Category: Office Tech

For some years now I have seen fitness bands on the wrists of friends of colleagues.  By far what I have seen most frequently is the Fitbit.  The Fitbit lists for $100 but if you shop around you can get it for as little as $78.  What does it do?  It does exactly one thing.  It measures accelerations in all directions.  It thus serves as a step counter and it tries to figure out when you are asleep so that it can tell you how many hours of sleep you got last night.  When it’s brand new its rechargeable battery lasts five days.

What if I were to tell you that a big company that you have never heard of makes a fitness band that does everything that the Fitbit does, only better, and also measures your heart rate, and only costs $20?   Oh and the battery life between charges is three or four weeks.

Continue reading “A remarkably inexpensive fitness band that outperforms much more expensive ones”

On the notebook computer of a friend or colleague, I have often seen a piece of a Post-it stuck to the camera opening.  The person who does this is prompted by the fear, perhaps not an unreasonable fear, that a bit of malware might turn on the camera and permit someone to spy upon the user.

I was fascinated to learn of a commercial product that addresses this concern, and is elegant in its simplicity.   Continue reading “A shutter for the camera on your notebook computer”

As most readers know, a RAID system makes use of two or more hard disk drives to provide a very reliable network-attached storage system.  In a sophisticated way, the system stores information redundantly across two or more drives.  If any one drive were to fail, the system would be able to continue in its normal function using the remaining drive or drives.  Importantly, no data would be lost.  This article talks about how you might pick the hard drives that you would plug into your RAID system.

Continue reading “Picking a hard drive for your RAID system”

I’ve blogged about many different disruptive consumer technologies.  I’ve blogged about VOIP telephone services (which is an over-the-top way of replacing a traditional landline).  I’ve blogged about streaming media sticks such as the Amazon Fire TV stick, the Roku stick, and the Chromecast stick.  I’ve blogged about the Tablo, a television receiver and digital video recorder that permits time-shifting and place-shifting your viewing of broadcast television programs.

What’s pretty interesting, I think, is what all of these technologies have in common.  Of course one thing they all have in common is that they rely on internet connectivity.  But the other thing they all have in common is their bland, featureless, nondescript boxes. Continue reading “Disruptive technologies in nondescript boxes”

I have been seeing a bit of a trend lately.  The trend is free wifi that is blazing fast, many tens of megabits per second both up and down.

At right is a speed test result for the free wifi in the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.  And this did not even require me to accept some terms and conditions.

Some time ago a friend was in the new Whitney museum in Manhattan.  Again blazing fast, eighty megs down and fifty megs up.  And again no need to accept terms and conditions.

It’s nice when this happens.

What’s the fastest free wifi you have encountered?  Please post a comment.

The last time I tried to use the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months ago, the login process was so cumbersome that eventually I gave up and used my own wifi hotspot instead.  The last time I did successfully log in to the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months before that, it was embarrassingly slow, slower than 100K bits per second up or down.  Basically voice phone modem speeds.

Can someone who has recently made use of the public wifi at the USPTO share a comment about how fast the wifi was, and how easy or difficult the login process was?

Used to be that to accept credit cards, a business had no choice but to open a “merchant account” through a bank.  The merchant account had a monthly service fee of at least $30 and required purchase of a card reader costing $500 or more.

A couple of years ago, startup Square offered a new way that a business could process credit card payments.  An inexpensive card swipe reader would plug into the user’s smart phone.  With no monthly service fee and no signup fee, Square became very popular among small businesses.  Close on its heels, Paypal launched its own very similar service.  Then a year ago, Amazon decided to take over the market with its Amazon Local Register service.  Amazon promised a smaller commission (a mere 1.75% compared with 2.5 to 2.7% for Square and Paypal) and backed the system with its well-known brand name and market clout.

Then October of 2015 kept getting closer and closer, and this was important because in October of 2015, there was going to be a “liability shift” in which a merchant would have to absorb the losses from credit card fraud if the store failed to use the “chip” in a credit card.  Square sent out new card readers to its users, card readers that could read a chip as well as swipe a magnetic stripe.  And Paypal rolled out a super-sophisticated card reader that would read a chip, swipe a card, or even accept a contactless payment such as Android Pay or Apple Pay (and that cost $150).  Industry watchers watched Amazon to see what it would do for its users of Local Register.  Would Amazon mail out small and inexpensive chip card readers to its users as Square had done?  Would it invite its users to purchase super-sophisticated $150 readers as Paypal had done?  Or would it move to the head of the pack by rewarding its loyal customers with free-of-charge super-sophisticated card readers?

I was astonished to learn today that Amazon has given up.  It will not do anything to make it possible for its users to read chip cards.  Amazon stopped signing up new Local Register accounts today, and users with existing accounts will only be able to use them until February 1, 2016.  Amazon is abandoning the merchant credit card processing business.

What should existing users of Amazon Local Register do about this? Continue reading “Amazon scraps its Local Register service”