Firefox simplifies Tinyurl

Dave Farquhar Software

This is cool. Steve DeLassus finds stuff and I blog it. If you like Tinyurl, there’s a Firefox extension that’s going to make you like it a lot more. If you don’t know what Tinyurl is, read on and you’ll be using it almost every day.First, why Tinyurl is useful: Ever try to give someone a web address, and you end up with something that’s three lines long? Items on Ebay are probably the worst. You try to e-mail it to someone, or post it on a discussion board, and the long length messes up the formatting, or the address gets chopped up and people have to copy and paste the thing back together again–if they think to try it.

Tinyurl is a web page you can visit, punch in any obnoxious address of any length, and it spits out an address that’s a few characters long, which can be easily passed along and won’t mess anything up.

Nice, eh? But what if you don’t want to visit tinyurl.com over and over again?

Install the TinyURL extension for Firefox, that’s what. Then you can just push a button to turn whatever page you’re viewing into a tinyurl and it goes straight to the clipboard. Push a button, then paste, and you’ve got it. What could be easier?

Robin, thank you and goodbye

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

I hang out at several train-related sites online. The Gauge is one of my favorites, partly because I learn so much there.

One of its great teachers, who was known both by his handle, Matthyro, and his first name, Robin, died today. In some ways he was the heart and soul of The Gauge–not many have their own entire section named after them.

You owe it to yourself to take a look at what Robin could build. What you’ll see isn’t the work of a hobbyist. It’s the work of a true artist.Unfortunately not many build like Robin anymore. Robin’s main material was, of all things, cardboard from cereal boxes. Sometimes he’d add corrugated cardboard, and wood was almost a last resort.

In an era when most people buy their structures for their layouts already assembled, and people can wow a crowd by dripping thinned gray paint into the lines that are supposed to represent mortar and drybrush a little grime on it, Robin stood out.

And he wasn’t the least bit shy about sharing his methods. He patiently took pictures of each step of most of his projects, posting them online and explaining just about everything he did–the master teaching his captivated students.

I learned a ton from reading his posts on the forum the last 18 months or so. I know I’m not the only one who will miss him.

I count myself fortunate to have been able to follow some of the last of his projects while they were still in progress.

Need a cheap NAS? Grab this floppy and an old Pentium and you’ve got it

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

I wanted to build a small-as-possible Linux for the purpose of creating a lightweight NAS a few years back. I even downloaded the uclibc development tools and started compiling for the purpose of doing it. Then I got distracted.

I guess it doesn’t matter. I think NASLite had beaten me to the punch anyway.Here’s how it works. You download the appropriate floppy for the network type (SMB for Windows networks, NFS for Unix) and network card you have. You find an old PC. As long as it has PCI slots, it’ll work. Drop in the NIC if there isn’t one there already, and then drop in as many as four IDE hard drives. (The disk will reformat the drives if there’s anything there, so make sure they’re new or scratch drives beforehand.) If the BIOS doesn’t support the drives because they’re too big, disable them in the BIOS. Don’t worry, Linux controls the drives directly so you don’t need the BIOS. Boot off the floppy, and it joins the network and you’ve got a bunch of disk space for the cost of the drives and possibly the NIC.

Nice, huh?

This isn’t suitable for use in most corporate environments since it creates wide-open storage (it might work well as a big file dump, so long as people realize there’s no security there, but I’ve learned the hard way that users tend not to listen, or at least not remember, when they’re told such things). For home networks it’s fine, unless you’ve got wireless, in which case anyone who can get into your wireless network would also be able to get to your NAS.

Even then, it’s useful if what you want is a central repository for programs like Irfanview and Mozilla Firefox that you install on all your PCs and want to keep handy.

At any rate, if you’re creative and careful and have a Linux box and know how to use the dd command (or have a fairly up-to-date copy of WinImage) to copy a 1.72-meg disk image to a floppy, this is a useful tool for you.

Have you noticed your inbox is lighter lately?

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

The FBI nailed Alan Ralsky.

Ralsky’s reaction? “I’m not a spammer. I’m a commercial e-mailer.”

In other news, Marion Berry doesn’t go to strip bars. He goes to erotic clubs.Ralsky, if you’re not familiar with him, is one of the more prolific spammers in the world. And while some people sympathize with him since sending spam seems to be the only way he can make a living, the fact is that spam hurts everyone. It wastes your time–the lost productivity dealing with spam has been valued at anywhere from $9 to $22 billion–and it hurts your ISP too.

