Refinishing without refinishing

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

As I was walking through the paint section of my local hardware store, I spied a product on the shelves that claimed to work miracles. It was called Howard Restorafinish. The can shows a picture of someone wiping a door or tabletop that has scratches, water marks, and other nastiness and making it look brand new.

Too good to be true? Probably. But it was about five bucks. So I bought a can.I have a grandfather clock that belonged to my dad. A family friend built it for him in 1978. To most people it would be nothing special, but for whatever reason it meant a lot to my dad, and he lost it under some questionable circumstances and ended up going to a lot of trouble and expense to get it back.

Since then it’s endured four moves, and it’s spent the majority of the past 10 years sitting in basements. It sustained some damage in at least two of the moves, and in the last move it got some nasty scratches. Scratches is probably putting it nicely. I want it in my combination study/den, next to my wall-size bookcase, where I think it’d look gorgeous, but not with those huge gouges in it.

Since the clock needs to be sanded down and refinished anyway, I figured this stuff couldn’t do any harm, and I figured it was worth my five bucks to find out. So I took it home, grabbed an old sock, took the Howard Restorafinish and the sock down to the basement, and went to town.

The results were mixed. It really does seem to make minor scratches disappear. It also seems to help tired, faded color. I don’t really know how to describe it, other than spots that seem dry and lifeless. It also seems to do a good job of eliminating dirty buildup that turns the wood almost black.

The parts that were passable before now look bright and shiny–better than I ever remember it looking.

At first I was really impressed with what it did with the gouges. It recolored them. After 24 hours, I’m a bit less impressed. The cherry tint it put down is too dark. It seems where there’s no finish left to restore, its results aren’t as good. But I have to admit it still looks much better than before.

I found a few other light spots that it wasn’t able to do much of anything with. They’re minor. I can live with it.

The verdict? It didn’t exactly work miracles, but it made the clock look more than presentable again. I might need heavier-duty artillery for the spot that gave me trouble, but in all honesty I might be the only one who’ll notice it. I’m glad I spent the five bucks.

At some point I do need to sand it down and restain and refinish it. I’m sure I could sand it down, stain it and lacquer it and spend less than $100. But I really don’t have the time right now to do it. I can easily come up with five bucks and half an hour.

So I wouldn’t buy it expecting to make thrift-store furniture look like it came from Neimann Marcus, but for a scratch or a watermark on a kitchen cabinet, a piece of furniture, or a hardwood floor, it might save you a time-consuming refinishing job, or at least let you put that off until a more serious accident.

I’ll be buying the oak and walnut varieties to see what it can do for a couple of spots on my hardwood floors and my kitchen cabinets.

Taking decent photographs

Dave Farquhar Photography , , ,

I’m not a serious photographer and I don’t play one on TV. But I’m tired of looking at dark, fuzzy, tiny photographs that don’t tell anything, so here’s a way someone who knows nothing about photography–such as Yours Truly–can take a decent picture.For some examples of my photography, which I consider barely acceptable, here’s a windup train and an American Flyer electric.

The second photograph is worse than the first, for two reasons. I took the second photograph indoors, and used a rug as a backdrop. The texture of the rug detracts from the photo. As does the lack of light.

I took the first photograph outside. It wasn’t all that sunny of a day, and it was about 9 in the morning on a Saturday. I used a white towel as a backdrop. A neutral-colored sheet would have been even much better, but I had the towel handy. The photograph is small enough that the towel’s texture doesn’t detract as badly as it normally would.

So the first trick is to use a decent backdrop.

Light is trick #2. Get enough light on your subject to not need the flash. Light up the room, take a shot, and see what happens. If the camera flashes, get more light. Better yet, take the object outside. In the daytime, of course. Ideally, the majority of your light should be coming from behind you and the camera, rather than from behind the object. A little bit of light behind the object to eliminate shadows is a good thing, but too much will look harsh.

Focus is trick #3. I assume you know to push the button halfway to focus it. That’s the first step. The second step is to take five or six shots because one of them is likely to look better than the worst of them.

