Category: Office Tech

Yesterday, for the first time in the seven-year history of our OPLF shopping cart, somebody used our shopping cart for “card testing”.  A fraudster in a foreign country had purchased a bundle of stolen credit card numbers, and wanted to determine which of the cards was still valid.  Such a person will engage in “card testing”.  The person tries to make purchases with the credit card numbers, using an online commerce site.  Yesterday, the person chose our OPLF shopping cart.  By the time that we had shut out the “card testing”, the fraudster had tested about 198 credit card numbers, and had found two of the cards to be valid.  (This means the card holder had not yet canceled the stolen card number.)

The service providers Woo and Stripe performed admirably in this incident.

How did we learn that the “card testing” was happening?  What did we do in response?  What permanent harm, if any, flowed from this incident?  What protective step might we have taken earlier?  Continue reading “What is “card testing”? What should you do about it?”

Hello loyal readers.  A couple of days ago, this blog got hacked.  Instead of the usual “Ant-Like Persistence” page, it was a mostly blank page asking the visitor to type in a password.

Several nice people dropped emails to me to let me know they had noticed the problem.

I will describe what had gone wrong and what I did to fix the hack.  Continue reading “Dealing with a hack”

I am hoping to collect some fairly comprehensive information about where the charging ports are on EVs and PHEVs that are used in the US.

At this article you can see information about charging port locations on European vehicles.  My hope is to do the same for America vehicles.

Are you in the US?  Do you have an EV or a PHEV?  If so, I would be very grateful if you could share the location of your charging port.  To respond, click here.

The questionnaire also asks if you have an EV charger at home, and whether you have any adapters for charging at other kinds of charging stations.

Thank you for helping.

The US State Department says that an “expedited” passport renewal by mail has a processing time of 7-9 weeks.  I recently had the good fortune to get a renewal done by mail in less than a month.   My renewal papers got delivered to the State Department on August 16, 2023, and I had my new passport in hand on September 15, 2023.   Here are things that probably helped.  Continue reading “Getting a US passport renewed promptly”

Every time one inserts a connector into any communications channel, there will inevitably be some nonzero amount of signal loss.  Green optical fiber connectors use a clever bit of geometry to reduce greatly the signal loss that would otherwise be incurred.

Continue reading “How green optical fiber connectors work”

One of the most familiar and beloved wildflowers in the Rocky Mountains is the so-called “one-sided penstemon”.  True to its name, the plant has its flowers all on one side of the stem.  Continue reading “Why penstemon is one-sided?”

What is the device shown in the photograph at right? My quick answer, and you might say the same thing, is that it is “an EV charger”. But my quick answer is wrong. The device shown at right is a mere “EVSE”, not an “EV charger”. This fact, it turns out, explains why a Hyundai Kona charges at a mere 26 miles per hour, when plugged into this 48-amp device, instead of as much as 42 or 43 miles per hour the way some other EV might do.   See a blog article about this.

The question presented (and answered) here is “which GL.iNet routers provide VLAN wifi client isolation?”  This is likely to be of interest to those who want to set up VLAN protection in their home or small office local area network.  The idea would be to relegate relatively untrusted IOT (internet-of-things) devices to a separate VLAN from the main VLAN of trusted devices, but in addition, to isolate the untrusted IOT wifi clients from each other.  On this page you can see the results of my actual testing as to which GL.iNet routers provide this isolation feature, and which do not.

Many owners of all-wheel-drive vehicles have had it drummed into their heads that if you find the need to replace one tire, the only correct way to proceed is to replace all four tires.  But if your vehicle is a “dual motor” EV, that’s wrong.   You can get away with replacing just two tires.  See blog article.