Category: Office Tech

When a notebook computer stops working, the usual next steps are:

• • buy a new notebook computer, and
  • spend at least two lost weekends getting the new computer loaded up and configured so that it does for you what the old computer used to do.

For must of us, the emotional cost of the second step, and the lost-professional-billing cost of the second step, far exceed the amount of money involved in the first step.

Yesterday I had to retire an old notebook computer and move to a new one.  But for me, the second step was only about ten minutes.  Not the usual two lost weekends.  How did this delightful result happen?  Continue reading “A fresh computer with no migration cost”

(Update:  See a followup message here about a step that you might take to try to get the listservs working for you again.)

For those who are following my travails trying to get ISPs to accept our listserv email messages now that we are on our dedicated server (original post and update) … this posting about “munging” may be of interest.  Others are invited to skip this posting as being even more geeky than usual.  Continue reading “Listserv update – I turned on “munging””

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”