David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The Marx 761 train set was a windup set headed by Marx M10005 diesel engines, one with a clockwork motor and one unpowered, along with freight cars. It allowed Marx to use up slow selling obsolete inventory. Marx sold it from 1951 to 1953, when presumably it had worked through its surplus of locomotives.
A friend bought an old house recently, and he came across an odd outlet. He asked me to look at it, wondering what it was, and if it was even AC. He thought it might be high voltage DC, a holdover from a very different time. It turned out what he had was a Harvey Hubbell Twist-Tite outlet.
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Jeff Kent has an unusual Hall of Fame case. He has a reputation for being surly, not being the best teammate, and then there is that motorcycle incident, but if his career had looked a little bit different, I think everyone would have looked right past all of that.
I argue that Jeff Kent had an inverted career, and that inverted career made it more difficult for him to put up conventional Hall of Fame numbers.
The Marx 552 gondola was a staple of Marx’s 6-inch line, running from way back in 1935 to 1952. It came in four different major variants, and only one of them is rare. The 552 is a good car for toy train operators, and also makes a nice Christmas train or display because of its color choices. Read more
Officially, the maximum memory in the Dell Latitude E6420 laptop is 8 GB. That is the maximum stated Dell’s website, and the large memory vendors state the same thing. It’s hard for them to guarantee compatibility when the OEM states the maximum is 8 GB. Unofficially, numerous people, including yours truly, have upgraded them to 16 GB. Here’s how to install 16 GB in a Dell Latitude E6420 successfully.
PDF, or portable document format, is a somewhat problematic but very useful file format, especially for people who conduct a lot of historical research. But the problem with having megabytes or gigabytes of historical data on your computer is finding the information you are looking for. Here’s how to make PDFs searchable in Windows, because by default they are not.
The IBM 4863 matched the industrial design of the PCjr, but was functionally very similar. And it wasn’t really priced any lower than it counterpart for the IBM PC. It’s retail price was $680, and the RGB cable to connect it to a PCjr was an additional $20.
I was restoring an old Micron Clientpro 766Xi when I ran into a corrupt BIOS password, so I couldn’t do much with the system. Micron used a slightly modified Intel AL440LX motherboard in these systems. So here’s how to clear a CMOS password on an Intel AL440LX. Other P2-era Intel boards will be similar.
The Intel AL440LX has a jumper at the front of the board. Unlike some other systems, you have to change the position of the jumper and turn the power on.
The Marx Sinclair tanker was a refresh of the earlier and more common Marx 553 Middle States Oil tanker, a design that originated way back in 1935. The Sinclair tanker made the old design book newer, and perhaps more relevant for its era. It came in two major variants, one much easier to find than the other. It dates to 1956 and 1957.
Creating an IMG file of a DOS disk from individual files isn’t something you have to do often, but when you do, it’s a bit of a hassle. But it’s doable. Here’s how to write files to an img file in Windows, which you can then read with a Gotek floppy emulator running Flashfloppy.