Category: Uncategorised

Getting Tested for Covid-19

Last night I received a call from the vice-principal of one of my son’s high school. They indicated that my son had an indirect contact with a Covid positive individual. That individual was not a member of the school, but is a family member of a classmate.

As a result of this discovery, his entire class now requires isolation and a Covid-19 test is strongly recommended.

Mackenzie Health, located on 10 Trench St., Richmond Hill, ON. is about 10 minutes drive from our house. It just so happens they have a Covid-19 Assessment Centre there. In Ontario, all Covid-19 tests are conducted at these assessment centres, and at the time of this writing, an appointment is required.

I called 905-417-2004 at 8am sharp this morning and ended up first in the queue to make an appointment. I had my son’s Health Card ready, and is the first thing they ask for. They have all of our information once I gave them my son’s Health Card number. They collected his email address so that they can register him through MyChart, an online site where you can get your test results once it is ready.

If you are already a patient at Mackenzie Health, and already have a MyChart account, you can schedule a test online without having the need to call in.

The appointment was for 4:20pm this afternoon, and we arrived at around 5 minutes early. We park in the A-Wing parking lot. They will give you a voucher / ticket to get out of the parking lot, so you do not need to pay for parking.

Here is a top down satellite photo to show precisely where you need to go and park and where the walk-in entrance is.

Satellite Photo (Up is North) – click to enlarge

There was only about 2 to 3 groups ahead of us in line, so the wait was a matter of couple of minutes. At registration, they ask you to change your mask to the ones they provided. The test was completed in less than 15 minutes. They had 8 stations performing the tests in parallel.

The cotton swab test was a bit uncomfortable for my son. He characterized it as a bit of a burning sensation afterwards.

Overall the process is fairly simple and straight forward. Now we await the good news in 2 to 3 days.

Converting iPhone 12 HDR Videos to SDR with FFMpeg

In a previous post, I talked about how to view HDR (High Dynamic Range) videos from the iPhone 12 on my OLED TV. However, sometimes I like to take that HDR video and converted into SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) videos for posting or distribution.

During the course of experimenting with FFMpeg, as the primary tool for this purpose, I found out that it is not always necessary to convert the video depending on where you are going to use the video. For example, uploading the raw HDR footage from the iPhone 12 to YouTube works just fine. However posting HDR video footage to Instagram currently yields a very washed out result.

I personally prefer to store all my raw footage in its high resolution 4K HDR goodness. However, I also keep a rendered down SDR version for practical use. How does one get an SDR video from an HDR source? This is what FFMpeg is for.

All the command line instructions below have been tested on the macOS, and it is assumed that you already have brew installed.

You will need to install a version of FFMpeg that has the zscale filter. If you have a previous version installed without this filter, then you will have to uninstall it first.

brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies ffmpeg

And then we install the version with the filter from the homebrew-ffmpeg tap.

brew install homebrew-ffmpeg/ffmpeg/ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-libbluray --with-libbs2b --with-libcaca --with-libgsm --with-libmodplug --with-librsvg --with-libsoxr --with-libssh --with-libvidstab --with-libvmaf --with-libxml2 --with-opencore-amr --with-openh264 --with-openjpeg --with-openssl --with-openssl@1.1 --with-rav1e --with-rtmpdump --with-rubberband --with-speex --with-srt --with-tesseract --with-two-lame --with-wavpack --with-webp --with-xvid --with-zeromq --with-zimg

I recorded a sample video from my iPhone 12 Pro, below is the raw footage.

The included videos in this article are all HEVC encoded. If your browser does not support this encoding, then you will not be able to play the videos. Safari has no issues. If you have Windows 10, then you can install an extension. How the videos are displayed also depend on the quality and capability of your monitor.

Raw footage from iPhone 12 (4K HDR 60fps) – 92M in size

If you just perform a simple conversion, you will get the washed up version:

ffmpeg -y -i raw.mov -map v:0 -map 0:a -c:v hevc -preset veryfast -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy sdr_washed_out.mp4

Simple conversion without filters gets a bland result – 5.8M in size

The HDR colours have to be appropriately mapped using some filter trickery with FFMpeg. I found these filter settings about two years ago when trying to convert HDR videos from YouTube in the BT2020 space to BT709. Below is the set of filters used:

ffmpeg -y -i raw.mov -filter_complex "[0:v]zscale=t=linear:npl=100,format=gbrpf32le,zscale=p=bt709,tonemap=tonemap=hable:desat=0,zscale=t=bt709:m=bt709:r=tv,format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:v hevc -preset veryfast -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy sdr.mp4

SDR result with filter – 5.6M in size

As you can see the SDR version with filter is a lot closer to the original one.

