David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
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.
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++.
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.
I don’t look for vintage computers in the wild nearly as much anymore as I look for vintage computer accessories. I was very happy to find a vintage desktop keyboard drawer less than 6 miles from home. And I bought it straight out of the room its previous owner probably used it in for a good three decades.
Marx train set #25000 is perhaps the quintessential O gauge 3/16 scale set from Louis Marx & Co., featuring a classic 999 locomotive and tender and a consist of 3/16 scaled tin lithographed freight cars.
Milwaukee is a popular brand of power tools, often used by professionals and one of the biggest rivals of DeWalt. Meanwhile, Lowe’s is the second largest home improvement store chain in North America. It would be natural to expect Lowe’s to carry Milwaukee tools. But the relationship between Lowe’s and Milwaukee is complicated.
Lowe’s sells a brand of cart and dolly called Milwaukee that has no connection to Milwaukee power tools. Lowe’s hasn’t sold Milwaukee power tools since 2007, and Milwaukee’s parent company’s relationship with Home Depot makes it unlikely that situation will change any time soon.
Where to buy steel wool isn’t a difficult question. It’s clear from the Google search results that any hardware store, home improvement store, and even one of the large discount store chains carries steel wool. But finding it in those huge 100,000-square-foot stores is another matter. I’ve even heard people lament that nobody seems to sell plain steel wool anymore, that all they can find are SOS pads that have a cleaner embedded in them. In this blog post, I’ll reveal the secret of where to find steel wool in big box stores.
You can still find plain steel wool today, but the trick is to not look in the cleaning section. It’s usually in the part of the store that sells paint, wood stain, and/or sandpaper.
You’ll frequently hear the word dataframe thrown around, sometimes by data scientists or Python programmers. It can be an intimidating subject but it doesn’t need to be. Let’s talk about what a dataframe is in Python, in lay person’s terms, and how you can use them.
Marx train set #26259 is a somewhat unusual set, dating to the mid 1950s. Marx sold it through Montgomery Ward, and it is something of a transition set. The cars didn’t exactly match the locomotive and tender.