General

Weekend content through the end of 2026

Dave Farquhar General 9 Comments

About three and a half years ago, I had to make some changes to my format and workflow. It wasn’t the first time I’d done things like that and probably won’t be the last. And usually when I make changes, I don’t say much about it. I usually find it’s better if I don’t. But I think this time it’s worth talking about it a little.

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I thought turkeys could fly

Dave Farquhar General
I thought turkeys could fly

I thought turkeys could fly was a line from a 1978 episode of the TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. The episode, titled Turkeys Away, is generally considered one of the 100 greatest TV sitcom episodes of all time.

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Are cassette tapes worth anything?

Dave Farquhar General
Are cassette tapes worth anything?

Are cassette tapes worth anything? Are cassette tapes worth collecting? Those are not the same question, and the answer to both is changing. There was a time when very few cassette tapes were worth enough money to be worth bothering with. But they are starting to become collectible.

When audio tapes were new, they were all about practicality. Vinyl records and CDs had major advantages over cassettes unless you were listening in your car, or needed a smaller form factor for any other reason.

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Looking back at the Challenger disaster through Gen-X eyes

Dave Farquhar General
Looking back at the Challenger disaster through Gen-X eyes

It’s January 29, 2021 as I write this. Thirty five years after the Challenger disaster. I was in math class when I found out it happened. That was a little unusual.

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How not to do business

Dave Farquhar General

I contracted out some work recently. It involved a large sum of money, at least to me. It amounted to about a three weeks’ worth of take-home pay. He wanted the money for the materials up front. I didn’t really want to do that, but other people had told me he was completely honest, so I did it.

He had trouble getting the necessary permits and other paperwork. I had trouble keeping his story straight. I gave him some time to sort it out. After about a month–which might have been too long–he concluded he wasn’t going to be able to do the work, and told me he’d give me a refund.

Then he quit answering his phone.

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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.

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Instant welding with Aileene’s Tacky Glue

Dave Farquhar General

I’m not sure where I read this first, but I love this trick for making instant repairs. If you’re putting together something made of paper, wood, or a combination of the two, join it together with a bit of Aileene’s Tacky Glue (this also works with ordinary Elmer’s white glue or Elmer’s wood glue), then zap it in a microwave for 20 seconds. That 20 seconds is enough to instantly cure the glue for a strong bond.

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Secret weapon of the day: music wire

Dave Farquhar General, Saving money ,

The secret weapon of the day is music wire, also sometimes called piano wire. It is a super stiff, hardened steel wire, available in diameters ranging from .006 inches to .192 inches, a range that starts out smaller than a #80 drill, and ends at the approximate size of a #10 drill.
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WordPress may be coming soon. I hope.

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’m experimenting with WordPress. I have it up and running on a system built from spare parts, but importing from this archaic blogging platform that nobody uses (and for good reason) is less than obvious. A filter exists but isn’t officially blessed, so you can’t just go grab it like you can for a common blog platform like Movable Type or Greymatter.I’m going to look at it all again when I’m less tired. It may be possible to just take the importer and turn it into a standalone program that just slurps the database over and puts it into WordPress format. It’s probably been eight years since I did any PHP coding at all. But I have everything to gain from the move.

As far as I can tell, this server and this software have been running for 8 years. That’s a good run, but it’s too long. It’s time to modernize. Time to use modern software, running on a system that was built in this century.

Upcoming

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I’m working on a post about SSD myths/misconceptions. Hopefully it will be helpful to someone.

I don’t understand why some people are downright hostile toward SSDs–I haven’t seen anything like it since the hostility I saw towards Amigas in the late 1980s, and OS/2 in the early 1990s.

Maybe it’ll help some people.