Category: Office Tech

Recently I got the idea of replacing an ancient irrigation controller at my house. The existing irrigation controller was a Rainbird ISA408 (photograph at right) which dates from before the Internet happened.  In today’s world of course we all have the idea that anything around the house, no matter what it is, should somehow be connected to the Internet or to our smart phone, or should in any event be very high-tech. Taken to its extreme we would have the Internet of Things.  How might one go about selecting a new irrigation controller?  In this article I talk about the new irrigation controller that most people choose these days, and what I think might be a better choice for some people. Continue reading “Selecting an irrigation controller”

In a previous blog post, I described that I had set up a smart plug that pings a pre-arranged IP address, and if the ping fails, the smart plug will power-cycle our modem and main router in our office.

The world we live in is enriched because there are smart people around us (not only smart plugs!).  One of those smart people is alert reader Manuel Fortin, who commented:

Very interesting, but I see a problem with the ping feature. What address will you use? If the address is unreachable for any reason that is unrelated to your modem and router, you will just end up with an endless loop of resets. Pinging an address within your network will not reset the system in case you lose internet access. Pinging an address outside of your network would completely disable your network if that address only, or a subset of the internet, cannot be accessed. It happens that servers, even from the most reputable companies, experience problems, or that problems make some part of the internet impossible to access.

Of course he is exactly right.  It is the Goldilocks problem.  Ping a host that is too close, and the ping result tells you nothing of interest.  Ping a host that is too far away, and the ping result might get overwhelmed with noise from Internet connectivity failures that have nothing to do with any good reason for power-cycling of your own modem or router.  It needs to be “just right”.  So how to do it “just right”? Continue reading “Pinging the first hop”

Everybody nowadays uses smart plugs.  A smart plug is a thing that you plug into the wall and then you plug something (maybe a lamp) into it.  The smart plug typically connects to your wifi and from there to the Internet.  Using an app on your smart phone, or using Alexa, you can remotely send a signal to the plug to tell it to turn off the lamp.  Later you can send another signal to the plug to tell it to turn the lamp back on.  Smart plugs are a lot of fun and you can do lots of interesting things with them.

Now let’s talk about the cable or DSL modem that connects your office to the Internet (see figure at right).  There is a main router the WAN port of which connects to that modem, and the LAN ports of which connect (directly or indirectly through ethernet switches) to all of the devices in your office.  Although one hopes that it does not happen very often, the real-life situation is that every now and then one feels the need to power-cycle the main router and modem.

Suppose you were to use one of the smart plugs of the kind that I just described, as a way to control the electrical power (shown by dashed lines in the figure) to the main router and modem.  It turns out this would be a really unwise thing to do.  Do you see why?

Think about it.  Suppose you were to use the app on your smart phone to send a signal to the smart plug, telling it to turn off the main router and modem.

Yeah.

The situation at this point would be that you would never be able to send a signal to the smart plug, telling it to turn on the main router and modem.  The reason being that the main router and modem are off.  Meaning that the smart plug does not have any connection to the Internet.

Meaning that if you had sent the “power off” command from some remote location, then to get things turned on again, you would have to travel in a car or airplane or train to the office location to turn things back on.

Yeah.

So this explains why if you know what to search for, you can find a very specialized kind of smart plug, a smart plug where you can send a single command that tells the smart plug to turn off the controlled devices and then turn them back on.   My favorite smart plug in this category is the EZOutlet2, shown at right.

This smart plug connects to your network with a wired ethernet cable, not wifi.  And you can send it any of three commands — turn the outlet off, turn the outlet on, and reset the outlet (which means turning the outlet off and then back on).  The reset command is the only command that makes any sense if you have the smart plug connected to a main router and modem.  To say this another way, if you were to have this smart plug connected as in the diagram above, you would never never never be using the “turn the outlet off” command (because that is irreversible).  And you would never never never be using the “turn the outlet on” command (because that is impossible).  The only command you would ever actually use is the “reset the outlet” command.

Yet another really nice thing about this smart plug is that if you like, you can configure it so that it pings some predetermined IP address from time to time.  You can configure it so that if the ping fails, the smart plug will power-cycle (reset) its outlet.  In the setup portrayed above, Ihave it configured so that the smart plug will be power-cycling the main router and modem if a ping fails.  Hopefully this reset will restore Internet connectivity to the office.

