Category: Office Tech

Over the course of many decades I have loosened and tightened motor vehicle lug nuts hundreds of times.  I have always done this with hand tools.

Now I have a big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrench and maybe now I will not be stuck having to use hand tools for lug nuts.

All of a sudden I have no choice but to think about “torque sticks”.  Maybe you have strong feelings about torque sticks, in which case please post a comment below.  Maybe you have never heard of torque sticks.  Loyal readers know exactly where this is going.  What follows is a prolonged discussion of torque sticks as they related to big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrenches.  Continue reading “Torque sticks and big cordless ½-inch drive impact wrenches”

Maybe you have bufferbloat, perhaps not being directly aware of it.  In a local area network (LAN) suffering from bufferbloat, the network can become practically unusable for many interactive applications like voice over IP (VoIP), media streaming, online gaming, and even ordinary web browsing.  This can happen no matter how much money you spend to get high-speed service from your ISP (internet service provider).

If you have bufferbloat, then the thing to do is to take the protective measure of installing and using SQM (“Smart Queue Management”) in your data router.   It might turn out that your data router is unable to do SQM in which case you might want to upgrade your router.

How can you figure out whether you have bufferbloat?  How can you fix it?

This blog article talks about these things.  Continue reading “Do you have bufferbloat?”

Hello, dear readers.  I have just published three new articles about various home automation challenges and successes:

• • Overcoming Legrand’s abandonment of its light switch customers
  • One home automation app to rule them all
  • Simplifying the “last 50 feet” problem in home automation

If you have comments on any of the three articles, please post them below.

I am fascinated to learn that the term “vegetative electron microscopy” is starting to pop up in published academic papers.  And that there is no such thing as “vegetative electron microscopy”.  It seems that some early AI systems picked up this term as a sort of OCR scanning error.  And now lots of present-day AI systems keep repeating the term to each other.  And now maybe the term will never go away.

I am trying to think of fun ways to use an inexpensive pH meter in home experiments with a hope of getting youngsters interested in science.  I will describe what I have imagined thus far, and I welcome suggestions.  Continue reading “Looking for ideas how to use a pH meter with youngsters”

I recently received a box of sachets like what you see in the photo at right.  Each sachet contains a few grams of white powder which, if mixed with 250 ml of water, yields a stable buffer solution of one of the pH values mentioned in the subject line.

What is so interesting about these three pH values?  Why did the maker of these sachets pick these three pH values?  And, the alert reader demands to learn, what exactly is in the sachets? Continue reading “What is interesting about pH values of 4.01, 6.86 and 9.18?”

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.

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.

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]

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”