US Naval Observatory Master Clock

If you have a smartphone, it is very easy to find the current date and time. But what if you are in a rare situation where you need to find the exact time, down to the second, but don’t have a smartphone? You can search Google for ”time” but it only provides the time down to the minute.

Look no further than the US Naval Observatory (USNO). They provide a master clock which lists the date and time in UTC as well as Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, and Hawaii time zones.

They also provide a phone service that verbally tells you the time. Just call (202) 762-1401. Those of us past a certain age might expect a female voice stating, “At the time the time will be…” However, the USNO time is narrated by actor Fred Covington according to this article. The USNO has provided the same time-by-phone service since 1978.

Keep Your Fax Machines For Now

I previously wrote about COVID-⁠19 At-home Tests and that insurance companies and group health plans must provide full reimbursement for up to 8 over-the-counter at-home tests per individual per month. In follow-up to this announcement, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a brief study of the methods that private insurers are covering at-home rapid COVID tests. They reviewed publicly available rapid at-home COVID tests coverage and reimbursement policies for the 13 private insurers with at least 1 million fully-insured members across their U.S. subsidiaries between January 18, 2022 and January 20, 2022, and this is what they found:

In summary, 6 of 13 insurers have a direct coverage option, meaning that enrollees can buy rapid at-home tests without paying anything up front or navigating a complicated reimbursement process if the test is obtained through a preferred network of pharmacies or retailers, or through a mail order option.

The other 7 insurers do not have direct coverage but have some kind of reimbursement policy. 4 of those 7 insurers require receipts and a form be mailed in, with one of those 4 offering a fax option, but email and online submissions were not viable options. It is interesting that with all the technology we have available today, 4 of 7 insurers offer reimbursement of COVID tests only via mail or fax. In my opinion, mail and fax are harder to use than online options. I wonder if the new coverage policies will influence their migration to email or online reimbursement processes.

Readability Statistics

You may be familiar with recommendations for certain things to be communicated in a manner that is easily understand. For example, it is so important that public health messaging be understood by people of all literacy levels that the CDC has published a guide for creating easy-to-understand materials.

One specific component that determines how easy it is to understand written works is the readability of words and sentences. If you use Microsoft Word, you may have come across a feature where it calculates readability statistics. For any given document, there are two scores that it provides. The Flesch Reading Ease score rates text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score rates text on a U.S. school grade level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader can understand the document.

If you don’t have Microsoft Word and still want to calculate readability statistics, there are a number of free online tools that you can use. One of them is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level calculator provided by TextCompare.org. Simply input your text to check its readability score. Another resource is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level calculator provided by Good Calculators. I noticed some variability in the scores with the same text sample, so read the details of their methods to learn more.

Another resource is the Readability Test provided by WebFX. In addition to allowing you to enter a text sample, you can also enter a URL to calculate the readability score of an entire website. It presents scores for Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and a variety of other scores. Here are the results for my blog:

Add Wordle to your iPhone Home Screen

Lots of people are playing Wordle nowadays. There does not exist an iOS or Android app for the game, so it is accessed exclusively via web browsers on desktop and mobile devices. Although I don’t have any statistics on how it is accessed, my guess is that most people access it via their default web browser on their phones. In case you weren’t already aware, you can add a shortcut to the Wordle website (or any URL for that matter) to your iPhone home screen. Here’s how.

Step 1: From your iPhone browser, navigate to the Wordle website, https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Step 2: At the bottom of the webpage, tap on the “Share” icon (it’s the icon of the box with the up-pointing arrow)

Step 3: Tap “Add to Home Screen”

Step 4: Tap “Add” (optionally rename the shortcut before adding)

Step 5: Access the Wordle icon directly from your home screen

COVID-⁠19 At-home Tests

If you’re like millions of other Americans, you’re having difficulty obtaining and/or paying for COVID-19 tests. There are 2 promising developments related to COVID-19 tests that you should be aware of.

First, on January 10, 2022, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced that insurance companies and group health plans must provide full reimbursement for up to 8 over-the-counter at-home tests per individual per month. Because cost-sharing requirements (e.g., deductibles, co-payments or coinsurance, prior authorization, or other medical management requirements) are prohibited, these tests will be completely free.

Second, on January 14, 2022, the White House announced that the government will begin distributing at-home rapid COVID-19 tests for free. Simply visit COVIDtests.gov starting January 19 to place your order for 4 free at-⁠home COVID-⁠19 tests per residence. There won’t be any shipping costs, nor will there be a need to provide a credit card number. I assume that once there is equal distribution across American residences, there will be opportunities to order more.

Stay safe America!

Convert and Play Apple System 7 Sounds

The other day I stumbled across some items in my closet that probably belong in a computer museum: a 3.5-inch floppy drive (with a USB cable) and a collection of 3.5-inch floppy diskettes dating back to when I used a Mac Classic II in college. Among these old documents I found one diskette that was filled to its 1.4 MB capacity with sound files. The files did not have any extensions, and their icons in macOS Mojave 10.14.6 look like this:

Double-clicking the files did not play the sounds, so I tried to append common file extensions like .wav and .aiff to see if the macOS Finder or VLC would play the sounds, but that didn’t work. That is because those sound files were created in Apple System 7, and the actual sounds were stored in the resource fork where modern macOS applications no longer use this approach.

I found a handy donationware application called SystemSound which can convert System 7 sounds to AIFF or WAVE formats. It also includes an extension that allows you to play System 7 sound files natively in Mac OS X. SystemSound runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and is free. It worked like a charm, and here is what the user interface looks like:

I found a other approaches to extracting System 7 sounds that I did not test. One of them is an application called File Juicer, and other approaches are discussed in this thread. I hope this helps you make use of your System 7 sound files.

Dial-A-Moon

Most of us learned in school that there is a lunar cycle that repeats monthly (every 29.5 days). In the lunar cycle, there are different phases of the Moon that represent different quarters of the cycle (at least from earth’s vantage point of only half of the Moon’s sphere): waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full Moon, waning gibbous, third quarter, waning crescent, and new Moon.

However, we all know that the appearance of the Moon on any given day does not always fall neatly into one of the named phases. If you’d like to see what the Moon looks like at any given time in 2022, look no further than Dial-A-Moon which is provided to us by the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio.

Dial-A-Moon lets you see what the Moon looks like at any hour of any day, past or present, in calendar year 2022. Want to know what the Moon will look like on your birthday or on a night when you’ll be camping? Just enter the month, day, and hour in Coordinated Universal Time.

The site also provides links to many high-resolution images and videos that illustrate the Moon phases and the lesser known concepts of libration and position angle. Here’s one such example: