Category: Office Tech

I use luggage tracking tags.  As you can see from the map at right, it looks like my medium-sized suitcase is at Porto Airport in Portugal.  Actually the suitcase is with me right now at home in the mountains of Colorado.  What explains this?  Continue reading “My luggage tracking tag ended up in Portugal”

Recently I added an environmental sensor to a rooftop solar meshtastic node.  This provides telemetry of temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure.  In this article I describe what was required to accomplish this.  Continue reading “Adding a barometric pressure sensor to a Meshtastic rooftop solar node”

Recent news articles talk about instances where Anthropic’s Mythos AI is said to have found software flaws in pieces of software that have been around for a long time.  The pieces of software in which Mythos has been said to have found flaws were each from the open-source community.

What should we, as readers and users of software, make of this?  What should we do differently?  Should we avoid open-source software?  In this blog article I offer my thoughts.  I do think there are things that we, as readers and users of software, should do and not do.  But avoiding open-source software is not among them.  Continue reading “What to make of the threats from AI that jeopardize software that we all rely upon?”

I must confess I was not aware, until a few moments ago, that there was such a thing as a World Quantum Day.

You can see the Wikipedia page about World Quantum Day.

You can see a nice video with some fun facts about quantum physics.

Many long-time readers of this blog will recall the anxieties leading up to the year 2000.  The worry was that some software systems, to squeeze more information into less memory, were storing only the last two digits of the year instead of storing all four digits.  The worry was that when January 1, 2000 arrived, some systems would crash or calculate things incorrectly.  This was called “the Y2K problem”.  And now we have an example of a sort of Y2K problem with gasoline pumps.  Continue reading “Sort of a Y2K problem with gasoline pumps”

It will be recalled (blog page) that Legrand had permitted its Eliot cloud to fall into disrepair.  It appears that Legrand has restored its Eliot cloud to normal function.  Continue reading “Legrand has (maybe) restored its Eliot cloud to normal function”

Most readers of my blog will recall my blog article dated March 2, 2020 entitled Charging port redundancy.  The article talked about how nice it is if a maker of a notebook computer would set it up so that you could use any of a wide range of charging adapters, made by a wide range of manufacturers.  You would not be stuck having to purchase multiples of some proprietary-plug adapter to match a proprietary connector on a notebook computer.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the USB-C “power delivery” port on a notebook computer is fragile.  It wears out.  The miniscule connector pins in the USB-C port are only just barely up to the task of carrying the five or six amperes of charging current.  Every time the charging plug gets bumped or jiggled, there is a bit of flex imposed upon the fragile surface-mount solder connections for the port.  This blog article describes a way to try to deal with this fragility.   Continue reading “Dealing with fragile USB C “power delivery” charging ports”

One of the places where our firm receives mail is a post office box.  As recently as a couple of years ago, the USPS did not permit our firm to sign up for informed delivery with respect to our post office box.

But something has changed at the USPS.  At some unknown time in the past few months, the USPS has changed policy on this.  We have successfully signed up for informed delivery for our P O Box.

Hello dear readers.  On and around February 28, there will be opportunities to see several planets in the sky.   This will be shortly after sunset.

The planets that will be easy to see are Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.  The eagle-eyed watcher might get a glimpse of Mercury.  Only with binoculars might one also spy Uranus and Neptune.

My favorite smart phone app for locating such celestial objects is Stellarium.  Learn more at Starwalk.

For years I have hoped that Barnes & Noble would, through its Nook service, serve as a competent ebook competitor to Amazon’s Kindle service.  My recent experience with Nook is a complete disappointment, as it is clear that Barnes & Noble cheats its Nook customers.  If you purchase a book from Barnes & Noble that has maps in it, and if you purchase the book on paper, the maps will be legible.  If you purchase that same book from Barnes & Noble as an ebook (through its Nook service), the maps will be illegible. See an example of this at right.

It is clear that Barnes & Noble’s process for converting a physical book to its Nook (ebook) format is defective.   Barnes & Noble says that it offers over 4.5 million ebooks.  I suspect that most of not all of its ebooks with maps inside are defective.  What needs to happen is that Barnes & Noble needs to redo the conversions of those books so that the maps are legible in the ebook format. Only then will customers be receiving what they paid for, namely legible maps. Continue reading “Barnes & Noble cheats Nook customers”