David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Lionel trains have a reputation for high quality, but like any machine, you have to take care of them. Here’s how to maintain Lionel trains to ensure they last another generation or two.
Even if you run your trains a lot, your trains should only need maintenance every few years. For about $30-$35 worth of materials, you can ensure your Lionel trains have a long, productive life.
Permanent means permanent, right? Not necessarily. It’s difficult to remove permanent marker from plastic, but not impossible. Here are several ways to get permanent marker off plastic.
The favorite trick is coloring over it with a dry erase marker, then erasing it. But if this doesn’t work, or you don’t have a dry erase marker, there are other solvents and cleaners that can also work. On cloth, permanent marker really is permanent, or nearly so, since it can soak into the surface. On plastic it can’t, so permanent marker is more like semi-permanent on plastic.
I’m a landlord, and my tenants can be hard on garbage disposals. One time I couldn’t get my preferred brand, so I ended up installing a Barracuda. Was it any good? Here’s my Barracuda garbage disposal review.
Barracuda garbage disposals are made by Moen. They are made overseas and imported, and sold in discount hardware and home improvement stores like Menards. Barracuda garbage disposals are also sold under the Waste King brand name.
Sometimes when you’re fitting a motherboard into a case, especially an aftermarket board into a name-brand case, the connectors for the panel LEDs and switches don’t match up with the board. You can usually rewire it fairly easily, but extending them means splicing the wires. But there’s an easier solution, and it’s cheap. Here’s how to rewire or extend case front panel connectors with plug-in connectors.
I ran into this on my IBM PC/AT. Its HDD connector wasn’t long enough to reach an ISA IDE card because it was designed for a full-length card. And the LED for the power light didn’t reach either. The problem is less rare with recent hardware, but not non-existent.
How tall is an O scale train? It varies. It can vary quite a bit. But I can give you some general guidelines. I can do the same for a related question, how long an O scale train is.
Can you put laminate over a tile floor? That’s a fairly common question. But unfortunately, like so many things, the answer is, it depends. In many cases you can install laminate over tile, but in some cases, you can make a problem worse by doing so. Here’s how you can know.
You can install laminate over tile if the tile floor is in reasonably good physical condition. But installing laminate over cracked, uneven tile will result in wavy, uneven, undesirable laminate.
The original breadbin-style Commodore 64 and VIC-20 are designed to be easy to open while keeping production cost reasonably low. But they made the design so easy it’s hard. Worse yet, due to the age of the plastics, if you open one today the way Commodore intended, you can damage it. So here’s how to open a Commodore 64 or VIC-20. Let’s also talk about how to fix one if you damage the case when opening it.
The breadbin-style 64 and VIC-20 have three large L-shaped tabs on the back that originally behaved like pivots or hinges. If you try to use them like a hinge today, you’ll probably hear plastic popping, so the trick is to open the case slightly, then pull the top forward.
What is an integrated motherboard? Every motherboard is integrated to a degree. But there are positives and negatives to integration. So not everyone sees an integrated motherboard as an advantage. Here’s what it means and why it matters to you.
Today, an integrated motherboard usually means all the functionality, including video, network, and all common I/O are built right onto the motherboard, with no need for any cards in expansion slots. This allows for a smaller and cheaper system.
Setting up a Super Nintendo can get tricky if you can’t find all of the cables. Cables from some other Nintendo consoles will work, but not always. Plus, TV sets have changed a lot since the 1990s, and that makes it much more difficult. HDTVs don’t necessarily have the same options as vintage TVs. So here’s how to hook up a Super Nintendo to a modern TV.
The Super Nintendo was really designed to use composite video or S-Video, like a VCR. It shares the same rectangular connector with many other Nintendo consoles, but a cable to use the Wii with HDMI, for example, doesn’t work on an SNES. The SNES requires a different, more expensive converter for HDMI.
Lionel enthusiasts, especially postwar enthusiasts, talk about Magne-Traction a lot. But what is a Magne-Traction train, and what makes it special?
Magne-Traction was a feature Lionel introduced in the 1950s. By putting magnets in the driver wheels, a Magne-Traction train can pull more, climb steeper grades, and run at higher speeds without derailing on sharp curves.