David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I don’t think it’s news to anybody that the days of being able to go to thrift stores and find interesting retro computers and software without any effort are over, and probably not coming back. And last week, I lamented about what ruined thrift stores. But that’s not to say there aren’t interesting and useful retro items you can still find at thrift stores. I’ll give you a dozen ideas.
In the late 1990s, there were various rumors about Windows NT on the Macintosh. Most of them didn’t pan out, but with the development this month of a way to run Windows NT 4.0 on a Power Mac to get the reverse Hackintosh you may have had nightmares about, this seems like a good time to revisit those old rumors.
I found out midday Wednesday that one of my former employers, the MSSP Deepwatch, laid off 25% of its staff, about 100 people, that day. Layoffs are a fact of life even in the security field. It happened to me back in March 2023. In this blog post, I want to share my experience with the LinkedIn green open to work banner in hopes it may help someone.
I have mixed feelings on the banner. As for Deepwatch, you’ll have to read between the lines, but I won’t make you squint too hard.
I was talking with someone who’d rather remain anonymous regarding AC and DC power on train layouts. When using AC power, a common trick to reduce the amount of wire you need is to run a power wire to each loop of track, and feed that loop of track from a dedicated loop of wire. Then you can run a second loop that each of your loops of track use as a common ground. His question was, if you wired your layout like this, would it be possible to switch to DC power?
The answer is yes, with a possible caveat.
I was watching LGR’s retrospective on making retro videos on YouTube and one of the things he said struck me. He said thrifting is a lot different now than it was in 2009. In this blog post, I’ll tell you what ruined thrift stores. I saw it happen while it was happening.
Last week I helped an old friend, Dan, get his dad’s Lionel train layout running for one last time. Dan’s dad, David, had built the layout sometime in the 1970s using traditional methods, but had partially disassembled the layout sometime around 1988 and could no longer remember how it went together. In the process of helping, I learned that a Lionel layout doesn’t have to be permanent to be special. A temporary layout can be just as memorable.
One of the reasons people keep a bridge PC around is the difficulty of writing 720k double density floppies with a modern USB floppy drive. In this blog post, I’ll share the secret of the MPF82E, a USB floppy drive that can write double density 720K disks, making it ideal for retro computing.
I recently went to install a modern dual fan GPU in my Dell OptiPlex 3010. It is an outmoded machine for gaming, and it’s not supported for Windows 11, but with a powerful enough GPU, I can do some other types of cool GPU work. It can still be a Folding at Home monster, and I can do some AI based image editing with it. But I ran into some challenges trying to install my RTX 3060 in my aged Dell Optiplex. In this blog post, I will tell you how I overcame them.
Later revisions of the Commodore 2031 look just like the 1541. But was this drive just the IEEE version of the 1541? And what about this drive almost made the 1541 not happen at all? In this blog post, we will dig into the last 170k IEEE drive Commodore made for the PET series, from 1981 to 1983.