David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The Miniscribe Brick refers to an accounting scandal perpetuated by Miniscribe Corporation, a defunct manufacturer of hard drives. CEO Quentin Thomas Wiles and CFO Patrick J. Schleibaum served time in Federal prison as a result of fallout from Miniscribe’s accounting practices, which included counting bricks as hard drive inventory.
In 1974, Marx introduced a steam freight train set, catalog number 2905, it called The Reliable that ran on a 6 volt lantern battery and sold through discount stores. If you have one today, it’s worth more than its original retail price, even adjusted for inflation.
The Marx Reliable was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 2905 and was sold only in 1974 and 1975.
In computer software and general IT circles, you will sometimes hear the phrase legacy thrown around. And you may hear some conflicting information about what legacy means. So let’s talk about what legacy means and software, and computers in general.
Sometimes when you are editing a text file, you want to go to a specific line. Here’s how you go to a line in Notepad++, along with a few more go to tricks.
When you go to a big box store to buy lumber, some lumber, often sold as appearance boards, has square edges. But construction lumber like 2x4s, also known as dimensional number, has rounded edges. In this blog post, we’ll explore why dimensional lumber has rounded edges.
Rounded edges on dimensional lumber, such as 2x4s, make it easier to process, handle, and deliver the lumber without damaging it during production and shipping. It also makes it less likely to damage drywall when using it for framing.
I thought turkeys could fly was a line from a 1978 episode of the TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. The episode, titled Turkeys Away, is generally considered one of the 100 greatest TV sitcom episodes of all time.
The Marx train set 3987 is a difficult set to pin down. There are a number of variations of it, some of them common, and at least one of them rather rare. What they generally have in common is being an electric train set, O gauge, headed by a Canadian Pacific Jubilee steam locomotive pulling 550 series freight cars.
You may have heard you can capture video with VLC, the popular open source media player. But how you do it isn’t intuitive and there’s some advice out there that doesn’t work. That said, it’s possible, and works well for certain use cases once you get used to the steps. In this blog post, I explain how to capture video with VLC, or record video in VLC.
VLC is primarily a video player, but it can act like a lightweight video capture tool. You can record video from VLC in 10 steps.
Blowing into NES cartridges is something almost any member of Generation X can remember doing at some point. The schoolyard wisdom was that when your NES cartridge didn’t work and console gave a flashing red light, blowing into a Nintendo cartridge helped it work. In this blog post, we’ll explore why it became a common practice, and why it is not a good practice and what you should do instead.
Can a light switch go bad? The answer surprises some people, but yes, being an electromechanical device, there are parts in a light switch that can wear out or become oxidized over time and eventually stop making good electrical contact. In this blog post, I’ll explain how to tell if your light switch is going bad and if it’s time to replace it.