Category: Office Tech

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.

Two days ago I griped about a vendor who sold me a window regulator that had a poor quality plastic part, and I complained to the vendor.  Today there is encouraging word from the vendor.  It looks like the vendor might take some corrective action.  Continue reading “Encouraging word from the vendor of the window regulator”

Update:  in response to my complaint, it looks like the vendor might take corrective action so that future customers would not face a repeat of my very disappointing experience.  See blog article.

Hello dear readers.  It will be recalled (blog article) that I was working on a project to replace a window regulator in my car.  I am delighted to be able to report that the car window is now once again working properly.  It took far longer to accomplish than it should have taken, but now all is well with the window.  Hopefully soon I will be able to report corrective action by the maker of the replacement regulator.  Continue reading “Window regulator success after problems”

Update:  the replacement of the window regulator has been accomplished (blog article).

One of my current projects is to replace the window regulator in the driver’s side door of my car.  Continue reading “Replacing a vehicle window regulator”

Over the course of many decades I have loosened and tightened motor vehicle lug nuts hundreds of times.  I have always done this with hand tools.

Now I have a big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrench and maybe now I will not be stuck having to use hand tools for lug nuts.

All of a sudden I have no choice but to think about “torque sticks”.  Maybe you have strong feelings about torque sticks, in which case please post a comment below.  Maybe you have never heard of torque sticks.  Loyal readers know exactly where this is going.  What follows is a prolonged discussion of torque sticks as they related to big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrenches.  Continue reading “Torque sticks and big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrenches”

Maybe you have bufferbloat, perhaps not being directly aware of it.  In a local area network (LAN) suffering from bufferbloat, the network can become practically unusable for many interactive applications like voice over IP (VoIP), media streaming, online gaming, and even ordinary web browsing.  This can happen no matter how much money you spend to get high-speed service from your ISP (internet service provider).

If you have bufferbloat, then the thing to do is to take the protective measure of installing and using SQM (“Smart Queue Management”) in your data router.   It might turn out that your data router is unable to do SQM in which case you might want to upgrade your router.

How can you figure out whether you have bufferbloat?  How can you fix it?

This blog article talks about these things.  Continue reading “Do you have bufferbloat?”

Hello, dear readers.  I have just published three new articles about various home automation challenges and successes:

• • Overcoming Legrand’s abandonment of its light switch customers
  • One home automation app to rule them all
  • Simplifying the “last 50 feet” problem in home automation

If you have comments on any of the three articles, please post them below.

I am fascinated to learn that the term “vegetative electron microscopy” is starting to pop up in published academic papers.  And that there is no such thing as “vegetative electron microscopy”.  It seems that some early AI systems picked up this term as a sort of OCR scanning error.  And now lots of present-day AI systems keep repeating the term to each other.  And now maybe the term will never go away.

I am trying to think of fun ways to use an inexpensive pH meter in home experiments with a hope of getting youngsters interested in science.  I will describe what I have imagined thus far, and I welcome suggestions.  Continue reading “Looking for ideas how to use a pH meter with youngsters”

I recently received a box of sachets like what you see in the photo at right.  Each sachet contains a few grams of white powder which, if mixed with 250 ml of water, yields a stable buffer solution of one of the pH values mentioned in the subject line.

What is so interesting about these three pH values?  Why did the maker of these sachets pick these three pH values?  And, the alert reader demands to learn, what exactly is in the sachets? Continue reading “What is interesting about pH values of 4.01, 6.86 and 9.18?”