Kang's Thoughts

Green Sunroom Project

YouTube viewing has been one of our favourite pass times during the lock down nature of the Covid-19 pandemic. I personally have been watching quite a few channels on how to use LiPO4 cells to build rechargeable battery banks for solar applications, primarily for off grid purposes.

We have a sunroom in our back yard that we used during the summer to grow some vegetables. It has some electrical needs such as water pumps, a temperature sensor, and a fan. Currently there is an electrical socket, fed from the house, that we plug these devices into. We thought it would be a good project to try to get our sunroom off grid. This would be a good learning project.

The first task is to build a 12V LiFePO4 prismatic cells battery bank. I purchased 4 3.2V 100Ah battery cells from AliExpress. The cells came with bus bars so I did not have to purchase those. However, I did have to buy a battery management system (BMS) to balance and manage the charging and discharging of the battery cells. It was very tempting to buy a BMS from AliExpress, but I decided to be cautious and purchased one from a US vendor with the accompanying and preferred quality control. The company Overkill provides a 12V BMS specifically for four LiFePO4 battery cells in series.

It took a very long time for the batteries to arrive from China. I suppose the pandemic could be one of the many reasons for the delay. Once they arrived, I connected in parallel and proceeded to perform a top balance procedure with my voltage limiting desktop power supply. This step is required because each cell will have a different voltage potential from each other. We want all the cells to have the same voltage potential to maximize the capacity that we will get from the aggregated 12V battery bank.

Cells in parallel being topped balanced at 3.65V until zero current

To top balance all the cells, first I hook up the cells in parallel and charge them at a constant voltage of 3.65V. The charge will continue until my desktop power supply shows zero amp going into the battery. This process took a very long time, almost 2 days.

Once the cells are balanced, I reconfigured the cells in series and proceeded to hookup the BMS and the pure sine wave 600W inverter I purchased from Amazon. I had to buy 4 AWG wire, once again from Amazon, because the 10 AWG wire that I purchased earlier was not going to be enough if I want to discharge the battery at 600W which is going to result in more than 50A of current at 12V. I used the remaining 10 AWG wire for solar controller and panel hookups. I also got some XT90 connectors so that I can easily plug/unplug the solar charge controller, solar panels, and potentially plugin charger. I will talk about the solar side some more later on.

All wired up. The yellow XT90 connector is to either a solar charge controller or an external DC charger

So now that we have the guts of our 12V LiFePO4 battery pack, we need to find a suitable home for this thing. My wife had an extra plastic filing box hanging around which is perfect for this.

A filing box is perfect to fit everything

I needed to drill some holes to fit a 12V 120mm PC fan for ventilation, and a couple of 2″ grommets so that we can pass plugs and connectors through the box. The fan will be powered by the inverter.

At this point we have ourselves a 1200Wh portable super battery pack that can power up to 600W of electronics, which will be great for road trips. If you plug a 20W iPhone fast charger and charge your phone, it can continuously charge for 60 hours (2.5 days). That is a lot of phones. If your MacBook Air ran out of juice on the road, then this battery pack can power a 45W charger for your MacBook Air for more than a day, and also charge your computer fully. Quite a handy thing to have for emergencies.

Doubles as a 1200Wh portable battery bank

For the solar panels, I purchased two Xinpuguang 100 W flexible solar panels from Aliexpress. They were about $1 / Watt, a pretty good deal. I hook the two panels together in series and got a Victron BlueSolar MPPT 75/10 solar charger to manage the charging of the batteries. The charge controller can accept a maximum of 75V and outputs a maximum of 10A.

The charge controller will automatically adjust the amperage and voltage to the battery bank as required ensuring optimal charging scenario. During a sunny day, it will run the sunroom load from the panels and any remaining current will goto charge the battery. At night, the battery will run the sunroom.

Today, we installed the entire setup. The battery is placed inside the green house to give it some precipitation protection.

The panels are latched to the roof of the green house, one on each side.

The BMS unit has a bluetooth connection and an iOS App. I can use my iPhone when in bluetooth range of the battery to see if the battery is being charged or discharged.

I took the following screen shot of the app today at around 5pm EDT. You can see that there is no current going into the battery and no current going out of the battery. This means the sun is powerful enough to run all the pumps and other electrical appliances in the sunroom. Pretty cool!

