Category: Office Tech

Summary:  The savvy webmaster in 2018 should probably be using the free-of-charge and very convenient Let’s Encrypt system for “https://” certificates on web sites.  But this post mentions that for the webmaster who can’t or won’t learn how to use Let’s Encrypt, and who instead stubbornly carries out annual (and fiddly manual) certificate renewals using SSL certificates that cost money, there is a certificate authority that provides SSL certificates for a mere $8.88 per year instead of the $60 or $149 per year that the webmaster is paying now.

If you have a web site, you should probably forward this blog article to your webmaster.  Hopefully he or she will be able to tell you that either (a) you are already using Let’s Encrypt or (b) you are only paying $8.88 per year for your SSL certificate!

Continue reading “Can’t or won’t use Let’s Encrypt? Cheap SSL cert”

Our office, like most offices these days, is paperless.  (Well, not exactly paperless.  We go through many reams of paper per week.  But I digress.)  Being paperless, our important files are all maintained on file servers.  Imagine how one’s office would be brought to its knees, or worse, if a such electronic files were to be lost!  Which brings me to the concept of monthly disk health reports.

Continue reading “Monthly disk health reports”

A long time ago we had a special clock with four time zones.  We correspond a lot with clients in China.  And we often need to keep track of when it will be midnight at the USPTO or at WIPO.  The four-zone clock helped us keep track of these things.

But the special clock was noisy.  It clicked as the second hand advanced, and somehow the clicks really carried through the office.  Not only that, but all four of the clock faces clicked and the clicks were never quite simultaneous across the four faces.  So there were 240 clicks per minute.  We eventually scrapped that clock.

Now we have a new four-zone clock as you can see in the photograph.  The clocks are silent.  And the clocks synchronize their time with WWV.

Two of the clocks (the two in the middle) automatically update themselves for Daylight Saving Time.  The one on the right will require manual adjustment four times per year (see blog article).

I imagine some readers of this blog use an authentication app as part of a two-factor authentication process for various services.  For a long time I have been using Google Authenticator (right) with some systems.  I’d like to ask readers to please post a comment below if you use an authentication app, mentioning some of the services that you use it with. Continue reading “Seeking comments on authenticator apps”

We know the many reasons why it is good for a web site to be SSL protected (see the padlock in the purple oval at right).  Reasons include:

• an eavesdropper cannot see the information flowing back and forth
• Search engines such as Google give higher page rankings

(I have blogged about the importance of SSL protection here and here and here.)  Why doesn’t everyone secure every web site with SSL?  One reason might be cost.  To secure a web site with SSL, it is necessary to obtain an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority.  The company we have traditionally used for obtaining SSL certificates charges $56 per year for a basic SSL certificate.

I was astonished, however, to learn recently that there is a free-of-charge Certificate Authority!  Our firm operates quite a few web sites, and I am delighted that we will save some money in recurring costs by using the free-of-charge CA. Continue reading “SSL web site protection free of charge”

Many readers may have followed with interest the news of a recently discovered triceratops fossil.  I note that the dinosaur was found about seven miles east of the Westminster, Colorado office of Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC.

So far as I am aware there is no connection between these places other than mere geographic proximity.

We are all accustomed to using “ping” as a way to test Internet connectivity and to measure the latency of an Internet connection. This post talks about a similar function for telephones, a function that can be very helpful in testing the configuration of a VOIP (voice over IP) telephone. Continue reading ““Ping” for telephones”

Let’s suppose you have made a plan to migrate your office telephone system from analog phone lines to VOIP trunks.  Maybe you are doing this to reduce your monthly telephone bill to 85¢ as I blogged recently.  But regardless of why you are migrating, clearly you will want to carry out the migration in a way that minimizes the risk of disruption of incoming or outgoing telephone service.  In this article I describe a migration path that worked well for our firm, and along the way I explain a little bit more about SIP trunking and how it works. Continue reading “Seamless migration from analog phone lines to SIP trunks?”