Author: Dave Farquhar

Keeping a Lionel 1122 switch from buzzing

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

The other day I helped someone troubleshoot a Lionel 1122 switch that was buzzing and not operating. I don’t have time to take pictures or anything but hopefully this brief rundown will be helpful for someone.First, some background information: The Lionel 1122 and later switches are designed to switch automatically for an incoming train, because a train approaching the curved section of the switch when the switch is set straight will derail.

The buzzing generally is caused by a short circuit making the switch think a train is approaching when it isn’t.

This same procedure will aid in the troubleshooting of Lionel O22 switches as well as later non-derailing switches made by Lionel and K-Line.

First, remove the troublesome switch from the track. Connect two wires directly to the transformer, and touch one of the wires to any center rail. Touch the other wire to one of the outer rails of the curved leg. If the switch doesn’t snap, touch the wire to the other outer rail. The switch should operate. Whichever rail causes the switch to operate when touched with a wire needs an insulating O27 track pin, rather than a standard metal track pin. These pins, which used to be made of fiber but are now made of plastic, are available online and possibly from your local hobby shop.

Now that you’ve confirmed the curved leg works, repeat for the straight leg, and insert an insulating pin into that rail if one isn’t already present. If the switch operates on both legs in this fashion, the switch is operable and you just have a short circuit somewhere.

If the activating rails already had insulating pins and the switch still buzzes, you have a short circuit somewhere and you probably need to add more insulating pins. The center rail should never be insulated. But you may need to add insulating pins to several of the other rails. The easiest way to do this is to set up a simple loop on the floor with two switches, connect a transformer, put a locomotive on the track, and apply a little bit of power. If one or more switches still buzz, add insulating pins until the buzz goes away. This solution worked for us and got a layout that had two buzzing 1122s (out of three total) working again.

Time to winterize the house…

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

We had a day last week where we topped 80 degrees and set a record, so small wonder I never thought winter would actually get here.

But we’ve had our first good freeze and it looks like that’ll be a weekly thing from here on out (assuming we don’t get multiples every week), so it’s time to winterize the house.I learned about plastic film window insulation when I was in college and lived in a drafty old barn–it wasn’t really a barn, but it felt like one–where the inside temperature was rarely higher than 60 during the winter and space heaters were strictly prohibited. It’s best to buy the stuff at the end of the winter and save it for next winter, but if you’re like me, you always underestimate how much you need.

The tape that came with one of my kits seemed strong enough to hold a car together, while the tape that came with another kit isn’t suitable for wrapping a present, let alone holding plastic to cold aluminum window frames. I ended up using packing tape to hold part of the plastic to a window, since I ran out of good tape.

Of course when I was finished with one package, I ended up with three odd-sized pieces, none of which fit any of my windows. So I tried an experiment. Out came the packing tape and the scissors. I taped together the odd-sized sheets to make one suitable for one of the windows, then I put it in the window. It held together just fine when I hit it with the hair dryer to shrink it into place. I don’t think this method will get wife approval, but it works. I guess I can tell her that Red Green would have used duct tape.

I also changed my furnace filter. My size was sold out at all of the usual places I buy them, but I happened to find them at Big Lots for $1.79 each. They’re rated for two months instead of three and they probably don’t catch as much, but they’re definitely better than the clogged filter that was in there. I don’t know when the last time was I changed the filter. Shame on me. For $1.79 I need to be changing it every month because it’ll save me a lot more than that if I don’t do it, at least in the summer and winter months.

I also went looking, without success, for insulation pads for electrical outlets and light switches. I have some double-sized ones and other oddities that I didn’t have a good fit for. When I came home I still didn’t have a good fit. So I ended up removing the plate, taking a styrofoam meat tray, and cutting my own with a hobby knife. It’s not quite the same material commercial insulators are made from, but it has good insulating properties and it’s hard to beat the price.

Of course I’m looking for other ideas, but these three things are a good start. I installed a programmable thermostat about two years ago and it paid for itself in the first month. The basic models cost half as much now.

Addendum: After sealing the sliding glass door and two of the three largest windows in the house, last night after the programmable thermostat kicked down I noticed that the temperature in the house dropped by about a degree an hour. The temperature inside the house started at 70, and the low overnight was around 30. I know under similar conditions earlier in the week, the temperature was dropping at least two or possibly even three degrees an hour.

I think that plastic is going to pay for itself very quickly.

