Author: Dave Farquhar

Marx State of Maine boxcar

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx State of Maine boxcar

The Marx State of Maine boxcars are colorful tin representations of real, prototypical cars that ran on the Bangor and Aroostook and New Haven railroads. Read more

What an error in baseball is

Dave Farquhar Baseball
What an error in baseball is

What is an error in baseball? To an extent, it is a judgment call, but generally speaking, it is when a fielder makes a misplay on a routine play that allows an opposing player to reach base when they normally would have been out, in the judgment of the official scorer. The counts of runs, hits, and errors by each team are three standard numbers displayed on the scoreboard throughout the game

Some examples include a tagging error, where a player catches the ball but misses a tag for an out, a dropped fly ball, or a fumble. But when a ball takes an unnatural bounce or is out of reach, it is generally not an error. A player is also not charged with an error if they drop or fail to catch a foul fly, since it doesn’t allow a runner to reach base. Read more

What are tamper-resistant outlets?

Dave Farquhar DIY
What are tamper-resistant outlets?

What are tamper-resistant outlets? Tamper-resistant outlets are a special electrical outlet, sold in North America, designed to prevent injury or death from toddlers or children inserting a foreign metal object into the outlet and causing electrical shock or electrocution. They have an embossed “TR” to distinguish them from earlier types of outlets. You can buy tamper resistant versions of various types of outlets, including standard duplex outlets, and ground fault circuit interrupter outlets (GFCIs).

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The Bell and Howell Apple II

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
The Bell and Howell Apple II

The Bell and Howell Apple II, also known as the Darth Vader Apple II, was a slightly modified Apple II for the education market manufactured by Apple but distributed and supported by Bell and Howell. It is a curiosity for collectors today, and a potential pitfall.

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Marx The Meteor Diesel Freight set 2915

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx The Meteor Diesel Freight set 2915

In 1974, Marx introduced a diesel freight set it called The Meteor, catalog number 2915, that ran on a 6 volt lantern battery and sold through discount stores. If you have one today, it’s worth more than its original retail price, even adjusted for inflation.

The Marx Meteor train set was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 2915 and was sold only in 1974 and 1975.

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Handling API pagination with Python

Dave Farquhar security

A common problem in using Python to gather data via APIs is pagination. Most APIs have a limit on how much data they are willing to send you in a single API call. So they break the data into pages. In this blog post, I’ll go through an example of handling API pagination in Python.

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Replace carriage returns with commas in Notepad++

Dave Farquhar Windows
Replace carriage returns with commas in Notepad++

There are times when you need comma-separated lists but the data you have is separated by carriage returns instead. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to easily replace carriage returns with commas in Notepad++.

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Microsoft Softcard: How it transformed the company

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Microsoft Softcard: How it transformed the company

The Microsoft Softcard, released April 2, 1980, was Microsoft’s first hardware product. Not only that, it was a hardware product that made two products from two of its historical rivals work together. For those reasons and more, it is a historically very important product. But even more important was how this hardware product from a software company changed Microsoft’s trajectory dramatically, and in unexpected ways.

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Desktop keyboard drawer: Unheralded retro accessory

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Desktop keyboard drawer: Unheralded retro accessory

I don’t look for vintage computers in the wild nearly as much anymore as I look for vintage computer accessories. I was very happy to find a vintage desktop keyboard drawer less than 6 miles from home. And I bought it straight out of the room its previous owner probably used it in for a good three decades.

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Marx train set #25000

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

Marx train set #25000 is perhaps the quintessential O gauge 3/16 scale set from Louis Marx & Co., featuring a classic 999 locomotive and tender and a consist of 3/16 scaled tin lithographed freight cars.

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