The second-cheapest way to get household necessities

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , ,

The topic at lunch at work turned to saving money around the house earlier this week, largely because one of my coworkers suddenly found himself with full responsibility for his two pre-teen nieces. The coworkers who are parents started talking about the best places to get good used clothes, the best places to get food cheap, and other stuff. Not being a parent, I just listened. I’m not at that stage in life.

I’m in a different stage of life, still a relatively new homeowner. Yesterday I paid a grand total of $5 for an ironing board and a stepladder, two things I’ve been surviving without. I’m about ready to quit going to the hardware store and to Kmart.The secret is estate sales.

Estate sales are usually crowded affairs, as people swoop in from all corners of the globe to cram themselves into tiny houses in search of things that are rare, things that are cheap, or best yet, rare and cheap.

I see two types at estate sales. The first is the well-to-do, who are there in hopes of securing antiques and collectibles for pennies on the dollar. The other is recent immigrants, who are generally there in search of inexpensive household necessities. They already know the secret.

The best time to go to estate sales is either really early or really late. If you get there early–it seems like people show up an hour early sometimes–you’ll get the best selection but you’ll pay top dollar. In some cases I’ve seen things priced at literally 10 times what they’re worth. In less extreme cases, I’ve seen tools priced the same as a new one at Sears.

Then again, yesterday I bought a pair of small pruning shears for 50 cents and a sharpening file for a quarter.

If you get there on the last day, reality has kicked in, the sucker prices have generally gone away, and dickering becomes the rule of the day. Prices drop by a factor of two or three, and the later it gets, the more willing they are to listen to prices.

If you’re shopping for household necessities, this is a good thing. The antique furniture dealers have no interest in ironing boards and laundry baskets and trash cans. Recent immigrants do, but chances are they already have those things. Stuff like this is often priced low to begin with, and it gets cheaper as time marches on because the chances of someone buying it are pretty low.

You can get household appliances cheap too. I saw a 20-inch Zenith TV marked at $50 yesterday. I know it works because they had it turned on. I’ll bet someone will get it for $20 today. I saw a washer and a dryer priced around $200 each yesterday. The washer was less than two years old. The dryer was a bit older but it was a Maytag. Those prices were decent, and could go way down if they sat long enough. If you’re willing to live without a warranty, you can save yourself a bundle. Two years ago I paid $900 for a washer and a fridge. A friend gave me a dryer. It looks like it could be 25 years old but it works and I was happy to save $250.

But yesterday I wasn’t looking for appliances. I wasn’t necessarily looking for household necessities either, but I’ve been needing a stepladder and a full-size ironing board. So when I spotted one marked at $4.50 and $6, respectively, I wasn’t going to pass them up. It was around noon, and it was a Friday-Saturday sale. They’d be closing up shop in an hour or two. Anything under $20 was automatically half price. I dragged the ironing board and the stepladder up to the checkout. “Five dollars is fine,” she said.

And it was fine with me too. I still remember the day when I went out to either Wal-Mart or Kmart (I try not to shop at Wal-Mart anymore but I did then), days before I moved out of my mom’s house for good, to buy household necessities. After spending more than $200 on things like trash cans and laundry baskets, there was still a lot of stuff I lacked.

If I’d known then what I know now, I probably could have gone to three sales, spent a grand total of 50 bucks, and ended up lacking a lot less.

A super-cool Mozilla extension

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

I’m about to get you to dump Internet Explorer for good.

And no, this has nothing to do with the latest security exploits (there were only four revealed this week, right?). This has to do with functionality.

Super Drag & Go is what I call a disruptive technology. It’s like multitasking. You won’t understand what the big deal is when I explain it to you, but once you try it out, you’ll find it impossible to use a computer that doesn’t have it.It’s dead simple. You’re using the Web for research. You’re tooling along, finding lots of information you didn’t know about ancestors, obscure toy train manufacturers, or whatever it is you like to use the Web to research. You hit upon a name or phrase or topic or book title that’s useful, so you highlight it with your mouse, copy the text, then open a new browser window, go to Google or Amazon or Dictionary.com or Wikipedia or whatever the appropriate research tool is, paste it in, and keep on going, right?

Wrong. That’s what you used to do.

