionel tended to target one another in their advertisements. They referred to one another as “Brand K” and “Brand L.” In 2005, the rivalry turned to litigation, which eventually resulted in K-Line admitting wrongdoing, going out of business, and Lionel licensing and selling products under the K-Line name from 2006 to 2010.
Texas Instruments was supposed to dominate the home computer market in the 1980s. And on paper they had a good product. But things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for the Texas Instruments home computer, the TI-99/4A. And that’s why you probably don’t hear as much about it as you’d think you would.
TI entered the personal computer market in 1979 and had some success in the early 1980s. But Apple’s former management literally doesn’t remember competing with it.
Is your upload faster than your download with your Internet connection? This is a fairly obscure problem that seems to have started happening again. Here’s how to test to see if you’re actually having a problem, and how to fix it.
If your upload speed is slightly faster than your download speed, it’s not worth worrying about. On a symmetric Internet connection where the two are supposed to be the same, I expect to see them within about 10 percent of one another, and if download slightly outpaces upload, it’s not hurting anything. But if upload is faster when it’s supposed to be slower, something weird is going on.
The first desktop computer dates to earlier than you probably think. And officially at least, it was an accident. Great inventions often are. But it was surprisingly similar to desktop computers that followed it.
Design work on the first desktop computer commenced in 1969. Yes, you read that right. It predated the Apple II by several years, and the IBM Personal Computer and IBM compatibles by a good decade. And it wasn’t built in Silicon Valley either. But this ahead-of-its-time oddball is the direct ancestor of your modern desktop or laptop computer, right down to the Intel processor design.
Can you use Roku without wifi? In some cases you can, although depending on the circumstances, a Roku can certainly be less useful without wifi. Here’s what models work without wifi and what they can do for you.
How to restore Marx trains varies by model but many of the same principles apply universally. Let’s take a step by step look at how to restore a Marx 999 locomotive.
I think most people know the Nintendo NES was an 8-bit system. That tends to confuse people when it comes to the previous-generation system, the Atari 2600. Was Atari 2600 8 bit? Or something else?
The answer, of course, is that it depends.