Category: Office Tech

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:

• • • “preantepenultimate” means “fourth from the end” and
    • “propreantepenultimate” means “fifth from the end”.

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.

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.