Category: Office Tech

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”

I checked into a hotel recently where the clock radio in the guest room had a conventional 3½-millimeter plug (see photo) which could be plugged into the guest’s smart phone or music player.  This would permit playing music through the speaker of the clock radio.  What I found amusing is what the manufacturer chose to write on the clock to let the user know about this feature — “MP3”.  This is silly.

Continue reading “What “MP3” means”

In a previous blog post I urged you to adopt a digital wallet.  Players in the digital wallet arena are falling by the wayside, but this leave unchanged the important reason why you should adopt a digital wallet, namely that bad guys won’t be able to skim your credit card number as they would with your use of a swiped mag-stripe card.  Most strikingly the digital wallet that I adopted, Softcard, has bitten the dust.  Appropriately for this blog, nobody actually purchased the ill-fated Softcard.  Instead someone merely purchased its intellectual property.

Continue reading “Adopting a digital wallet redux”

Effective December 29, 2014, US citizens traveling to Germany have an opportunity to speed their entry into Germany, using Germany’s EasyPASS system.   German citizens traveling to the US likewise have an opportunity to speed their entry into the US using the US’s Global Entry system.

Continue reading “New reciprocal trusted traveler program – US and Germany”

Whenever you generate a Federal Express shipping label, you reach a place where you have to pick which service you want.  In general you would expect that the faster service costs more than that slower service.  But no!

Continue reading “Slow Fedex costs more than fast Fedex”

Recently I went through the process of replacing most of the incandescent bulbs in my car with LEDs.  Why did I do this?  Mostly because it reduces the risk of someone tail-ending my car.

Continue reading “Replacing the bulbs in your car tail lights with LEDs”

If you are a frequent traveler you know that it is a life-changing event to start carrying a wifi hot spot with you.  I count it as a necessity.  I have had a dozen mobile data devices over the past fifteen years or so.  Years ago the way to connect was by means of a plug-in card in your notebook computer.  Nowadays the smart way to go is a wifi hot spot.  The hot spot provides wifi for your notebook computer, for your tablet, for your smart phone, and if you are traveling with co-workers, it provides wifi for your co-workers’ devices as well.

Many hotels gouge their guests with charges of $10 or even $15 or $20 per night for internet service.  Some of them charge this fee a second or third time per night for your second or third device.   Even in a hotel that (nicely) does not charge for the wifi you can occasionally have a bad night that the hotel’s wifi is not working well or at all.

When you are in an airport, you may find that the “free” wifi in the airport is very slow, or only works for so many minutes and then they expect you to pay to keep using it.

The monthly fee that you pay for a wifi hot spot can pay for itself during just a single out-of-town trip.

A wifi hot spot can make an intercity train ride much more productive.

If you do international travel, as I often do, the usual worry with international data usage is the fear that you could return to the US and receive a bill for thousands of dollars.  The way to avoid this risk is to use prepaid international data such as AT&T’s Buyasession program, loaded into a wifi hot spot, and then configure your smart phone and notebook computer and tablet to draw their data only from wifi and not from the local phone company.

The point of this blog posting is to tell you about a particular wifi hot spot that has served me well lately, and that has a particular feature that I have not seen in other wifi hot spots.

Continue reading “Picking a wifi hot spot – 5 GHz band”

(Here is a follow-on article.)

I finally decided to try out a digital wallet system.  By this we mean a system that uses an NFC (near field communications) radio link to pay at a store.  You can recognize which stores are equipped for NFC payments by looking for this logo (right).

Of course the digital wallet system that is all over the media lately is Apple Pay, which works only with certain very recently released models of iPhones.

It turns out that Apple Pay is the johnny-come-lately to the NFC party.  Other companies have been offering NFC payment systems (digital wallets) for over a year now. These systems that have been around for over a year do not require you to have an iPhone.

Continue reading “Adopting a digital wallet”