Category: Office Tech

(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”

Many readers of this blog are doubtless aware of N26, a German bank that is expanding to the US.  I had put myself on their waiting list some months ago.  (According to news reports about 100,000 people in the US had put themselves on that waiting list.)  A week or so ago an email arrived saying that Real Soon Now I would have an opportunity to actually open an account.  Today another email arrived saying yes I really can open an account.  Which I have done.  And I have a few initial reactions. Continue reading “N26 in the United States”

(In this article I said “Zelle cannot be used by a business”.  That has changed, as I mention here.)

Over a decade ago when our firm opened the Wells Fargo bank account that is our firm’s present operating account, the bank told us that there were two “ABA routing numbers” that we needed to know.  I never really understood why there were two, or how a person might know when to use one or when to use the other.  Very recently in my efforts to learn about international business money transfer options, I have gotten to the point of understanding the two routing numbers better.  It turns out that there are two ways for a business to send money from one US bank to another, and one is faster and more expensive, and the other is slower and less expensive.  In this blog article I will explain what I have learned about this.  This information might possibly be helpful to you in either of two ways:

• maybe you have in the past been using the more expensive way for transactions where you were not really in a hurry, and you would benefit from knowing about the slower and less expensive way, or
• maybe in the past you only knew about the slower way, and you would benefit from knowing how to use the faster way in cases where you do not mind paying the higher fee.

Continue reading “Sending money fast or slow”