Monitoring your water softener

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Some water softeners recharge on a predetermined schedule, but other water softeners recharge when they feel like it.  If your water softener is the latter kind, then you might want to somehow get notified each time that it decides to recharge.  This article describes a successful design and implementation of a system to monitor such recharging.

A cogent analysis of Wednesday’s tragic airplane accident at National Airport

Here is a Youtube video with a cogent analysis of publicly available information about the tragic airplane accident at National Airport this past Wednesday.  The video is about fourteen minutes in length and I think for any reader it would be time well spent.

I was in Washington earlier this week to argue an ex parte patent appeal before the PTAB.  The way I arrived in Washington on Tuesday was through National Airport.  Yes, the same approach from the south, with a glide slope down to Runway 1.  My flight was not asked to swing over to Runway 33.

My return flight from Washington was on Thursday, through Dulles.

What USPTO’s report on eliminating work-from-home will say

As mentioned in a previous post, USPTO will be required to hand in its report detailing its plan for eliminating work-from-home within the next nine business days.  I don’t envy the USPTO’s task on this.  Many of us recall a song by Miley Cyrus (Wikipedia article) that says:

And we can’t stop …
And we won’t stop …

I predict that USPTO’s report, reduced to its essence, will be along the lines of:

And we can’t stop [doing work-from-home]
And we won’t stop [doing work-from-home]

Something I should have enabled a long time ago — media mail postage

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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”

The Helvetica Scenario

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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”

Why dinosaurs and humans both have a radius and ulna

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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”

Does your bank participate in FedNow?

FedNowFedNow (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?”

I unplug a VOIP phone, and later I receive an email telling me it got unplugged

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.