What you do is you install Mozilla Firefox, then you click on that Google icon and install the interfaces for whatever search engines besides Google you like (there’s plumbing that hooks you up with Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Dictionary.com, and everything else you can possibly think of). Then you install Super Drag & Go. Then you instantly become about 40 times as productive as you were 20 minutes ago.

How? I tool along the same way I always did. Then, when I find reference to, oh, say, Voltamp, I highlight it like I was going to copy and paste it, but instead of hitting copy, I just drag it with my mouse over to some blank area on my browser window.

Boom-shakalaka, a browser window opens with that phrase punched into Google for me with my results. So then I can read the three–wait, now it’s four!–webpages that make mention of the first company that made an electric toy train that used a transformer plugged into a household AC wall socket.

(You can thank me later for putting that song in your head. Change browsers and I promise I won’t do it again.)

Of course, if you’ve changed your default search engine to something else, then it’ll go to that other page. Now you know why it might be useful to set your default search engine to Wikipedia or Amazon.com. It changes back easily–it’s just a matter of clicking the icon in the browser’s search bar.

Next time I see him, I’ll have to thank Todd, the coworker who showed me how this works. I’d read about it and dismissed it, until he showed it to me. And now?

It’s not a habit, it’s cool. I feel alive. If you don’t have it you’re on the other side. I’m not an addict…. Maybe that’s a lie? –K’s Choice, Not an Addict

Some painting tips for around the house

Dave Farquhar General

My mom and girlfriend and sister spent some time this past week painting my house. I can paint a little, but it’s not something I enjoy as much as they do, and I’m definitely not as fast as they are.

I made a couple of small contributions. It was strictly a case of me applying things I’ve learned from model railroading. So there is some tangible benefit to that time I’ve spent playing with trains after all.

So here’s everything I know. (This is gonna be a short one.)Remove latex paint drips and spills with rubbing alcohol. Latex paint is water-soluble, but alcohol does even better. A rag dipped in alcohol makes quick work of the nasty stuff.

Don’t paint wall plates and registers with latex paint! In a lot of older houses, you’ll run across these things, painted in a misguided attempt to make them match the room color. The result always looks like crap, because latex paint is intended for drywall, which is porous, and plastic and metal aren’t. The result is you get a thick, gloppy mess that peels really easily.

If you want to paint those metal registers or plastic wallplates, paint them with a paint designed for a nonporous surface. Find a can of spray paint whose color is a nice complement to the room color (you probably won’t find an exact match). First, prime it with two superthin coats. Spray a thin coat that just puts a colored haze over the surface and let dry. A few hours later, put on another thin haze. Next, paint with the desired color in the same fashion. About 3-4 of these coats will cover it with a very nice, smooth, durable layer. People who’ve been doing this much longer than me say Krylon is the best brand.

What to do if someone already ruined your register with several thick coats of latex. I had a return vent cover that was covered with about three thick, ugly layers and the texture of a poorly done ceiling. I took it out to the garage, chucked a wire wheel into my drill, and ground off all that paint, all the way down to the metal. For stubborn spots, I used my Dremel rotary tool with a grinding bit chucked into it. I then primed and painted it. The result doesn’t look quite new, but it looks far, far better than it would with any coat of latex paint on it.

For plastic wall plates, it’s not worth the effort. Buy a 25-cent one and paint it the color you want. But saving a vent cover is easy.

Free stuck and painted-over screws with a pair of locking pliers. Lock a pair of pliers (I use the Vise-Grip brand) around a stuck screw as tightly as it will go, and turn. You’ll have to re-lock and turn several times but if you work at it, the screw will come out. To clean off the paint so you can reuse them, you can just carefully chip off the paint–you’re more likely to injure yourself than the screw–or soak in alcohol. I cleaned out two slotted screws by sawing along the painted-over slot with a small razor saw intended for hobby use. After just a little convincing, the paint just lifted out. I guess slotted screws have one advantage–just one–over Phillips screws after all.

For rusted screws, try soaking them overnight in a glass of cola. The phosphoric acid in the cola attacks the rust. You could also try chucking a bit of aluminum foil in your drill or rotary tool and polish it. Aluminum oxidizes much more quickly than iron, so the aluminum rubbing against the rust will de-oxidize the iron and give you a shiny surface again. Drive the screw into a piece of scrap wood and then paint it to keep it from oxidizing again. Then remove the screw and re-use.

