About time! Apple announced in Safari 14, Web Extensions will be compatible with those used by Chromium and Firefox. They’ve bravely added a tool to XCode to help people convert their old Safari extensions to the what they call the new format. Most people probably won’t find that useful, having converted their Chromium extensions to work on Safari in the… Read more →
getDisplayMedia vs. getUserMedia
I’ve been messing around with the browser API navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia(). The question I hoped to answer: can I capture the content in some computer display surface and push it through the same sorts of process that I use with .getUserMedia()? I tested on Google Chrome 84. Answer: yes. It has some quirks. It doesn’t need, and indeed rejects, elaborate constraints. {… Read more →
Flood Maps Miss Risk Factors
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) national flood insurance program has a non-governmental competitor. Here’s a Times piece about a Brooklyn-based non-governmental outfit called First Street Foundation. They’ve put together an online address lookup scheme called Flood Factor that returns a risk of flood at a property. They claim that FEMA’s rating system, based on Flood Insurance Rate Maps… Read more →
Bar codes (QR Codes) for web sites
I was really getting tired of the Wookiee look. So, I called the barber who usually takes care of that for me. She said they don’t allow walk-in customers because of the pandemic, and proceeded to read me a long URL over the phone to make an appointment. Generally I’m a geek and a Mr. Fixit, so I made her… Read more →
New Microsoft Edge rolls out to everybody this month
About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. They worked well enough that… Read more →
Rig Windows 10 to make work easier
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make Windows 10 easier to use. X Window System display server Download and install the free and open-source vcsxrv package from SourceForge. Then, configure your ssh to forward X11 packets. Then, when you ssh to a Linux or FreeBSD box, you’ll be able to run X programs. They’ll show… Read more →
Massachusetts town-by-town COVID-19 cases
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health started publishing, on April 14, 2020, epidemiological data for each of the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns. The results come out once a week each Wednesday. They publish them in .pdf and .docx format. And, they don’t keep previous weeks’ data on their web site. Here is a .csv file containing all the data… Read more →
Electronic Health Records considered harmful
Wow. Authorities finally figured what doctors have been saying for years. EHRs suck time and attention. The primary-care doctor who sees me works for a gigantic health-care conglomerate. He uses his own money to hire young people to sit and type mandatory gibberish into EPIC while he examines patients like me. Everybody knows the purpose of EPIC is CYA: to… Read more →
The Field Epidemiology Manual: Communications
The US Centers for Disease Control publishes a Field Epidemiology Manual with lots of great material on how to handle epidemics. There’s a great chapter on communications during an epidemic here. (Infosec incident response planners would be wise to read this material; lots of it applies to communicating about data breaches. Back to the topic at hand.) Communication starts with… Read more →
The first robin of spring 2020
