Category: Office Tech

So often there is reason to be discouraged about this development somewhere in the world or that event in the US.  But today I was reminded that even with innumerable reasons to be discouraged, there are sometimes reasons to look forward.

Today an important argument took place before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.  The Court made this hearing accessible to everyone across the US to many places outside the US, via Youtube.  As you can see on the screen shot, some 136000 people were watching the Youtube stream.  (I understand that the Youtube stream was further propagated to some millions of additional listeners by various media.)

It gave me pause to realize that I was but one among millions of people listening to the lawyers for the two sides, and listening to the judges.  Each of us perhaps finding this point more persuasive, that point less persuasive.  Hearing a judge asking a question of one of the lawyers, maybe we asked ourselves how we would have answered the question.  Maybe we compared the answer that we would have given with the answer that the lawyer actually gave.  Each of us participating, in our own small way, in the making of history today.

Maybe one reader of this blog favored one side in this appeal, and maybe another reader of this blog favored another side.  I don’t mean for this blog to be a place for arguing the merits of the appeal itself; there are many forums better suited to hosting such issues.  My point is that we live in a country with institutions, including the courts, that have survived for over two hundred years.  What I urge in this blog is for us to consider that it strengthens those institutions that across the US, and indeed in many countries around the world, anyone who wished to listen in on this appellate argument was able to do so.

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The problem was that the pilot light in my boiler kept blowing out.  This blog article describes how I managed to fix that problem.  Continue reading “Retrofitting a boiler to spark ignition”

(Note:  I do not recommend Whatsapp any more.  I now recommend Signal.)

Long-time readers of this listserv will recall my suggestion that the smart way to do messaging is not through cell service text messaging and is not through most of the available messaging apps.  As I wrote in this blog article, in my view by far the best choice is Whatsapp.  Whatsapp is encrypted from end to end.  Whatsapp gets through any firewall, no matter where you are in the world, and nobody can eavesdrop on the messages.  You can use it for messaging but you can also use it to send attachments, including large files, again safe against eavesdropping.  No other messaging app or service is quite this safe against eavesdropping.

Just now I have added a Whatsapp plugin to this blog.  If you are viewing this blog article on a smart phone or tablet, you should be able to see a Whatsapp button (like the icon at right) below this posting.

Here’s the fun part.  The first three readers who successfully share this very article with me using the Whatsapp share button below (visible only if you are using a smart phone or tablet) will win a prize, namely a spiffy OPLF digital voltmeter.

To do this, you will need to install the Whatsapp app onto your smart phone or tablet (if you have not done so already) and then you will need to add me to your Whatsapp contacts list (if you have not done so already).  Then you will need to view this blog article on your smart phone or tablet, and scroll down to the Whatsapp share button, and click on it.

We at OPLF should have done it a long time ago … but finally today we have implemented SSL (“https”) for our main web site www.oppedahl.com.   In addition we have configured the SSL on https://www.oppedahl.com so that it uses PFS (perfect forward secrecy).  The domain name itself has for several years now been protected by DNSSEC.

One reason that a webmaster should implement SSL is that Google and the other search engines give a small boost in page ranking to a web site that supports SSL.

But the more important reason to implement SSL is simply to make web connections more secure.  Among other things SSL eliminates eavesdropping on a web connection.

If you haven’t already done so, you should implement SSL (and PFS, and DNSSEC) on the web sites that you operate.

 

The other day we had soldering class at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC.  Everybody at the firm received a nice soldering station and soldering tools and a toolbox to keep everything in.  We assembled several do-it-yourself kits that required soldering.  Some of our people already knew how to solder and got through the kits pretty quickly, and others got to learn how to solder for the first time.  Continue reading “Building a guitar compressor pedal”

I’ve been teaching patent law as an adjunct professor at University of Denver law school for some twenty years, and every one of my students over the years has heard my recommendation that they subscribe to The Economist. I think The Economist offers a very helpful non-American perspective on events of the day.

Today, reading The Economist, I learned the term a “curate’s egg”.  As Wikipedia explains, a curate’s egg is something that is mostly or partly bad, but partly good.  The term has its origin in a cartoon published in 1895 in the British humor magazine Punch.  Drawn by George du Maurier, it pictures a timid-looking curate eating breakfast in his bishop’s house. The bishop says:

I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones.

The curate, desperate not to offend his eminent host and ultimate employer, replies:

Oh no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!

A Google search for the term “curate’s egg” yields over a hundred thousand hits.

 

As of a couple of years ago the big thing in microcontrollers was the Arduino.  The Arduino was (and still is) a delightful board for hobby projects.  But now there’s a new microcontroller board for hobby projects, namely the fetchingly named ESP8266 ESP-12E NodeMCU board, pictured at right.  There are many nice things about this board.   Continue reading “The Next Big Thing in microcontrollers”

It’s getting to the point where a person might choose to get a smart speaker.  Which reminds us that we are in a fast-changing world.  Used to be there was no such thing as a smart speaker.  Which by the way makes me feel ancient.  Just in case anyone does not know what a smart speaker is, I will now explain.

Continue reading “Picking a smart speaker”