The smart plug can also be configured to carry out a scheduled reset, say once a week on Sunday morning.  It seems to me that there are pros and cons to setting up scheduled resets of critical equipment like main routers and modems.  I have never actually used this “scheduled reset” feature.

Do you have such a smart plug set up in your office?  By this I mean a smart plug that can respond to a single command by power-cycling its connected equipment?  Maybe a smart plug that can do this in response to a failed ping?  Maybe a smart plug that simply resets the equipment once a week regardless of whether the equipment actually needs to be reset?  Please post a comment below.

Our “contacts” page for Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC lists some “iNum” telephone numbers.  Should you use those numbers?  The short answer is yes, you should use them if you find that you can call them for free.  And if you are located outside of the US, you might find that it will be cheaper for you to dial one of our iNum numbers than to dial our old-fashioned North American Numbering Plan (NANP) numbers.

What follows is an astonishingly long and rambling answer to this question. Continue reading “Should you use our iNum telephone numbers?”

At our firm we use VOIP.MS for our outbound telephone service and for most of our inbound telephone service.  VOIP.MS is one of the several companies these days that makes it easy to dump the traditional landline telephone services and make use of voice over IP.  As I have discussed in previous blog articles, it is astonishing how much money one can save and it is astonishing what powerful features can be implemented in one’s telephone system, using voice over IP.  There are a bunch of reasons why we felt good about having selected VOIP.MS for most of our voice over IP services.

But today’s blog article talks about a new and different reason why we feel good about having selected VOIP.MS.  They noticed that someone in the Gaza strip had snuck into our PBX and had placed several telephone calls to mobile phones in Albania.  They proactively shut off the international calling on the trunk that had been passing these calls, and they dropped an email to us letting us know.  This was at 9AM on a Sunday.   Continue reading “Another reason why I am glad we use VOIP.MS telephone service”

A few months ago I needed to get a prescription filled, and my doctor said “you might want to consider using GoodRX.com“.  My doctor suggested that when I got to the pharmacy, I should pull out my smart phone, open a web browser, visit the web site GoodRX.com, type in the name of the drug, and show the screen to the pharmacist.

I followed the doctor’s suggestion and I was astonished at what happened next.  The list price for the drug (thank goodness I only needed it once, for a problem that thankfully was not very serious and thankfully went away promptly!) was slightly over $100.  With my health insurance it was around $70.  Using the information on the screen of my smart phone, the price dropped to $20.  I paid the $20, took the drug, the problem went away, and I realized I had better blog about GoodRX.

So what’s the deal?  Is it a scam?  Does it always work?  Is it somehow illegal?  Is there some catch?  When a person gets this price reduction, are they somehow paying for this by revealing private information to Facebook or something? Continue reading “The smart consumer will consider using GoodRX.com”

Today’s random blog posting is on the subject of enunciation. Continue reading “Enunciation”

When you use a presentation screen at a hotel, you can pay a few hundred dollars a day to rent a projector from a hotel.  Or you can pay an A/V contractor to set up a projector.  What I realized when I was setting up my recent PCT Seminar in Redwood City, California is that you can buy a projector and a screen and throw them away at the end of the meeting and it costs less money than renting.

What I also learned is that there are some really nice projectors available nowadays, such as this Epson 1781W projector.  I’ve decided I will simply bring this projector with me every time I present at any meeting in the future.

What we are all accustomed to is having to bring our notebook computer with us to a meeting, finding the lectern, finding a fat cable, and connecting the cable to our computer.  The cable runs to the projector and has been duct-taped to the floor so that it is not a trip hazard.  The cable might be a VGA cable or it might be an HDMI cable.  Years ago the projector’s input was always VGA and the computer’s output was always VGA.  In more recent times more and more projectors do not have a VGA input;  instead the input is HDMI.  Some computers have an HDMI output.  More and more notebook computers do not have a video output at all and instead the user must bring along an adapter that adapts USB to the desired output such as VGA or HDMI.  In my experience there is only about a 50-50 chance that the adapter I brought with me to a meeting location (VGA or HDMI) will turn out to match the type of cable at the lectern.  (You would think I would always remember to bring both kinds of adapters.  Yeah right!)  The A/V contractors sometimes plan ahead and carry a full range of adapters that convert VGA to HDMI and HDMI to VGA and so on.  Of course what also happens is that the display screen image quality often suffers due to awkward interpolation conversions between the screen resolution of the source (the notebook computer) and the destination (the native resolution of the imaging device in the projector).

