Category: Office Tech

Update!  I now have a status monitor working.  See blog article.

VOIP.MS is my preferred service provider for VOIP telephone service.  I am looking for one or two PHP coders to join me in constructing a PHP status monitor for monitoring the registration status of SIP trunks provided by VOIP.MS.  Continue reading “Volunteers sought for coding a PHP registration status monitor for VOIP.MS”

Has your Chargepoint Home Flex EV charger lost its green halo, as shown at right?  Is the halo white instead of green?  If so, you may find this blog article to be of interest.

General Motors announced today that it will partner with the Tesla supercharging network.  This comes on the heels of Ford’s announcement of a couple of weeks ago that it had done so.

You can see a blog article in a writing style much like mine that talks about these developments.   It predicts that more US EV makers will follow suit.  As time goes on, fewer and fewer cars will use the big, awkward, heavy CCS1 plug for fast charging, if this blog article turns out to be correct.

Test your mastery of Tesla EV charging etiquette with this quick quiz.  If you arrive at a Tesla supercharging station and three of six charging ports are already in use, as shown in this diagram, where is the polite place for you to plug in?  Should you choose the place that is shown as “park here”?  The correct answer might not be what you think.  Continue reading “Proper etiquette for Tesla EV charging”

Route 66 is one of the most famous roads in the US.  It originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before terminating in Santa Monica in Los Angeles County, California, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). Established in 1926, by 1938 it became the first highway in the US to be paved along its entire length.  Continue reading “Being on Route 66”

As many readers know, nearly all electrical power transmission lines are three-phase AC (alternating current).  When you look up at one of the towers, you see three (or a multiple of three) transmission conductors.  In the US there are are only a few direct-current (DC) transmission lines.  One of them is called Path 27.  I first read about Path 27 about seventeen years ago, when I was writing the patent application that became US patent number 8183714.  Recently I was able to do something that I had wanted to do for a very long time — I visited one of the massive ground electrodes for Path 27.  Continue reading “A pilgrimage to Path 27”

This photo shows a charging station in Baker, California.  At left are twelve Electrify America supercharging spots.  At right are forty Tesla charging spots.  Behind this is a construction area where there will soon be fifty more Tesla charging spots.  All of these charging spots are shaded by canopies made of, you guessed it, photovoltaic solar panels.  The Tesla charging station also has battery storage.  Continue reading “Supercharging station with lots of plugs”

Lewis Carroll is of course well known as the pen name for Charles Dodgson.  And he is of course well known for having written two Alice books.

But he was a also a mathematician and devised many clever puzzles that involved math and deductive reasoning and probability.  Here is one.  Continue reading “What color is the counter?”

I have aways sort of vaguely assumed that at some point in my youth I must have sat in a class in which the teacher made a potato battery and used it to light up a light bulb.  Recently I got it into my head that it might be interesting to reconstruct that old classroom demonstration.  But events of the past few days, recounted in this blog article, make me think that the old classroom demonstration must have never actually happened.  I must have just read about it in books and I must have sort of assumed that you could do, in real life, anything that is described in a book.  After many false starts, I did eventually manage to light up a light with a potato battery.  Continue reading “quantum physics and potato batteries”

Loyal readers will recall that recently I did a large number of test welds to measure welding currents generated by my new inexpensive stick welder (blog article).  I had been using my smart phone to log real-time current measurements via Bluetooth from a clamp-on DC ammeter (blog article).  Part way through the large number of test welds, I was astonished to see that my smart phone had powered itself down.  I tapped the power button and coaxed the phone back to life and completed my current logging activities, and eventually figured out why the phone had so mysteriously and abruptly powered itself off.  A tiny bit of hot steel from one of my test welds had flown several feet and had landed on the glass screen of the phone, and had melted a small crater in the glass.  You can see the crater, which is less than one-fourth of a millimeter in diameter, in the photomicrograph above.  After about a day, cracks had traveled from this crater across the full expanse of the glass.  I realized I would need to learn how to replace the screen.  This blog article describes it.  Continue reading “Replacing a screen of a smart phone”