Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Finding your USPS postal carrier route

If you are like me, you like to know how things are organized. What is my postal carrier's route? How many houses and businesses do they have on it? If someone else says they aren't receiving their mail, is that on my carrier's route as well? Searching for this info should seem simple, but Google guides you towards paid solutions like Melissa -- just like when searching for a weather forecast they'll send you to a commerical provider instead of the NWS. The USPS offers a service called "Every Door Direct Mail". You can deliver to them a stack of advertising mailers and they can deliver them cheaply to individual carrier routes. And so the information about the route is available.

Just visit https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/customer/routeSearch.action and enter your ZIP code

. Carrier routes with demographics, incomes, numbers of business & residents are then clickable on the map. Enjoy!

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

1st Starlink sightings

I just caught the end tail of a pass of Starlink satellites. I haven't really tried to see them, but it was clear tonight and we had a convenient pass of a constellation of them. They were all from the Nov 11th 2019 launch and were brighter than predicted (3.0)--looked like about Mag 2 to me--but I wasn't checking very hard. Something like 5 in a row--had I started watching earlier would have seen 12. The chain I saw started with Starlink-1051, then 1012, 1026, 1013, 1009, and finished with 1015.