It is still too early to tell yet whether there is enough sun power to charge the battery and run the electrical devices in the sunroom in a sustainable manner. My current suspicion is that the two panels are just enough even on a full, bright, sunny day and at peak hours, to power devices and also provide surplus current to charge the batteries.

Here is my overall connectivity diagram:

We will let the system run for about a week to see if this is sustainable during the summer months or not. If not, then I will have to create an automatic transfer switch so that we can intermittently recharge the batteries during the evening with an optional 480W DC charger, which I also got from Aliexpress. This charger can operate between 0-24V and 0-20A. To charge the battery bank, I have set it to a constant voltage of 14.0V and allow the output current to flow unrestricted. This should charge the battery fully in a little over 4 hours from scratch.

Overall, I learned a lot from this project and what a great way to spend the pandemic indoors. This could be a precursor to a DIY Tesla Powerwall Project. We’ll see.

I See the Light!

Today my wife and I got our first dose of Pfizer BioNTech Covid 19 Vaccine after probably more than 14 months since the first lock down notice from 2020. Of course it is still too soon to declare victory, as our second dose is still scheduled 3 months from now.

On a related note, the Ontario government has also declared the AstraZeneca vaccine will no longer be available as a first dose: “the decision was made out of an abundance of caution.”

I can’t help but think that this sounds a bit contradictory to what the government was peddling a few weeks ago. It kind of makes you think whether their 3 months guidance between the two doses of mRNA based vaccines is warranted and backed up by facts or not.

Regardless, this is another case of inconsistent information provided by our institutions. It certainly will continue to chip away at the credibility of the same institutions.

I hope we learn something from episodes such as this. In the meantime, both of our sons, who are age 17 and 16 should also be eligible for Pfizer or Moderna soon. We are now just monitoring our local clinic schedules to see when they can be booked. Fingers crossed, and three months cannot come soon enough.

The story continues in the media:

Recent Gout Attack

On the Wednesday morning of April the 14th, right after I took out the garbage, I noticed that I experienced some tightness when I was bending my left knee going up the stairs. As time goes by the knee begins to swell. By lunch time, it was swollen to the point that I can no longer bend my knee and I can feel a continuous throbbing pain around my left knee. I can also feel that the temperature around my knee has also been elevated. When I took some measurements with a touchless temperature sensor for measuring fevers, my left knee is like 2ºC more than my right knee. This is not my first gout attack, but it has been very long since my last one that I couldn’t even remember when I had it.

I decided to document my current experience, so that next time, I personally have something to recount. Therefore, this blog entry is more for myself than you the reader if you are reading this already.

I have had swollen joints due to gout in my ankle and my knee, always on my left side for some reasons. I wasn’t sure whether I should take Allopurinol or wait until the attack subsides. I seem to recall that in the past that I should not take any Allopurinol during an attack, but the recollection was pretty murky, and doctors are hard to come by these days, so I read the following article: Allopurinol Doesn’t Worsen Acute Gout Attacks, and decided to take Allopurinol in my medicine cabinet. Later on I found out from my family doctor and my local pharmacist that I may have been better off not taking it. What I can tell you is that it started to heal even with the taking of Allopurinol during the attack, so there is some truth to the above article.

I also decided to take Ibuprofen which is available over the counter to reduce the inflammation. The Ibuprofen worked within a couple of hours and really helped with the throbbing. In the end, there is not much to do but to wait and drink lots of water and let my system dissolve and eat away at the uric crystals in my knee.

I got some diclofenac sodium topical cream, which I applied on the affected area overnight. Unfortunately, I felt some skin irritation, and an over tightening or stretching of the skin situation. I had to wash it out in the morning and stuck to Ibuprofen. A single does of 400mg Ibuprofen didn’t do the trick. I had to double the dosage to 800mg.

My hope of the swelling going away in a few days was dashed on the first weekend when I knew that it was getting worse and not better. It was not until the second weekend (approx. 10 days into the ordeal) when I can finally begin to bend my knee. At this point I stopped taking the Ibuprofen and let it naturally take its course.

