Author: Dave Farquhar

How to clean paint from outlet and switch covers

Dave Farquhar DIY, Saving money
How to clean paint from outlet and switch covers

Earlier this year, I did some cosmetic fix-up of a house that, among other things, had a lot of painted-over outlet covers. Preventing that is easy–it takes a couple of minutes to unscrew the cover and put tape over the outlet–but if someone didn’t do that, the cleanup is cheap and easy too, even years after the painting mishap. And all you need are common household items to clean paint from outlet and switch covers or other types of wall plates.

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Early impressions of G7’s 900-lumen 9W LED bulb

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , ,

My latest lighting experiment is a 900-lumen bulb from G7, which is rated at 9 watts and priced at around $16. It’s advertised as equivalent to a 65W incandescent. I’ve had two of them for about two months now, and my initial impressions are favorable overall.

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Reduce your RAID failure rate

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security , , , ,

It’s not often that you end up talking about computer hardware at church. It’s especially not often that you end up talking about a RAID failure at church. But one such conversation got me thinking again about ways to reduce RAID failure rate.

This past Sunday, I talked with the executive director, who told me five of the drives in the 8-drive RAID array failed all at once. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said.

It isn’t. But I know why it did.

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Cable connections are the last thing most people check…

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

Fed up with trying to host a network printer on a Windows 7 box on a mixed network, I broke down and bought a Jetdirect card for my aged HP Laserjet 4100. Don’t worry–used Jetdirect cards are cheap these days. I paid $7 for mine.

Of course I made installing it harder than I needed to. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home. Read more

How abandonware gets abandoned

Dave Farquhar Copyright, Retro Computing, Software , , , , , ,

From time to time on classic computing and/or videogaming forums, the question of how to track down the current copyright holder to a particular given title comes up. Sometimes someone knows the answer. Frequently they don’t.

This week, when George Lucas announced he’d sold Lucasfilm to Disney, illustrated precisely how this kind of thing happens.

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A cheap upgrade for obsolete computer cases

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

The ATX standard has changed very little in the last 15 years, which means some rather old computer cases can still accept new motherboards, as long as you also replace the power supply.

The bad news, as I stare at the case that once housed a Micron Client Pro 766 Xi (a 266 MHz Pentium II that was state of the art in 1997) is that front-mount USB ports were unheard of in those days, as were digital camera memory cards. Instead, machines of that era used obsolete floppy and Zip disks for removable storage. They also typically had more 5.25″ bays than we need today. When CD burners cost $400, most of us kept a reader in as well, to avoid wearing out expensive burners prematurely.

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Hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

For now at least, I edit a lot of security documents as part of my job. Today, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: Word 2010 was hiding all of the headers, footers, and whitespace in the document. That made navigating the document a whole lot faster and easier, but it also meant I couldn’t verify that the headers and footers were correct. I figured out how to hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word.

The solution was simple but non-obvious, and works in all versions of Word that I know of. Read more

How to migrate to an SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

A longtime reader asked me to verify the easiest way to migrate from an obsolete hard drive to a new, shiny SSD: Is it to use the SSD migration tool included with the drive?

Yes. Yes it is. And it may even be able to help you if it doesn’t come with the drive. Read more

Tweak your PHP memory settings to fix weird WordPress issues

Dave Farquhar Wordpress

Over time, I’ve been experiencing weird issues with my blog. Plugins worked, then stopped working. Or they’d just run really slow. Occasionally I’d get error messages saying the plugin ran out of memory, but frequently it would just do nothing.

I found a solution inside wp-config.php. Read more

Plain, pure and simple advice from the guy with a credit score of 848

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

One day a Cleveland-area man walked into a Bass Pro Shop, and they offered him a credit card with a promotion that would pay the sales tax. The savings amounted to $50, so he accepted. A few weeks later, he received a letter in the mail informing him that his credit score was 848. Perfect score is 850.

 My credit score raises eyebrows when people see it, but mine is still a pretty fair distance from that.
This Cleveland Plain Dealer article has some down-to-earth advice from the guy with 99.7% credit. Read more