The rule of thirds is something they actually teach you in school. (I spent about a month studying photography in journalism school because they make everyone do that. The rule of thirds is about all I remember.) Professional photographers can disregard this rule the way professional writers sometimes disregard rules about sentence fragments. People like me need to follow it. Look at an existing photograph. Mentally draw two horizontal and two vertical lines, dividing the photograph into thirds. The intersection of each line is what the human eye is going to find interesting. So at the very least, position your object so that part of it is hitting as many of those points as possible.

Use a tripod. You’ll get sharper pictures because a tripod holds the camera steady. I didn’t use a tripod for either of these shots, so it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. For small objects, a three-inch pocket tripod from Kmart will do just fine. Mine cost about $5. For larger objects, a larger tripod is necessary. Generally speaking, even a cheap and nasty tripod is better than no tripod, so long as it isn’t so wobbly that it can’t hold the camera straight.

And finally: Crop. After you’ve taken the photograph and you get it into the computer, crop it. This lets you make the picture smaller without losing resolution. It also lets you get rid of unnecessary whitespace and/or objects. Did you catch the edge of your backdrop, revealing the concrete or table underneath? Crop it out. Did you forget the rule of thirds? Crop the picture to move the object into place. I cropped both of the pictures I used as examples because otherwise you’d have seen two pictures with lots of towel or carpet and itty-bitty trains. But I wanted pictures of trains, not man-made fibers.

If you follow these simple principles, you can set your camera to auto everything and get a decent shot. The idea is to make the job as easy on the camera as possible. If you halfway follow the rule of thirds, you get an even better shot.

I almost forgot one other thing. I cleaned the objects in the photos. You might be reluctant to clean objects for sale on Ebay for the legitimate fear of damaging them, but at least brush the dust off with a soft brush, such as a makeup brush or soft paint brush. Chances are, anything you photograph looks better without loose dust covering it.

Following these tips won’t make you look like a pro, but your Wikipedia articles will look better and so will your Ebay listings. And on Ebay, a good, clear photograph means more bids and higher prices.

Remember type-ins?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , ,
Remember type-ins?

An article on type-in programs showed up on Wikipedia in September 2004. Ah, memories. There was a time when the programs listed in the back of a magazine were at least as important as the editorial content.

I mentioned to the initial author of the article that type-ins became a bit of a bragging right. Soon after meeting someone else who subscribed to the same magazines as you, you’d ask about the longest program they’d ever typed in. I’m pretty sure in my case the longest would have been SpeedScript 128, which was a word processor published in 1987 or 1988. Another candidate is Crossroads, which was a 2D shoot-’em-up (and a really good one at that) published in 1987, but I may have bribed my sister into helping me type parts of that monstrosity in. You’d get cross-eyed after a while after looking at those pages of hexadecimal code.

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Pretentious Pontifications: Raunche sells out

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire ,

Raunche interrupted my presidential campaign today by coughing up some bile about the prototype for his new computer.

I had to remind him that there are two hardware companies to trust: Intel and Microsoft. This computer incorporates neither. And multiple G5s does not a supercomputer make. Especially when it runs a second-rate operating system, which means anything but Windows, of course.What multiple G5s make, regardless of whose name ends up on the front, is nouveau riche computers suitable for aristocracy that wears high heels. (My evil twin, David, asked me if he also wears suspendies and a brar. I almost laughed.) I do hope IBM had the good sense not to put it in a translucent case with blue polka dots, but I will not hold my breath.

As for my adoring fans, you may catch a brief glimpse of me at the Scottish Festival in St. Louis at Forest Park on 9 September before I resume my run for the presidency.

Tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout

In 2004, after being back in the hobby a few months, I decided I didn’t want a train layout like the ones I saw in the magazines, which all take a hi-rail approach. The layouts looked nice, but they all had the same buildings and figures on them. I wanted to do something different. That got me looking for tin litho buildings for a traditional pre-war train layout. And it started a quest that continues to this day.

Don’t get me wrong. Today I have more than enough tin buildings to populate an 8×8 layout. Had I known what I was looking for from the start, it would have taken a lot less time. I might as well share my experience.

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Fixing Windows font sizing. Sort of.

Dave Farquhar Windows

So, I’ve got this nifty new laptop. It’s fast and reliable and it’s got a huge 15-inch screen.

The screen’s native resolution is 1400×1050. So the huge screen is full of tiny text.No problem, right? Right-click on the desktop, hit properties, go to appearance, go to font size, select extra large, and go to town, right?

