How I set up office hours in Google Voice

Dave Farquhar Landlording , ,
How I set up office hours in Google Voice

If you have a side business, you need to offer customer service, but it’s also perfectly reasonable to not want your phone to ring at 3 a.m. You can fix that if you set up office hours in Google Voice.

Fortunately it’s easy to set up Google Voice to allow your phone to ring during office hours and go straight to voice mail after hours. And the nice thing is, Google Voice transcribes your messages. This makes it very easy to filter out people who are calling you trying to solicit your services at 25 cents on the dollar. I can’t say for certain that people are more likely to do that at off hours. But it’s certainly more annoying to get awakened at 3 a.m. by someone wanting to lowball you. And yes, I speak from experience.

Here’s how you do it if you don’t want to be disturbed at unreasonable hours.

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When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,
When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives?

When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives? Based on history, it’s possible to make an educated guess, and I’m going to do it.

Back in 2011, I noticed that historical hard drive pricing fell in line pretty nicely with Moore’s Law, and predicted that SSDs would do the same. I predicted that SSDs would reach 25 cents per gigabyte sometime in 2016, and was wrong. They hit that price in 2015. So I was late by a few months.

But I’m still willing to try to predict when SSDs will cost less than hard drives. I’ll predict when they’ll hit parity too. SSDs work differently from hard drives but their pricing trend is frighteningly similar.

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Convert scale between wargaming, diecast, trains, and slot cars

Dave Farquhar model railroading, Toy trains , , , ,

Borrowing materials and models from other hobbies can often be productive, and in the early stages of a hobby, often it’s a necessity due to a lack of products available. But it occurs to me that other hobbies borrow from model railroading more often than the other way around, and that means there are untapped resources available. To do that, you need a way to convert scale between wargaming, diecast, trains, and slot cars.

In that spirit, I present a chart of scales. Two neglected train scales, O and S, it turns out, can borrow heavily from elsewhere to make up somewhat for the greater selection of products available for HO and N scale. But this chart will, I hope, prove useful to other hobbyists as well.

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Using PC ATX power supplies on a train layout

Dave Farquhar model railroading, Toy trains , ,
Using PC ATX power supplies on a train layout

PC power supplies are exceptionally cheap and plentiful these days. If you’ve noticed and wondered whether you can use PC ATX power supplies on a train layout, wonder no more. You can.

Thanks to the miracle of mass production, even the cheapest, nastiest PC power supply gives far more power output per dollar than any train transformer. So if the lights and accessories on your electric train layout can run on 12 volts DC, which is a fairly good bet, you can get a lot of wattage for very little money by repurposing an inexpensive ATX power supply, whether new or secondhand. And on a wattage-per-dollar basis, they’re about twice as cost-effective as outdoor lighting transformers, which are another popular option for hobbyists. If you need AC power and more than 12 volts, get a lighting transformer. Otherwise, you can go ATX.

All it takes to use these cost-effective ATX power supplies is a bit of rewiring.

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How to tell if a Lionel tender has a whistle

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

One of the things Lionel did that set its electric trains apart from its competitors was integrating a whistle in the tender that was included with its steam locomotives. Because of the added play value and charm, the whistling tender is a sought-after feature, even in this era when electronic sounds are so inexpensive that even dollar store toys sometimes have them.

Here’s how to quickly tell if a Lionel tender has a whistle.

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Easier application whitelisting in Windows with App Locker

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

Application whitelisting is the holy grail of security, but it’s always at the top of the list of things people should do but haven’t yet. The reason is because it breaks stuff and it’s almost as impossible to anticipate ahead of time what it’s going to break as it is to fix whatever breaks.

I know. I wanted to do application whitelisting way back in 1997 and failed miserably.

I found a good-enough approach recently, though.

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Where the red wire goes in a light fixture

Dave Farquhar DIY
Where the red wire goes in a light fixture

A friend was replacing a light fixture in his bathroom and ran into something confusing–a red wire in the electrical box along with the usual black and white wires. And when he hooked up his new light fixture, he did what I would expect the majority of homeowners to do. He connected the white wire on the fixture to the white wires in the box, and the black wire on the fixture to the black wires in the box. And then his light switch wouldn’t work. The light stayed on all the time. He was on the right track when he asked what the red wire is for.

It turns out the red wire was the key to solving his light fixture problem.

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