David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
How much weight can a 2×4 hold? There’s a meme going around social media showing the differences in 2x4s over the years, decrying how old houses were stronger. But appearances can be deceiving. Modern 2x4s are probably stronger than you think.
Under optimal conditions, a single 2×4 can support about 1,000 pounds, or half a ton vertically. And when we build a house, we don’t ask it to support much more than that horizontally.
Brushless drills are more expensive than brushed drills. But old-fashioned brushed drills are getting hard to find. What’s the big deal about a brushless drill vs brushed? Which is better?
Brushed tools are cheaper, often by $20, when you can find them. Brushless tools offer longer battery life and better reliability and lower maintenance in the long run, in addition to being smaller, lighter, and having more power.
For nearly 20 years, I was the guy people asked if an e-mail message they got was real. And if they were interested, I’d show them how I figured out if it was real. To do that, you have to look at the headers. Here’s how to view headers in Gmail.
Gmail doesn’t have an option called view headers–it’s called Show Original. Choosing this obscure option lets you view the headers and investigate a message.
The Atari 2600 had the largest game library of its generation, and it wasn’t close. Other systems surpassed it, but in its time, the 2600 was king. But how many Atari 2600 games are there? Like many questions, it depends.
It’s really two questions, since some titles were released under multiple names, even though they were the same title. There were about 450 unique Atari 2600 games, but the number of variations of those games pushes the total number of cartridges much higher, around 900 by some counts.
“It’s a Lionel Scout,” the auctioneer said breathlessly. I walked out the door without placing a bid. If you found a Lionel Scout train set and you think you found something valuable, I’m about to dash your hopes and dreams. That’s not to say Lionel Scouts aren’t interesting. But they were Lionel’s economy sets of the postwar era.
The Lionel Scout was a low-end train set Lionel introduced starting in 1948 to compete with Marx trains. When new, a Scout set sold for around $19, or a little over $200 in today’s dollars.
The Commodore 1084 monitor was Commodore’s flagship monitor, a monitor that worked with everything they produced in the late 1980s, including the C-64, the C-128 in 40 and 80 column modes, the Amiga line, and Commodore’s CGA-equipped PC clones like the Commodore Colt. Its versatility makes it popular with retro computer enthusiasts today. Not only does it work with almost any Commodore computer, it also works with a lot of non-Commodore computers.
Blackout curtains help to keep light out, making them useful if you have a lot of light pollution at night or need to sleep during the day. But do blackout curtains help with heat? Do blackout curtains save energy? And how much?
Blackout curtains can have an R value of up to 5, depending on how you use them. Considering most windows have an R value between 1 and 5, and your walls have an R value of at least 13, blackout curtains do help with heat, and can save you hundreds of dollars per year.
If you want a good paint job, you need to make sure the paint dries thoroughly and completely before disturbing it. So how long does oil based paint take to dry? And how long does it take oil based primer to dry?
It varies depending on the paint formula and the temperature, but it typically takes 8 hours for oil based paint to dry. The general time can range from 2-24 hours, so it’s best to check your instruction label for your paint’s specifics. Oil based primer can be ready for a topcoat within 1-2 hours, but that may or may not be what you mean by dry time.
Does baking computer chips fix them when they’re broken? Can you fix computer chips in an oven? The answer is sometimes. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know when it will help, and when it does, we may not know why. But, when faced with a broken chip, we don’t exactly have anything to lose, either.
Baking computer chips does seem to fix them, at least sometimes. Whether it works depends entirely on why the chip failed in the first place, which isn’t always possible to know.
The Mizuno East-West battery operated train set has all the hallmarks of postwar Japanese trains. It’s made of tin. It runs on batteries. It was cheap. And it carries an aura of mystery. Fortunately time unraveled a number of those mysteries.