David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
If your mower deck keeps clogging, you’re not alone. It’s a common problem, especially in the spring. I wish I could tell you there’s one weird trick to fix everything. That’s not quite the case, but there are several things you can do when your mower deck clogs with grass that will help.
On Fridays, a lot of families order pizza to celebrate the weekend’s arrival. In the 80s, we often went out for pizza instead. And while for a lot of Gen Xers that meant Pizza Hut, it wasn’t the only game in town. In eastern Missouri, including St. Louis, the dominant pizza chain was Pantera’s. Let’s take a look back at Pantera’s Pizza and its history.
Pantera’s Pizza is a mostly defunct pizza chain that specialized in a 5-pound pizza it called The Hunk, and its commercials featured two characters named Betty and Mario, often containing the catchphrase, “What a hunk!” It was up to the viewer to decide whether Betty was referring to the pizza, Mario, or both.
Both the Atari 7800 and NES were third generation game consoles, and they competed directly with one another. Furthermore, they shared a common influence. So the Atari 7800 vs NES is a natural comparison. But one was much more successful than the other. Here’s why.
One Wednesday a little after 8:30 AM, my phone dinged. And it dinged four more times that minute. Some bot was signing me up for subscriptions at the speed of light, and my inbox was floding. Here’s how to deal with Gmail subscriptions flooding.
One of the first things I do when I open a vulnerability scan is make a pivot table on the title of the vulnerability and the count of that title. Then I do the same for all the systems. It’s easy to do in Excel once you’ve seen someone do it once, but if you have a lot of data it can be crash prone. Here’s how to make a simple pivot table in Python.
This example is for Qualys data but it’s easy to adapt it to another scanner. Just change the names of the columns. Python is so much faster and more reliable for this that I rarely make pivots in Excel anymore. I make them in Python, then load the output file in Excel for viewing.
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Cattle vs pets refers to two philosophies of server management. As an IT veteran who’s worked in the field since 1995, I’ve seen the transition. I’m very familiar with the problems of pet servers, and also familiar with the trickiness of replacing them with cattle servers.
Commodore (in)famously owned its own chip manufacturer, MOS Technology, later known as Commodore Semiconductor Group. MOS was pivotal to helping Commodore keep prices low in the early 1980s, as it lowered Commodore’s overhead, and ensured a steady supply of chips. In 1983 and 1984, MOS produced 74LS logic chips. These chips are very failure prone. Here’s how to find MOS 74LS logic chips, and more importantly, what to replace them with.
So I bought the Ryobi 13 inch ONE+ cordless lawn mower that I warned you about. I had my reasons for buying it. And I have to say, if you go in with the right expectations, it’s pretty great for what it is.
Vintage computer games and vintage toys display better in their original boxes. But frequently those boxes are in less than ideal condition, especially if you got it at a good price. A pristine box can be worth more than the contents. I recently lucked into a couple of vintage Commodore game cartridge boxes. Their best days were behind them, but I was able to make them presentable again. Here’s my approach to game box repair.
I fixed up quite a few battered books in my day to make them more suitable for resale. The tricks I learned fixing books helped me with fixing game boxes and toy boxes as well.
I was installing Windows 10 on an HP Z210 workstation and kept getting error 0x8007025. There’s not a lot of information about that error, so here’s how I fixed it.