It\’s 2004, and that means a new presidency

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , ,

I am Lutheran. Lutheran in both senses. Dad was Lutheran because his mother was Lutheran and she was Lutheran because her grandparents were Lutheran when they got off the boat in Philadelphia. But that’s not the end of my Lutheran background–my ancestry hits Baron Jost Hans Hite (Heydt) at least twice.

But I’m not a Lutheran just because my forefathers were Lutheran. I left the church, and at 22 found myself at another church that I sensed was teaching things that were wrong, but I wasn’t sure why. So I read the Bible cover to cover trying to find out why. And in the end, I realized the Lutheran explanation of all this stuff made more sense than anyone else’s.

So here’s my take on the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s much publicized convention.The semi-underground Christian News reported the following: “MAJORITY IN THE LCMS VOTES THAT LUTHERANISM IS NOT WHAT THEY WANT IN A CHURCH – KIESCHNICK IS RE-ELECTED; OKLAHOMA D.P. DIEKELMAN ELECTED AS 1ST V.P.”

I define “Lutheranism” as a discipline that teaches people to read and interpret the Bible and not necessarily take the clergy’s word for it because the clergy can be wrong and needs those checks and balances. That’s my Lutheranism.

In my Lutheranism, God chooses us, not the other way around.

In my Lutheranism, we believe that faith without works is dead, but we teach that it’s God who does those works through us. It’s by grace that we’re saved, not those works. Works are a symptom of that disease called faith. We don’t do it ourselves! That’s what Jesus came here for, because we spent 4,000 years proving that all we could do was mess it up! In my Lutheranism, we don’t compare works and beat each other up trying to prove who’s the better Christian.

In my Lutheranism, “grace” is a simple concept: God’s riches at Christ’s expense. And that’s Lutheranism’s greatest treasure.

I may have ruffled a few feathers by not saying anything about tradition. Funny thing about tradition. It explains things that were never officially written down, and that can be a good thing. But tradition can get in the way too. The Pharisees had tradition. In spades. Jesus had some problems with them.

And I wonder sometimes too if we Lutherans might be a bit too smug. The Lutheran stereotype is someone with a whole lot of education and a whole lot of money. We’re successful, and that makes us not too eager to try out something we never thought of before, because, well, look where my way has gotten us!

There’s room for tradition and excellence in my Lutheranism. But when tradition and excellence get in the way of that last thing Jesus said before the ascension (“Go to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”), then they become a problem.

When publications like the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch call you “The Taliban of American Christianity,” I think we have a problem.

Now, I know I don’t have as much education as some people, but when I look at the election results, I don’t see it as a majority of delegates rejecting Lutheranism. I see it as a majority of delegates rejecting the power plays and the infighting that happened after an LCMS pastor offered up a prayer in mixed company at Yankee Stadium after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

Some believed that wasn’t a very Lutheran thing to do. And some believed it wasn’t a very Lutheran thing for our president to do, approving this despicable act of praying in mixed company. Now I’m not saying that this was the motivation, but what happened next appeared to be an attempt by the president’s political opponents to bring him up on charges so they could take the presidency, since the next person in line for the presidency was one of the president’s political opponents.

It left a bitter taste in some people’s mouths.

And I think that’s why Dr. Gerald Kieschnick won re-election by a reasonably comfortable margin on the first ballot this year, and why another person much like him won the #2 slot, and other like-minded people took three of the remaining four slots.

I have one question for those of you who are Lutheran like me.

If–without changing any of your fundamental beliefs, but simply losing a label–if giving up that “Lutheran” label would cause one–just one–person to be in heaven who otherwise wouldn’t, would you do it?

No one’s asking you to do that. I’m just trying to get you to decide where your priorities sit.

If you use Mozilla, you need to read this

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

No sooner than I presented Mozilla, specifically Mozilla Firefox, as a safe alternative to Internet Explorer did an exploit for Mozilla show up. Argh!

At least the fix came out swiftly and installs painlessly. Visit the page, click another link, wait a minute or so, and then restart the browser. Badda bing, badda boom, you’re patched. No reboot necessary.I still stand by my recommendation of Mozilla, whether it’s the entire bloatware Mozilla suite or the lightweight Mozilla Firefox, over IE. Why? Lessons learned from Linux.

