David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Blockbuster video was a staple in American neighborhoods and a key part of Friday and Saturday night entertainment for about two decades. Now this giant is reduced to a single location. Here’s what happened to Blockbuster and why Blockbuster failed.
Blockbuster was a benefactor of a disruptive technology. However, like the icons it displaced, Blockbuster itself got disrupted by two upstarts that it had the opportunity to buy early on, declined, and then had to replicate at higher cost.
I think we can all agree, you can never have too much storage space. But most of us don’t have unlimited budget for storage space, and we have to Make room in our computer budget for other things, like RAM, a CPU, and video card as well. So that raises the question, is 500 GB SSD enough for gaming? In this blog post, I’ll help you determine the answer.
The Marx Pennsylvania Railroad Merchanside Service boxcars are colorful tin representations of real, prototypical cars that ran on the Pennsylvania Railroad during the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Read more
Just because you have a new shiny Smart TV doesn’t mean you don’t want to enjoy some of your favorite video games of the past. But it’s not always clear how to connect your old Wii to a new smart TV. In this blog post, I will cover the various options to hook up a classic Nintendo Wii to a smart TV, or any other type of digital flat panel TV.
The other night I heard a boom. It turned out a picture we’d hung with 3M Command strips fell. I’d rather that not happen to you, so in this blog post, I’ll cover how much weight Command strips can hold.
How much weight Command strips can hold varies depending on their size, and there’s more that goes into it than just weight. But they hold a maximum of 16 pounds in the case of the large version, with smaller versions holding considerably less.
If your Hisense TV won’t power on, I have a 1 minute fix. Your TV isn’t broken, it’s just a bit confused. In this blog post, I’ll cover basic troubleshooting for your Hisense TV that almost always gets it up and running again very quickly.
When your Hisense TV won’t power on, it’s usually an easy fix. After making sure it’s receiving power, unplugging it and holding the power button with the power off before plugging it back in works wonders.
The Marx 59 stock car is derived from the 555 refrigerator car. It ran from 1939 to 1952, and was essentially a refrigerated car/boxcar with different lithography and slightly revised tooling to put slats in the door and sides. Reusing an existing design with minor changes to make something that looked new and different was a hallmark of Marx, and one of the ways it produced variety in its product line while keeping prices down. Read more
Purple Power is an extremely versatile and effective cleaner. But is Purple Power safe on paint? That’s not exactly a yes or no answer. In this blog post, I’ll talk about the caveats of using Purple Power on paint.
It can be a little bit jarring to see a blinking light on your Ethernet cable when the device you plugged it into isn’t even powered on. Why is my Ethernet cable blinking orange? For that matter, why is that light constantly blinking? Is that bad? In this blog post, I will explain what the two lights on an Ethernet port mean.
The Pentium MMX represents a sweet spot in retro computing. Prices aren’t too far out of hand yet, and with one system and a utility, you can slow it down to match speeds with various other vintage systems, including the 386 and 486 generation, for running speed-sensitive games. This means one system can run DOS games going back to approximately 1987 or 1988, and still do relatively well with DOS and Windows games up to approximately 1998.
It also means you can use relatively inexpensive and still-plentiful PCI cards. PCI-based 486s exist but they are uncommon and getting expensive. And 386 PCI motherboards don’t exist.