Author: Dave Farquhar

Can you listen to cell phone calls with a scanner?

Dave Farquhar security
Can you listen to cell phone calls with a scanner?

Can you listen to cell phone calls with a scanner? Can someone listen to your cell phone calls with a scanner? Depending on who you are, I have good news and bad news.

It’s always been possible to listen to analog cell phone calls with a cheap police scanner. But modern cell phones, including smartphones, are digital and encrypted, so listening to them requires costlier equipment like a Stingray device, limiting cell phone snooping to government agencies and others with huge budgets.

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Is Atari still in business?

Dave Farquhar Retro Gaming
Is Atari still in business?

Is Atari still in business? That’s complicated. It might be better to ask is Atari still a company. A lot of things happened to the Atari name through the years and that can make it hard to keep track. It also gives retro gaming people something to argue about.

So let’s look at what happened to Atari. Atari is still a company, and that company actively uses the brand and Atari logo. But the ownership changed hands a lot in the last four decades, and sometimes multiple companies used the Atari brand at the same time.

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Alex Madrid error card: Why so expensive?

Dave Farquhar Baseball
Alex Madrid error card: Why so expensive?

I came across a Youtube video claiming Alex Madrid’s 1989 Donruss baseball card is incredibly valuable. I checked Ebay and found seven listings for this card for over $10,000. Why is Alex Madrid’s baseball card so expensive? And why are they calling it the Alex Madrid error card? What’s the error?

Hoax is a strong word, but it’s a hoax. If the listings say anything at all about the card, they say it’s an error because the copyright says “Leaf Inc.” instead of “Donruss.” Others are just listing any 1989 Donruss Alex Madrid card they can find at a high price, thinking it’s incredibly rare and expensive. It’s not. There are legitimately valuable cards from the 80s and 90s, but the “Alex Madrid error card” isn’t anything special.

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Galvanized village houses and trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Galvanized village houses and trains

A couple of years ago, I spied a couple of lonely galvanized village houses in the seasonal section at Kmart. My wife told me that galvanized Christmas village buildings were popular and laughed at the irony that I was buying them, not her.

Of course, I wanted them for my train layout, where I use metal buildings. In model railroading, I try to be the opposite of trendy.

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Can Roku replace cable TV?

Dave Farquhar Video
Can Roku replace cable TV?

A Roku device is a favorite choice of cord cutters. It’s cheaper than some rivals like Apple TV, it’s easy to set up, and it’s easy to use. But can Roku replace cable TV?

I was cord-cutting long before cord-cutting was cool, but I think it can. At least for some people.

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How to clean off battery acid

Dave Farquhar Hardware
How to clean off battery acid

If a battery leaked inside your favorite electrical or electronic gadget, don’t fret. You don’t have to throw it out. And you can fix it for a couple of dollars, at most. Here’s how to clean off battery acid.

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Computerland: Pioneering national computer store

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing

Computerland was perhaps the first big computer store to go national. It played an important role in the growth of the computer industry in the 1980s. It faded toward the end of the decade but hung on longer than you might think.

The company’s slogan in the 1980s was “Make friends with the future.”

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What is Lotus Notes? How IT becomes legacy

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
What is Lotus Notes? How IT becomes legacy

Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino were a juggernaut in mid-1990s IT. Some people loved it. Most people put up with it. And then people quit talking about it and thinking about it, even though almost every large organization still has Notes running somewhere. But what is Lotus Notes, and why did it fade from consciousness?

Lotus Notes was a popular software platform for e-mail, calendaring and collaboration in the 1990s. It was programmable and extensible, so many Notes shops created custom applications with it that became business critical. IBM bought it in 1995 for $3.5 billion, but couldn’t keep up with Microsoft’s marketing and the ecosystem that built up around it so it lost market share to Exchange. IBM sold Notes and Domino, its server component, in 2018 to Indian firm HCL for $1.8 billion.

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Ives trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

The largest maker of toy trains in the United States in the early 20th century was Ives, an old-line toy company headquartered in Bridgeport, Conn. Ives trains retained a following long after the company who made them went bankrupt. MTH produces reproduction Ives electric trains even today.

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OS/2 Warp: A tribute

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
OS/2 Warp: A tribute

OS/2 Warp was my operating system of choice for most of the 1990s. It never achieved mass appeal, and I think I know why. But I still liked it anyway. Here’s a look at its advantages and disadvantages.

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