Google is your friend if you have an old scanner

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

My wife bought a scanner around the turn of the century. It’s old, but has always worked well. It’s a Canon LIDE 50, which should come as no surprise. Canon generally makes good hardware. The only problem is that Canon hasn’t made a new driver for it since Windows XP.

I’ve thought of keeping an XP box around for scanning, but wondered if there was a better way. Turns out there is. Thanks to this blog post I know the LIDE 60 drivers work fine, so we can keep the scanner even as we leave XP behind. That’s great, because I hate tossing perfectly usable hardware just because it’s old.

So if you have an old scanner, Google it. There may very well be a close-enough driver out there for it that you can use with a bit of tweaking. And if not, and you don’t mind paying $40, there’s VueScan, which works with 2,400 different scanners and all three (yes, three!) major operating systems. So you can use old weird scanners with Mac OS X or Linux if you want. And $40 is probably less than a new comparable scanner will cost.

Macs aren’t the only computers that last forever

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

In the midst of Microsoft reminding everyone that Windows XP’s doomsday is less than a month away, Apple quietly announced that Mac OS 10.6’s doomsday was sometime last year, and no more security updates would be forthcoming for Snow Leopard.

That led to this piece about why anyone would still want to run Snow Leopard. Well, there are reasons for it–and for that matter, there are reasons why they would want/need to step back to 10.5 (Leopard). I don’t disagree with that part at all, but I do disagree with the point at the end, where he says that if you want a computer that lasts a long time, you have to buy a Mac.

Let me remind you that Microsoft is sending out reminders to people that it’s time to migrate off an operating system that hasn’t been generally available on new consumer PCs since 2007. Read more

Model railroading as fan fiction

Dave Farquhar model railroading, Toy trains , , ,
Model railroading as fan fiction

Dan Bowman sent me this a couple of weeks ago, and I found myself agreeing with it: Model railroading is a form of fan fiction.

It seems like a good way to look at it. Every model railroad is a compromise. By my rough estimations, it’s 4.1 miles from Dupo, Illinois to Cahokia, but even if you model in Z scale, you’ll need 97 linear feet to model that line. I would think it would be very difficult to build a Z scale layout of that size–it would take a huge basement–and only put two towns on it. So, at the very least, people put their towns closer together and use a fast clock to make up for the compression. Some people compromise a lot more than that. Read more

Some stock advice from the Post-Dispatch

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

I found this warning about trying to time the markets in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch over the weekend. The warning was that 2009 was when the stock market bottomed out. Nobody predicted that was when it was going to happen. People who were buying stocks in 2009, when things looked bleak, are sitting much prettier than people who weren’t.

Although the economy as a whole is still a bit shaky, the stock market has had a historic run from 2009 to now. It just goes to show that the markets are fickle. Very fickle.

When the market was sinking fast and hard in 2009, I saw an opportunity. The fortune my grandfather made in the Great Depression is something of a family legend. (Where that money went is another legend that I’m not interested in speaking about.) That year looked like it might be the best opportunity I would see in my lifetime, so I sunk every dime I could into my 401(K) that year and encouraged my coworkers to do the same, though the most vocal of them were certainly talking about how much of a waste of time the 401(K) was, as far as they could tell.

I don’t know how many listened, but those who did probably are glad they did.

You can’t time the market. The best you can do is buy whatever is cheap. Take the emotion out of it. Set it up and make it automatic. Buy stock every payday by having automatic withdrawals, set a mix of blue-chip stocks, growth stocks, small company stocks, and bonds, and set the portfolio to rebalance. Some years it’s been the big companies that made the best return and some years it’s the small ones. Rebalancing forces you to buy low and sell high, to take last year’s profits and turn them into next year’s.

Remember. The market is fickle. It’s not God, and it’s not infallible. It’s actually very fickle and stupid. The way you beat a fickle and stupid market is by not being fickle. Don’t trust the market. It’s not trustworthy. Exploit the market.

I’ve had financial advisors try to sell me other gimmicky investments over the years. None has come close to matching the simple formula of evenly dividing holdings between those four categories in plain, simple no-load index funds. (You may have to settle for a managed fund for your growth holdings, but that’s OK.) Then rebalance. Whether it’s better to rebalance once a year or once a month or once a quarter is unclear. Your 401(K) may only give you one option anyway, so don’t obsess over it. The important thing is having a schedule.

