Screw sizes and tips for various common types of Lionel track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , ,
Screw sizes and tips for various common types of Lionel track

So, maybe you set up a loop of track and an electric train for Christmas, and now you’re thinking about a permanent layout. I’ve been there. Once you build a table, you’ll need to attach your track. Screws are the most common way to do that. Here’s a list of the best screws for Lionel track. Read more

Merry and blessed Christmas to all

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I just wanted to take a minute to wish all of you a very merry and blessed Christmas. With the snowstorm, we had a whiter Christmas than I remember having in a very long time, and driving home from Christmas Eve service was a bigger adventure than I bargained for. My older son (who’s not quite 3) actually slept late this morning. That’s probably the last time that ever happens. I’m sure he’ll be up at 5 or 6 like every normal child next year, and for the foreseeable future.

I’m doing some computer upgrades now, so I may have some new experience to relate in the coming days. We’ll see. Hopefully there won’t be too many stories of disaster and recovery.

Don’t use Internet Explorer this Christmas

Dave Farquhar security , , , , ,

In case you haven’t heard elsewhere, there’s a nifty unpatched vulnerability for Internet Explorer floating around. And it’s actively being exploited. Metasploit, an exploit toolkit used by penetration testers and script kiddies alike, is able to detect and utilize it.

Under these circumstances, Microsoft has been known to rush out a patch before the next scheduled Patch Tuesday, but the Christmas and New Year’s holidays will obviously slow things down.

In the meantime, installing Firefox and/or Chrome is prudent. I have and use both, since, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a time yet when both of the two most popular alternative browsers had unpatched exploits in the wild.

How to get more blog traffic without being sleazy

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

Something Steve A. wrote last week got me thinking. I’m paraphrasing, but if I’m interpreting him correctly, he’s written every day, or nearly every day, for about four years and would like to cut back, but is kinda-sorta addicted to the traffic he gets by writing every day. But there are more effective ways to get more blog traffic.

I think writing every day does increase your traffic, to a degree. But for long-term, sustainable traffic, I think it helps only indirectly. Here are seven things I’ve found that helped me get more blog traffic. Read more

Thrift-store PCs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the comments of a recent post I did, reader Glaurung Quena brought up a good topic: secondhand PCs, acquired cheaply, strictly as rebuild fodder.

I like the idea, of course, because I’ve been doing it for years. In the 1990s I built a lot of 486s and Pentiums into former IBM PC/ATs, basically until all the board makers relocated the memory slots into a position that wasn’t clear on the original PC/AT due to a beam that supported its drive bays. And of course the adoption of ATX and MicroATX killed that, at least for a while.

But now ATX has been around as long as the old AT architecture had been when ATX came along, and efforts to replace ATX haven’t been successful. So that trick makes more sense again. Buy a secondhand machine cheaply, intending to re-use the case, and regard anything else inside that happens to be reusable strictly as a bonus. Read more

Upgrading an HP Mini 110 with an Intel X25-V SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I installed an Intel X25-V in an HP Mini 110 and found it to be an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive in my current SSD Roundup will work even better today. It’s an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive available today will be considerably larger than the stock 16 GB SSD, and also considerably faster. Read more