The tipping point of obsolesence

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Gatermann just sent me a link to a $33 Dell P3-500 at Surplus Computers. It got both of us feeling old, because the day when that was a hot machine doesn’t seem long ago at all to either of us.

My initial reaction: That’s a lot of computer for 33 bucks. You get a 500 MHz CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and a 6 gig hard drive.

And then I got to thinking about it some more. I can think of people who could get by with that machine, but there’s a good reason why the P3-500’s star has fallen and you can get one for $33 without feeling like you’re at a Who concert.I guess first and foremost, you don’t get an operating system. That’s fine; OEM copies of XP home are cheap enough. Older versions of Windows are even cheaper because nobody wants them.

But even if you’re running 2000, you really want a minimum of 256 megs of RAM. For XP you want more than that; my mother-in-law’s PC, which is a Compaq with some flavor of Athlon in it, really drags these days because it only has 256 megs.

So I bopped on over to Crucial to see what I’d need to make that old Dell Optiplex GX1 rev its engine. And the price of a 256-meg DIMM was (sit down): $77.

So to max out the memory on this $33 machine, you’d need to spend another $231.

Gatermann just bought a gig of PC3200 DDR memory for $98.

So rather than spend $231 on 768 megs of PC133 SDRAM, you’d literally be better off buying the PC3200 and getting a $50 motherboard and a $60 CPU to put on it.

Trouble is, this is a Dell. You can’t swap off-the-shelf motherboards into a Dell. Some Dell cases will take a standard board, but you’ll have to replace the power supply. But the GX1 doesn’t use an ATX board.

That’s why this system costs 33 bucks. It’s pretty much at a dead end, and the memory it uses is no longer a mass-market item, so its price is inflated. It’s the same thing that happened to the 72-pin EDO SIMMs we used to put in our original Pentiums–you know, the ones that topped out at 233 MHz.

It’s a great machine for a tinkerer who happens to have a lot of PC100 or PC133 memory around, or for the Ebay addict. Obsolescent memory always sells more cheaply on Ebay.

I’ve always been in favor of upgrading a computer until it no longer makes economic sense to do so. If you’ve ever wondered when that is, this is a classic example.

This isn\’t the weirdest thing I\’ve seen stolen

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I heard about this on the radio yesterday: A Baltimore man was arrested when he was spotted driving with a 30-foot light pole belonging to Baltimore Gas and Electric sticking out of the front and rear windows of his station wagon.The DJs had some good questions, of course. Did the station wagon have fake wood paneling? How’d he get the pole into the wagon by himself? What was he going to do with the pole?

I suspect he was going to sell the pole for scrap. I thought they said it was made of aluminum (the story I found online didn’t say). At 40 cents a pound, a 30-foot aluminum light pole would be worth more than a few bucks. But I would think the people at the recycling center might get a little bit suspicious when someone brought in a pole that looks just like the one across the street. But maybe that’s just me.

Another possible explanation is just that there was alcohol involved.

The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen stolen was a 12-foot fiberglass chicken valued at approximately $1,500 (in the early 1990s). The chicken had been standing in front of a trailer park (where else?) in Columbia, Mo. When I did a search in the newspaper morgue, I found two other instances of chicken theft since the mid-1980s before the owner put an end to it by erecting a tall pole for the chicken to stand on.

The last theft turned into a media frenzy–hey, not much else happens in Columbia on Mondays–with people calling in to radio stations reporting chicken sightings all over town and people getting teary-eyed on the 6 o’clock news, bawling that the chicken meant so many things to so many people and they couldn’t believe it was gone, and wondering who’d steal a chicken.

I guess they forgot about the other two times the chicken had been recovered. People have short memories, I guess. After they put the chicken on a pole, reports of thefts ceased. (I have spies who keep an eye on Columbia for me, although, come to think of it, I do have much more important things going on.)

Hey, maybe the guy who stole the Baltimore Gas & Electric pole had a fiberglass chicken?

The new nontraditional homeless

Dave Farquhar Society

This St. Louis Post-Dispatch article talks about a new type of homeless: A family, in most cases, where both parents work, but neither makes enough to be able to afford both a home and transportation.

This is where salary deflation and the end of inexpensive housing meet, and it’s not pretty.One of the many reasons I oppose eminent domain is because it wipes out private housing. While the targeted areas often aren’t the nicest neighborhoods, frequently the people who live in them aren’t able to afford other housing in the area–that’s why they opposed the buyout in the first place. If your home is worth $40,000 and you can’t find another $40,000 home, or the only comparable home you can find is next door to a crack house, you’re not going to want to leave either.

