Category: Office Tech

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 “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.

(Note:  this posting replaces the similarly titled posting on May 20, 2024.  It provides a report on the results of the trip to the Atlanta airport and it offers examples of other more sensible rapid transit senior discount cards.)

The reader will recall that I had been in Atlanta in recent days to host the eleventh annual e-Trademarks listserv reception.  During my time in Atlanta, I obtained a Senior Reduced Fare card for MARTA, the subway system in Atlanta, which is the bottom card at right, called “breeze”.   I qualified for this card by being 65 years of age or older.  (The other way to qualify is to have a disability.)  This process is by now rather familiar to me, since I had previously obtained a senior discount card from the Washington Metro (top card at right, called “Senior Smartrip”) and from Denver’s Regional Transportation District (middle card at right, called “Special discount card”).

The Washington Metro Senior Smartrip card has no expiration date.  The Denver regional special discount card recites an expiration date, but it is some 65 years in the future, a date I think I can safely ignore.   But as you will see the Atlanta MARTA card unaccountably bears an expiration date a mere three years in the future.

It is understandable, I suppose, for such a reduced-fare card to have an expiration date in the near future if the way that the card holder were to qualify is by having a disability — I suppose there is some chance that the disability might go away at some later time.  But it strikes me that the status of “being 65 years of age or older” cannot cease to be the case merely because of the passage of three years.  Nonetheless you see that MARTA has in mind that I will need to go again to their headquarters in Atlanta three years from now, and to present myself in person, to prove that I continue to be at least 65 years old.

Oh, and for those keeping score at home, I can report that my trip to the Atlanta airport on May 21, 2024 did take place as planned, was very pleasant, and did cost a mere one dollar.  The trip was faster than a trip to the airport by taxi or Lyft or Uber would have been.

These days, most people who want to have security camera systems choose cloud-based systems.  The cloud-based systems have recurring costs, and it is anyone’s guess how badly one’s privacy could be violated in the cloud.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to set up a security camera system that is completely self-contained, that does not send video data to a cloud, and that has no recurring cost?  The alert reader will have no difficulty guessing where this article is going.  Of course there is a way to set up a security camera system that is completely self-contained, that does not send video data to a cloud, and that has no recurring cost.  For convenient reference I will give a name to such a system:  “a good system.”  I have set up a page describing how to set up a “good” security camera system.

Our firm has been using VOIP.MS as our telephone service provider since 2017, with no regrets.  Across those seven years we have saved at least twenty thousand dollars compared with what our telephone services would have cost from any other service provider.  This blog article provides a reminder of one of the reasons that I like VOIP.MS, namely geographic server diversity.  Continue reading “A reminder of why I like VOIP.MS as our telephone service provider”

In the old days, a POTS (plain old telephone service) telephone, also sometimes called an “analog phone”, got its dial tone from a pair of copper wires that led to a telephone company central office.  The distance between the telephone and the central office might be miles.  The telephone company might have sophisticated equipment in the central office that can test for faults on the telephone line, such as spurious voltages or shorted connections.

Nowadays if the customer is trendy, modern, and up-to-date, the POTS telephone will get its dial tone from an ATA (analog telephone adapter).  At above right we see a functional blog diagram including an ATA.  It turns out that some ATAs have sophisticated circuitry, like that in a legacy telephone company central office, that can test for faults on the telephone line, such as spurious voltages or shorted connections.  Continue reading “Some VOIP analog telephone adapters are very feature-rich”

This blog article reports success (screen shot at right) at getting a particular smart television connected to the world through IPv6.  But the more general goal of this article is to gently remind the reader that he or she may wish to tackle this project in his or her home as well.  Continue reading “Getting your streaming television onto IPv6”

Here is a canonical list of domino clicks for adoption of NACS (Tesla-style) electric vehicle charging plugs and charging ports.

As you will see, nearly all makers of EVs for the US market have by now joined the NACS club, the sole holdout being Stellantis (maker of Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram).

Dear reader, are you located in the US and do you own or lease an EV that is not a Tesla vehicle?  If so, then I’d like to know where on your vehicle the charging port is located.  Please visit this blog article and complete the survey to let me know where the charging port is located on your vehicle.

Here is a blog article, in a writing style that might look somewhat familiar, about a travel case that carries a Starlink router and antenna.