Ant-Like Persistence

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”

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”