By the third week, I can bend my knee for most daily activities but going down the stairs and simple things like putting on my pants still created a sharp pain sensation.

This has been the longest gout attack that I have experienced. This time around, I noticed significant muscle atrophy in my left thigh and calf. I also noticed pull tendon or cramping sensations when going down the stairs. Fortunately these sensations went away as I started to do more walking in the latter part of the third week.

On day 22, I still have minor pain on my knee cap but I was able to walk so I did a 3.5 km walk with my wife in the evening of May 6th. Since there were no additional swelling the following day, I decided to do an indoor bike ride of 20km. Yesterday was another 3.5 km of walking and today another indoor ride.

As you can see from the Strava statistics, I am improving, so back in the saddle and back on the climb. Slowly but surely.

Checking for Vaccine Schedule Availability

It looks like York Region is beginning to ramp up our vaccine schedules. We are now awaiting our postal code to be eligible so that my wife and I can make an appointment. At the time of writing this post, unfortunately, our postal code is still not eligible.

We know some of our neighbours are checking the website, https://york.ca/covid19vaccine on a regular basis. Obviously, this is very tedious and frustrating. I decided to embark on a small project to detect our postal code from the web site. My goal is to write a script that can be executed from my NAS server every 30 minutes to see if it can find our postal code on the website. My first attempt was to use Python and Selenium. The API was a bit clunky and I found it to be somewhat unreliable and fraught with timing issues. I gave up on this approach.

I thought I give it another shot, but this time using Puppeteer. This was much more simpler to use, and I found it to be more friendly especially if you’ve worked with Browser based Javascript to begin with.

I wrote this simple node script called scrape.js:

#!/usr/bin/env node

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const targetPostalCode = process.argv[2] || 'A2B';

console.log ('scraping for ' + targetPostalCode + '...\n');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('http://york.ca/covid19vaccine');

  const anchorSelector = 'div#Y_accor div.new h3.Y_accordion span.trigger a';
  await page.waitForSelector(anchorSelector);

  console.log ('received...\n');

  const result = await page.evaluate((anchorSelector) => {
    let res = [];
    document.querySelectorAll(anchorSelector).forEach(function(elem){
      if (elem.textContent.match(/.*50 Years of Age and Older.*/i) != null) {
        elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelectorAll("p").forEach(function(elem){
          if (elem.textContent.match(/.*postal codes.*/i) != null) { 
            const postalCodes = elem.parentElement.querySelector("strong").textContent;
            postalCodes.split(", ").forEach(function(pc) {
              res.push(pc.trim());
            });
          }
        });
      }
    });
    return res;
  }, anchorSelector);

  console.log(result);

  let found = false;
  let regex = new RegExp(targetPostalCode, "i");
  result.forEach(function(postalCode) {
    if (postalCode.match(regex) != null) {
        // Postal Code Found!
        console.log("We found: " + targetPostalCode);
        found = true;
    }
  });

  console.log('closing...');

  await browser.close();
})();

I placed this script in the directory /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor. Note that I targeted “50 years of Age and Older“, because this is the age group that I am personally interested in. The A2B is also not my real postal code. It is used instead of my own private postal code.

Before I run the program, I had to install puppeteer in my working directory.

cd /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor
sudo npm i puppeteer

Running the above scrape.js produces the following:

scraping for A2B...

received...

[ 'L0J',
  'L4B',
  'L4E',
  'L4H',
  'L4J',
  'L4K',
  'L4L',
  'L6A',
  'L3S',
  'L3T',
  'L6B',
  'L6C',
  'L6E' ]
closing.

Of course A2B is not in the list. If it was, another line like:

We found: A2B

will be in the output.

I supplemented the above with a shell script program which I can later use to configure cron to be executed every 30 minutes. The shell script’s job is to monitor the website using scrape.js and if the postal code is found, then send a notification email.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

cd /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor

if [ $(./scrape.js | tee /home/xxxxx/log/covidPostalCodes.log | grep "found" | wc -l) -ge 1 ]
then

sendmail xxxxx@gmail.com <<@
Subject: Covid Vaccine Can Be Scheduled

Goto the following site to schedule your vaccine:

https://york.ca/covid19vaccine

@

fi

I could have included the email notification logic in the node script as well, but I figure I may want to check manually on an infrequent basis, in which case I simply run the scrape.js script on the command line.

