David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Marx train set 9624 was an electric train set Marx that Sears sold in 1953. But you may also hear collectors refer to it as Happi-Time train set 9624, because that’s what Marx printed on the box. It was something of a transition set, mixing new plastic diesel engines with tin lithographed freight cars.
Marx reused this set number a few times. This blog post covers the variation Sears sold in 1953.
If your drill bits keep breaking, I can sympathize. It happens to me too. But I also know how to prevent, or at least reduce, how often this happens. In this blog post, I’ll tell you why your drill bits keep breaking, and that knowledge will help keep it from happening as frequently in the future.
Have you heard of Crusty the Mac, the indestructable Macintosh SE? Let me tell you the story of Scratchy the Micron. Scratchy was a Micron Transport Trek 2 laptop, one of the best laptops money could buy in 1998. And you needed a lot of money to buy one. It cost $2,999 when it was new in 1998, the equivalent of $5,600 in today’s money.
YouTuber Mike Tech was attempting to refurbish a couple of Gateway 2000 desktops recently, and he observed that one of them had features you normally only see in business class PCs. And he expressed surprise, because Gateway is a brand we typically associate with consumer PCs. But I can confirm Gateway did attempt to compete in the business/enterprise PC market. Here’s why that didn’t go so well for them.
Marx train set 50885 is very similar to some variants of another set, 52875, and set 50875. But it has a distinct number on the box, so let’s walk through set 50875, which featured a 2-4-2 steam locomotive with a slopeback tender pulling three freight cars and a caboose.
The Commodore 8050 disk drive was the second-highest capacity floppy drive Commodore made for its 8-bit computers. It was a dual drive unit that connected to the IEEE-488 bus used on the PET and CBM line of computers. Each drive stored half a megabyte of data on 5.25 inch single sided quad density disks. When you listed the directory on a Commodore equipped with an 8050, the disk read 2102 blocks free. They were marketed for educational and business use.
How Tenable sets plugin severity is a question customers have been asking me for years, dating back to the days I worked for Tenable partners. It can be a bit complicated, so in this blog post I will explain what goes into Tenable plugin severity.
ARCnet was the first commercially available local area network standard, beating both Ethernet and Token Ring to market. Conceptually, it had similarities with both, and because it was inexpensive and efficient, it was popular for a good 15 years or so. ARCnet was an abbreviation for Attached Resource Computer NETwork.
Youtuber SMT Mainline recently encountered a Marx 4915S Steam type electric train set when recording a video. He said he didn’t know much about it but thought it was neat. In this blog post, I’ll give some background on Marx train set 4915S.
Successful vulnerability management is deceptively simple. It comes down to being able to answer yes to two questions: Are you fixing the right things? And are you fixing them fast enough? But how fast is fast enough? In this blog post, I’ll explain how I use peer benchmarking to help companies figure out how fast is fast enough. I’ll also explain how to know if your security policies are less popular than speed limit laws, and why that will make them fail.