These FFMpeg conversions require a lot of CPU horse power, so beware that they will take a long time. Let me know if there is a better way, as I’m always open to optimize this workflow.

Best Way to Play Dolby Vision Videos from your iPhone 12

Last week our iPhone 12 Pro arrived.

One of the many highlights of owning the new iPhone 12 Pro is the new Dolby Vision videos one can take. I took some footage of Darci our cat using the 4K 60FPS mode. The footage looked stunning on the iPhone itself. However, the small screen of the iPhone is less compelling than our 65″ LG OLED B7 TV that we have in the living room.

The question is, “What is the best way to get these new recordings on the TV and is our 3 year old TV compatible with the new Dolby Vision format?”

My first instinct is to slap it on to my Plex server and play it with the Apple TV 4K Plex App. This was terrible. It was like watching the video in slow motion.

Then I try the Plex App on the LG TV. This was better. The image was sharp, and the colour was vivid. However, the TV buffers every 5 to 7 seconds causing the video to pause or stutter. Not ideal!

I gave up on Plex, and went back to basics. I copied the video file to a NTFS formatted USB drive, that I previously AirDrop’ed from the iPhone to my Mac. The TV only understands FAT or NTFS, and FAT is pretty much useless because it has a file size limit of 4GB. I also tried exFAT but the TV did not like that format either. The video played flawlessly directly from the USB drive. So from this exercise, I knew the TV was compatible with the Dolby Digital format from the iPhone. Hurray!

Now, is there a way to direct stream the video to the TV from our NAS storage that the Plex Media Server is referencing. The LG is DLNA compatible, so I enabled the DLNA feature on my Plex server and voila.

The Plex Server Setting Screen used to enable DLNA

Below is a video showing the steps that I took on the LG OLED TV.

It is too bad that the Plex App on both the TV and the Apple TV cannot make it work. I hope this will be remedy with a future release.

York Region Covid-19 Communication Issues

We are parents of a son who has opted for choosing the in-person learning format this fall in Richmond Green Secondary School. With the recent rises in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks, we have been monitoring new developments continuously. We attempt to monitor new information on regional news via mostly online resources.

However, recent school communication has gotten us pretty confused and frustrated which prompted me, admittedly, ranting about this here. I do hope to provide some constructive feedback, so let me set this up.

On October the 18th, we received the following form letter via an email from the principal.

From: Richmond Green SS xxxxx.yyyyyyy.zz@yrdsb.ca
Subject: COVID-19 Notice of exposure – Richmond Green Secondary School
Date: October 26, 2020 at 1:33 AM
To: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

To: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

Dear Parents & Guardians

Please find attached a notification from York Region Public Health. We ask that you please read the attached letter carefully as it contains important information regarding COVID-19.

Sincerely

X. YYYYYY
Principal

email: xxxxxx.yyyyy@yrdsb.ca

The attached notification PDF file is here. The last paragraph of the letter is:

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit york.ca/covid19 or contact York Region Public Health at 1-877-464-9675.

When you click on the above link, I had to do this (follow my navigation by viewing the video below):

So you can see from the above video, that it was not immediately apparent how to get to the information. It took some hunting and exploring. You almost wish that the link that they had will bring you directly to:

School Covid Information

Life would be so much simpler!

If you are trying to access the york.ca/covid19 site on your mobile phone, then the user experience is worse than using a desktop browser.

I understand that they are trying to reuse their existing dashboard information, but frankly speaking this is just throwing data into a big pile and asking people to go to the pile and hunt for the relevant needle that you want, and call it job done.

On top of this, we got the exactly the same email yesterday on October 27th. I am sorry, but now we are being spammed by our schools without net added information, which simply causes more confusion. These guys are responsible for the education of our kids, and yet their form of communication and distributing information is second rate to industry norms. It is sad to see.

I want to be clear that I am criticizing the system and the process, and not laying any blame to the principal who may simply be a conduit in all of this. I know we are in a pandemic and we are all under stress. However, we can use this as an excuse, or we can use this opportunity to bring out the best in us.

Maybe I’m simply being too picky. Let me know what you think.

Update 2020-10-27 8:20PM:

Our York Region, Dave Barrow, has provided an alternative link york.ca/covid19data, which actually work so much better on my mobile phone.