When a vulnerability is discovered in a Microsoft product, an unpredictable length of time passes before the vulnerability is patched. Sometimes it’s a matter of days, but sometimes the length of time is just plain ridiculous. Forgetting for a minute how frequently patches come out–a case can be made that Linux gets more patches than Windows but just as strong of a case can be made that it gets less–the length of time that passes between the instant the vulnerability is discovered and announced and the release of a patch is usually very small. Usually it’s a matter of hours.

The reason is simple. Lots and lots of eyeballs looking at the code. And in Open Source, having your name in the code is a badge of honor. It’s a big, big line on a resume to say you wrote a line of code in the Linux kernel.

Other open-source software gets patched just as quickly, however. Not every open source programmer is comfortable maintaining operating system kernels. And no self-respecting programmer wants his or her system hacked due to a vulnerability in a piece of software she or he was perfectly capable of fixing.

This particular vulnerability stems from a little-known capability in Mozilla. I’m sure there was a legitimate use for it at one time, but were Mozilla being designed and rewritten from scratch today, I can’t see how it would possibly be implemented because the potential for abuse is huge. The code’s gone now. It won’t be in Firefox 0.92 or the next revision of the Mozilla suite.

Will there be other instances of this? Sure. Probably less of it, since Mozilla was a total rewrite of Netscape and the engine is entirely different from the one in Netscape 4.x. The IE codebase goes back to the early 1990s, as it’s based on the old NCSA Mosaic code, which Microsoft licensed from Spyglass. (Go into IE and hit Help, About to see for yourself.) There’s much more potential for harmful dead wood in IE than in Mozilla, but the presence of some in either is inevitable.

But at the end of this year’s storm season, I expect Mozilla to come out a lot stronger because most of the dead wood will be shaken out. I don’t expect the same from IE. The codebase is too old, the teams too disparate, and the motivations behind the changes that have been made were too different from Mozilla.

I’m standing by my browser.

A few short tips on buying laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

A client came into my cube today seeking advice on laptops. He asked lots of good questions, so I thought I’d share the answers with you.National chains versus local: If you’re staying local, you might get better service from a local shop. In his case, he’s sending a daughter off to college out of state. Better to buy from someone who has a store close to the college.

Recommended brands: Buy what the college recommends, if possible. Why? The college’s technicians are used to working on that equipment and know its quirks and how to get around them. When I was working at Mizzou, we were used to IBMs. When people brought us Dells, sometimes we had problems getting them working. And yes, all laptops have quirks. They’re crankier than desktops.

Extended warranties: As a rule I don’t buy them on electronics equipment. My philosophy is that since I fix computers for a living, I am an extended warranty. Laptops are different. You probably do want the extended warranty because I can almost guarantee something’s going to break a short time after the manufacturer’s warranty goes out.

But here’s a secret. Don’t buy the extended warranty from the salesperson. March up to customer service and ask them about the terms. Get them to go over the fine print with you. Wait in line if you have to. The reason is simple. At least one national chain, whose name I won’t name, has a tendency to tell the salespeople one thing and the customer service people another. Maybe the salesperson says the no-lemon clause kicks in after it breaks three times and the customer service rep says four. Guess who’s word counts? Customer service.

You might also get the name and employee number of the person who tells you the terms of the agreement. It’s a lot of extra work, but it’s probably worth it to protect a $1,500 laptop. When I had a piece of equipment die for the third time a day before the extended warranty expired, I had to fight to get it replaced. In the end, I had to go to a different store with a more agreeable manager.

Cheap laptops: As a general rule I don’t think I trust sub-$1,000 laptops. Too many compromises. Sotec of Japan tried to sell a dirt-cheap laptop a few years ago. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who come here looking for advice on it. For the most part it was a good laptop, but it seems it had a few annoying issues.

Really, the sweet spot tends to be $1,500-$3,000. If you’re paying for it, aim for $1,500. If your employer is paying for it, aim for $3,000 since most companies have a 3-year replacement cycle no matter what the machine originally cost, and in three years the $3,000 laptop will annoy you less.

Used laptops: Don’t do it. People who buy laptops almost always use them until the wheels fall off and won’t go back on again. You might get lucky and get an off-lease laptop from an executive who used it as a status symbol and only powered the thing on twice, but more likely than not, when you buy a used laptop, you’re buying someone else’s problem.

