MeghanIsMe

I've been kind of crashy this evening.

I found some information about a device called a ViraWarn that would make it safe to invite people over to my place, along with other layered protection measures, and possibly even without masks, if it operates the way the designers claim. I was so, so very hopeful. When I really want something to be true, though, I hold it a higher level of scrutiny than I otherwise would and there are questions that don't seem to have answers.

One of the points that raises concern for me is that, while there is a sort of summary of the results of independent testing on the device, the name of the laboratory is not there. Is that common in this kind of testing? Is it a fear of liability or the appearance of an endorsement from the lab? I would think that any legit safety testing lab would stand publicly behind its results, but maybe I'm wrong?

I turned up some relevant recent patents that are definitely directly related to this product, but it's entirely possible to patent a device that doesn't work and I don't have the expertise to evaluate this kind of complex engineering. I contacted the company and asked the following:

*Is the report from the independent testing lab available to look at?
*ViraWarn is in a clinical trial now: is there a preregistration document for that study?
*Is there any relevant medical literature publications that relate to the ViraWarn's theory of operation? I was able to find some papers by Dr. Mesfin Meshesha, but they do not appear to be directly related.

I would very much welcome other thoughts on this from my readers.

The company's website for the device is here:

https://opteev.com/virawarn/

This video seems to have more theory of operation information then the website in general does.

https://youtu.be/H2LPrpQIOMQ

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Anyway, having my hopes raised so high and then being let down made for a difficult evening, but I'm managing. And Miriam and I have made a lot of progress on the mask front as well. I'll probably write more about that later, but I desperately hope to open up my life a bit more in the near future in safe ways.

I need to manage passwords more securely. I'd decided tonight to start switching over to passwords generated randomly from word list. Here's a useful online implementation of such a thing. I used it to create passwords for a couple of things I had to sign up for today. www.rempe.us

Reading a bit more on the topic, I think I'm doing one better. I'm going to use KeePassX, an open-source and GNU licensed password database manager. It creates randomized strings of characters for use as passwords and protects them behind a master password that I can generate via Diceware. It's about time I started doing something like that.

And now, I should get to bed.

I just Googled up the process of using the Windows 7 magnifier function to invert screen colors. It's so much nicer reading PDFs in white on black!

Speaking of reading PDFs, I may use my first paycheck to buy a tablet for reading and annotating PDFs. Can anyone who does a lot of that recommend an OS that has a really good app for doing so? Ideally, I'd like a table that will interface with an external keyboard too.