David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
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.
I definitely have mixed feelings about LinkedIn. It’s helped me get several jobs, but it can also have the same pitfalls of any social network. Plus some that are unique to LinkedIn. If Linkedin is annoying you, here are some things I did to make LinkedIn less annoying and more helpful.
Rustoleum paint claims to bond to plastic. This is a good thing, because traditionally, plastic has been a bit difficult to paint at times. So are the claims true? Does Rustoleum plastic paint work?
Another vintage computer enthusiast was showing me some interesting items when the topic of expansion slot buses came up. If you think PCI is confusing, wait until you hear about the things that came before PCI. Let’s dive into the slow and confusing world of ISA vs EISA vs VLB.
The Intel 486DX-50 is a chip that puzzles many people when they encounter it. Intel released the chip at the end of June 1991, as its top of the line CPU. It wasn’t one of their success stories. Within 6 months, Intel followed up with its 486DX2 chips. The DX2 chips are extremely common today, because they were phenomenally successful. So let’s look at the 486DX-50 versus DX2, and why the DX50 failed.
It’s understandable if the concept of disk cache vs memory cache is confusing. They have distinct similarities though they are not interchangeable with one another. But let’s talk about the concept and how it works.
The 486 SLC2 is an oddball 486 chip made by IBM. It isn’t something anyone seems to talk about much, maybe because I’m the only one who finds its story ironic. It’s the story of a proprietary upgrade that found second life on clone motherboards. Except the clone motherboards were made by IBM themselves. If IBM made it, is it still a clone?