An easy fix for a Lionel ZW with dead posts

Dave Farquhar Toy trains ,

I helped someone troubleshoot a Lionel Trainmaster ZW transformer this week, because my Lionel ZW transformer had exactly the same problem. It seems like it’s pretty common, so maybe others have the problem too.

The Lionel ZW, as you may know, has four pairs of posts on the back for power. You can use it to run four trains, but what many people do is use the inner posts to power accessories and fine-tune the voltage output. The problem with my ZW was that one of the pairs of posts didn’t work. Sometimes two of them might not work.

Here’s a slick trick to try, and if it works, the fix is super cheap and easy and doesn’t require you to open it up. Read more

Beware the Black Friday electronics

Dave Farquhar Android, Saving money , , , , , , ,
Beware the Black Friday electronics

Ars Technica ran an aptly timed article today called How to talk your family out of bad consumer electronics purchases. (link removed in retaliation for Conde Nast’s 11/3/2025 layoffs–sorry not sorry) It’s definitely worth a read, to steer you away from bad Black Friday electronics.

There’s a great tip in the article. If a doorbuster item has a model number that isn’t available the rest of the year, you don’t want it. That’s a good rule.

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Testing gift electronics before wrapping them is an excellent idea

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,
Testing gift electronics before wrapping them is an excellent idea

The late, great Consumerist blog recommended testing a Playstation 4 before gifting it. That’s always a good idea anyway, given that most failures happen very early in the life of an electronics gadget. If they survive the first 24 hours, they are much more likely to have a long life. It’s a good idea with any game console, such as a Nintendo Switch.

This is called burning in.

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Using antivirus to deliver a virus

Dave Farquhar security ,

A coworker tipped me off the other day to how it’s possible to use a certain major-brand antivirus to infect a computer. “I didn’t have admin rights,” I overheard him explaining, “So I got them with [redacted] antivirus.”

My head spun around violently. “You did what?”

“Google ‘confused deputy persistence,'” he deadbeated. “It’s the first result.” Then he went back to explaining the problem at hand. Read more

The Asus Memo Pad HD 7 review: It’s a nice inexpensive tablet

Dave Farquhar Android , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been messing with an Asus Memopad, the 7-inch version. I think it’s a well-built, good-performing tablet for $149, and when you can get it on sale for less than that–and this is the time of year for that–I think it’s a great tablet for the money.

It’s not a high-end tablet. It has a 1280×800 screen, a quad-core 1.2 GHz Mediatek processor, a middling GPU, and 1 GB of RAM, and importantly, it includes a micro SD slot so you can add up to 32 GB of storage to it. The specs are all reasonable, but not mind-blowing. Most of the complaints I’ve seen about it are that it’s not a Nexus 7, but it’s 2/3 the price of a Nexus 7, too. When you compare it to other tablets in its price range, the worst you can say about it is that it holds its own. Read more

Can you mix Lionel and Marx track? Yes, pretty much.

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , ,

Here’s a question from the search engines: Can you mix Lionel and Marx track?

Generally speaking, yes you can. Just stick with O27 track, and you can mix Lionel, Marx, and K-Line as needed. Dad had a mixture of Lionel and Marx track in the 1950s–my theory is that someone tipped my grandfather off that you could buy a Lionel O27 starter set, expand it with cheaper Marx track, and once you had the track assembled, no one would know the difference. When we set his layout back up in the mid 1980s, we added some K-Line O27 track, because it was what we could find. I have a mixture of all three brands to this day. Read more

How long does a hard drive last?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,
How long does a hard drive last?

If you’re asking how long does a hard drive last, I found this study on hard drive longevity last week.

I take issue with the opening paragraph but the rest of the article is very good. The opening paragraph is a bit deceptive—hard drives were anything but common 30 years ago. Even 25 years ago, they were a serious status symbol. I remember in 1988, a classmate told me his dad had just bought a computer with a hard drive, and swore me to secrecy. Why? Because in today’s dollars, a computer with a hard drive in 1988 cost around $2,000, minimum, and given that his dad was working towards his master’s degree at the time, he probably had a really hard time affording that. If you had a hard drive even in the late 1980s, you were either very rich, or you took your computing very seriously and were willing to make some serious sacrifices somewhere else.

But, like I said, the rest of the article is very good. I’m being a curmudgeon. Read more