Author: Dave Farquhar

How long do roofs last on houses?

Dave Farquhar DIY, Landlording
How long do roofs last on houses?

How long do roofs last on houses? That’s an important question to ask when you’re buying a house, and an important thing to keep in mind if you own your home. A safe assumption is 20 years, though it varies depending on the roof type.

Your roof, air conditioner, and furnace are the big three expenses for a home. The roof lasts the longest of the three, but is also the most expensive.

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How many properties can one person manage?

Dave Farquhar Landlording
How many properties can one person manage?

How many properties can one person manage varies. It depends on your personality, whether you have a day job, and what your day job is. That said, I can give you some guidelines.

It may not be a hard question to answer. If you’re asking the question, there are really only two reasons. Either you are probably just starting out, or you’re close to your limit.

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Fix your dead SSD with the power cycle method

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Fix your dead SSD with the power cycle method

There was a big dustup a while ago about power failures killing SSDs. It turns out that when this happens, you can usually unbrick it. If your SSD died, here’s how to recover or fix your dead SSD in 61 minutes using the power cycle method.

Yes, it really does take 61 minutes to revive a dead SSD, but you only have direct involvement for a few minutes. The rest of the time, you can do something else while you wait for the drive to do its thing. This trick will even let you recover drives that won’t show up in Windows Device Manager or disk management if you transplant them into another machine.

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1948 Bowman baseball

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , ,
1948 Bowman baseball

I recently decided to collect the 1948 Bowman baseball set. It has a number of things going for it. With 48 cards in the set, it’s attainable. Of those 48 cards, 18.75% of them are Hall of Famers. It’s also one of the two first postwar major-issue sets.

A partial box of unopened 1948 packs surfaced recently in Tennessee, so that’s as good of an excuse to talk about the set as any. No one knew any unopened 1948 Bowman packs survived. It sold at auction for $521,180.

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Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1

I’ve talked a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of old milestone operating systems. But what were the advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1? That’s a fair question.

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Water seepage in basement: Five fixes

Dave Farquhar DIY, Landlording ,
Water seepage in basement: Five fixes

It’s not uncommon for water seepage to happen at random places in basements, sometimes even in the middle of the floor. And the first thought that comes into most people’s heads is a sump pump, which is an expensive proposition. Here are five fixes for water seepage in basement or basement water seepage to try first.

It’s possible that the problem does call for a sump pump. But before going to that expense, there are a number of things you can do that cost little or nothing. You should do those things anyway because the sump pump will work better when you do.

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Connect a 2-wire light fixture without ground

Dave Farquhar DIY
Connect a 2-wire light fixture without ground

If you’re changing out a light fixture and find there’s no ground wire in the box, you’re not out of luck. Here’s how to connect a 2-wire light fixture without ground.

If you’re having trouble locating the ground wire, the ground wire is either a bare wire or green.

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Epyx Fast Load cartridge

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , ,
Epyx Fast Load cartridge

The Epyx Fast Load cartridge, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful Commodore 64 fast load product. Commodore’s 1541 disk drive was much slower than competing disk drives, so fast load cartridges became popular. While the Epyx product was first, and sold very well, it didn’t have the market to itself for long. Its developer, Scott Nelson, went on to produce other fast loader products as well.

Epyx Fast Load was a plug-in cartridge that replaced the Commodore 64’s stock ROM disk loading routine with a more efficient routine that was about five times as fast. The result was that software that normally took three minutes to load often took closer to 30 seconds with the cartridge.

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Peel and stick tile over existing vinyl

Dave Farquhar DIY
Peel and stick tile over existing vinyl

You can put peel and stick tile over existing vinyl, but there are certainly right and wrong ways to do it. If the underlying vinyl isn’t in good condition, you won’t be very happy with the results. And if you don’t do any prep work, you won’t be very happy with the results.

I’ve seen this go well, and I’ve seen it go poorly. Here are the secrets that allow it to go well.

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Is powerline networking safe?

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking
Is powerline networking safe?

Is powerline networking safe? It may sound strange to send computer networking signals down the same wire you use to get electricity. Here’s what you need to know.

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