I know someone who administers mail servers for one of the largest cable companies in the United States. The upgrades to its mail servers cost six figures when they have to do it. This past week he described the situation with spam and worms as “SETI@Home in a DDoS attack against mail.ispname.net.”

If you want to know why broadband Internet access doesn’t cost $5 a month, you can blame people like Ralsky.

Defenders say Ralsky didn’t break any laws. But according to various anti-spam laws, you disguising the origins of your mail is illegal, and Ralsky has been guilty of this. To me, this rings of jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Another question to ask is whether Ralsky has hawked pornography to underage children and whether he has ever hawked prescription drugs. If he had set up a table on a streetcorner and done either of those things, he would have landed himself in jail. If it’s illegal on the streetcorner, it ought to be illegal online. Especially because if he were doing it on the streetcorner, he’s only using a small parcel of public land. When he does it online, he’s utilizing thousands of computers that don’t belong to him.

I was glad when thousands of people signed Ralsky up for every junk-mail list they could find. It told a lot about his character when he remained defiant afterward. Filling his mailbox with junk was wrong, yet he saw nothing wrong with filling out e-mail boxes and he continued to do so.

Someone else will rise to take his place, but it will take time to learn his tactics, and in the meantime, anti-spam tools will get better.

The reason spam works is because somebody buys stuff from it. It might be one out of a thousand, or one out of a million, depending on who you believe. But it doesn’t take much more effort to blast out 3 million messages than it takes to blast out 3 thousand. It’s an attractive business because someone who’s unable or unwilling to do other work can get started with little or no expense, using equipment he or she probably already owns. It’s safer than, say, trying to sell stuff on Ebay. If I list a big pile of stuff on Ebay and it doesn’t sell, I owe listing fees–probably around 30 cents–on each item that doesn’t sell. Plus I’m stuck with that item and out whatever I paid to get it. But if I blast out a bunch of spam and nobody bites, I haven’t really lost anything, except maybe my ISP suspending or discontinuing my service.

The courts need to make an example of Alan Ralsky. Meanwhile, the FBI needs to go find a few of the other big fish in this pond and do the same.

Windows 2000 in 32 megs of RAM

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, Windows ,

I can’t remember if I linked this before or not, so here’s Windows 2000 on 32 MB of RAM.

Of course I find this interesting. And his advice is pretty good. My first choice for an OS in 32 megs of RAM would be Windows 95, and probably Windows 95a at that (and gee, some idiot wrote a book about that), but if you need better reliability and stability, Windows 2000 is a good second choice.

One piece of advice worth mentioning that he didn’t mention: If there’s a modem on the system, lose it, especially if it’s a Winmodem. That’ll save lots of precious RAM and CPU cycles.

How to retire a millionaire without doing much of anything

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I just finished reading The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. It’s a good book. It promises to turn just about anyone into a millionaire in one easy step–if you do it right, you can make one phone call, do nothing else, and retire a millionaire.

I recommend the book.He’s saying essentially the same thing a lot of popular financial advisors right now are saying, but the spin is a bit different. You have to market something.

Essentially, what he says to do is to open up some kind of an IRA, be it a 401(K), 403(B), or Roth, and set up automatic deductions every month that happen before you get a chance to spend any of your paycheck.

If you were to start doing such a thing at age 16, it’s entirely possible to pile up more than $13 million by retirement age. Of course the later you start, the less you’ll pile up, but $1 million is within reach for most Americans.

It’s a boring way to make money but it works.

Of course he also advocates paying off all debts early, which makes it possible to save even more.

I believe that over the next decade, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer, maybe much poorer. People will blame the politicians, but I don’t know that politicans have much control over this situation. Here’s what I expect will happen.

A lot of people are getting non-traditional mortgages without necessarily understanding all of the terms. In many instances, at the end of five years, they will owe the entire cost of the house. Large numbers of people aren’t going to be able to afford to do this, and they aren’t going to be able to afford to refinance because they won’t be able to afford the higher monthly payments.

The homeowners will be forced to sell. And since so many of these mortgages are being handed out now, at some point there will be more sellers than buyers. That will be the end of today’s real estate boom. Thosee who have cash will buy these houses at depressed prices and rent them out to former homeowners who can no longer afford to buy a home.

