Author: Dave Farquhar

Splurge budgets keep you from overspending on impulse

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

Wise Bread (via Lifehacker) recommends creating a “splurge budget” to keep yourself from overspending on impulse.

My family does this. It works. Read more

The legacy lamp

Dave Farquhar Human Interest

About 35, or maybe even 40 years ago, my dad went through a phase. Or perhaps I should say a craze–he made lamps out of anything that didn’t move. And I’m sure if anyone had pointed that out to him, he would have made a lamp out of something that did, just to prove them wrong. Then, at some point, he stopped. I don’t know why and I never asked him. He kept one on his bedside table, and a couple in the room in the basement where he watched football. But it’s funny. I associate his lamps with him more than probably anything else, but I can’t recall ever watching him make one.

A number of years ago, I asked Mom if any of Dad’s old lamps were still around, and she gave me two of them. They both happened to be made of pieces of wood that he probably found somewhere. Read more

A snafu when installing an SSD in some laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I hotrodded an old Dell Inspiron e1505 laptop by installing a Samsung 830 SSD in it. I hit a snag along the way. The fix is easy but not necessarily obvious.

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Feeling poor on $100,000 a year

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , , ,

Yahoo! Finance! has! a! first-person! story! about! struggling! on! six! figures!

Silliness aside, you might be surprised to hear I–an infamous stingy Scottish miser–am at least a little sympathetic. Read more

Umm, no, that’s not Commodore, and that’s not an Amiga

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some stories floating around are suggesting that Commodore is still around, and they just released a new, overpriced Amiga.

Well, there’s a company slapping “Commodore” and “Amiga” labels on PC cases that look kind of like Apple Mac Mini cases and stuffing off-the-shelf components in them, but they’re Commodore Amigas in name only. Read more

A bad day to be a duck

Dave Farquhar Personal

It was a dark and dreary and rainy morning. Colder than it has been, too.

We were talking about it at work. “It’s a good day to be a duck,” I said. Read more

Don’t give prospective employers your Facebook password

Dave Farquhar security ,

I’ve read multiple stories this week about potential employers demanding that interviewees hand over their Facebook passwords during the job interview so they can snoop around.

There’s no good reason for this.
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The best SSD deal I’ve seen yet

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I apologize that there isn’t much time left, but for what’s left of March 21, you can snag a Samsung 830 SSD from Newegg for $140.

It’s the best deal I’ve seen on a highly regarded modern SSD. Read more

Move the print spool directory to your ramdisk

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows , , , , ,

You can improve the speed of printing slightly and, depending on the nature of your print jobs, dramatically reduce disk writes if you move the print spool directory to your ramdisk. It’s a little performance tweak you might have never heard of, but it’s helpful.

This trick works best with a ramdisk product that loads a disk image at startup, such as Dataram Ramdisk.

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How to move your temporary files to a ramdisk

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows , ,

Moving the rest of your temporary files to a ramdisk provides a number of performance benefits. Program installations proceed noticeably faster, and fewer files written to your system disk means less fragmentation, less maintenance for an SSD, and, most likely, longer SSD life.

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