David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I heard earlier this year that you can retrobright without chemicals, using only sunlight. I haven’t heard of a lot of people trying it. But I had a yellowed disk drive, and it’s summertime, so I decided to give it a shot.
A few people experimented with retrobright without chemicals in 2019, then the idea kind of faded away. I decided to try it, and found it works surprisingly well.
I’m a landlord, so I can vouch that there are certain tax advantages to investment property. But it can be a bit complicated. Here’s one question that isn’t as straightforward as it sounds: Is investment property tax deductible?
You can’t write off the purchase price of your property on next year’s taxes. What you can do is depreciate the costs of the property over a span of 27.5 years, so that’s why I say the question of whether investment property is tax deductible isn’t a simple yes/no question.
The name Charter Communications has largely disappeared, after years of being one of the largest cable companies in the country. So what happened to Charter Communications? When did Spectrum buy Charter? The answer probably isn’t what you think.
Charter Communications still exists as a legal entity. It just transitioned to using the Spectrum brand name starting in 2014.
There are a number of Youtube videos talking up the value of Jose Uribe’s baseball cards. The 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe, to be precise. So here’s some straight talk about what’s going on with regard to Jose Uribe baseball card value, and why some people think it’s absurdly valuable.
Sometimes you need to ping sweep a network. I have a batch file for that, but what if your list isn’t continuous? In that case, there’s a better tool for you. Pinginfoview is my favorite free Windows ping sweep tool. It’s easy to use, small, and standalone, requiring no installation. In this blog post, I’ll explain why it’s so great.
Masterforce is Menards’ house brand for power tools and hand tools. As a house brand, they are less expensive than the big name brands. But are Masterforce power tools good? And who makes Masterforce power tools for Menards? I did some digging to find out.
Masterforce power tools are made by Chervon, one of the 10 largest OEMs of power tools in the world. Contrary to rumor, they are not rebadged Maktec tools made by Makita.
ZIP and RAR are two popular file formats in the Windows world. They have similarities, since both of them provide lossless file compression. But they have some fairly significant technical and philosophical differences too. Here’s a look at ZIP vs RAR and why the two file formats have coexisted side by side for decades.
XXCOPY vs XCOPY: Which file copy utility do you like? Both of them are extensions of the DOS command COPY. Think eXtended Copy and eXtended eXtended Copy. Two extendeds are better, right? Yep.
Modern tamper resistant outlets are a good safety feature, but they also present a challenge. They can be much harder to plug into. Here’s how to open tamper resistant outlets if you can’t plug into an outlet.
Dealing with JSON is a common task when you’re coding in Python. Two functions you may use a lot without fully understanding them are json.loads and json.dumps. Let’s take a look at json.loads vs json.dumps in Python, what they do, and how they can help you, especially when wrangling complex JSON data from APIs.
json.loads and json.dumps are two functions in Python for converting JSON to and from simple strings. Sometimes one is better than the other, and being able to convert between them reduces the trade-offs you have to make.