Category: Office Tech

Hello dear readers.  By now you may have noticed the layout of the blog is back to normal.  It will be recalled that a couple of days ago I had migrated this blog from a shared server to a dedicated server.  As it turns out, one of the consequences of the migration was that the server defaults to a newer version of PHP.  To get my regular WordPress theme functioning again, what I had to do is force it that this blog is running on a slightly older version of PHP.  And indeed the theme functions again.

So now things are back to normal.

Why does the Ant-Like Persistence blog look strikingly different today?  I did not want it to look different today but it does.  I will explain why it looks different. Continue reading “WordPress Themes”

(I have posted a followup article.)

Hello readers who are in the US.  We all are familiar with this checkbox “this is a computer that I trust and use regularly”.  USPTO tells us that supposedly if we check this box, then for the next 24 hours we will be saved from the time-waste of having to do the two-step authentication.  This check box is super important given that a year or so ago the USPTO went against user wishes and shortened the forced-logout time interval from 60 minutes to a mere 30 minutes.  Anyway as readers know, this check box almost never actually works.  Finally today I figured out why it almost never works. Continue reading “why the MyUSPTO check box doesn’t work”

It was Penn Jillette whose comments on a television show (NSFW) made me realize that I had been misusing the term acronym all my life.   Continue reading “Using “acronym” correctly”

One way to purchase postage stamps from the US Postal Service is in coils of 100.  Just today in our office we purchased and placed into service this plastic dispenser for such a coil.  It is simple and elegant in its simplicity.   This dispenser replaces our expensive postage meter which we got rid of some time ago (blog article). 

This dispenser offers a sense of nostalgia, because it looks just like a dispenser that was in my home when I was a child.  For me, it’s in the category of comfort food.

In this blog article I said “Zelle cannot be used by a business”.  Recently, however, some banks that belong to Zelle, which is a money transfer service, have begun allowing businesses to use Zelle.  This article discusses this change. Continue reading “Maybe your firm can now use Zelle to make payments”

Our firm receives many incoming international bank wires every month.  These wires come from patent and trademark firms outside the US and they come from corporate clients outside the US.  In most cases, the amount of money that we receive matches the amount of money the sender says they sent.  But often enough to be annoying, we will receive a wire that is “short”.  Sometimes the shortage is $15, sometimes $40, sometimes another amount.  Is there a way to eliminate the shortages?  This blog article describes something you can do to try to reduce or eliminate the shortages. Continue reading “Getting paid in full when someone sends you a bank wire”

If you have a computer that runs Microsoft Windows 10, you probably did a pretty substantial Windows update within the past few months — the kind of update that requires two or three long periods of time during which the computer counts slowly up a percentage, reboots itself, and solemnly warns you not to unplug the computer or power it down or allow the battery to run down during the next few minutes.  After this update, you may have started noticing warnings when you connect to some wifi networks.  The warning says something like:

This wifi network uses an older security standard that is being phased out.  We recommend using a different network.

It wouldn’t be so bad except that likely as not, this warning is happening when you are connected to your own wifi network!  So what the heck are you supposed to do about this? Continue reading “Turning off TKIP”

For any blogger the really fun news is learning that some other web site has made a link to the blogger’s blog.  Many bloggers use plugins to try to notice when a visitor arrived because of a referral from another web site.  The other day my plugin told me that alert reader George Morgan had done me the honor of mentioning this blog when listing on Quora what he considered to be the best blogs on patents.  

Thank you George for the shout-out!

I am trying to maintain a list of such sites here.  

 

We receive many bank wires each month from patent and trademark firms outside of the US.  Some months ago in a flurry of micro-managing, I happened upon the realization that Wells Fargo was charging us anywhere in the range of $16-27 per incoming foreign bank wire.  This prompted us to switch over to Afex as a way to receive incoming bank wires, because Afex will receive such wires free of charge.

But we have decided to stop using Afex for incoming bank wires, and we are now using TransferWise to receive our incoming bank wires.  This blog article describes why. Continue reading “Why we stopped using Afex for incoming bank wires”