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Line vs load when wiring

Dave Farquhar DIY April 17, 2023March 31, 2024

Wiring conventional outlets and switches is usually pretty easy. As long as you match up the colors and match the right colored wires to the right colored pairs of screw terminals, everything just works. But with ground-fault circuit-interrupter (GFCI) or arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) outlets and occupancy detector switches, there’s an indicator for line and load. And if you mix up the line and load, nothing works. In this blog post, I’ll cover the difference between line vs load when wiring and how to find which is which in your electrical box.

In electrical wiring, the line is the upstream voltage from the source. The load is the downstream voltage to devices further along the circuit.

Ace Hardware garbage disposals

Dave Farquhar DIY April 14, 2023April 14, 2023

If you are in the market for a replacement garbage disposal, the unpretentious, unglamorous Ace Hardware garbage disposals deserve your consideration. That’s because they are InSinkErator garbage disposals in disguise.

Marx State of Maine boxcar

Dave Farquhar Toy trains April 13, 2023March 18, 2023

The Marx State of Maine boxcars are colorful tin representations of real, prototypical cars that ran on the Bangor and Aroostook and New Haven railroads. Read more

What an error in baseball is

Dave Farquhar Baseball April 12, 2023April 14, 2023

What is an error in baseball? To an extent, it is a judgment call, but generally speaking, it is when a fielder makes a misplay on a routine play that allows an opposing player to reach base when they normally would have been out, in the judgment of the official scorer. The counts of runs, hits, and errors by each team are three standard numbers displayed on the scoreboard throughout the game

Some examples include a tagging error, where a player catches the ball but misses a tag for an out, a dropped fly ball, or a fumble. But when a ball takes an unnatural bounce or is out of reach, it is generally not an error. A player is also not charged with an error if they drop or fail to catch a foul fly, since it doesn’t allow a runner to reach base. Read more

What are tamper-resistant outlets?

Dave Farquhar DIY April 11, 2023April 7, 2023

What are tamper-resistant outlets? Tamper-resistant outlets are a special electrical outlet, sold in North America, designed to prevent injury or death from toddlers or children inserting a foreign metal object into the outlet and causing electrical shock or electrocution. They have an embossed “TR” to distinguish them from earlier types of outlets. You can buy tamper resistant versions of various types of outlets, including standard duplex outlets, and ground fault circuit interrupter outlets (GFCIs).

The Bell and Howell Apple II

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 7, 2023April 16, 2025

The Bell and Howell Apple II, also known as the Darth Vader Apple II, was a slightly modified Apple II for the education market manufactured by Apple but distributed and supported by Bell and Howell. It is a curiosity for collectors today, and a potential pitfall.

Marx The Meteor Diesel Freight set 2915

Dave Farquhar Toy trains April 6, 2023May 4, 2023

In 1974, Marx introduced a diesel freight set it called The Meteor, catalog number 2915, 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 Meteor train set was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 2915 and was sold only in 1974 and 1975.

Handling API pagination with Python

Dave Farquhar security April 5, 2023March 25, 2023

A common problem in using Python to gather data via APIs is pagination. Most APIs have a limit on how much data they are willing to send you in a single API call. So they break the data into pages. In this blog post, I’ll go through an example of handling API pagination in Python.

Replace carriage returns with commas in Notepad++

Dave Farquhar Windows April 4, 2023March 25, 2023

There are times when you need comma-separated lists but the data you have is separated by carriage returns instead. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to easily replace carriage returns with commas in Notepad++.

Microsoft Softcard: How it transformed the company

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing April 3, 2023September 16, 2024

The Microsoft Softcard, released April 2, 1980, was Microsoft’s first hardware product. Not only that, it was a hardware product that made two products from two of its historical rivals work together. For those reasons and more, it is a historically very important product. But even more important was how this hardware product from a software company changed Microsoft’s trajectory dramatically, and in unexpected ways.