When the real estate market recovers, which it will, the people who bought lots of real estate at bargain basement prices will be extraordinarily wealthy–both from the rising value of the property they bought, and the money they made by renting it out.

I know what I need to be doing. I’m ahead of the game on paying off my mortgage. I need to get better about dumping money into a Roth IRA. And right about the time I make the last payment on the house, I expect I’ll get my yearly bill from the county, and for the first time ever, the number on it will be lower than it was the year before. That’ll be when I know it’s time to go for a walk and look for For Sale signs.

This is a good time to be buying financial books, using their advice to get your finances in order, and wait for up-and-coming troubled times. Because for the people who get out of debt now, the next depression (let’s not mince words here–when the economy is in the toilet, it’s called a depression) will be an opportunity.

It\’s finally out!

Dave Farquhar Society

OK, do I really need to tell you why you need The Complete Calvin and Hobbes?

I didn’t think so.My favorite one of all time, unfortunately, isn’t available on the Web anymore. It’s from March 31, 1986. Calvin has to go to the doctor. And the doctor approaches him with all the standard gear–tongue depressor, stethoscope–and a terrified Calvin keeps asking, “WHAT’S THAT!? WILL IT HURT?” And the doctor calmly tells him what it is and assures him that it won’t hurt at all.

Except for the last thing. Calvin asks his standard question, and then the doctor calmly says, “It’s a cattle prod. It hurts a little less than a branding iron.”

Calvin faints, and the doctor laments that kids have no sense of humor.

If I drop off the face of the earth for a month, it’ll be because I got my copy.

Cheap buildings for a train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Cheap buildings for a train layout

I’ve read about The New Pretty Village, published in book form by Dover Publications in 1980, as a source of buildings for a train layout, particularly a layout featuring tin litho Marx or prewar trains. Now I’ve got one in my hot little hands. I found some pictures of a reproduction online, and Marx expert Walt Hiteshew’s layout has used them as well.

Read more

The truth about DVD recordables

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I read Jim Louderback’s column from this week on DVD recordables with interest, but it was disappointing.

The most useful information in this column: Generic recordable DVDs don’t necessarily cost less than the brand names.

The rest of the column is just about hazing and an incomplete description of how he did various things you’re not supposed to do to DVD discs and then tried to see if they still worked.Since he did lots of things that you’re not supposed to do and many of the discs still worked immediately afterward, he came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what discs you buy.

Well, I used to do lots of things you’re not supposed to do to floppy disks. Sometimes I got away with it, and sometimes I didn’t, but since they weren’t repeatable experiments, that experience means nothing. And I didn’t try to present any of that experience as useful information either.

There is some advice that pertains to pretty much all recorded media and I’ll go ahead and repeat it here.

Buy the brand/type of media the drive manufacturer recommends. It’s not fair to say that, for instance, Verbatim discs are junk based on one bad experience with a Verbatim disc in one particular drive. Some combinations of disc and drive work better than others. That’s not to say that untested media won’t work, but it does mean you don’t know what you’re getting into. It’s better to know what you’re getting into.

This is why some people swear TDK is the best media and Verbatim is the worst, while someone else may say (with just as much passion) that Verbatim is the best media and TDK is the worst. I guarantee that the two people doing the arguing don’t have identical DVD burners.

Make at least two copies of everything. If the data is worth something to you, it’s worth the dollar or less it costs you to burn a second copy. Store it in a jewel case in a cool, dry, dark place. Why? Heat, light, and moisture are the three things aside from physical abuse that cause discs to break down most quickly. The jewels will protect the disc from physical abuse. Ironically, polystyrene jewel cases intended for CDs are more fragile than the media they protect, but in a way that’s a good thing. It gives you fair warning that you’re handling it too roughly.

If possible, store the second (or a third) copy offsite. A locked desk drawer at the office is a good candidate, but be careful if the owners of your office turn off the air conditioning during the weekends. Or store it at a friend’s house, and return the favor by storing a cache of discs for that friend.

And if it’s super-duper important… If the data absolutely has to be right, burn it at the slowest speed your software allows, and walk away from your computer until it’s finished. Discs written at the slowest speed are slightly more reliable than discs burned at high speeds, as are discs that didn’t require buffer-underrun protection to write.

It’s extremely rare for either of these things to make a difference, but if you’re paranoid, keep it in mind.