Author: Dave Farquhar

I didn’t winterize my lawnmower but I got away with it. Here’s how.

Dave Farquhar DIY , , , , ,
I didn’t winterize my lawnmower but I got away with it. Here’s how.

Last year I didn’t winterize my lawnmower at the end of the season. Shame on me. So I took some extra precautions this year to avoid a $50 lawn mower repair, and got away with it. Here’s what I did.

Read more

Loose brick repair with epoxy

Dave Farquhar DIY, Landlording , ,
Loose brick repair with epoxy

My home inspector told me about an easy, inexpensive and nearly permanent repair: Loose brick repair with epoxy. It works really well if you need to fix a loose brick in something like a fireplace or a retaining wall. Epoxy is a effective loose brick adhesive.

Epoxy works because it’s stronger than cement. And while it’s not economical to use epoxy for mortar instead of cement, in small quantities it’s cheap enough, and much quicker.

Read more

Build the best, most secure wifi in your neighborhood

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Servers and Networking , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My neighbor asked me for advice on setting up wi-fi in his new house. I realized it’s been a while since I’ve written about wi-fi, and it’s never been cheaper or easier to blanket your house and yard with a good signal.

Blanketing your house and yard while remaining secure, though, is still important.

Read more

What to look for in a wireless access point

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Servers and Networking , ,

A good way to eliminate dead zones in your house where wifi doesn’t work is to add one or two wireless access points to your setup.

Access points, thankfully, are no longer stupid expensive–they used to cost twice as much as a router in spite of being nothing more than a cut-down router–but almost every access point I’ve looked at has one or more compromises built in. That said, if you want something you can plug in and configure by filling out three or four things, you might be willing to live with those compromises.

Read more

Avoiding counterfeit baseball cards

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

Several times now, I’ve seen people like me, who used to collect baseball cards, went on hiatus, then came back, ask how to avoid counterfeit baseball cards, or at least detect them before it’s too late.

There’s a surprisingly simple answer that often works really well.

Read more

Home Depot’s Ecosmart 40w replacement is a good $5 LED bulb

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , ,

So I took the plunge and bought a package of the Ecosmart 40w equivalent soft white LED bulbs last week. As long as you’re aware that it’s not dimmable–let me repeat that, it’s not dimmable–it’s a really good bulb, especially at $10 for a package of two, assuming no local subsidies.

For $5 each, you get 450 lumens of soft white light while consuming only 6 watts of power.

Read more

Victory ping.

Dave Farquhar War Stories , , , ,

“Whatever happened to the Legions of Doom server?” a coworker asked me as a technician swapped her computer.

I smiled a wicked smile. “Victory ping!” I then turned to my computer. “Ping pmprint02. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out,” I read as the words scrolled onto my screen.

“Victory ping?” my boss–yes, my lunch ninja boss–came over and asked.

“I know that box,” the technician said. There’s a good reason he didn’t say “server.”

Read more

In defense of Anthem declining the OIG audit

Dave Farquhar security ,

Anthem recently refused to allow the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) to perform an audit of its networks. Coming on the heels of a large breach, there’s been a bit of an uproar about it.

There are a few things to keep in mind, the first being that this isn’t driven by law enforcement–it’s a customer requesting an audit.

Read more

Hillary, hackers, threats, and national security

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

I got a point-blank question in the comments earlier this week: Did Hillary Clinton’s home-made mail server put national secrets at risk of being hacked by our enemies?

Depending on the enemies, maybe marginally. But not enough that any security professional that I know of is worried about it. Here’s why.

Read more

Don’t e-mail yourself a list of all your passwords and bank account numbers to yourself from work

Dave Farquhar security, War Stories , , , , , , ,

So my buddy, we’ll call him Bob, runs Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for a big company. DLP is software that limits what you can do with sensitive information, in order to block it from going out of the company. The NSA wasn’t using DLP back when Ed Snowden was working for them; they probably are now.

Sometimes DLP blocks people from sending their own personal information. Doing so is their right–it’s their information–but from a security point of view, I’m really glad DLP kept them from e-mailing their entire life around in plaintext.

Read more