David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Louis Marx was the founder of the toy company that bore his name. His larger toys became staples in Christmas catalogs for generations, while his smaller toys dominated the discount stores of their day.
Louis Marx was first and foremost a toy salesman, but he lived an interesting life. He counted President Dwight Eisenhower among his friends, and Daniel Ellsberg, known for the Pentagon Papers, married his daughter.
Gamestop, the venerable video game retailer, announced in April 2020 it’s closing 300 stores. Rumors of Gamestop’s demise are rampant, and have been for a long time. Today it’s famous mostly for closing stores and becoming a meme stock. Can Gamestop survive?
Changes in the way people buy video games has made life more challenging for Gamestop. I believe the company could survive, but it will have to change its business model and improve its customer service a lot in order to do it.
Some enthusiasts will undervolt their GPU to save heat, reduce power consumption, and make their system run quieter. But does undervolting damage your GPU?
Undervolting can lead to stability issues, but when you get it right, it can actually be good for your GPU. Running cooler generally leads to longer life expectancy for the GPU chip and the graphics card as a whole.
My wife and sons asked me how to disassemble a Sharpie. They were working on a craft project and wanted to recover the ink from some dried-out markers. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to do it, but with the right tools, it’s not difficult. Here’s how to take apart a Sharpie and recover the ink for use in crafts or hobbies.
Sakai made a switch in the postwar era that looks a lot like a Lionel 1121 but acts like a Marx 1590. But if you use a Sakai control panel, it wires up differently from both of them. Here’s how to wire a Sakai O gauge switch.
The wiring diagram was on the back of the box, which you may not have anymore. I have a copy, as well as an explanation of how it works.
Statistical significance may be the most important concept you’ve never heard of. It takes more than knowing Mark Twain’s joke about statistics to know how to understand them. It’s easy to lie with statistics, after all. But it’s also not difficult to know when someone is lying with statistics.
Statistics work when you study a large enough segment of the population to be able to extrapolate with reasonable confidence of being accurate. Statistical significance is the key to measuring the quality of those statistics and the conclusions someone is making from them.
Western Digital found itself in a dustup in the summer of 2020 because it shipped shingled media recording (SMR) hard drives as RAID and NAS drives. What is shingled media recording? What are SMR hard drives? And why should you avoid it in RAID? And should you avoid it in general use too?
Shingled media recording, or SMR, takes advantage of a quirk in the way drives write versus read that allows tracks to overlap, like shingles on a house. This increases storage and decreases cost, but decreases performance. Non-sequential writes, also known as random writes, suffer in performance greatly.
Is your Folding at home GPU not running? If your GPU won’t fold, there may be several reasons for it. Here’s how to troubleshoot your GPU, and how to know when you just need to be patient and wait for the work. Read more
My oldest son wants to build up a computer on a budget. I think he wants something a little better than the laptop I got him a couple of years ago, but I think he’s also curious about what goes into building or upgrading a PC. Right now, it’s easy to find brand-name i5-3570 PCs for very little. With a video card and an SSD, they become very respectable machines. But what’s the best video card for an i5-3470?
The onboard video in an i5-3470 is roughly equivalent to a Geforce 210, which is about the cheapest discrete video card on the market today. You won’t see any noticeable improvement unless you put in something at least equivalent to a GT 710 or R7 240.
Are Lionel trains AC or DC? That’s a trick question. Traditionally, Lionel trains run on AC but there are exceptions. And even when Lionel trains run on AC, they sometimes do some DC trickery. Let’s explain.
Traditional Lionel trains from before 1969 can generally run on either AC or DC, but are better off running on AC. Some Lionel trains sold in discount stores in the 70s and 80s did run on DC, as a cost reduction measure.