Not quite. When I did that, I got big, gorgeous fonts some of the time and little teeny fonts other times and lots of apps, even those from the Vole itself, can’t handle the font size change without going all goofy.

A better solution is hidden more deeply. Right-click on the desktop and select properties. But go to settings, advanced, and under general, you’ll find a DPI setting. Since the default is 96 DPI and this screen’s resolution is about 50% larger than I would like, I switched to a custom setting and scaled to 150%, which gives 144 DPI.

Many CSS-heavy web pages still display goofy, including this one, so I end up hitting CTRL-+ and CTRL– to adjust the sizes of pages to make them readable, but apps like Outlook (yes, I’m one of those poor souls stuck in an MS Exchange environment) that don’t respond well to the large fonts setting work much better when you change the DPI.

So now I can take advantage of the high resolution display to actually make the computer display look better, rather than merely cramming lots more stuff in the same space as before.

My brother\’s speck and my log

Dave Farquhar Christianity

“I think if we were given the Scriptures, it was not so that we could prove that we were right about everything. If we were given the Scriptures, it was to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.” — Rich Mullins, famed Christian singer/songwriter

So, let’s say you decide another Christian might be subjecting his/her self to too much temptation. You don’t know that this someone else is sinning, mind you. You just suspect this other person’s actions might make this person tempted to sin. So you pull this person aside, forbid this person from doing whatever it is that might lead to temptation, justify yourself to yourself and this other person by saying you read the Bible, and then go on your merry way.
In 1997, I got fed up with Lutherans not talking about subjects that made them uncomfortable and started attending a non-denominational church that wasn’t scared of those questions. The fact that they weren’t scared of guitars and music written during my lifetime, and that the sermons were about real-life situations didn’t hurt either. That church changed my life.

The Sunday after Easter in 1998, I went back to being Lutheran again. Today, it’s been six and a half years, and I’ve hardly looked back.

What happened?

While in a lot of regards it was a great church, I didn’t feel like you could go there and get involved in anything without feeling like you were being watched. Anything I did or said was being watched by somebody. It might be by someone of the opposite sex who was sizing me up as a potential mate. It might be by someone of the same sex who was trying to hold me accountable. Considering I was 23, I needed a bit of that. But while some of the people’s motivations were clean, some of them seemed to be efforts to justify themselves.

And besides that, you were expected to act a certain way, have a certain set of interests, and to some degree even dress and carry yourself a certain way. It was justified as becoming more like Jesus. But we weren’t becoming more like Jesus. We were becoming more like the group. And Dave, 23 years in the making, was getting squeezed out.

Frankly, the weight was crushing me. I went into therapy in early 1998, where I met a member of a Lutheran church that he claimed offered what I was looking for. In the meantime, I’d read the Bible cover to cover and come to the conclusion that if Lutheran doctrine wasn’t the most correct doctrine I’d come across, it was at least less dangerous than any other I had seen.

So I left.

The other day, I heard a story very much like the second paragraph here. And it reminded me of why I left that fundamentalist church and never looked back.

This type of behavior is specifically prohibited in the Bible.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:3-5)

And just in case we didn’t see it the first time, it’s also in Luke:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

If you’re not perfect yet, then you don’t need to be worrying about the imperfections of the people around you. If you are perfect, then clearly you either aren’t reading the same Bible I am, or you need to go back and read it some more.

So what about 2 Timothy 3:16? All Scripture is Godbreathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

This verse suggests authority. Before invoking it, we have to consider whether we have it, who gave it to us, and whether the words we are about to say are worthy of someone who has authority over someone else.

One thing that being a Lutheran has taught me is to let scripture interpret scripture. When you want to invoke 1 Timothy 3:16, you have to do it in light of those verses in Matthew and Luke. And since the warning in the Gospels appears twice and was said earlier by Jesus Himself, doesn’t that mean it might be just a little bit more important?

That’s where I think this confrontation breaks down. You see, the thing that bugs me even more about this situation is that the person being confronted isn’t being confronted about sin. The person is being confronted about temptation. But there’s a funny thing about temptation. You and I aren’t necessarily tempted by the same things. When faced with a gourmet cheesecake, you might be tempted to do more than overeat, and devour the whole thing. And if I were standing there, I’d let you, because I’d find the thing repulsive. My only temptation would be to throw the wretched thing in the trash.

St. Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians, where he says twice that everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. (1 Cor. 6:12, 1 Cor. 10:23). In 6:12 he goes on to say, “But I will not be mastered by anything.”

The truth is, all of us are mastered by something. Much to the chagrin of marketers, however, we’re all mastered by different things.

Now, I don’t know what the person who confronted the other person was hoping to accomplish. But I do know what the confronter did accomplish: Looking like a Bible-thumper and alienating the other person.

I believe that if Christians took half the time they spend trying to figure out and fix what’s wrong with the people around them and instead spent that time looking instead deep inside themselves, we’d have a lot fewer people in this world who believe and trust in God but aren’t willing to set foot inside a church.

Taking the losses with the wins

Dave Farquhar Toy trains ,

I think I just missed a pretty nice Lionel prewar set today. I spotted it on my way out the door. Unfortunately, a guy was hovering over it, talking on a cell phone.I couldn’t get close enough to it to get much of a look at it. The locomotive was a streamliner type, and the passenger cars all had nickel journals. The whole set had the early Lionel latch couplers that predated the automatic box couplers. So I’m guessing the set was from the 1930s.

I couldn’t gauge condition but it seemed pretty good. The price was more than I had intended to pay for anything, but I know the locomotive alone was worth close to the asking price, and the passenger cars alone had to be worth the asking price, if not more.

The guy obviously had no great love for old Lionels. What I don’t know is if he was doing a friend a favor or if he was out to make a buck.

I wanted that set. I didn’t need it, but I wanted it.

I suppose I could have offered $20 more than the asking price, if I were that sort of person. But that’s not how God wants us to act. So on my way out the door, I took the guy aside, told him he was getting a good deal, that if he weren’t about to buy it I would have jumped on it, and congratulated him.

I also told him, in case he was wondering, that the second pile of Lionel stuff that was next to it was overpriced. I had paid $35 for a similar lot a few months ago. This lot was priced at more than four times that.

He thanked me, and I left.

I still can’t help but think the set would have meant a lot more to me than to him. Losing it stung a little. If doing the right thing felt good, losing out on that felt worse.

But I have an American Flyer passenger set I bought a while back that I still need to put in working order. I guess you call that compensation.

So, do you still think having Internet Explorer on your server is a good idea?

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , ,

Microsoft is making its updates to IE only available for Windows XP.

To which I say, what about all of those servers out there?Surely they include Server 2003 in this. But that’s a problem. Upgrading to Server 2003 isn’t always an option. Some applications only run on Windows NT 4.0, or on Windows 2000.

Unfortunately, sometimes you have to have a web browser installed on a server to get updates, either from your vendor or from MS. Windows Update, of course, only works with Internet Explorer.

One option is to uninstall Internet Explorer using the tools from litepc.com. A potentially more conservative option is to keep IE installed, use it exclusively for Windows Update, and install another lightweight browser for searching knowledge bases and downloading patches from vendors. Offbyone is a good choice. It has no Java or Javascript, so in theory it should be very secure. It’s standalone, so it won’t add more muck to your system. To install it, copy the executable somewhere. To uninstall it, delete the executable.

An even better option is just to run as few servers on Windows as possible, since they insist on installing unnecessary and potentially exploitable software on servers–Windows Media Player and DirectX are other glaring examples of this–but I seem to hold the minority opinion on that. Maybe now that they wilfully and deliberately install security holes on servers and refuse to patch them unless you run the very newest versions, that will change.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Vertigo!

Dave Farquhar Music

I missed the first play of the new single by U2 on the radio in St. Louis by about five minutes. Crud.The new album is called How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and will be released in November. The DJs really liked the new song, from what it sounded like, so I must have missed something.

I know nothing else about it, other than the album was produced by Steve Lillywhite, who produced 1980’s Boy, 1981’s October, and 1983’s War before the band started its long and profitable partnership with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno.

So my guess is this is will sound a little like the really early stuff, the same way All that You can’t Leave Behind sounded a little like Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree.

But it’s all speculation until I manage to hear it.