Author: Dave Farquhar

A cheap and easy replacement for insulators on American Flyer, Lionel and Marx track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

When you’re dealing with vintage toy train track, sometimes the insulators on the track will be damaged or missing. This will cause a short circuit and keep the train from running. This is one of the most common problems with vintage track.

But there’s a cheap and easy repair using material from an unlikely source: 2-liter soda bottles.

Read more

A contrarian (but defendable) view of e-books

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

Tech author Nicholas Carr has some interesting statistics that led him to state that perhaps e-books will complement printed books, rather than replace them.

It’s not hard to find history to support that hypothesis. Read more

Questions from the logs

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , ,

If one person uses a password, another will. That’s a popular hacking theory. If that’s true, then chances are if one person asks a question, another will. So here are three short questions (one completely unrelated to the others) I found in my logs over the weekend, and their answers.

Read more

Cheap cable management

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

If the back of your desk is a rat’s nest, here’s a cheap way to manage those cables.

This method uses a $4 box of large binder clips, plus some screws and washers. You may find it’s cheaper to buy a box of screws and washers as well.

I worked in a shop once where they contracted out the cable management. Calling those guys perfectionists was the understatement of the century, but their cable runs looked like a work of art.

There seemed to be two keys. One is getting your cables a uniform length. You can’t necessarily control that completely, but you can bundle up the slack space somewhere that it won’t be visible. The other key is bundling the cables tightly at regular intervals. Velcro strips are invaluable for that, though you can use cheap and cheerful wire ties if you don’t move cables around very often.

The 4W Lights of America Power LED from Costco: Finally a good LED lamp for bathrooms

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

Costco sells a 4W LED lamp by Lights of America. They briefly sold LEDs a few years ago from that company that weren’t highly regarded, and I think a lot of people are scared of the brand because of that experience. Not to worry, though. These are much better.

They’re billed as 25W replacements, and they’re globe-shaped. I find they’re a good replacement for 25W globes in bathroom fixtures.

Read more

Speed up Android with Seeder Entropy Generator

Dave Farquhar Android, Software , , ,

Seeder Entropy Generator, released on XDA Developers, became a sensation the last couple of days. There’s debate whether it works, and debate over why it works, but enough people reported an improvement that I gave it a whirl. The difference was noticeable. There is a downside–more on that in a bit.

I don’t know why it works either, but it made my pokey 800 MHz Nook Color running Cyanogenmod 7.2 more responsive. What I haven’t seen is a nice how-to on installing it. Read more

Are 80plus power supplies worth it?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,
Are 80plus power supplies worth it?

Are 80plus power supplies worth it? Extremetech just that question recently. Based on their conclusion, not usually, at least not solely for power savings. But it’s an easy way to get a box built to stricter tolerances with higher-quality electronics. Read more

Apply this fix if you aren’t running IE9

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows , , ,

Windows XP users, and those running something older than IE9 on newer versions of Windows need to apply this fix immediately.

Read more

That other use of Stability Test that I promised

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware ,

I promised earlier this week to write about another use of Stability Test. The other use of Stability Test is for underclocking your CPU for better performance, undervolting it for better battery life, or both.

While a good number of people do both to their Nook Color, I can’t get mine to run for any length of time without crashing when I do either. Oddly enough, my Nook Color will pass Stability Test for 12 hours at 1.1 GHz, but then when I go to use it, it freezes up.

Mine was a refurb unit, so I may not have gotten the best chip in the batch. It’s entirely possible that it’s a refurb because some other enthusiast got it, tried to overclock it and couldn’t, then exchanged it for another, and then B&N tested and resold it as a refurb. But I find using Go Launcher EX makes life at 800 MHz tolerable on the machine anyway, especially when I use the apps for the web sites I visit most frequently, rather than trying to use a web browser.

A cheap Nook Color case from an unexpected place

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I take my Nook Color with me enough that I wanted a case for it, but nothing too fancy, seeing as I’d rather spend money on hardware than on accessories.

Most retail stores carry cases for 7-inch tablets and e-readers, but they’re a high-margin item, often selling for $20 and up, which is 25% of what I paid for the device. I looked on Amazon, of course, where I found multiple cases for less than $10, but found conflicting reports as to whether any given case actually fit the Nook Color. Read more