Category: Office Tech

I realized that for quite a long time, I had sort of wondered how the tire pressure gauges work that have a thing that pops out.  Clicking around on the Internet, I have now learned what the common name is for that kind of tire pressure gauge. It is called a “pencil gauge”. And I have learned how they work.  Continue reading “How pencil tire pressure gauges work”

Pretty much the only periodical that I have made time to read diligently in recent years is the Economist.  A recent article in the Economist introduced me to ikigai, which is yet another of  many Japanese words that Westerners have appropriated and onto which much meaning has been grafted beyond the original Japanese meaning.  Continue reading “Thinking about ikigai”

Hello folks.  I am astonished to see the news (see court document) that a court case that had been grinding its way through the courts on for more than five years is apparently very close to being settled.  The result of the settlement will, it seems, lead to many people and firms that have paid fees to the Pacer system will get a lot of their fees refunded to them.  Our firm has paid many thousands of dollars to the Pacer system over the years.  I am sure many other firms can say the same.

I heard about this from alert listserv member Curtis Prescott (Linkedin page).  Thank you Curtis!

Hello loyal readers.  Here is a 4700-word article that I wrote about CCS charging of Tesla cars.

It took a year and a half of various efforts and dead ends, but by now I have actually figured out a way to force the fireplace in the photograph to make nice with a home automation ecosystem.  It is a built-in gas-fired fireplace.  This article describes the dead ends and the eventual success.  Continue reading “Forcing your fireplace to make nice with home automation”

Of course it is smart to install whole-house surge protection as it relates to the electrical power wires in the house.  See blog article.  Having installed a nice Seimens FS140 whole-house surge protector, do you get to relax?  Of course not!  If a person is going to be thorough about this, one needs to think about the other wires and cables that enter the house from outside.  Continue reading “Lightning protection around the house”

Readers will recall that I am slowly creeping in the direction of doing some ham radio transmitting.

It turns out that anybody who creeps in this direction sooner or later realizes that he or she is going to need a “dummy load” (Wikipedia article).  Continue reading “Dummy loads”

Hello readers.  For some twenty years now I have had the highest level of amateur radio license that it is possible to have (“extra class”), but until now I have not really made full use of the license (call sign AA2KW).  Until now I had only made use of the license for communications in the two-meter (VHF) and 70-centimeter (UHF) bands.  Those bands are only useful for local communications (with others who are no more than a few miles away).  Recently, however, some neighbors who are good friends asked if I might introduce their grandchildren to the world of HF (high frequency) amateur radio, which can reach thousands of miles.  So I have put my toe in the water and maybe soon I will successfully do some two-way communications in the 40-meter HF band.  Continue reading “Starting an HF ham radio station”

 

Everybody who is a Comcast internet customer eventually finds out that if you have one of these Comcast-provided routers that is the size of a cereal box, you are providing something called an “Xfinity hot spot” to everybody in the world.

The idea of the Xfinity hot spots, of course, is that this becomes a selling point — a reason why somebody might want to subscribe to Comcast internet service, so as to be able gain the benefit of the ten million or so of these cereal-box-sized routers that are in place around the US.

When you as a Comcast customer learn that you have one of these routers, and you learn that you are hosting an Xfinity hot spot, you wonder if there is any drawback to this.  Are you, for example, going to see a hit on your internet speeds if half a dozen members of the public are connected to your hot spot and making heavy use of the connection?  (I have done tests and yes, if you put enough public users on the hot spot, it does slow down the internet for the paying customer, especially if they are on a low-speed tier of service.)  But a completely separate question is, is the Xfinity hot spot taking up radio spectrum space that you might need in your home or office for other devices, such as Bluetooth hearing aids, DECT cordless phones, or mesh networking devices?  And of course the answer is yes.

Comcast goes out of its way to tout the ten million Xfinity hot spots to their potential users, and goes out of its way to minimize its candor toward the customers who host those hot spots.  It takes quite a lot of clicking around on the Comcast web site to learn that you, dear reader, are hosting such a hot spot, and it takes even more clicking around on the Comcast web site to learn how to toggle the hot spot on or off.

Which leads to the natural question, how does one go about turning off one’s Xfinity hot spot?  I spent the past 24 hours trying to turn it off for my new service that got installed yesterday, and I have still not succeeded.  Continue reading “Trying to turn off Comcast’s stealth wifi hotspot”

The year was 2001 and semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretations) had by then permeated Western thought, I think mostly because of Umberto Eco’s erudite The Name of the Rose, published in 1980.   I had just gotten done reading a rather baffling book that purported to find layers of meaning in the architecture of Hilton hotels around the world and their (I am not making this up) semiotic significance to the Cold War.  And pulp writer Dan Brown had just embarked on his series of pop novels like Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, each of which would build a whole story arc on the thinnest of semiotic reeds. Continue reading “The Annotated Alice”