Carl Oppedahl's blog
Are you in one of these 25 countries?
If so, can you please let me know whether your DAS Depositing Office charges a fee for a DAS access code?
It will be recalled that the Patentcenter listserv has secured an hour-long meeting with USPTO’s Chief Information Officer, Jamie Holcombe, on Thursday, March 23. This will run from 11AM to noon Eastern Time. I reported this to you in a blog article dated February 7, 2023. There are two developments about this. Continue reading “The upcoming meeting with USPTO about Patentcenter redux”
Loyal readers will recall that recently I did a large number of test welds to measure welding currents generated by my new inexpensive stick welder (blog article). I had been using my smart phone to log real-time current measurements via Bluetooth from a clamp-on DC ammeter (blog article). Part way through the large number of test welds, I was astonished to see that my smart phone had powered itself down. I tapped the power button and coaxed the phone back to life and completed my current logging activities, and eventually figured out why the phone had so mysteriously and abruptly powered itself off. A tiny bit of hot steel from one of my test welds had flown several feet and had landed on the glass screen of the phone, and had melted a small crater in the glass. You can see the crater, which is less than one-fourth of a millimeter in diameter, in the photomicrograph above. After about a day, cracks had traveled from this crater across the full expanse of the glass. I realized I would need to learn how to replace the screen. This blog article describes it. Continue reading “Replacing a screen of a smart phone”
Yes there are at least five DAS Depositing Offices that charge a fee to obtain a DAS access code! And there are at least six DAS Depositing Offices for which it is known that they do not charge a fee.
As of March 19, 2023, there are 36 DAS Depositing Offices. They are listed in the table on this page. The rightmost column lists information, if any, that is known about whether or not a particular Depositing Office charges a fee for a DAS access code.
As you can see, there are twenty-five DAS Depositing Offices for which it is not known whether or not a fee is charged for a DAS Access Code. I invite practitioners who practice in the Offices listed below to let me know if they are aware of their Depositing Office charging a fee for a DAS access code, and, if so, the amount of the fee.
Kindly detail the fee charged for the particular application types in your Office:
It would be particularly helpful if you can provide a URL to a place on the web site of the Office detailing the fee.
The March 17 version of Patentcenter was clearly not tested before release. It breaks many things that worked properly in the pre-March 17 version. This has given rise to at least ten new trouble tickets in the Patentcenter Trouble Ticket page. Continue reading “March 17 version of Patentcenter breaks things that worked in previous version”
Hello readers. Some will recall that I am now three lectures into a sixteen-lecture series of webinars about ePCT. I am pleased to report that I was successful in recording each of those first three webinars. The recordings are now available for viewing! Continue reading “Recorded ePCT webinars are now available for viewing”
Today the USPTO rolled out its “modernized look and feel” version of Patentcenter. It contains lots of new content-free “icons” that take up valuable screen space, wasting pixels and forcing users to scroll further down to reach what they need. Continue reading “Pixel waste in content-free icons in the “modernized look and feel” Patentcenter”
One of the easiest things to get wrong, for some programmers in some programming languages, are “boundary values”. Here we see a classic example of a boundary-value mistake by the developers of Patentcenter. Continue reading “A boundary-value programming mistake in Patentcenter”
Hello folks. Here is a warning that I saw today in a USPTO system when I was paying a government fee in Financial Manager:
Credit/Debit Card Expiration Dates
Due to a recent system upgrade, some card expiration dates may have been converted to an incorrect month for cards stored within Financial Manager. …
Try to guess, dear reader, what the next few words were. For example, maybe the next few words explained that the USPTO was working to restore the expiration dates to their correct values, but that this might take a day or two, and they apologize for the inconvenience. Continue reading “USPTO corrupts credit card expiration dates in FM”
As we know, the “springing forward” of clocks for Daylight Saving Time happens at about 2AM. This “radio controlled” wristwatch does the DST adjustments automatically. I happened to be awake when it happened just now, and you can see a video recording of the automatic adjustment carried out by this wristwatch.