Category: Office Tech

Hello dear readers. What a relief it is, when so many things that are happening around us clamor for our attention, that we can sometimes return to pleasant and diverting discussions of some of the more important things in life. A chief example for today being the ingredient lists for two beverages that I discussed the other day in this blog article, namely Diet Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. Continue reading “Mountain Dew Zero Sugar redux”

If like me you quaff the occasional Diet Mountain Dew, then you may have shared my puzzlement at the presence of a new product in stores — Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.  Are they the same thing? Continue reading “Mountain Dew Zero Sugar?”

The headlines and press relations and social media are filled with corporate responses to the recent health and economic challenge.  Many of the corporate responses are a bit discouraging — Apple closing its iPhone stores, airlines canceling flights.  Many other corporate responses are predictable but a bit ham-fisted — hotel chains with emails to me in which the supposed communications goal is to let me know that they are cleaning each guest room extra well, but poorly concealed is a rather desperate plea that I will please book a room at one of their hotels so that they can make a little money.  Other corporate responses, for example from banks and other service industries, try to put the best face they can on the cutting back of their opening hours.  A remaining category of corporate response is to covertly raise prices, typically by keeping the nominal price the same while cutting back on the variety or quantity or timeliness of services or hours of operation.  Which brings us to a frankly encouraging corporate response from one of our favorite service providers.  Continue reading “A refreshing corporate response to the recent health and economic challenge”

Recently I happened upon a weather station with a couple of interesting-looking air sensors.  What do they sense?  It’s easy of course to work out what the white one (upper right) is sensing.  But the one in the lower center, metallic colored — what is it sensing? Continue reading “What is it sensing?”

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and a previous article talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers.  The previous article talks about being able to unplug a phone from a desk in the office, and put the phone into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  This article talks about being able to unplug a desktop computer from a desk in the office, and put the computer into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access — computers”

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and some subsequent articles talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers. In this article we talk about setting up what we call “bat phones”, meaning phones that can be plugged in at the homes of employees and the phones work exactly as they would work in the office.  In a subsequent article we talk about setting up VPN access so that an employee might be able to take his or her desktop computer home, and plug it in, and have it work just as if it were in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access – telephones”

Quite often when I find that some consumer electronic device that I purchased has a really nice or clever feature, I realize that this is not at all due to my somehow having been a savvy purchaser, but instead that it is due to dumb luck.  This really nice feature of my new Lenovo Yoga notebook computer falls into the “dumb luck” category. Continue reading “Charging port redundancy”

Yesterday I offered a quiz to my loyal readers.  Which readers could figure out what these four things had in common?  Today I announce the winners and I offer some discussion and explanation as to how these four things are really very nearly exactly the same. Continue reading “What the four things have in common”

Okay, loyal readers, here is a quiz for you.  These four things turn out to be exactly the same in a very important way. Continue reading “What do these four things have in common?”

A week ago I blogged that we migrated our OPLF speed test from our office in Colorado to a server farm in Arizona.  At that moment our speed test was on a box that was connected to the rest of the world through 100base-T ethernet.  That meant that the fastest speed you would ever see in the speed test is 100 Mbps.  If your own Internet connection happened to be faster than 100 Mbps, then our speedtest would give you an unnecessarily pessimistic sense of the speed of your Internet connection.  Just now we took a step that removes this unnecessary pessimism.  Continue reading “Our speed test improved still more”