Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Musings about office technology from an intellectual property lawyer
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.
For years I have hoped that Barnes & Noble would, through its Nook service, serve as a competent ebook competitor to Amazon’s Kindle service. My recent experience with Nook is a complete disappointment, as it is clear that Barnes & Noble cheats its Nook customers. If you purchase a book from Barnes & Noble that has maps in it, and if you purchase the book on paper, the maps will be legible. If you purchase that same book from Barnes & Noble as an ebook (through its Nook service), the maps will be illegible. See an example of this at right.
It is clear that Barnes & Noble’s process for converting a physical book to its Nook (ebook) format is defective. Barnes & Noble says that it offers over 4.5 million ebooks. I suspect that most of not all of its ebooks with maps inside are defective. What needs to happen is that Barnes & Noble needs to redo the conversions of those books so that the maps are legible in the ebook format. Only then will customers be receiving what they paid for, namely legible maps. Continue reading “Barnes & Noble cheats Nook customers”
We all see in the news that earlier today (Thursday, January 22) Microsoft had some massive internal crash that affected lots of people who had selected Microsoft (aka Outlook) to handle their email service.
I have seen this in two ways. A first way is that over the course of many hours, I was often unable to send an email to some person or another, and when I looked up the MX record (Wikipedia article) for that person’s domain, it would turn out to be “outlook.com”. Meaning that the person to whom I was trying (unsuccessfully) to send email had selected Microsoft (aka Outlook) to handle their email service.
A second way is that our listserv server has been crippled by this outage. In a an average day our listserv server (see past blog postings here and here and how to donate) sends out a few tens of thousands of email messages to the members of our listservs. Each email gets sent once (in normal times) and that is it.
About one-third of the members of our listservs, it turns out, have selected Microsoft to be their service provider to handle their email.
Normally the chief way that this decision makes a problem for our listserv server is that Microsoft will wrongly make decisions to bounce our listserv emails as if they were spam (which of course they are not). As for this problem, what is desperately needed is for each member of our listservs (each member that uses Microsoft for email service) to contact Microsoft and tell them to stop doing that. (This includes, but is not limited to, telling Microsoft to whitelist our server’s IP address as described here.)
But a new and different way that this decision by many of our listserv members makes a problem for our listserv server arose today. Today, in a very intermittent and unpredictable way, Microsoft just sort of professed to be unable to receive any email at all (no matter who was trying to send the email), inviting the would-be sender to try again later. How much later, Microsoft did not say.
For our listserv server, this meant that our server would try again after a few minutes, and would get rebuffed by Microsoft, and would try again a few minutes later, and would get rebuffed by Microsoft again, and so on. This led to a massive queue of many thousands of outbound email messages that needed to be re-attempted over and over again. As for any particular listserv posting to some particular listserv member (who had selected Microsoft to handle that listserv member’s email service) this would eventually lead up to a reluctant decision by our server to abandon the efforts to send the email message.
Microsoft has not come out and said just what went wrong and has not come out and said they fixed it, whatever it was. But from reviews of our logs of outbound listserv emails, I get the impression that Microsoft may have fixed whatever it was that went wrong. Outbound listserv emails to listserv members who use Microsoft for their email seem to be back to their normal level of Microsoft randomly and wrongly discarding some percentage of our emails as if they were spam. Instead of bouncing all emails, Microsoft is back to bouncing only some percentage of them.
Again, if you are a member of one or more of our listservs, and if the company that you selected to handle your email is Microsoft, then please please tell Microsoft to whitelist our server’s IP address as described here.)
Day-to-day users of Patent Center are accustomed to the USPTO’s requirement that you provide two-factor authentication (“2FA”) as part of the login process. It turns out that you may be able to use your cryptocurrency hardware wallet as your 2FA at the USPTO. This blog article explains how to do it. Continue reading “Maybe you have not used this kind of two-factor authentication for Patent Center?”
(Update on December 30, 2025. The listservs seem to be back in service, see blog posting.)
(Update on December 29, 2025. Today I have spent around eight hours arm-wrestling with Namecheap tech support people, working on the migration of the listservs from a “shared hosting” server to a “virtual private server”. It has been exhausting. I think there is a chance that progress has been made. I will update this posting if I see more progress.)
The executive summary is: the listservs are broken. I am working on getting them back into service. Continue reading “The listservs are broken”
CNN launched on June 1, 1980. Only now, 45 years later, has CNN become available “over-the-top” and unbundled. Continue reading “It only took 45 years — CNN over-the-top and unbundled”
Thanks to Brian E. Hanlon, Assistant Commissioner for Patents at the USPTO, I learned a new word today:
antepenultimate.
Assistant Commissioner Hanlon recently published a memo dated October 24, 2025 entitled Advance notice of change to the MPEP with respect to false assertions or certifications of entity status. It contains these words:
The ante-penultimate and penultimate paragraphs in MPEP § 410 are revised to read …
Of course we all already knew what “penultimate” means, namely “second from the end”. Thanks to Mr. Hanlon, today I learned of the existence of “antepenultimate” which means “third from the end”. (The word is not actually hyphenated.)
It turns out that there are more words like this:
Loyal readers of this blog will recall (blog article) that I have constructed and have placed into service a station that detects a lightning strike and reports it to a crowd-sourced system that uses the report to determine where the lightning strike happened. Hundreds or thousands of times per day, my station detects a lightning strike and reports it to the crowd-sourced system.
The alert reader will surely wonder “how far away are these lightning strikes?” Today’s blog article answers this question, and it draws upon the screen shot that you see above. Continue reading “Detecting and locating lightning strikes”
From time to time I will become aware for the first time of some element of popular culture that most other people already know about. Today’s example is a term for a kind or category of song, namely the “I Want” song. There is a particular song that is very popular right now, all around the world, and it turns out that this particular song falls into the (apparently well-known) category of “I Want” songs. Today is when I learned that there is this category of song.
What is the definition of an “I Want” song? What is this particular song that is right now very popular all around the world that falls into the category of being an “I Want” song? Continue reading “What is an “I Want” song?”
It will be recalled that recently I obtained a Blitzortung lightning detection station and placed it into service. My station is number 3205 and it is one of about 1170 active stations around the world.
No single station ever figures out the location of a lightning strike by itself; whenever the Blitzortung server figures out the location of a lightning strike, it is by drawing upon signal reports from dozens of stations like mine.
Here you can see a lightning strike that happened a few minutes ago, at about 8:35 PM, just southwest of Albuquerque, NM. On this map, lines radiate outward from the strike location to the locations of the stations that participated in the location process. On this map, I have noted the location of my station in the mountains of Colorado.
It is interesting to see that some of the stations that helped to detect this strike in New Mexico were as far as 3000 kilometers (1800 miles) away. (The electromagnetic pulse created by a lightning strike will routinely propagate many thousands of kilometers.)
My station detects an average of about one lightning strike per second, thus sending tens of thousands of signal reports per day to the server. On an average day, the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a couple of thousand lightning strikes. Another way to say this is that on average, about 8% of the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a particular lightning strike.