Category: Office Tech

When I was in college, long before most readers of this blog were born, I was a double major in physics and mathematics.  There was a fairly predictable path of eight physics courses over four years for the physics major, and a fairly predictable path of eight math courses over four years for the math major.  Not much room for other things.  In my case I came within a couple of credits of also earning a triple major in philosophy.  But I did not quite get there.

Conspicuously absent from my four-year course of study was geology.  At the college that I attended there was a geology course that was part of the physics department.  There was never room in my packed course schedule for that geology course.  That course had a counterpart at many colleges and universities, I later learned, and at many schools it was somewhat condescendingly nicknamed “rocks for jocks”, the course that a student might sign up for as a way of satisfying a requirement for getting a certain minimum number of science credits if the student otherwise was not going to find it very easy to satisfy that requirement.

Decades have passed and over and over again I have been reminded how much I missed by never having taken that geology course, or any other geology course.  Pretty much all I knew was that there are three kinds of rocks:  sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous.  That was it.  Which brings me around to the word “regolith”.  What does “regolith” mean? 

A chief reason why I think about words like this is that I keep hoping that life will eventually return to normal and there will be things like cocktail parties and salon dinners where people can talk about stuff and learn new things from each other.  Yes by now I have despaired that this return to normalcy would happen in 2020, but maybe in 2021?  2022?  Anyway, what does “regolith” mean?

Continue reading “A good word to save up: regolith”

The other day I was working on setting up an equipment rack in a new location.  I had ordered a piece of equipment and it had arrived.  You can see it at right.  It made me think of a bottle of “gluten-free” seltzer water that I had encountered recently in a grocery store. Continue reading “Gluten-free seltzer water”

I was intrigued to learn that apparently Android 10 (wikipedia article) does not have a formal name.  Continue reading “Android 10 does not have a name?”

Before all of this work-from-home happened, I’d guess that most of us very very little thought to the extreme asymmetry in the internet service provided by our internet service providers.  Continue reading “Asymmetric bandwidth”

Here is something about heat-shrink tubing that I bet you never thought about.  If well designed, it shrinks only circumferentially and not axially.  Yeah!  That’s the part I never thought about until somebody told me.  And then my reaction was, yes of course.  You would never want it to be any other way!   Meaning that the material, although visually undistinguished in one direction or another, is extremely anisotropic as to the two directions, the circumferential direction on the one hand and the axial direction on the other hand, in terms of what it does when you heat it.  So how does the manufacturer make that happen?  Continue reading “Heat-shrink tubing!”

Many of us are at least sort of vaguely aware that “the world is running out of IP addresses”.  And by this we mean IP addresses like 162.255.116.157 — four numbers each in the range of 000 to 255.  These are called IPv4 IP addresses.  But there is also a newer kind of IP addresses called IPv6 IP addresses.  I was fascinated recently to find out that my firm has some of these newer kind of IP addresses.  Continue reading “IPv6 IP addresses!”

These days everybody seems to use Zoom for videoconferencing.   But it is all over the news that Zoom has many privacy issues and security issues.  This has prompted tech writers to write articles such as The best alternatives to Zoom for videoconferencing.  Some of the alternatives cost a lot of money.  One of them requires that everyone be using Apple products.  One of them works only for two participants.  Most of the services pass the video and audio streams through a server controlled by the service provider and you do not know who might be eavesdropping on the streams.

And then there’s Jitsi, which is what I recommend.  Jitsi is open-source, and it is encrypted, and you can host it yourself.  Our firm recently set up our own Jitsi server.  So we can host our own Jitsi videoconferences at a cost per minute of zero and a cost per month of zero, and the connections are about as secure as any videoconference could possibly be.  But even if you use the public Jitsi server (“Jitsi Meet“), you are still far better off in terms of privacy and security than if you were to use Zoom.

Have you used Jitsi?  Would you like to try out our firm’s Jitsi server?  Please post a comment below.

This blog article talks about “power over ethernet” or POE.  Those who are affected by work-from-home arrangements might find it helpful to learn a little bit about POE even if you have not been trained in electrical engineering.  This article talks a little bit about POE. Continue reading “A new work-from-home skill – wrangling power over ethernet”

In an earlier article I offered some tips for making work-from-home work well for you.  Here is one more tip.  Make use of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Continue reading “Another work-from-home tip – MBSR”

This article talks about things that you can do in your home to get the best possible work-from-home results. Continue reading “Tips for best work-from-home results”