When I was still in my 20s, I lost most of my retirement savings to poor management. I don’t intend to repeat that.

Oh, and one more thing: Don’t look at your financial statements. Toss them in a drawer in case you need them. The only time I look at them is when I’m trying to get a mortgage. Real estate is cheap, but stocks are expensive, so I’m buying real estate. I have to prove I have six months’ worth of mortgage payments stashed somewhere to get a loan, so that’s when I look at those statements–and then, just to make sure the big number is big enough, and that I’m putting it right-side up in the scanner.

Cree releases a $20 100W-equivalent LED bulb–but do you want one?

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

Cree joined Phillips in offering an LED bulb in the 1600-lumen class, suitable for replacing 100W incandescents. The Cree bulb costs $5 less than the Phillips competitor, in unsubsidized markets. (Many utilities subsidize energy efficient bulbs because it’s cheaper than building more power plants. Really.)

I own several Cree 60W equivalents and I’m very happy with them. They’ve been dependable, the price is reasonable, the quality of light is outstanding, they turn on instantly, and, believe it or not, they’re designed and built in the United States.

Now that Cree has four different bulbs at different ratings and three different price points, I weighed the pros and cons of each. Read more

And in a story that should surprise no one, Target’s attack was unsophisticated

Dave Farquhar security , , , ,

I found a story today stating that the attackers who stole millions of credit cards from Target didn’t have to try very hard to hide. I wish I could say I was surprised.

My boss says it this way: Amateurs hit as hard as they can. Professionals hit as hard as they have to.

Why? Because if they only hit as hard as they have to, they can save the hard hit for another day. And it really boils down to simple economics. If I can buy off-the-shelf malware for $1,000 and use it to steal millions of dollars, then use the same malware again somewhere else and steal another few million, why not do that? The alternative is to buy a sophisticated attack that costs five or six figures. Then what happens? I use it, get my money, and then the victim can’t figure it out, so the victim calls in Mandiant. Mandiant discovers the zero-day attack, then tells the world about it. Mandiant looks good because they discovered something nobody else has ever seen before. The victim looks a lot better too, because they got mowed down by something that was unstoppable. But then the vendor moves heaven and earth to release an emergency out-of-band patch as quickly as possible, closing down a very brief window of opportunity to use it.

Cyber criminals may be crooked and unethical, but they aren’t stupid. And that’s why this is an uphill battle: A cheap attack can go up against defenses that cost an order of magnitude more, and still win. Read more

Why tech encourages bad managers–and hope for those who want to be good managers

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

A friend asked me recently to talk to his son, a talented software developer whose career recently took a (temporary) turn for the worse, and he asked me a very good question.

Are there more bad managers in technology than good ones?

I said I think there are. And I told him why. But I’ve also worked for some very good managers, and I know exactly what it is that sets them apart. Read more

The bitcoin-train connection

Dave Farquhar model railroading, security ,

Ever since Bitcoin came into prominence, there’s been a great deal of speculation about the shadowy creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Newsweek thinks they found him: A semi-retired engineer who dislikes banks and the government and the fees and difficulty associated with importing model train parts from England and Japan.

Well, if you’re going to invent a cryptocurrency, what better thing to spend it on than model train parts? Read more

Microsoft is offering some help in migrating off XP

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

Since there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 or even Windows 8, Microsoft has reacted to criticism by licensing a cut-down version of PC Mover and offering it to latter-day XP upgraders for free. It will only migrate three applications for you, but for most people, that’s probably enough.

The good news is that this version of PC Mover works with Windows 7 as well, so if you want to take the strategy of migrating people to $99 off-lease PCs running Windows 7, it will still help.

The linked article above criticized Microsoft for not developing its own migration tool, but that seems a bit harsh. I’ve used PC Mover before, and found it to be a very capable tool. I’d be surprised if Microsoft actually could do much better. And Microsoft has a history of licensing third-party tools anyway: Every disk defragmenter Microsoft has ever shipped was a cut-down version of something written by other companies.

Of course it’s best to rebuild machines from scratch–it will perform much faster that way–but when there’s a must-have program on an old PC and the installation media is long gone, PC Mover is about the only way to recover it and move it on. Most people probably don’t have much more than three programs in that category.