I told you so.  Four months ago I told you so.  I told you to drop Whatsapp and switch to Signal in my article It is time to switch to a new end-to-end encrypted messaging app.  Now in January of 2021 lots of people are finally realizing they should switch to Signal.  

Please recall this article (August 23, 2020) in which I explain how to be smart about what kind of phone number to use as your user ID for Signal.

If you’d like to try messaging me with Signal, drop me a note at my email address with your Signal identifier telephone number and I will fire off a Signal message to you.

Yeah, I had Covid-19.  I’m fine now.  I’ll say a few words about how it went for me, but my reason for mentioning this is mostly to urge you to consider donating convalescent plasma (see blog article).  Continue reading →

Hello blog colleagues.

A couple of days ago I went to a blood donation center and I donated 650 units of convalescent plasma.

Yeah.  I had Covid-19.  Continue reading →

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I imagine for most people, a file server is not the sort of thing that you have warm and fuzzy feelings about.  But hear me out.  Continue reading →

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(Corrected thanks to alert reader Jarek Markieta who pointed out that 1, 4 and 9 are squares of the first three counting numbers, not cubes.)

(Not one but two alert readers immediately pointed out my mistake about the metal from which the top of the Washington Monument is made — aluminum and not gold.  See comments below.  I have corrected this.)

What word may correctly be used to describe this object?  People call it a “monolith”.  That’s wrong.  People call it an “obelisk”.  That’s wrong. What can we call it? Continue reading →

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I was puzzled and intrigued to learn about something called “the nasal cycle”. Maybe it will turn out that most of my readers already knew about this, but I certainly did not. It turns out that in all mammals, including humans, there is an autonomic mechanism by which a first nostril’s breathing path constricts for a while and the second nostril’s breathing path remains open. Then after a while the second breathing path is the path that gets constricted and the first breathing path opens up. In most healthy humans, this back-and-forth constriction usually takes place in a cycle of about five hours, with two and a half hours during which one nostril gets preference and another two and a half hours during which the other nostril gets preference.  Or, maybe I am just making this up!  Could there be such a thing and people would not already know all about it? Continue reading →

The time is 5AM Mountain Time on a Saturday.  I post a new blog article How long it takes USPTO to issue a patent these days.  Is anyone else awake at this hour?  The answer to this question turns out to be “yes”.  I know this because my blog has a “Site Stats” page that tells me how many times a blog article has been viewed.  And what I see there is that within two minutes of when I clicked the “publish” button, more than twenty people had already viewed the article.

So I think it can safely be said that the hive mind never sleeps.

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It is ingrained in our behavior that if we are going to take a step toward calling someone on the telephone, we need to ask them “what is your telephone number?”  It is is ingrained in our behavior that if we are going to make it possible for someone to call us on the telephone, we need to be able to tell someone “our telephone number”.  This world of “having a telephone number” and “calling a telephone number” is the most prominent aspect of the Public Switched Telephone Network (Wikipedia article).  One way to think of the PSTN is that it is a collective effort by governments and post offices and landline telephone companies to collect money from people who “dial telephone numbers” and who receive telephone calls from other people who “dial telephone numbers”.  

The rise of the Internet has prompted many efforts to find ways that people can talk to each other without paying money to the PSTN.  One of those ways is the SIP URI (Wikipedia article).  Continue reading →

Recently Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC migrated from a physical local PBX to a cloud PBX.  What prompted us to do this?  What are the pros and cons of such a migration?  How might one go about selecting a cloud PBX service provider?  Continue reading →

I think the best identifier to use with a messaging app is a VOIP SMS telephone number.

The identifier that Signal uses is a cellular telephone number.  I am very glad to tell you, however, that you don’t really have to use a traditional cellular telephone number.  For example for my Signal service I don’t actually use a cellular number, I use instead a VOIP number that happens to have SMS service enabled.  That VOIP number is not linked to any SIM card.  My VOIP provider (VOIP.MS) uses two-factor authentication and, because it is not a cellular provider, is not going to fall prey to a SIM swap attempt.  (See Being smart about SMS two-factor authentication.)  This protective step costs me only 85¢ per month.  I recommend it for all of your SMS two-factor authentication and I recommend it for your Signal service.