Author: Dave Farquhar

Gotek floppy emulator for retro PCs

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Gotek floppy emulator for retro PCs

Gotek floppy emulators are a useful piece of hardware, especially for retro PCs. The problem is they suffer from poor (or entirely missing) instructions. If you mess around with old PCs a lot, a Gotek is a must-have.

A Gotek floppy emulator is a drop-in replacement for 3.5-inch floppy drives that reads images off a USB flash drive. The Gotek can cycle through 1000 disk images on the USB drive by pressing buttons on its front panel. Goteks are really designed and marketed with vintage music equipment in mind, but they benefit old PCs too, for exactly the same reason.

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Does a Lionel train have to run in a circular loop?

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Does a Lionel train have to run in a circular loop?

Electrically speaking, there’s no reason a Lionel train has to run in a circular loop. A circular loop is the simplest way to set one up. But if you want another shape, you can do it.

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Why computer cases changed from beige to black

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Why computer cases changed from beige to black

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, computer cases were an off-white color people variously called cream, putty, or beige. It changed in the early 2000s, and from then onward, the most common color was black. Here’s why computer cases changed from beige to black.

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News vs propaganda

Dave Farquhar Writing
News vs propaganda

A day after watching the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, which is mostly about modern propaganda, I had an exchange on social media that got me thinking about news vs propaganda. What’s the difference? It can be subtle, but here are things I look for, as a former journalist myself.

News follows several rules, but the most important rules are named sources and the quantity. If a story doesn’t have three sources, it’s not news.

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Optimizing DOS memory

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Optimizing DOS memory

After watching some 486 build videos, it became clear to me that optimizing DOS memory is a lost art. Yes, I made some boot menus and custom DOS boot disks in my day, but for power users familiar with DOS memory management, boot disks were usually a last resort. Memory managers usually free up more than 600K of conventional memory so the overwhelming majority of DOS programs don’t need a special configuration. Here’s how to use them.

The key is using HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE in your config.sys with certain recommended parameters. These programs move device drivers and memory-resident utilities out of conventional memory to make room for memory-hungry DOS programs. Using HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE is a bit of a lost art, so let’s see if we can un-lose it.

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Who owns Lionel Trains?

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Who owns Lionel Trains?

Lionel has a storied history, and its ownership has changed several times since 1969. Who owns Lionel Trains now? The answer may surprise you.

Lionel, LLC, manufacturer of Lionel electric trains, is owned by Guggenheim Partners, who also own the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. Rock and roller Neil Young remains affiliated with Lionel but his ownership stake is unclear.

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How to leave an expansion gap

Dave Farquhar DIY
How to leave an expansion gap

A reader asked me how to leave an expansion gap when installing laminate floor or any other type of floating fllor. That’s an important question. With the right tools it’s really easy. Without the right tools, it’s incredibly frustrating.

The trick to leaving an expansion gap is to place some type of spacer of uniform thickness between your flooring and the wall on all four sides of the room. You can either use commercially produced spacers or make some yourself from thin plywood or other scrap wood.

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What a buffer overflow looks like

Dave Farquhar security
What a buffer overflow looks like

Once you know what to look for, a buffer overflow is almost as easy to spot as it is to understand. So here’s what a buffer overflow looks like, whether you’re looking at suspicious network traffic or a suspicious file on disk.

A buffer overflow is a long sequence of NOP operations followed by machine code. The long sequence of NOPs is a tell-tale sign, but disassembling the data that follows will verify it–if it doesn’t disassemble to gibberish, you found a buffer overflow.

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PC DOS vs MS-DOS

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
PC DOS vs MS-DOS

DOS was a bit of an oddity, in that you could buy it from either Microsoft or IBM. The two were never quite identical, but were always mostly interchangeable. The differences grew larger at version 6, but they were still more alike than different. Let’s take a look at PC DOS vs MS-DOS.

IBM and Microsoft collaborated on DOS, and both had the right to market it. IBM sold its version as PC DOS, while Microsoft sold its version as MS-DOS. And for a time, IBM was happy just to sell PC DOS to owners of true-blue IBM PCs. But in 1993 it changed.

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Lionel CW-40 vs CW-80 transformers

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Lionel CW-40 vs CW-80 transformers

The Lionel CW-40, also known as the Powermax Plus, looks just like the CW-80, at least if you’re looking from the front. But it has significant differences from its bigger brother. Let’s look at the Lionel CW-40 vs CW-80 and whether those differences matter to you.

Neither the CW-40 or CW-80 are high-end transformers. But if you’re doing anything more ambitious than running a simple loop of track, you’ll probably be happier with a CW-80.

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