Author: Dave Farquhar

How to disassemble a Sharpie

Dave Farquhar model railroading
How to disassemble a Sharpie

My wife and sons asked me how to disassemble a Sharpie. They were working on a craft project and wanted to recover the ink from some dried-out markers. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to do it, but with the right tools, it’s not difficult. Here’s how to take apart a Sharpie and recover the ink for use in crafts or hobbies.

Read more

Wire a Sakai O gauge switch

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Wire a Sakai O gauge switch

Sakai made a switch in the postwar era that looks a lot like a Lionel 1121 but acts like a Marx 1590. But if you use a Sakai control panel, it wires up differently from both of them. Here’s how to wire a Sakai O gauge switch.

The wiring diagram was on the back of the box, which you may not have anymore. I have a copy, as well as an explanation of how it works.

Read more

Statistical significance – why it matters

Dave Farquhar Writing
Statistical significance – why it matters

Statistical significance may be the most important concept you’ve never heard of. It takes more than knowing Mark Twain’s joke about statistics to know how to understand them. It’s easy to lie with statistics, after all. But it’s also not difficult to know when someone is lying with statistics.

Statistics work when you study a large enough segment of the population to be able to extrapolate with reasonable confidence of being accurate. Statistical significance is the key to measuring the quality of those statistics and the conclusions someone is making from them.

Read more

SMR hard drives

Dave Farquhar Hardware
SMR hard drives

Western Digital found itself in a dustup in the summer of 2020 because it shipped shingled media recording (SMR) hard drives as RAID and NAS drives. What is shingled media recording? What are SMR hard drives? And why should you avoid it in RAID? And should you avoid it in general use too?

Shingled media recording, or SMR, takes advantage of a quirk in the way drives write versus read that allows tracks to overlap, like shingles on a house. This increases storage and decreases cost, but decreases performance. Non-sequential writes, also known as random writes, suffer in performance greatly.

Read more

Folding at home GPU not running

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Is your Folding at home GPU not running? If your GPU won’t fold, there may be several reasons for it. Here’s how to troubleshoot your GPU, and how to know when you just need to be patient and wait for the work. Read more

Best video card for i5-3470

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Best video card for i5-3470

My oldest son wants to build up a computer on a budget. I think he wants something a little better than the laptop I got him a couple of years ago, but I think he’s also curious about what goes into building or upgrading a PC. Right now, it’s easy to find brand-name i5-3570 PCs for very little. With a video card and an SSD, they become very respectable machines. But what’s the best video card for an i5-3470?

The onboard video in an i5-3470 is roughly equivalent to a Geforce 210, which is about the cheapest discrete video card on the market today. You won’t see any noticeable improvement unless you put in something at least equivalent to a GT 710 or R7 240.

Read more

Are Lionel trains AC or DC?

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Are Lionel trains AC or DC?

Are Lionel trains AC or DC? That’s a trick question. Traditionally, Lionel trains run on AC but there are exceptions. And even when Lionel trains run on AC, they sometimes do some DC trickery. Let’s explain.

Traditional Lionel trains from before 1969 can generally run on either AC or DC, but are better off running on AC. Some Lionel trains sold in discount stores in the 70s and 80s did run on DC, as a cost reduction measure.

Read more

How to get an entry level cyber security job

Dave Farquhar Careers
How to get an entry level cyber security job

Unlike most of the job market, cyber security is a growing field with no signs of slowing down, lots of upward mobility, and good prospects for getting a raise once in a while. At the time of this writing, there are 500,000 security vacancies in the United States alone. There’s little hope of filling most of them. One of them could be you, if only someone would discover you. Here’s how to get an entry level cyber security job.

There’s no proven formula for getting into the cyber security field. But through a combination of networking and saying the right things on your resume and in the interview process, you can get into this field. Someone less smart than you has a security job. With some perseverance, you can get in too.

Read more

Qualys false positives

Dave Farquhar security
Qualys false positives

I’m not sure any three words strike more fear into the hearts and minds of security analysts than the words “Qualys false positives.” Some number of false positives is unavoidable. But the perceived number of false positives is usually an order of magnitude larger than the real number of false positives. Here’s how to estimate how many you should have, how to investigate them, and break the gridlock.

Read more

Dell Optiplex 3010 upgrades

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Dell Optiplex 3010 upgrades

I picked up a Dell Optiplex 3010 for cheap cheap over the weekend. It was a nice computer for its day, especially in the right configuration. But its day was a long time ago at this point. That said, it definitely has upgrade potential to get more life out of it.

The Optiplex 3010 is still fast enough to be serviceable, and can take an SSD, a video card upgrade, and up to 16 GB of RAM. This configuration will run Windows 10 well and even works surprisingly well for midrange gaming.

Read more