What browser should I use?

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

Mozilla downloads are spiking since, among other people, US-CERT issued what amounted to a plea for people to use some browser, any browser, other than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Several well-known computer columnists have been trumpeting Mozilla for months now. At least one has stated repeatedly and publicly that he’s staying with IE. So what should you do?Interestingly, IE only has about 50% of my readership. That doesn’t surprise me; I’ve long been an IE critic, and blogs tend to attract readers who agree with them. So I don’t pretend that my readership is representative of anything.

As far as alternatives to IE, I’ve been running some flavor or another of Mozilla as my workaday browser since about version 0.7, using IE just for running Windows Update and not much else. Why? Well, while IE usually loads faster than Mozilla, once it’s up and running, I think Mozilla is the faster browser. I love tabbed browsing, and I love how you can search web pages by hitting the ‘/’ key and then typing the phrase you’re looking for. To me, those reasons alone are reasons to switch; it just lets me work so much faster.

But I’ve overlooked possibly the best reason to switch, because it’s been so long since I’ve noticed the problem. Are you tired of popup and popunder ads? Mozilla browsers block them. No extra software needed. This weekend, when I used a computer that only had IE on it, I got so sick of popups I was about ready to download and install Firefox to get some relief. Microsoft’s been promising this functionality for months, maybe even a year, and still hasn’t delivered. Honestly, I’ll be surprised if it’s ever delivered as anything other than part of the next version of Windows.

But besides that, it’s a matter of security. So this most recent security hole has been patched. It’s been known for weeks and they’ve just now gotten around to patching it? What about next month’s exploit? I’m confident there’ll be another, and soon, just because IE has nearly as many security patches as Windows itself.

Besides keeping out hackers, it’s been known for some time that people who run something other than Internet Explorer have fewer problems with spyware.

So what about sites that require Internet Explorer? Actually not a whole lot of them do, these days. Most remaining compatibility issues with Mozilla are resolved as soon as you install Sun’s J2SE Java library.

And if you want some more tips on living with Mozilla Firefox, you’ve come to the right place.

I switched to IE at version 5.01 for a simple reason. At that point, IE was the better browser. Mozilla caught up again sometime around version 0.7. That was when I switched back. And it’s done nothing but get better since.

Commodore’s back!

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , ,

Long, long ago, I owned a computer that was so reliable that it only ever crashed on me and caused me to lose work once. I remember it well, and I was livid about it. So much so that I never used that word processor again. And the computer never crashed on me or caused me to lose work again.

That computer was a Commodore 128.It was slow, it didn’t multitask, and I could barely type on its awful keyboard, and it irritated me that MicroLeague Baseball took 15 minutes to load if I wanted to use its General Manager and its Stat Compiler add-ons (of course I did), but from a pure reliability standpoint, that simple machine was the best computer I’ve ever owned.

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American Model Toys and Kusan trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , ,
American Model Toys and Kusan trains

While almost everyone knows American Flyer and Lionel, and a lot of people have heard of Marx, there was a fourth maker of toy trains in the late 1940s and early 1950s that was much smaller, although very innovative, and today is nearly forgotten: Auburn, Indiana-based American Model Toys.

Its legacy, however, ties into virtually every major producer of O gauge trains in business today.

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A search engine that learns

Dave Farquhar Software

I saw a reference to Eurekster today. While I didn’t think the world really needed another search engine, it brings an interesting idea to it. Dare I say that it’s the most interesting new idea I’ve seen since Google?
While Google ranks its pages based on the number of people linking to it, it can still lose relevance. A recent search I performed looking for tips on building things out of brass was a good example. If I’m interested in something that not many people think about–which seems to happen a lot these days–then Google’s system starts to break down.

Eurekster keeps track of what links you visit and how long you stay there in an effort to learn what you find interesting. Then, when you search again, pages similar to the ones you spent time with should bubble to the top.

If you dare, you can also link yourself to other people with similar interests so that what they like colors your results.

I tried using a Genealogy “search group” to see if it colored my results. It did, but the results were hardly earth-shattering.

Time will tell how well this will work. It seems to be use that puts the intelligence in artificial intelligence.