Month: February 2026

Most readers of my blog will recall my blog article dated March 2, 2020 entitled Charging port redundancy.  The article talked about how nice it is if a maker of a notebook computer would set it up so that you could use any of a wide range of charging adapters, made by a wide range of manufacturers.  You would not be stuck having to purchase multiples of some proprietary-plug adapter to match a proprietary connector on a notebook computer.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the USB-C “power delivery” port on a notebook computer is fragile.  It wears out.  The miniscule connector pins in the USB-C port are only just barely up to the task of carrying the five or six amperes of charging current.  Every time the charging plug gets bumped or jiggled, there is a bit of flex imposed upon the fragile surface-mount solder connections for the port.  This blog article describes a way to try to deal with this fragility.   Continue reading “Dealing with fragile USB C “power delivery” charging ports”

One of the places where our firm receives mail is a post office box.  As recently as a couple of years ago, the USPS did not permit our firm to sign up for informed delivery with respect to our post office box.

But something has changed at the USPS.  At some unknown time in the past few months, the USPS has changed policy on this.  We have successfully signed up for informed delivery for our P O Box.

Hello dear readers.  On and around February 28, there will be opportunities to see several planets in the sky.   This will be shortly after sunset.

The planets that will be easy to see are Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.  The eagle-eyed watcher might get a glimpse of Mercury.  Only with binoculars might one also spy Uranus and Neptune.

My favorite smart phone app for locating such celestial objects is Stellarium.  Learn more at Starwalk.