David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
If you’ve built a few PCs, or repaired a few PCs, you have some idea how important the power supply is. If you buy any old tin box that fits, you can probably expect to run into some problems. Here’s some advice on buying power supplies, including reliable power supply brands.
Although the 1970s may not have been quite the golden era for baseball that, say, the 1950s were, the decade produced a good number of stars. An important thing to consider, too, is that many players Generation X grew up watching came up in the 1970s. That, along with lower production numbers, makes it an important decade in today’s market. Let’s take a year by year walk through the most valuable baseball cards of the 1970s.
If you’re wondering about a vacancy switch vs occupancy switch, both types of switches have their uses. The basic difference comes down to whether you want the light to turn on when it senses motion and turn itself off after the last time it senses motion, or only turn itself off after the last time it senses motion.
Do AC adapters go bad? The answer surprises many people, but the answer is yes. The question, then, is how to lengthen their life expectancy and what to do if they do eventually go bad.
A watering hole attack is an indirect attack on a victim. Rather than directly attacking the victim’s network, the attacker attacks a web site that the victim’s employees are likely to visit. Then the attacker attacks the victim’s network, via its own workstations, from that web site. A former colleague asked me how you protect against watering hole attacks, and I thought this was a good exercise. So here are some strategies for watering hole attack prevention.
Old PCs, especially PCs from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, have a button with the curious label “Turbo.” On some PCs, a number on the front changes when you push it, or an LED toggles on or off. Why did old PCs have a turbo button?
Turbo buttons are a quirk of old PCs, kind of like their beige color that tends to turn yellow, but it served a functional purpose.
I spotted it on page 597 of the 1983 Sears Christmas catalog. “Two big names play the same games,” the headline boasted. Next to the venerable Atari 2600, Sears presented the Coleco Gemini video game system, an Atari 2600 clone.
In 1982, Coleco built an add-on to make its Coleco Vision game system Atari 2600-compatible. Atari sued. Coleco poked the bear by making the Gemini, an outright clone. Sears had sold Atari 2600 clones before, but they were actually real Atari 2600s with a different label on them, supplied by Atari itself. The Gemini was more of a true Atari 2600 clone.
Sometimes it’s faster just to type a command than to dig around in the start menu. That’s especially true for many sysadmin tasks. Knowing the command line for active directory users and computers can save you a lot of time.
Some 90s computer brands are the same as today, but a lot more companies played in the field than now. Profit margins were higher then, so industry consolidation wasn’t the matter of survival that it is now. The most popular computer brands of today were among the most popular brands in the 90s, but some popular 1990s computers no longer exist in any form.
Here’s a look back at some of the brands of old, including some famous PC brands, some not-so-famous, and some notorious. The 1990s were certainly a make or break time for many of them, arguably just as volatile as the merciless 1980s had been.
Someone asked me about laser printer consumables, specifically toner vs drum unit. That’s a fair question. The drum unit is the gotcha consumable that people sometimes forget about.