Now all there is to be done is relax and wait, a thing that we have been doing a lot lately during the pandemic.

Chinese Mauritian Roots

I recently received a YouTube video from one of my uncles on the topic of the migration of Hakka (客家) Chinese from Mexian, China to Mauritius.

My maternal heritage is from Mauritius and I have made previous postings in this regard. You can simply do a quick search in this blog on the term, Mauritius, and you’ll see other related postings.

For keep sake, I’ve gathered the videos here for easy reference to share this knowledge with other relatives. It is also pretty amazing what you will find when searching for “Chinese in Mauritius” on YouTube.

Below are four videos which I personally found interesting. The first three videos are from Jeanette Lan’s YouTube Channel, kudos to her for sharing these videos. They are listed in chronological order of production.

Commemoration of the 178th anniversary of the Arrival of Indentured Immigrants to Mauritius (November 2nd, 2012)

A Journey to Our Roots

The Cradle of Hakka Culture

Hakka History, Cooking, and Rhymes with the Toronto Hakka Heritage Alliance

Darci Door Bell

We have a cat named Darci. During the summer time she likes to take strolls through our backyard, checking out other frequent visitors like rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, birds, and the like. She does this on an extended leash so to avoid her chasing these visitors and get lost into the wild. If you are curious, then visit her on Instagram.

We of course turn on the air conditioner on most days of the summer, so when Darci wants to come back into the house, she sits by the backyard sliding door and await one of us to open the door for her. If we are busy, she waits patiently for quite some time. My wife came up with the door bell idea. Instead of scratching the glass pane of the sliding door, which is mostly silent, we will train her to hit a door bell, which will alert us to let her in.

This is how I was assigned the Darci Door Bell project. This is another excellent opportunity to create a gadget. My first thought is to create a Raspberry Pi with a camera that uses an AI image classifier on the backend. I thought this would be a good opportunity to get my feet wet in AI. However, when dealing with a camera, and a Raspberry Pi, we are now talking about power and the need to be “plugged in”. We wanted a gadget that is wireless and battery operated. A battery based solution will severely restrict the power budget, so back to a WiFi based remote door bell idea.

After more research, I decided to use an ESP8266 MCU with WiFi and a simple step-down buck converter to convert 9V to 3.3V. I had worked with the ESP8266 before when I was attempting to use it to create my garage door opener. That was over six years ago. ESP8266 just came out and has yet to be integrated into the Arduino platform. Today, it is now much easier to work with the ESP8266. Using the Arduino IDE, one can simply program the ESP8266 natively as an MCU without even requiring an Arduino board.

From a previous project, I built a small circuit using an USB FTDI interface that will accept the ESP8266 ESP-01 board. This way I can plug the ESP8266 using USB to my computer and program it with the Arduino IDE. I wrote the following sketch, and programmed the ESP8266 ESP-01 board.

 #include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
 #include <ESP8266HTTPClient.h>

 #define SERVER_IP "192.168.1.111"
 
 #ifndef STASSID
 #define STASSID "myssid"
 #define STAPSK  "adsjfkdajfioeujfngjhf"
 #endif
 
 void setup() {
 
   WiFi.begin(STASSID, STAPSK);
 
   while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
     delay(250);
   }
 
   WiFiClient client;
   HTTPClient http;

   // configure traged server and url
   http.begin(client, "http://" SERVER_IP "/IOTHandler.php"); //HTTP
   http.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
 
   // start connection and send HTTP header and body
   http.POST("id=darciButton");
 
   http.end();
 
   ESP.deepSleep(0);
 }
 
 void loop() {
   ESP.deepSleep(0);
 }

The above program is pretty simple. When the board wakes up, it connects to my WiFi and then send an HTTP-POST request to my server that will handle the request based on the id, which in this case, it will be darciButton. As soon as the request is sent, the MCU will go into a deep sleep.

This way, the door bell will be a physical button that is hooked to the RST pin of the ESP8266 causing the ESP8266 to boot and send this POST request and immediately goes to sleep. The deep sleep is important, because while the device is in this deep sleep mode, the current draw from the 9V battery is negligible (<< 1mA). The only time the battery is used is when the button is pressed and released, and the ESP8266 is sending out the POST request. Using this power conservation approach, it is my hope that the 9V battery will last for the entire year of operation.

