Category: Office Tech

In our law firm shopping cart we sell a lot of books.  For as long as I can recall, each book purchaser has at to pay at least ten dollars’ postage to get a book from us.

Finally today I got a clue and realized that if I were to try hard enough I could probably figure out how to configure our law firm shopping cart to offer “book rate” as a shipping option.  Continue reading “Something I should have enabled a long time ago — media mail postage”

Recently I have had reason to try to learn a bit about a type of AI (artificial intelligence) called machine learning.  It turns out that sometimes a researcher in this area will encounter the Helvetica scenario, which is a phenomenon where a machine learning model gradually degrades due to errors coming from uncurated training on the outputs of another model, including prior versions of itself.  The Helvetica scenario, also called “Model Collapse” (Wikipedia article) is a common problem when training generative adversarial networks (GANs) (Machine Learning Glossary).  The natural question for the reader is where this terminology came from?  Continue reading “The Helvetica Scenario”

A few days ago I got to see Apex, which is thought to be the largest and one of the most complete stegosaurus specimens ever uncovered.  I am sure that most museumgoers had the same reaction I had, which was a sense of profound wonder at the fact that the stegosaurus (and indeed nearly all dinosaurs) had a radius and ulna below the elbow of each forelimb, exactly like humans (and nearly all mammals), and had a tibia and fibula below the knee of each hindlimb, again exactly like humans.

Given that dinosaurs and mammals are different branches of the evolutionary family tree, separated for tens of millions of years, how can this possibly have worked out this way?  Continue reading “Why dinosaurs and humans both have a radius and ulna”

Hello dear reader.  It was on July 23, 2024 (blog post) that I first tried to get my blog set up so that it would auto-post to Bluesky.   By now it seems I have succeeded (Bluesky).  Another notable intellectual property blog that has succeeded is The TTABlog (Bluesky).  The World Intellectual Property Organization has succeeded (Bluesky).

This is a fourth Bluesky test.  The previous post (called “third”) seemed to have worked.  Now let’s see if this one works.

FedNow (Wikipedia article) is an instant payment service developed by the Federal Reserve for depository institutions in the United States, which allows individuals and businesses to send and receive money.  FedNow is intended to be faster and less expensive than other traditional ways that banks in the US send money to each other.  FedNow is instant, which is better than the delays of hours or even days for ACH and bank wire transactions.  Bank customers, including businesses and individuals, can benefit greatly from FedNow.  Does your financial institution participate in FedNow?  Continue reading “Does your bank participate in FedNow?”

Yes, just an hour ago I unplugged a VOIP phone, and 45 minutes later I received an email telling me that it had gotten unplugged.  It means that my spiffy new SIP trunk monitor  is working.

It will be recalled (see blog article dated June 25, 2023) that I fished for people to join me in an open-source project.  The idea was to set up some PHP script that would run periodically, interrogating an API at the VOIP.MS company, querying the registration status of a long list of SIP trunks (what the company calls “subaccounts”).  Now I have this working, in a sort of simple way.

This kind of monitoring actually monitors quite a few things.  Suppose the VOIP device being monitored is a desktop phone.  Then this monitor will tip me off if any of these things happen:

• • Somebody unplugging the phone itself.
  • Failure in the power-over-ethernet delivery of power to the phone.
  • Loss of Internet connectivity at the place where the phone is located.

You can read about it here.

(Update:  prompted by helpful comments from readers, I was able to write the code myself.  Click on the link to see the happy results.)

Hello readers.  I wonder if somebody knows a PHP coder who would like to get hired to write some PHP code for me?  Here is a description of the code that I hope to pay somebody to write.

Well, folks, I am only slowly making progress at setting up Bluesky and Mastodon on this blog.  This is a test posting on this blog to see if it propagates through to Bluesky and Mastodon.

As best I can discern, my Bluesky identifier is @oppedahl.com “ant-like.bsky.social” and my Mastodon ID is “@ant_like@mastodon.social”.

If any reader is an experienced user of Bluesky or Mastodon, I’d be grateful if you can look to see if I have made progress.

Recently John Welch, the author of the TTABlog, posted to the e-Trademarks listserv to ask this:

I’ve been tweeting my blog posts for many years now, but I am fed up with the increasingly vile content on X/Twitter.

Can anyone recommend a good alternative?

Several listserv members offered very helpful suggestions.  Perhaps the most helpful response was from Rebecca Tushnet, who wrote:

It is true, by the way, that John’s TTABlog is indispensable.

I have just now added a couple of plugins to my blog that I hope will automatically feed my blog postings to both Mastodon and Bluesky.  I would be grateful if a reader who uses Mastodon can take a look to see if I succeeded.  Likewise, I would be grateful if a reader who uses Bluesky can take a look to see if I succeeded.

I have also added an RSS feed icon which you can see at right.  I would be grateful if a reader who uses an RSS reader can take a look to see if I succeeded.