But since affordable housing can’t stand in the way of progress, inevitably the buildings fall, our country gets another strip mall, which causes a domino effect where another strip mall gets abandoned and blighted. And if that area isn’t redeveloped, property values there will fall, but not quickly enough to help the people who were displaced.

I don’t know about anywhere else in the country, but in St. Louis, it’s exceedingly difficult to live on $8.50 an hour. That’s $1300 a month, which is enough for a single person to afford a small apartment (say, $400) and some kind of transportation and a simple life. But it’s tight some months. I remember the utilities in my one-bedroom apartment topping $200 a month during the hottest and coldest months. The heating and cooling systems in apartments tend not to be very efficient. And mine wasn’t a cheap apartment by any stretch. Add kids into the equation and it gets difficult.

Ten years ago, when someone asked me to sign a petition to raise the minimum wage, I gave them a lecture about why that was a bad idea. Like a good Republican, I said the cost of everything would increase, and the people who were making minimum wage wouldn’t end up being any better off.

Besides, at that point in time I had seen minimum wage rise three times since I’d been a teenager. The argument may have been valid then.

Minimum wage increased that year, although not by as much as that group wanted. And I remember restaurant owners grumbling about it and saying that prices would have to increase in order to support it.

But a funny thing happened along the way. I worked fast food 15 years ago. And 15 years ago, when minimum wage was $4.15 an hour (up from $3.35) you could pretty much expect to pay about five bucks for a meal at a fast-food joint. When I was 14, before I was working, and minimum wage was $3.35 an hour, I usually paid $5 or less for a meal at a fast-food joint.

And today, with a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, I still pay about $5 for lunch at a fast-food joint. The $5 lunch might be a bit smaller than the $5 lunch of 1990, but for about 50 cents, I can get 1990 portions.

Minimum wage peaked in 1968. Adjusted for inflation, 1968’s minimum wage would be about $8 today.

Frankly, I think $8 is probably a fair minimum wage when I consider that the cost of living in St. Louis is lower than the national average and yet it’s difficult to get an apartment for less than $400 if you don’t like living around gunshots, and considering that monthly payments on a Kia Rio are $166 a month. At $5.15 an hour, that leaves $258 for utilities, food, clothes, health insurance, and gas to put in that Rio. Health insurance and utilities can easily wipe that out.

Even when you argue that someone making minimum wage ought to be driving an older car, eliminating that $166 payment still makes for a tight budget. If you get sick and miss more than a day of work, it’s a budget breaker.

Oh, and by the way, we’re talking pre-tax dollars here. That $800 a month is really less than $700 by the time the government gets its share.

Better get a $300 apartment. And a gun, just in case you need to shoot back when you hear those gunshots. Hopefully you’ve got enough money left over for bullets.

Come to think of it, living on the street probably is safer alternative.

Dumbest line I heard all day, Installment I

Dave Farquhar General

"You don’t have to know how to program in PERL, you just have to know how to use PERL."

PERL, in case you don’t know, is a programming language. If you’re not going to program in PERL, what are you going to do with it?To me that’s like saying you don’t have to know how to ride a bicycle, you just have to know how to use one.

BMW is opening a plant in India

Dave Farquhar General ,

Here’s the best tidbit from the article I found:

“The Indian automobile market offers significant growth potential in the long term. With our increased presence there, we will be well positioned to fully tap into this potential,” Chief Executive Helmut Panke said in a statement.Well, duh. All those Indian IT workers are going to need fancy cars to buy once their salaries get more in line with the rest of the world.

Are other automobile manufacturers listening?

In honor of Southwestern Bell and AT&T getting back together

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

In honor of Southwestern Bell and AT&T getting back together, here’s how to do your own phone wiring.

Atari vs Nintendo

Dave Farquhar Retro Gaming , , , , ,
Atari vs Nintendo

Every time a major anniversary for either system comes along, discussion of how the NES saved the videogame industry after the disastrous Atari 2600 comes with it. Your opinion of Atari vs Nintendo probably depends on your age.

I have to admit I scratch my head as I read this stuff. Did the people who write it live through both of them? By what measure was the 2600 a disaster? I can’t help but speak out in defense of Atari a bit.

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Speeding up Openoffice

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

This week the usual sources were flooded with stories about how slow and bloated Openoffice is. I guess this came on the heels of the release of version 2.0; it’s never been much of a secret that Openoffice was big and slow. It’s descended from Staroffice, after all, and it was big and slow too.

Speedup tips ensued.

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