David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw a YouTube video the other day saying it was time to stop buying used Dell Optiplexes, and he advocated building a new PC based on an AMD Ryzen 5 instead. But is it really as cut and dry as that? In this blog post, I will look at both options.
I’m not a big fan of the whitelist and blacklist terminology. The language is potentially harmful, but besides the racial implications, it’s also unclear. In this blog post, I’ll go over the traditional meaning of whitelist vs blacklist, and you’ll see why I say the alternative, dare I say progressive, terminology is also much more clear.
At the dawn of October 1988, the IBM PS/2 was looking like a success. As it closed out its third quarter of 1988, IBM announced the PS/2 had sold 3 million units in its first year and a half on the market. The pace of 2 million units a year made it one of the best-selling machines in the world at the time. But it ultimately proved to be IBM’s downfall in the PC market. So it’s historically significant, however you feel about IBM. But should you buy an IBM PS/2? Is an IBM PS/2 a good retro computer?
Marx train set 29609 was an electric train set from 1953. While some Marx collectors joke that the only rare Marx train set is the one that doesn’t run, this diesel transition set is rare and valuable today.
If you need to resolve CVE-2023-33140 OneNote Spoofing remediation, the best way to do it is to uninstall it. Here’s why this is OK to do, and how to do it. Fixing Windows Store vulnerabilities is hard.
Although never as big as some of the other more memorable trends of the time, penny loafers were absolutely something you saw people wearing in the 1980s and 1990s. Here’s how a traditional shoe design from the 1950s came to be remembered as an 80s and 90s trend.
The Tandy CM-11 monitor, introduced in 1988, was the more expensive CGA-compatible monitor from the Tandy 1000’s heyday. It had a reputation for being reliable, but more importantly, it included a better picture tube than its entry-level counterpart, to provide a display more worthy of the Tandy tagline of “Clearly Superior.”
Marx train set 9632 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 9632, because that’s what Marx printed on the box. While some Marx collectors joke that the only rare Marx train set is the one that doesn’t run, this entry-level set is surprisingly rare and valuable today.
It seems like a good Jeopardy question. This early home computer was called the blank 80. In this blog post, I’ll fill in the blank, explain what the number 80 meant, and why the number was more memorable than the initials.
The early home computer blank 80 was the TRS-80, manufactured by Tandy Corporation and sold in its Radio Shack stores.
The Radio Shack Armatron was a toy robotic arm manufactured by Tomy, the Japanese toy maker, and imported and sold at Radio Shack stores from 1984 to 1991 and again in 1994. It was a robotic arm that you controlled with joysticks and it came with game pieces so you could make a game of trying to pick up objects and perform simple tasks.