David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
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.
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.
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 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? 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, 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.