David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
From 1924 to 1979, National Lead Co operated a titanium dioxide plant at the confluence of River Des Peres and the Mississippi River, on the site of what is now River City Casino.
The street address had been 8900 South Broadway. The site was approximately 88 acres, bounded by River Des Peres on the north, the Mississippi River on the east, the Union Pacific railroad tracks on the west, and extending more or less as far south as Hoffmeister Avenue.
A Tandy 1000EX is harder to disassemble than a typical 1980s PC clone. And for as popular as this machine is, I couldn’t find any thorough explanation of how to do it. Even the 1980s service manuals for the machine gloss over or omit disassembly. So here’s how to disassemble a Tandy 1000EX, such as to give the case a thorough cleaning.
The question of backdrops, especially for a tinplate layout, is always a difficult question. Lots of commercial backdrops are available today, but modern backdrops often look more appropriate with scale models than with a traditional toy train layout. American Flyer’s Trainorama is a potential solution that works well with prewar and postwar style layouts.
The American Flyer Trainorama was a 3D backdrop, 9 feet long, lithographed on heavy cardstock by Niagra Litho Company. Its catalog number was 790 or 791, and it was only available in 1953. The packaging was a large paper envelope.
When it comes to the best operating system to use for a vintage PC, if it has a 286 or better processor, there is little reason to use anything older than MS-DOS 5 or PC-DOS 5. But with an XT, it’s a little different. The best MS-DOS version to use is one you may have never heard of. MS-DOS 3.31 was an upgrade you couldn’t buy.
What is the Up South? Where is Up South? The phrase has its origins in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. During those decades, Black migrants were moving from southern states into midwestern cities, seeking jobs, education, and an exit from the Jim Crow south.
What they found was that the Jim Crow laws in midwestern cities like St. Louis were in effect. The housing and schools were segregated. Maybe there were fewer restrictions than in the deep south, but there were still restrictions on them.
Sometimes a vintage toy electric train has paint that’s too good to restore, but looks too bad to leave as-is. The question, then, is how to revive the paint. While some people use oil, there are commercial products intended for the task that will do a better job.
Paint will absorb oil to some extent, but it can affect the sheen and any oil that doesn’t soak in will attract dust over time, causing other problems. It’s better to use products intended for reviving automotive paint, which will also work on trains and has fewer undesirable side effects.
I used to have and recommend a tool for updating all your third party software on Windows machines. Unfortunately that tool went end of life several years ago. But Microsoft, of all people, has a tool that works suitably. Usage is similar to apt or yum on Linux. It’s called Microsoft App Installer, and at the command line, it takes the form of the command winget.
App Installer is a free tool that updates what Windows Update won’t. That means open source apps, but also some third party apps, and even some difficult-to-update Microsoft apps, like the Visual C++ runtime. It is capable of updating more than 3,000 apps.
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The Lionel 6111 is a rather common, unheralded Lionel postwar freight car. But it’s fun, at least as an oddity. It’s also a very versatile car.
After years of searching, I was able to locate an untested IBM 5170 motherboard about 2 hours away. Being untested, of course I was taking my chances. But I was able to get it working. Here’s how I fixed my IBM 5170 motherboard so I could restore my IBM 5170 with a true-blue IBM board to replace the clone board in it.
I was downloading from a very intermittent webserver and the download kept quitting less than 80% in. And if my timing wasn’t perfect, the web browser wouldn’t resume it. Then I thought to try to resume my downloads with wget.
wget is a command line tool for Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, and Windows. It is good for resuming downloads and can even do it automatically.