David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
People frequently wire a ceiling fan with a light to two light switches. That way they can control the fan with one switch and the light with the other. But what if the room has only one switch and you have to wire a ceiling fan with light to one switch? You can still do it. You just have to know what to do with the fan’s red or blue wire.
If your ceiling light fixture doesn’t work, let’s talk about one I worked on last weekend. It wasn’t my first time doing that. I ended up replacing the fixture, but then I fixed the broken fixture afterward.
Besides work experience, I probably get more questions about CISSP continuing education than anything else CISSP-related. Fortunately, keeping your CISSP can be a lot cheaper and easier than getting it in the first place was.
CISSP continuing education is measured in CPEs. You get one CPE per hour of “study.” Study is a pretty loose term. If you’re learning about security, you can probably find a way to make it count. You need to get 40 CPEs per year.
What scale are Hot Wheels cars, you ask? Unfortunately it varies a bit. They tend to be a bit less than 1:64. But scale isn’t Hot Wheels’ objective. Fitting in the package is. That means the size of Hot Wheels cars is between 2.5 and 3 inches, depending on what looks right for the prototype model. That’s when a prototype even exists. So it can take some homework to figure out the actual scale of any given model. Read more
What scale are Matchbox cars, you ask? Unfortunately it varies a bit. Nominally they’re around 1:64 scale. But scale isn’t Matchbox’s objective. Fitting in the package is. That means the size of Matchbox cars is between 2.5 and 3 inches, depending on what looks right for the prototype model. So it can take some homework to figure out the actual scale of any given model.
Babe Ruth is arguably the greatest baseball player of all time. No doubt he’s the most famous baseball player of all time. Goudey was the top baseball card brand of the 1930s, so Goudey and the Sultan of Swat make a legendary combination. When it comes to Goudey Babe Ruth cards, there are several options.
I don’t generally recommend baseball cards as investments. But Goudey Babe Ruth cards have increased in value over time and they aren’t hard to sell quickly if the need ever arises. So they are a safer investment than most other baseball cards, at least.
I had trouble in Disk Manager the other day. It hung at the message that says “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service.” My problem happened with an SD card, but it can happen with any type of drive.
Here’s how I fixed it.
I don’t recommend MAC address filtering–it stands for Media Access Control and has nothing to do with Apple computers–as a security measure. It’s too easy to bypass it. But if you want or need to do MAC address filtering in DD-WRT it’s easy to do.
And admittedly, even though MAC filtering won’t help your security, DD-WRT’s implementation of it lets you do some neat tricks that an off-the-shelf router can’t do–like forcing a device to use 5 GHz even if it wants to use 2.4 GHz.
People frequently ask me for a list of common or useful Commodore 64 commands, including disk drive commands. Since the C-64’s built in operating system is more of a combination command line/Basic interpreter, it takes some getting used to if you didn’t grow up with it.
These commands assume a stock, unmodified C-64, freshly powered on. Many fast-load cartridges, ROM replacements, or so-called DOS wedge programs include shortcuts for these commands. But these commands work on any C-64 with a disk drive, modified or stock.
I’ve seen a lot of gimmicky hacks to speed up Firefox, and you probably have too. But chances are Firefox ran just fine when you started, then it slowed down over time. Here’s my collection of tips to restore Firefox’s performance if Firefox is slow.