Author: Dave Farquhar

I need a hair dryer, some nail polish, and two clothespins

Dave Farquhar security , ,
I need a hair dryer, some nail polish, and two clothespins

At least it looked like a clean break.

I commonly run errands mid-evening because strapping my two kids into seat belts is a good way to keep them from tripping over their own shadows and hurting themselves. So we did that one night, and when we got home, my wife logged onto Facebook, where a picture of my sister’s USB flash drive greeted her. It was in pieces.

“Have her call me,” I said.

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2011 retail tinplate finds, at Big Lots and Shack

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you’re a tinplate fan like me, it would behoove you to make a trip to Big Lots sometime this week. Big Lots has a selection of building-shaped cookie tins priced at $5 each. The buildings include a town hall, post office, bakery, and general store. Additionally, my old friend Radio Shack is selling a building tin full of AA and AAA batteries for $10 until December 10 (it’ll be $20 after that).
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No, purchaser reviews on online web sites aren’t worthless

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

A magazine editor whose name I dare not mention pontificated this weekend that it’s never worth reading reviews on web sites like Amazon.

I expect more from someone with that job title–better writing and better thinking. There are times for words like always and never, but this certainly isn’t one of them. The reviews certainly have their uses. The trick is knowing how to read them.

Here’s how to wade through the muck, find good reviews, and use those reviews to find good products.

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How to wire LEDs and other circuits risk-free

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,
How to wire LEDs and other circuits risk-free

I see a lot of questions about how to wire up circuits, and unfortunately when people ask these questions on train forums, those innocent questions often devolve into heated and unproductive discussions focused on the math and physics involved, or other creative things that overcomplicate the project, and it scares off a number of people, often including the person who asked the question.

Usually what the person asking the question really wants is to not spend a whole Saturday soldering a circuit together, only to find out in the end that it doesn’t work.

So I’ll attack that issue. Here’s how to stage a circuit, find out in a matter of minutes whether it will work, and delay the soldering until you have something promising.
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What do you have against Frank White, Mr. Glass?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , ,

The Kansas City Royals didn’t exactly fire Frank White this week. They just dumped him like last week’s garbage.

And that’s a completely classless act, given Frank White’s history with the franchise. Frank White literally helped build Royals Stadium–now Kauffman Stadium. He worked on the stadium construction crew as a teenager. He went to the Royals baseball academy, worked through the Royals’ minor league system in three years, then played 17 years for the Royals at second base, winning 8 gold gloves, appearing in five All-Star games, and hitting cleanup in the 1985 World Series. He did everything the team ever asked of him, and he did it well. After his playing days were done, he came back to the Royals in 1997, where he’s done various jobs but has rarely been appreciated.

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The end of the hard drive shortage is in sight

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Western Digital has been able to start resuming hard drive production in flood-ravaged Thailand earlier this week. It was a surprise for the industry, though a pleasant one.

Ending the shortage will take time of course, but this will answer some of the questions and end some of the speculation.

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Balancing safety and versatility

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , , , , , ,

John C Dvorak has a very simple solution to the HP printing problem. Lock down the firmware so it’s not upgradeable. And while we’re at it, do the same thing to routers and other equipment.

This solves the problem of loading rogue firmware on the devices, but there are several problems with such a draconian approach.
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Don’t write Android’s obit yet

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PC Magazine’s Tim Bajarin seems ready to write the obituary for Android for tablets which, to me, seems extremely premature.
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Expect your HP printer to get 0wnz0r3d shortly

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

Courtesy of Dan Bowman: You may have seen the brief writeup on Slashdot about how to set printers on fire by messing with the fuser, but in Germany next month there’s going to be a security engineer’s nightmare unleashed, courtesy of the HP printer that’s probably sitting a few feet outside your cubicle and mine.

And there’s a whole lot more to it than just messing with the fuser in hopes of killing a printer or (perhaps) starting a fire. There’s a lot more to a printer than toner and a fuser. As the link above says, a printer contains an embedded Linux or Vxworks system that’s trivially easy to install a rootkit on and that nobody’s paying attention to. Seriously, who watches traffic coming from the printer?

The possibilities are endless.
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Smart card problems and other Monday weirdness

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

My boss’ computer had a bad case of the Mondays this week. It took forever to come out of power saving mode, and then when it finally did, it was mostly unresponsive. He couldn’t log in, and the system didn’t even recognize his smartcard reader. The usual fix for a smartcard reader that won’t read and whose light doesn’t blink or come on is to unplug the card reader, wait a few seconds or a minute, and plug it back in, but even that didn’t help this time. Nor did plugging in a known-working reader.

The machine did respond to ctrl-alt-del, and the shutdown options weren’t disabled. Fortunately. So I did a full shutdown, which it did, under protest.
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