I used my 3D printer to print a little box for the whole thing and gave it some packaging padding, making sure the switch is on the top and properly supported. The final result looks something like this.

We then created a cardboard top cover that snugly fit the box, so that the top cover can freely move up and down the containing, plastic box. The switch itself has a little spring to it that allows the top cover to return back to its original position after being pressed. The finished product looks like this:

The top cover has a nickel on there so that Darci has a good target to train on.

Remember the server receiving the POST request? Well, I did some simple php programming on the server so that once the POST is received, I send out another HTTP request. This time to the Homebridge server with the homebridge-button-platform plugin installed. Homebridge is something that I already have and use to connect all non-compliant HomeKit accessories so that I can use those accessories via Siri. With this new plugin, I can connect this custom WiFi button to the HomeKit ecosystem within the house.

In effect, whenever this button is pressed, my HomeKit service will register an accessory button being pressed, and I can program a HomeKit scene that gets executed. I programmed a scene to play an audio file on all of my HomePods in the house. The audio file plays an audible door bell twice which I previously added to my Music library.

The final reward as shown by Darci herself. Watch the video below:

Darci Approves!

Of course with the button hooked up to HomeKit, we can now use this wireless button to do whatever HomeKit can do, unlock doors, turn lights on or off, etc. We will explore those possibilities in the future.

Going to Traffic Court During the Pandemic

I was ticketed during 2019 for a minor offence in my neighbourhood. I requested a court hearing at the time and had an original court date set in the spring of 2020. Of course this coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when almost all provincial services have decided to shutdown to adhere to the pandemic closure.

Throughout the remaining months of 2020 there were many emails and phone calls with the court services for me to find out the rescheduled date. After more than three follow up calls and many emails I finally received a “virtual” court date for March 17, 2021, earlier this month.

Let me detail my experience of my traffic offence virtual hearing. Hopefully you will find this useful in case you have to go through a similar event.

The meeting was conducted with Zoom. I have used Zoom before so I was pretty comfortable with the format and functionality. I joined the meeting 15 minutes prior to my scheduled court appearance. After waiting for a couple of minutes a prosecutor appeared and pre-registered me and briefed me to what will happen. The most important information is to mute your mic when you are not talking, and unmute when you are talking. I also had to remind myself to address the “Justice of the Peace” as your Worship.

I learned something new with Zoom during the session. Zoom has the ability to create rooms and the prosecutor can move individuals from one room to another. When I first joined Zoom, I was automatically sent to a virtual waiting room. Once the court room is made available, I was then transferred to the virtual court room. I thought this was a pretty good coordination and worked very well.

Once in the court room, the experience is pretty standard. You get to hear in great detail all of the other hearings that were scheduled with the same court room. There were more than 10 other individuals that were scheduled within the same time slot. I had to wait for about 40 minutes before I was called up by the prosecutor. Her Worship was very friendly and accommodating and my session did not take more than 10 minutes to conclude our business.

We reached a mutually agreeable arrangement, and I proceeded to pay my offence on paytickets.ca the next day. Overall it was good to get this monkey off my back without having to visit a physical court during the pandemic. The experience was more streamlined than I thought, so kudos to the Ontario Court Services.

Windows 10 on Ubuntu 20.04 with VirtualBox

It is tax season again in Canada. In the past I had a VirtualBox virtual machine that I would only bring up for the purpose of running the Windows version of TurboTax because the member of our family who files the taxes dislike the too simplified online version.

Unfortunately VirtualBox refuses to come up on macOS BigSur due to new security considerations enforced by macOS. The new System Integrity Protection (SIP) disallows the kernel extension required for VirtualBox. Instead of going around SIP via the crsutil disable command, I decided to move all of my virtual machines that is currently sitting on my Mac to my Ubuntu NAS, since the Ubuntu box is up 24 x 7 and should be more convenient.

Below is what I had to do on my Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS server.

