Category: Office Tech

The religious scholar Maimonides from 900 years ago (Wikipedia article) wrote about lots of things including the best kinds of charity.  He fingered a telltale:  what if the donor gives anonymously?   The anonymous gift of charity is the highest kind of charity, said this religious scholar.

Which brings me to the strong emotions that I felt as I read a flurry of recent news stories about a fellow in a rural part of Alabama who did not have very much money, but who (after his recent death, it comes out for the first time) had been dropping by a local pharmacy for some ten years and had been handing the pharmacist a $100 bill each month with instructions that the money should be applied toward prescriptions for people who could not afford their drug prescriptions.

One of his very strict instructions to the pharmacy was that nobody was to be told where the money came from. Continue reading “The best kind of charity”

Each time I install another internet-of-things (“IOT”) device in my home, it is always the same:  the device requires that I tell it the wifi password for the Internet connection in my home.  The app that needs to be installed on my smart phone to get the IOT device working also asks lots of intrusive things, and demands to be given access to my “location”.  This leads to a situation where the IOT device could be a security risk for trusted devices on my local area network.  What can be done to reduce or eliminate the security risks presented by the dozens of IOT devices in my home?  Part of the answer is to set up a VLAN (virtual local area network).  Then the IOT devices are denied any opportunity to have any access to my trusted devices.  I will describe how this is done.

Continue reading “Setting up a VLAN for your IOT devices”

Forty-one years ago, I co-authored a law review article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review promoting the use of wind energy.  You can see it here:

Carl Oppedahl & Mary E. Tarduno, Wind Energy Conversion, 5 Harv. Entl. L. Rev. 431 (1981).

This blog article talks about a situation that comes up frequently in all of our daily lives — removing the front cover of a circuit breaker panel and working on the panel.  The main point of today’s article is that in the circuit panel shown at right, we recently added the two yellow caps shown at A. This makes the circuit breaker panel less dangerous. Continue reading “Making a circuit breaker panel less dangerous”

I was astonished to hear from D-Link that it has shut down its cloud that makes its smart plugs work.  Pictured at right is one of the three DSP-W110 smart plugs that I purchased from D-Link in 2016.  I still own the plugs and one of the plugs still has a device plugged into it — a table lamp.

But as of today, I cannot turn the lamp on or off using the app on my smart phone.  As of today, the D-Link smart plugs don’t do anything any more.  Continue reading “D-Link IOT cloud evaporates”

Many readers know that during World War II, military aircraft used red internal lighting.  Pilots used red flashlights to view maps while in flight.  The reason for using red is that if ordinary full-spectrum (white) light had been used, this would spoil the “night vision” (vision using rods instead of cones).  Red light does not harm night vision as much as white light.  This blog article talks about using night lights around the house that are red instead of white.  Continue reading “Red night lights”

I enjoyed immensely my first viewing of Glass Onion.  I then enjoyed immensely my second viewing of Glass Onion.  In this blog article I will reveal how you can get an identical copy of the digital voice recorder (seen at right) that appears on the screen in this movie at 42:14.  Continue reading “Heavens, the dog ate the caviar again”

If you are like most folks these days, you are getting ready to install an EV charger at your home.  You agonize about whether to get this brand of EV charger or that brand of EV charger.  And then just as you think you figured everything out about which EV charger to purchase, you smack into a wall.  The charger is available with two kinds of plug, a so-called “6-50” plug or a so-called “14-50” plug.  Which variant of the EV charger should you choose?  Which plug is the right one to pick?

It turns out that this is a trick question.  But if you click here, you can read a blog article by someone whose writing style you might recognize, who answers this question for you.

I recently received this handheld distance measurement device.  Like a laser pointer, it shoots out a narrow beam of red light, making a small red dot on a surface that might be 100 feet away.  It then uses a built-in telescope to view the red dot of light, and works out the distance to that surface.  The device arrived today, and I compared its measurement with that of a long fiberglass measuring tape.    The two approaches yielded answers that differed by only a tenth of a percent.  How does it work exactly?

Star Trek fans might be able to guess where I am going with this. There were episodes of Star Trek where an enemy had somehow found a way to bypass the Enterprise’s shields, at which point the captain on the bridge of the Enterprise would shout out “modulate the shield harmonics!” In the world of Star Trek, this modulation apparently restored the protection of the shields. And indeed this kind of laser distance measurement uses a modulation of a signal to accomplish its remarkable result. Continue reading “Modulate the shield harmonics!”

We recently started using a new VPN solution at OPLF.  It is faster than our previous VPN solution and has lower latency.  It has no recurring cost and the one-time cost to get it working was under $100.  In this article I will describe this new VPN solution in detail.  I will also explain how you could set this up yourself in your own office.  Continue reading “Making your office VPN situation faster and easier to use”