Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Musings about office technology from an intellectual property lawyer
Okay folks here is a chance to win a free digital multimeter.
What prompts this is that I keep hearing a particular music-on-hold (MOH) song on lots of different tech support and customer service systems. So I figure this song is probably one of the standard royalty-free MOH songs that comes with the Asterisk phone system or something. You can hear the song here.
To win the prize, post a comment with a link to the web page where this particular MOH song can be downloaded.
I’ve worked out how to host multiple WordPress sites on a single Synology box. You can read the how-to article here. Please post comments and suggestions and corrections in the comments below.
I just learned that today is World Backup Day. I’ll describe the no-monthly-charge backup system that I recommend nowadays to everybody. Continue reading “Celebrate World Backup Day today”
When I started my law firm (almost 25 years ago now), the connection from a UPS (uninterruptible power supply or “battery backup”) to a server was by means of a 9-pin RS-232 serial cable. The signals were simple binary values — power fail, low battery, and UPS shutdown.
Nowadays the connection from a UPS to a server is smarter, as I will describe. Continue reading “Smarter battery backup communications nowadays”
Here’s a nice home-improvement project — installing some USB receptacles around the house. You’ve used outlets like this in hotels and airports. Why not enjoy the convenience of such outlets in your own home?
Here’s a fun rainy-day project for those visiting nieces and nephews – labeling the electrical outlets. A first person is stationed at the circuit breaker panel. A second person is roaming the house, carrying a label maker and a lamp. These people are using walkie-talkies, if needed, or better yet, if they have amateur radio licenses, ham radio handy-talkies. The lamp is plugged into an outlet and is turned on. The person at the circuit breaker panel switches off the breakers one by one until it is determined which circuit breaker powers the outlet. A label is printed and applied to the cover plate of the outlet. (For example in this case it is breaker number 15.) The process is repeated until every electrical outlet has been labeled.
For extra credit, a third person can sketch a map of the house and the outlet locations plotted on the map. The map can then be posted next to the circuit breaker panel.
When the project is finished, everybody can make popcorn and watch a movie. A fun activity for the entire family!
Today’s blog article is a “tech” article and it is a “trademarks” article. The main point of this blog article is that probably you should activate “wifi calling” on your mobile phone, if you have not already done so.
For most mobile telephone customers in the US, wifi calling has only been available for a few months. So a reader of this blog may be forgiven for having failed to activate this service before now.
What is wifi calling? Continue reading “Learning about “wifi calling””
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”
(Update: see our new speed test here.)
When I check into a hotel or log in at a public wifi location, I sometimes do a “speed test”. The goal of course is partly just to make sure that I have successfully logged in or have successfully entered an access code. And to test to see how fast the Internet connection is.
I am tickled to be able to report that we at OPLF have set up a speed test which everyone can use. The speed test, unfortunately, requires that your system has “Flash”. Most smart phones and tablets do not have Flash. So the speed test is generally available only for laptop and desktop computers.
Who would like to receive a free super spiffy OPLF digital multimeter? Maybe you already have an OPLF digital multimeter? This one is new and more spiffy. In addition to the features of our original digital multimeter, this device measures current and has an audible continuity indicator. (It can be set to beep when there is continuity.) This new device does auto-ranging; with our original multimeter you had to select the range.
So if you’d like to receive one of our super spiffy new OPLF digital multimeters, just be one of the first three people to post a comment in which you report the results of at least two speed tests — a speed test result using your favorite speed test that you have used in the past (a speed test hosted by someone other than OPLF) and a speed test result using our new speed test. It would be interesting to see how the results compare.