Author: Dave Farquhar

Fix or restore Lionel track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Fix or restore Lionel track

It’s that time of year again. Time to get that old Lionel (or Marx or American Flyer) electric train running before the holidays sneak up. More often than not, the track isn’t in the best of shape. Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to fix or restore Lionel track.

Believe it or not, you can effectively remove rust from old Lionel track with a ball of aluminum foil. A small ball of aluminum foil plundered from your kitchen and five minutes of your time is likely to be enough to restore a loop of Lionel track from rusty, unusable junk to reliable operation.

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Increasing memory cache to improve Firefox performance

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

I read today in Lifehacker about disabling Firefox’s disk cache and increasing the memory cache, as an alternative to putting the disk cache on a ramdisk. The trick can work, depending on the types of sites you visit. But the two aren’t quite interchangeable. The disk cache stores compressed images and (I believe) html. The memory cache stores uncompressed pictures for fast rendering, and no html. Content stored in one isn’t necessarily stored in the other. Read more

Predict your SSD life expectancy with SSDLife

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Here’s a great tool: SSDLife. It helps you predict SSD life expectancy.

Back in the bad old days of hard drives with magnetic platters, you could only speculate about their life expectancy. With SSDs, life expectancy is a lot more predictable, and that’s what this tool does. Read more

Do Christians hate soldiers? No!

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

I’ve seen the question come up on Digg more than once: Why do Christians hate soldiers?

The perception undoubtedly comes from the protests at military funerals. Unfortunately, there’s a small fringe group from Kansas that’s giving the perception that Christians hate soldiers.

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How to invest without a financial adviser

Dave Farquhar Investing , , , ,

I’m not a big fan of financial advisers. Their job is to sell you financial products, not to look out for your own best interests. I learned that the hard way, after sending most of what I made in my early 20s to one. He doubled my money in a year or two, but erased the gain and then some just as quickly. So I had motivation to learn how to invest without a financial adviser.

There’s a pretty easy formula you can use to outperform 90-95% of financial advisers.
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Um, no, software shouldn’t have kill switches or time bombs in it

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

So,  ZDNet is advocating that Microsoft use a kill switch to render existing Windows XP computers non-functional. Then he relented and said maybe an expiration date would be sufficient.

John C Dvorak is attacking the idea, with good reason. Dvorak is right.
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Fixing weird printing problems in MS Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software ,

Some of my coworkers deal with long documents that give our printer fits. “Fits” meaning that 60-page documents take 30-45 minutes to print if they don’t abort in the middle with a printing error.

The documents in question contain a cover sheet, scanned in at high resolution, and usually have some large charts.

I devised a workaround. Read more

Unfinished thoughts from yesterday

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , ,

I talked yesterday about what I did about my debt and why I have the attitude I have, but I didn’t talk about how to get started. Read more

Just because you can afford it now…

Dave Farquhar Christianity, Saving money , ,

Today, the sermon at church was based mostly on Nehemiah 5. Nehemiah 5 talks about the ruinous financial situation of the children of Israel at the time the book was written. Check out Nehemiah 5:4-5.

“We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards. Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our fellow Jews and though our children are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”

In other words, in order to pay their bills, some had resorted to selling their children into slavery. Sadly, some Americans find themselves in that situation today. Or close to it. At least it’s uncommon enough that we’re offended when we hear about it. Read more

LED night lights

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

With two young kids, we find ourselves fumbling around in the kitchen at night more than just occasionally. At some point, we turned to flipping the microwave’s night light on.Which was fine, except I found that one of its settings uses 30 watts, the other 60, and more often than not, that light stays lit 24/7. That’s more power than I want to leave on full time. LED night lights solve that problem neatly. Read more