I think the team must have modified something. Kudos to a team for a rapid response.

Pandemic Travel Booking and Refund

Before the Covid-19 pandemic we had booked travel to Mauritius for the entire month of July. The idea is to bring the kids to Mauritius for a very nice summer vacation in paradise. Of course this did not go as plan as the entire world went into lockdown in March and travel everywhere was curtailed.

Not seeing any end in sight for the pandemic, I decided to cancel our flights to Mauritius and seek a full refund in May. At first I was not sure whether we would be able to obtain a refund. As I read more and more articles regarding this topic, such as the CBC article linked here, I felt more empowered to seek a refund. I decided to take a dual prong approach. First I filed a travel insurance claim with TD Visa, and second I requested a refund with Expedia for TD.

I was very encouraged by the fact that Expedia for TD sent me an email in May indicating that my refund is being processed. However, I got heard from no one from May until August. When I look up Air France’s schedule, they have shown that our original flights have all been cancelled. I decided to call Expedia for TD and ask for an update on the matter.

Long story short, it took them until the end of August to refund 4 out of 5 tickets on the itinerary. The last ticket was recently refunded and it my credit card statement yesterday. I made a total of 7 calls to Expedia for TD, the shortest was about 20 minutes, but more often than not it was between 30 minutes to an hour. The good news is that the on hold time was less than 5 minutes for all the calls that I made from August. Here is a summary of all the calls that I’ve made:

- August 4
- August 14
- August 26 (4 of 5 tickets were refunded at this time)
- September 11
- September 21
- September 22
- September 30 (last ticket acknowledged to be in processed)
- Last refund hit my credit card on October 1

So you can see from above, that a fair bit of persistence is required to obtain your traveler’s rights during these times. If you are still in the midst of finalizing your travel situation that has been impacted by the pandemic, then I urge you to keep at it. It will pay off.

No more network interface

This afternoon I wanted to experiment with how I can connect the Gosund WiFi electrical sockets to HomeKit. Unfortunately while I was attempting to do so, I installed packages that corrupted my Linux kernel and removed my network interface.

This is of course a huge inconvenience. After a reboot, I found the media server to not have any networking. The only network interface that it recognized was lo (the loop back interface 127.0.0.1).

When I performed a:

sudo lshw -C network

The network card was recognized but was UNCLAIMED. This obviously raised alarm bells and indicated to me that the kernel was some how not recognizing the card.

I had to download a version of Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 LTS on a USB drive and proceeded to live boot from it. Luckily the live boot recognize the network card and I was able to get networking.

Before I can perform any rescue activities, I had to mount the old root file system and chroot to it by taking the following steps:

# Boot the Ubuntu Live CD.
# Press Ctrl-Alt-F1

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev

sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc

sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys

sudo chroot /mnt

# Add the following lines into /etc/resolv.conf after you use chroot:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

I then needed to restore the kernel by executing the following:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04

After another reboot, the server is back to its old self.

Online Melt Down

Normally one expects the base services especially those relating to government and financial services to be ironclad. However, I get something like this:

The above is what resulted today when I wanted to check my 2019 Notice of Assessment online. I suppose in times when even the government of Canada experiences security breaches, then the above should not be a surprise.

On this same day, we checked our TD Visa card online statements and found a very large discrepancy in our balance. I called up their support line and they told us it is a known issue and it will be fixed next week. I commented on why we have not received a notification if this is a known issue. The representative was speechless as expected.

Our threshold for good service is dropping. I hope these are not early signs of things to come.

Bye Bye Kevo and Hello August

About two weeks ago the Kevo smart lock was becoming unresponsive. My kids were having problems unlocking it from the outside and it was difficult to lock it as well.

The old Kevo lock was bluetooth only and with recent iOS updates, the quality of the bluetooth connection has gradually degraded to the point it rarely works. Because it is a very old version, we have not received any firmware updates. We purchased the lock in 2013/14 period so we have gotten a good 6 years worth of use.

Weiser Round Deadbolt Featuring SmartKey, Exterior Door Lock, Brass (9GDC94710-061)

We decided to get the August WiFi Smart Lock, with the hope that its WiFi connectivity will enable us to use the lock with HomeKit. Along with the August, I also purchased the Weiser Round Deadbolt Featuring SmartKey. The SmartKey feature allows us to reprogram the lock with our old set of keys so that we don’t have to change the front door keys.

