David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ll argue with anyone that WHIP is the most fair statistic when it comes to measuring a pitcher’s success. What WHIP measures is how many base runners a pitcher allows in an average inning. It’s a pretty easy way to calculate a pitcher’s effectiveness. What is a good WHIP in baseball, then? In this blog post, I’ll explain how to calculate WHIP and what a good and great WHIP are.
I hear the argument all the time that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about privacy. So is data privacy important? I’ll tell you why it is.
There was a very vocal element of society that was very anti-data privacy until 2021. Once the COVID vaccine was released, suddenly they became very concerned about their privacy. I hope that element of society learned some empathy from this. How they felt about their privacy is how the rest of us feel when it comes to large corporations tracking our every move.
I was watching a YouTube video where someone was talking about his new acquisition, and he commented that he thought the operating system might be too new for that PC. So I thought maybe a list of recommended operating systems for vintage PCs might be helpful.
If you shop at Home Depot or Lowe’s, and possibly other home improvement stores, you will hear or see the phrase whitewood lumber. What is whitewood at Home Depot and what does it mean?
If you want to sound like you know baseball, one of the fun facts you can drop is that Nolan Ryan never won a Cy Young award. He was so good for so long, that sounds astounding, even absurd. But if you look it up, it’s true. Here’s why Nolan Ryan won zero Cy Young Awards.
When talking about retro computers or any other collectible, sometimes you’re run into the term period correctness. What does period correct mean? In this blog post, I’ll talk about the concept and give some examples from a couple of different hobbies.
Period correctness is simply a term that means correct for the era. It means that an accessory or add-on came from the same era as the item you are using with, and the two items likely would have been used together when they were new.
My WordPress has been acting strange for a while, missing scheduled posts and other general weirdness. I eventually traced the problem to a file called wp-cron.php. Here’s how I automated wp-cron.php to improve WordPress speed and reliability.
The Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a popular 16-bit sound card in the early 1990s. It attempted to do to Creative Labs what Creative had previously done to Ad Lib. When it didn’t meet that goal, the company became infamous for securities fraud. Two of its executives served prison terms.
I helped my son replace the i5 CPU in his PC with an i7 to hopefully solve some occasional performance problems he was having. But when we booted the upgraded machine for the first time and pulled up task manager, Windows 10 still thought it was an i5. Here’s how to fix Windows 10 not recognizing a new CPU.
I’ve been messing around with Windows 95 on a 486 PC. When people think of non-optional bloat and Windows 95 or 98, they usually think of Internet Explorer. But there were two non-removable components in the original Windows 95, when Internet Explorer was an afterthought in the Plus Pack, that date from Microsoft’s ambition to supplant Lotus Notes and AOL. Let’s talk about cutting the bloat out of Windows 95. Specifically, how to remove the Inbox and MSN, and reduce the minimum requirements to 17 MB.
Why would you want to do this? Disk space isn’t a problem anymore, but the bloat does slow down Windows 95’s FAT file system. There’s no software you want or need to use today on a retro Windows 95 build that needs these components, so they are just wasting space and slowing down your disk. Even if you’re using a solid state solution. I covered this back in 1999 in my book about Windows 95 and 98, but it doesn’t seem like the information is easy to get anymore, so I want to revisit it here.