Author: Dave Farquhar

Four ways to save a little money on $4 gas

Dave Farquhar Saving money

So gas prices jumped to about $4 per gallon this week. I have a pretty long commute, so that hurts. It also means I stay on top of ways to keep my fuel prices as low as I can.
Read more

Android-ified.

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

After agonizing for a few weeks, I bought an Android phone. Specifically, a Samsung Galaxy S 4G. Being a T-Mobile phone, it’s a potential dead end, but I opted to do it for a few reasons.

Why? I’m sick of not being able to play Angry Birds. Not really, but I like seeing people’s reaction when I say that.

Read more

Tame your USB multi-card reader

Dave Farquhar Hardware

If you have a USB multi-card reader and don’t like how each slot takes up a separate drive letter, the venerable Uwe Sieber has a utility for that: USB Drive Letter Manager.

Read more

Roll your own Retro-64

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,

So an upstart company has licensed the Commodore name and unveiled an updated C-64, which is essentially a nettop in a 64-alike case with a 64-like keyboard. Reactions are extreme. People either love it or hate it.

I’d like to have one, but I’m not paying $595 for a nettop. But it should be possible to roll your own.

Read more

If Microsoft goes through with the threat to ribbon-ize Explorer

Dave Farquhar Software

If Microsoft goes through with its threat to foist the atrocious ribbon on the flawed but useful and usable Explorer, I have insurance.

You can install Far Manager, a text-mode Win32/Win64 clone of the classic Norton Commander. It’s fast, it’s functional, it’s easy to use, and it looks just like you remember the old DOS classic that you haven’t used since the day you upgraded from DOS to something else, whether that was OS/2 or Windows 95. But it supports long filenames and it’s a true 32- or 64-bit application.

If you prefer a GUI application, there’s Free Commander, which resembles the Windows GUI version of Norton Commander.

Read more

My proposal to improve Windows 8

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I propose a new user interface for Calculator, because the one we’ve been using since 1990 is too confusing, and the one that came with Windows 7 didn’t help. It’s just different, not better.

The only thing that can save Calculator is the ribbon interface.
Read more

Buy online, manufacture at home

Dave Farquhar General , ,

The way we buy things (or don’t buy them) has changed a lot in the last decade or so. We stopped buying CDs. Now that our Internet connections are fast enough, we’ve really slowed down on buying movies, too. And the emergence of practical e-readers means a lot fewer people are buying books now too. All of this is part of the reason why there’s probably a Borders closing near you, and there are suddenly a lot less of what we used to call record stores too.

But there’s something even bigger looming overhead. 3D printing. Ars Technica has a piece about its legal implications.  Rather than rehash that, I’d rather talk about some of its other implications, including why you should care at all.

Read more

Stan Musial and his frozen appendix

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold (who also happens to be a former classmate) dug out an interesting story about Cardinal great Stan Musial.  In 1947, he was diagnosed with appendicitis. Team doctor Robert Hyland was reluctant to recommend immediate surgery, as it would sideline Musial, the team’s best player, for nearly a month. So instead, he froze Musial’s appendix, Musial sat out five days, and played the rest of the season before having the appendix removed.

This curious, um, cure caused a lot of head shaking and questions. So I did a little digging. Read more

How to find out what add-ons are slowing down Firefox

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

Here’s a site worth bookmarking. Add-ons are the big thing Firefox offers that the other browsers don’t, but it sometimes comes at the price of performance. And I guess Mozilla is tired of that, so now they’re testing add-on speed and publishing the results at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ .
Read more

Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Servers and Networking , , , , ,
Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

It was 1998. I was getting ready to network my two PCs, so I asked my friendly neighborhood networking professional what to buy. He didn’t hesitate. “Intel or 3Com,” he said. “Cheap NICs will talk, but they’ll start acting flaky after a while, dropping packets in the middle of transfers, stuff like that.”

I couldn’t afford 3Com or Intel at the time, so I bought a cheap “SOHOware” brand bundle that included two 10/100 NICs, a hub, and cables for around $150. A comparable first-tier setup would have run me twice that. The hub died after a couple of years. The cards fared better. “After a while” took 11 years or so to come, and I finally got sick enough of it to retire my last one.

Read more