Add the apt source where we can get VirtualBox.

sudo wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian focal contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

sudo apt update

Install Virtual Box and our user to the vboxusers group.

sudo apt install --yes virtualbox-6.1
sudo systemctl status vboxdrv

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $USER

We then need to install the extension that enables RDP. The virtual machine is going to be hosted on a server without a graphics user interface, so we have to use a Remote Desktop Client (from Microsoft) on another machine (e.g. my Mac) to gain access.

VBOXVER=`vboxmanage -v | cut -dr -f1`
wget -P /tmp \
https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOXVER/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack

vboxmanage extpack install /tmp/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVER.vbox-extpack

I tried to import my existing Windows VM without much success, so I decided to create a new one from scratch and reinstalled Windows 10 Pro.

vboxmanage createvm --ostype Windows10_64 --basefolder "/home/kang/VirtualBox" --register --name "win10"

vboxmanage modifyvm "win10" --memory 4096 --nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 em1 --vrde on --vrdeport 3389

vboxmanage createhd --filename "/home/kang/VirtualBox/win10/win10.vdi" --format VDI --size 100000

vboxmanage storagectl "win10" --name "SATA" --add sata

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 0 --type hdd --medium "/home/kang/VirtualBox/win10/win10.vdi"

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 15 --type dvddrive --medium /home/kang/VirtualBox/en_windows_10_consumer_editions_version_2004_updated_feb_2021_x64_dvd_f42b7d6d.iso

vboxmanage storageattach "win10" --storagectl SATA --port 14 --type dvddrive --medium /home/kang/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions_6.1.18.iso

Note that I had to pre-download the Windows 10 ISO and VBoxGuestAdditions ISO files. The guest additions iso file was available from this site.

https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.18/

For some reason my motherboard did not have the cpu virtualization mode enabled, so I had to do that with my BIOS settings. It was cryptically called AMD SVM (secure virtual machine).

I started the virtual machine with:

vboxmanage startvm win10 --type headless

However, I had issues with remote desktop. I had to set some permissions with the VirtualBox extensions. The following commands were executed to create a user and its password for Remote Desktop access.

vboxmanage shutdown win10 

vboxmanage setproperty vrdeauthlibrary VBoxAuthSimple

vboxmanage modifyvm "win10" --vrdeauthtype external

vboxmanage internalcommands passwordhash YOUR_PASSWORD
Password hash: 1ffc0406b9891fcd265a225e83a668fa045f1282588f80c8d11c029bad156d85

vboxmanage setextradata "win10" "VBoxAuthSimple/users/tax" 1ffc0406b9891fcd265a225e83a668fa045f1282588f80c8d11c029bad156d85

Now, I can access the VM through Remote Desktop from my Mac. I continue through the process of installing Windows 10, and the VirtualBox guest additions.

The rest is pretty simple. Install Chrome, Buy TurboTax for 2020 tax year, and we are all set!

One final note, I shared a macOS folder to the VM using normal SMB protocol, so that once my taxes are completed, this VM is a throw away, until next year!

The Day After: Installed a security update in regards to virtualbox-dkvm and VirtualBox now refuses to boot from any bootable iso. I gave up and used Parallels on my MacBook Pro. I may try kvm later.

Covid-19 Vaccine Appointment

Today marks the opening day at York Region where appointments will be taken for covid-19 vaccine appointments for people who are 80+ years of age. We were instructed to visit the following link (york.ca/covid19vaccine).

Since both of my parents are within this age group, I proceeded to the site this morning at 8am sharp to book their appointments. No surprise, the site was not available and I saw this:

At around 8:10am, the site was finally active. It was not immediately apparent to me how to book the vaccine, but after more reading, menu hunting, and a few clicks later I finally figured out. I had to choose the location first and then proceed to book an “activity” at that location.

At first, I was delighted to find out that there were hundreds of spots available at Richmond Green, a community facility just 10 minutes walk from our place. Unfortunately, when I proceeded with the booking, I had to create an account first. By the time I created the account, all the spots at Richmond Green were gone, and I had to book elsewhere. At around 9am, all spots from all locations were gone.

My advice is that if you don’t have a york.ca account now, go and create one before you make a booking.

Below is a video that may be useful to others showing how I navigated their web site to get to the booking. Good luck with your bookings!