The uninstallation of the Kevo unit and the installation of August was pretty straight forward. However, the operation with HomeKit did not work fully. It registered fine, and HomeKit was able to detect whether the lock was engaged or not. However, HomeKit did not respond very well to locking and unlocking the lock. Things improved when I reset the unit to factory settings and repeat the procedure again.

The iOS August App worked fine. I learned from the App that it has a smart connectivity feature that automatically determines whether it will connect via bluetooth or WiFi. As a person in this profession, this immediately raised alarm bells. My theory is that to save power and battery life, August engineers have aggressively underpowered the WiFi functionality. This was partially confirmed when I noticed the very long latency pings to the unit. Here is a sample inspection:

$ ping 192.168.168.36
PING 192.168.168.36 (192.168.168.36) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=1 ttl=255 time=381 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=2 ttl=255 time=10384 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=3 ttl=255 time=9377 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=4 ttl=255 time=8377 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=5 ttl=255 time=7377 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=6 ttl=255 time=6377 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=7 ttl=255 time=5377 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=8 ttl=255 time=4380 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=9 ttl=255 time=3370 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=10 ttl=255 time=2370 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=11 ttl=255 time=1360 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.168.36: icmp_req=12 ttl=255 time=359 ms

As you can see the latency is extremely long. The unresponsive aspect of the WiFi connection probably explains why HomeKit connectivity is largely craps shoot. If I was August, it was probably premature to market this product as WiFi capable, should have waited for or designed for better reliability.

In conclusion, the lock works fine with the App and mostly work with HomeKit (70/30 chance). I find that it works better with HomeKit if you are in close proximity with the lock and your iOS device. Can you lock/unlock when you are around the world? Once again, it mostly works depending on the connectivity, but I would not depend on it for emergencies.

First Week of School (OR NOT)

If it was a normal year, my kids will be going to school tomorrow, the traditional first Tuesday after Labour Day long weekend. We all know 2020 is not a normal year. We are in the midst of a pandemic, and along with this crisis comes with special circumstances. Public schooling is no exception to special treatments. All of this is quite understandable and expected.

What is disappointing is that our school board and our government has had many months to prepare since March of this year, and yet as a parent of two secondary school students, I feel that our schools are woefully unprepared. Yes, they have provided emails, videos, and web resources filled with general information, along with “more information to come”, but nothing concrete and specific to my kids’ schedule. There are sample schedules to be sure, but the answers communicated so far raises more questions than answers. For example, as of the writing of this post, we still do not know:

When exactly is the first day of school (physically)?
Which cohort?
How does a student who opted for virtual learning register?
What are the details to synchronous virtual / online learning for those who have chosen in-person learning?
Will the above information come from a future email before school starts, or will they get it on the first day of school?

The best information so far is from this web page (http://www.yrdsb.ca/school-reopening). The most important excerpts are:

So if your child is going to grade 9, you currently do not know which cohort. If your child is not in grade 9, they currently do not have any information to attend the so called, “Compressed online schedule for all courses”.

The information for Thursday, Friday, and Monday could not be more cryptic for students who are in grades 10 to 12, because we were lead to believe from previous emails that the idea of cohorts is that the in-person sessions are staggered to be held on alternate days. The above Monday description seems a little contradictory to our previous expectation.

The school board is effectively launching a new service or product, and yet their communication for this new service is well below industry standard. Compare the board’s effort in launching this “re-opening” with product launches from Apple, Tesla, Samsung, and others. I think you will find the difference quite stark.

Is my expectation too high? Perhaps. However, these are the folks who bear the responsibility for teaching our next generation. Collectively as a decision making body, and the execution of this re-opening clearly show “they” do not fully comprehend how to launch something new. Think about this, as this is the example that your kids will be learning from!

Thankfully, the uncertainty does not affect our family too much, but I hate to be a parent of a grade 9 student who is standing on pins and needles as they try to comprehend how they are going to plan for this week and the next. I truly feel for them.

First Dim Sum in 6 Months

Today we went out to Premiere Ballroom & Convention Centre for dim sum. My dad made the reservation for 11am.

The protocol there was pretty impressive. The tables are spaced between 3 to 6 meters apart, very spacious. Along with the high ceiling, you do have the feeling of being “isolated”. All attending staff was wearing face masks and gloves. Face masks are mandatory when you are not at your table eating, and your temperature is checked before they allow you to enter the dining area.

So if you miss your dim sum dining experience during the pandemic, I think Premiere Ballroom provides a very nice compromise. They are also opened on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening for dinner services.