I have attended many a meeting where the first five or ten minutes of meeting time gets lost while everyone sits around as the presenter fumbles to try to get his or her computer to talk nicely with the cable and with the data projector.

What’s so nice about this Epson 1781W data projector?  Well, a bunch of things.  One thing is that it is thin and light compared with a lot of data projectors.  It weighs only about four pounds (about 1.8 kilograms).  It is only about 2.1 inches (about 5.3 centimeters) tall.

Still another nice thing about this projector is a feature that it has in common, I guess, with a lot of today’s generation of data projectors.  You can shine it on a wall and no matter how awkward the angle that it hits the wall, the projector can “keystone” the image in an automatic way, by which we mean that the projector can change what it projects so that instead of a trapezoid, what appears on the display area is a rectangle.  Not only that, however, with this projector you can point it at your display area and the projector will resize itself as needed to match the actual dimensions of your display area.  I guess there must be a digital camera built into the projector.  The projector shoots a sophisticated test pattern onto the display area and, I guess, it takes a photograph and analyzes the photograph and works out how to change what it projects onto the display area so that it will be a nice rectangle that fills the display area fully without spilling over.

In one test I pointed the projector toward a large wall area framed by a couple of potted plants.  The projector worked out exactly how to size the image so as to exactly fill the area between the two potted plants, almost but not quite touching the two potted plants.  It noticed where the potted plants were.

Another nice thing about this projector is that if you like, you could just put your presentation slides on a USB drive and plug the drive into a USB port on the projector, and use a remote control to click through the slides.  What I mean is that you don’t even need to connect your computer to the projector.  The only cable you need to connect to the projector is a power cable.  Isn’t that nice!

Still another nice thing is that if you do feel that you need to connect your computer to the projector, you still do not need to use a cable to do it.  You can connect the projector to wifi, and connect your computer to the same wifi, and use an app on the computer to cast the screen of the computer to the screen of the projector.  This is very convenient.  This is what I did for my recent PCT Seminar in Redwood City, California.

One thing to watch out for is that in most hotels, they set up the wifi so that any two devices connected to the hotel’s wifi are blocked from communicating with each other.  Any device that is connected to the hotel’s wifi is only permitted to connect to the Internet.  So the hotel wifi is no good for permitting this kind of data projector to connect to your computer.  So you have to use your own wifi hot spot or your own wifi router.

My personal favorite is the GL.iNet GL-AR750 travel router (at right) which is the size of a deck of playing cards and has every nice feature you could want in a wifi router, for a mere $45.  But there are many very nice travel routers these days that would be well suited to such a purpose.  This router is what I used with this projector for the recent PCT Seminar.

Oh and if you are stubborn and you actually want to use an HDMI cable with this Epson projector, you can.  The projector does have an HDMI port.  I just cannot imagine you would want to do this, since the other approaches are so much smarter.

In this article I describe in quite some technical detail what happens if you were to place a telephone call to our office.  In this article I also describe a failover measure that I set up today. You might want to set up a similar failover measure for your own telephone system.

Continue reading “How it works if you call our office”

A long time ago the way to log in was with a user ID and password.  Then people started using two-factor authentication (2FA or “something you have, and something you know”).  USPTO’s particularly poor choice for 2FA was the Entrust Java Applet.  After a while some organizations started using a text message on a cell phone as the second factor.  This turns out to be a really poor choice as well because it is very easy to hack.

The smart way to do this nowadays is TOTP (time-based one-time password).  For most people the way you do this is to install an authenticator app onto your smart phone, and you scan a QR code.  The app displays a six-digit code that changes every thirty or sixty seconds.  The code is the second factor.

The point of this article is to invite you to consider smarter ways to do TOTP. Continue reading “Being smart about TOTP (time-based one-time password)”