Category: Office Tech

(Summary:  SIP telephone service is really neat and you should learn about it and use it if you want to be trendy, modern, and up-to-date.)

“Over-the-top” is a general term for the Schumpeterian sort of disruption that we see over and over again as various categories of commerce get disrupted by new distribution mechanisms (generally involving the Internet).  We see the traditional world of record labels, a world in which ten or twenty years ago a handful of companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of music.  A world in which I had no choice but to purchase a “record album” of maybe ten tracks to get the one or two tracks that I actually wanted to listen to.  That traditional world is now in the past, replaced by an over-the-top world in which the consumer can download the one or two tracks of interest by clicking around on the Internet at iTunes or Amazon.

We see the traditional world of video entertainment, a world in which ten years ago a handful of cable TV and satellite TV companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of things like HBO and sports event broadcasts as parts of bundles of dozens or hundreds of channels which the consumer was forced to buy to get the two or three or four channels that the consumer actually wanted to watch.  That world is likewise gradually receding into the past, with OTT mechanisms like HBO Now and Netflix and Hulu and CBS All Access.

I’ve recently encountered some aspects of modern telephone service that also count as over-the-top, new services called “SIP” that bypass the traditional landline telephone companies and that will likely be as disruptive in the telephone world as the OTT services have been for music and video.  I will tell you about some of the SIP services. Continue reading “Over-the-top as it relates to telephone services”

(Summary:  Install Android Pay on your smart phone and use it, because it is trendy and modern and up-to-date and greatly reduces the risk of someone misusing your credit card information.)

The last that you heard from me about digital wallets (blog article) was that Softcard, the non-Apple digital wallet, had bitten the dust, and that Google had rather carefully not actually purchased Softcard but instead merely purchased its IP (mostly, its pending patent applications).   This left Google Wallet as the successor app for Android phones.  Google Wallet was decidedly clunky in several ways.  Industry observers stood around waiting for Google’s next step, whatever it might turn out to be.  Now we can see Google’s next step.  It is Android Pay. Continue reading “Adopting a digital wallet – now Android Pay”

Every one of USPTO’s e-commerce systems — EFS-Web, TEAS, RAM, ETAS, and others — has a place where the system forces the user to answer this question.

Continue reading “USPTO should not require “credit card type””

In our office we have two wifi networks — a secure network that is available only for employee use, and a public network for visitors.  (Actually it’s three wifi networks — a 5-GHz secure network, 2.4-GHz secure network, and a 2.4-GHz guest network.)  When a visitor arrives, the usual first step is to get their smart phone or tablet or notebook computer connected to the guest network.  The old-fashioned way is, of course, to give the visitor a piece of paper with the system ID and password, and they hand-key this information into their device.

But there are nice new ways to do this.  Continue reading “Using NFC to make it easy for a visitor to use the guest wifi”

This blog post discusses two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook. Continue reading “Two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook”

DNSSEC is an important protocol by which DNS zone records are cryptographically signed.  The protocol permits an internet user to be confident that a particular web site is what it purports to be rather than a fake or substitute web site created by an intermeddler or wrongdoer.  The protocol also offers many other benefits too numerous to discuss here in detail.

I use GoDaddy for hosting of this blog and I use GoDaddy to provide DNSSEC protection for the blog.  Unfortunately GoDaddy has implemented DNSSEC in a way that does not work well with the way that it provides blog hosting.  This has led to three intervals in the past year during which the DNSSEC protection did not work for the domain blog.oppedahl.com.  The result has been that some visitors (those whose connection to the Internet is sophisticated enough to make use of the protection offered by DNSSEC) have been unable to visit the blog web site during those intervals.

In technical terms, what GoDaddy has screwed up during those three intervals is that it has stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedahl.com zone file.

It is a big disappointment that GoDaddy did not fix the bug in its implementation of DNSSEC after the first failure, which was about a year ago.  When that first failure happened a year ago, it looks as though GoDaddy fixed the problem manually, by manually re-inserting the all-important DS records into the zone file.  But did not correct the underlying problem, which is that GoDaddy’s DNS setup for blog.oppedahl.com is fragile and breaks at the slightest provocation, like changing some other record in the zone file.

Then around eight months ago some change that should have been harmless led once again to GoDaddy failing to provide DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedabl.com zone file.  GoDaddy eventually got the DS records back into place, but again apparently only due to some manual update.  GoDaddy’s mistakes in implementing DNSSEC generally remained uncorrected.

Three days ago the fragility of GoDaddy’s implementation of DNSSEC revealed itself again, because once again GoDaddy stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com.  What’s frustrating with GoDaddy is that when I try to explain the problem (the blog.oppedahl.com subdomain lacks any DS records), the response from the GoDaddy tech support person is the telephone equivalent of a deer in the headlights.

The image above, from VeriSign’s DNS Analyzer, shows that GoDaddy is to blame.

Anyway after something like the fourth call to GoDaddy tech support in three days, I finally reached someone who understood the problem.  And supposedly GoDaddy’s “advanced tech support” will now manually re-insert the missing DS records into the zone file.

Of course what needs to happen is that GoDaddy needs to correct its implementation of DNSSEC so that it handles subdomains (such as blog.oppedahl.com) reliably rather than in a fragile way.

So anyway if you have been unable to reach this blog during the past three days, that’s why.

 

We’re all familiar with media sticks such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick (left) and the Roku Stick (right) and the Google Chromecast (not shown).  You plug the stick into a spare HDMI port on your television, explain to the stick how to connect to your wifi, and sit back and watch any of a range of “over-the-top” programming.  This “over-the-top” programming, by the way, is going to change everything for those entertainment providers (DirecTV, Dish, Comcast cable TV, Time-Warner cable TV) that traditionally made big profits by forcing you to buy expensive bundles of channels just to get the one or two channels that you actually wanted.  But the new world of “over-the-top” programming will be the subject of a later posting.  For now, the important thing is that one of these media sticks just got better, and is now the ideal media stick for the road warrior who wants to watch the occasional movie-on-demand or television-episode-on-demand while on the road in a hotel.

The big problem, until today, with all of these media sticks was that they won’t work worth a darn in a hotel.  The hotel wifi nearly always has a “terms and conditions” screen that you must view and click on to gain access to the hotel’s wifi.  Or requires that you enter your room number and name as part of gaining access.  And the media sticks lacked any way to do this.

The media sticks are programmed to update themselves with the maker’s latest firmware.  And today’s firmware update for one of these media sticks gave it the ability to connect in a hotel.  Which media stick, you might wonder, am I talking about?

Continue reading “Picking a media stick for road warrior use just got easier”

(See followup article here.)

These days my notebook computer is absolutely mission critical for me.  If my notebook computer were to fail and if it were to take some days to get it repaired, the loss of use of the computer for those days would be a really big problem.  Fortunately, a few years ago I figured out how to reduce any service disruption due to a computer failure to just about zero.

Continue reading “How to minimize service disruption with a notebook computer”