UKC19TRACING - What is it?

If you've been taken here after scanning a UK COVID venue QR code - your device offering to search for "UKC19TRACING" - then to make use of this QR code you'll need to load the UK NHS COVID19 app on your device so you can "check in" to the visited venue where the QR code is displayed. This is the app that is based on the purportedly privacy preserving Apple and Google Exposure Notification system so in theory your 'check-in' is anonymous and probably preferable to writing down your address/phone at said venue.

On an Apple iPhone/iPad when you scan these QR codes from the lock screen camera it will attempt to search for "UKC19TRACING" - which why you may have arrived here. Curiously this doesn't happen when the device is not locked and instead says "No usable Data found". 

If you extract the content from one of these [big!] QR codes (with one of the many QR code scanning apps) it starts with "UKC19TRACING" and is then followed ":1:" and after that the main section is encoded in JSON Web Signature (JWS) [See RFC7515] format. Basically this consists of the following; after the "UKC19TRACING:1:" part there's three sequences of base64 separated by a dot("."), the second of which contains the venue name and postcode, and the other contain the signature and associated details - see here for more details.

If you're interested in creating a QR code for your venue see the the relevant gov.uk site.

Google Chrome: SPDY (Speedy)

So Google have now deployed their 'go faster' SPDY (Speedy) web page delivery protocol - which is not only in Chrome but also running on various Google services including gmail.

Google's performance figures on SPDY look good - and I think their figures are impressive. So if you want speeded up Google services then run Chrome!

There's all the dirt on SPDY here and of course they have a 'magic' URI/URL you can tap into your Chrome browser to see the internal stats:

about:net-internals

Our Solar system (planets) broken on Google Earth/Sky

I was trying to see the planets (our solar system) on google earth recently but there seems to be a problem/bug - they do not display - both in the dedicated app and on the google sky website. When you click on the planets in the app (with error reporting on) you get:
http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/sky/sky0/solarsearch/mars-en-currenthour.kmz 404 not found
...and for all the others (maybe it's something else but they're not working on either right now).

Wonder when it'll be fixed?!

I posted a question on the help forums but no response....

Weird MagicCam error message from Google talk video device

Have you ever seen this error when attempting to run some capture software on OSX? (Note: The current process label in the error message is dependent upon which app you're running - in my case its one called vic):
[000:029] MagicCam 0: Current process: vic, Flash is loaded: no
[000:029] Error(magiccammac.cc:276): MagicCam 0: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!
It is coming from the Google Talk's virtual video devices (but it's probably not actually causing any trouble directly - see below) - which are installed here:
/Library/QuickTime/Google Camera Adapter 0.component
And the MacCam related functions are in these two files:
/Library/QuickTime/Google Camera Adapter 0.component/Contents/MacOS/Google Camera Adapter 0
Run strings on it:
strings "/Library/QuickTime/Google Camera Adapter 0.component/Contents/MacOS/Google Camera Adapter 0" | grep -i magiccam)
and you get:
/Volumes/BuildData/PulseData/data/recipes/320452156/base/branches/googletalkplugin_release_branch/googleclient/talk/magicflute/magiccam/magiccammac.cc

Anyway it's not actually harmful and generally if you've a problem this is unlikely to be the cause of it. You can just [re]move the files as necessary to get rid the messages though your problem may well be somewhere else but at least you can eliminate it as a possible cause.

Stopping all OSX Google background 'updater' apps

Once you install Google software you get lumbered with various 'updater' daemons running on your machine. If you want to stop 'em running the Google way then you're obliged to uninstall all Google apps... However there always another way... Here are all the offending processes listed by process name as seen in Activity monitor:

• "Google Updater Helper" - Firstly started by /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist (from here) and subsequently by launchd - (seen by running launchctl list | grep com.google.Updater.helper) - more info on startup from Apple.
  Removal: edit/remove the google item in that file using property editor/textedit/Pacifist
• "googleml-modwatch" - Started by launchd from: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.
  Removal: rename com.google.GoogleML.plist to com.google.GoogleML.plist.off e.g.:
  sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.off
• "GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon" - another launchd startup
  Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist.off
• "GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent" - another launchd startup
  Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist.off

Then Restart and they should all be gone.... You can still manually run the updates when you want to by running:"/Library/Google/Google Updater/Google Updater.app".

Google Sketchup install problem on OSX

A friend tried to install Google's latest Sktetchup 6 and despite the fact he's running Mac OSX 10.4.11 it failed to install and complained that "Google SketchUp requires Mac OS X 10.4 or above"?? So I thought I'd take a look...

It turns out that the installer does a check for the OS version which apparently fails - I'm not quite sure why as it looks like an ok check - anyway if you want to install it then you can tweak things to get it going. Basically you can eliminate the check:
1) Download and mount the GoogleSketchUpMEN.dmg image
2) Copy the install package (named something like: FM101326ENA.mpkg) to your desktop
3) Locate the package on your desktop and open it using the Control-click (or right-click) menu 'Show Package contents' - open the 'Contents' folder and locate the info.plist file.
4) Edit the info.plist file - using a text editor (or plist editor), or just use the command line : vi ~/Desktop/FM101326ENA.mpkg/Contents/info.plist and remove the lines starting here:
<key><IFRequirementDicts</key>
<array>
<dict>
........
And finishing here:(about 22 lines)
</array>
5) Locate the installer on your desktop and run it - and it should just work!