Why dimensional lumber has rounded edges

Dave Farquhar DIY
Why dimensional lumber has rounded edges

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.

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Marx train set 3987

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx train set 3987

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.

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Record video in VLC

Dave Farquhar Video
Record video in VLC

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.

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Blowing into NES cartridges

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Blowing into NES cartridges

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.

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Line vs load when wiring

Dave Farquhar DIY
Line vs load when wiring

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.

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What an error in baseball is

Dave Farquhar Baseball
What an error in baseball is

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