Other

Lock-down pro-tip to save the battery of your car

 in Other  tagged battery / car / covid / covid-19 / lockdown / negative / terminal by

Most cars (if not all) consume energy even when they are parked, with the engine off and no visible systems working. Electrical systems including the clock and on-board computer systems drain the battery little by little until they completely empty it.

When the energy level in a battery is low, it might prevent it from being capable to start your car and you will need a boost to get your car running again. In worse scenarios, batteries that are completely drained can get damaged and they need to be replaced.

Therefore, if you do not move your car for a long period (like during the lock-down period), then the extended lack of use might damage the battery and cause it to need replacement.

Simple Solution

Check the operation manual of your car or contact your dealer prior to disconnecting the battery. (We are not sure if there is a car out there that would not like having its battery removed)

Disconnect the battery from you car to stop the energy draining.
To do so remove the cable from the negative port (has the minus sign "-" and is usually black colored).

Do not let the negative and positive cable exposed metal ends touch under any circumstances.

Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment

 in Other  tagged covid-19 / Prevention / Treatment by

[download id=”5353″]

This is an unprecedented global war, and mankind is facing the same enemy, the novel corona- virus. And the first battlefield is the hospital where our soldiers are the medical workers.
To ensure that this war can be won, we must first make sure that our medical staff is guaranteed sufficient resources, including experience and technologies. Also, we need to make sure that the hospital is the battleground where we eliminate the virus, not where the virus defeats us.
Therefore, Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation have convened a group of medical experts who have just returned from the frontlines of fighting the pandemic. With the support of The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine (FAHZU), they quickly published a guidebook on the clinical experience of how to treat this new coronavirus. The treatment guide offers advice and reference against the pandemic for medical staff around the world who are about to join the war.
Thanks to the medical staff from FAHZU. While taking huge risks in treating COVID-19 patients, they wrote down their treatment experience day and night in this Handbook.
Over the past 50 days, 104 confirmed patients have been admitted to FAHZU, including 78 severe and critically ill ones. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of medical staff and the application of new technologies, to date, we have witnessed a miracle. No staff is infected, and there is no missed diagnosis or patient deaths.
Today, with the spread of the pandemic, these experiences are the most valuable sources of information and the most important weapon for medical workers on the battlefield. This is a brand-new disease, and China was the first to suffer from the pandemic. Isolation, diagnosis, treatment, protective measures, and rehabilitation have all been started from scratch, but we hope that with the advent of this Handbook doctors and nurses in other affected areas can learn from our experience when entering the battlefield and they won’t have to start from zero.
This pandemic is a common challenge faced by mankind in the age of globalization. At this moment, sharing resources, experiences and lessons, regardless of who you are, is our only chance to win. Because the real remedy for epidemics is not isolation, but cooperation.
This war has just begun.

[download id=”5353″]

[download id=”5353″]

Hikvision DVR sending email over GMail

 in Other  tagged dvr / email / gmail / hikvision / smtp / ssl / tls by

Recently, we were trying to setup the email configuration of a Hikvision DVR which even though it was updated to the latest firmware we would get the message Testing Failed when trying to send an email over GMail.

In the GUI of the DVR there was an option to Enable SSL but no option to enable TLS/STARTTLS. So after consulting the GMail official documentation on how to configure an email client for GMail, we set the SMTP Port to 465 and enabled the SSL option. Then we created an application password for the DVR and tried to test the settings. To our disappointment we got the Testing Failed message.

After reading the latest user manual of the DVR, it mentioned an option to Enable SSL/TLS but not Enable SSL which got us curious. It raised the following question to us: “What if they enabled the TLS functionality but they forgot to update the GUI to match it?”. So we changed the port to 587 and hit Test again.

Guess what ?

It worked!!

It appears that Hikvision enabled the TLS/STARTTLS functionality but forgot to make their GUI reflect the change!

Using the settings depicted in this photo, we were able to send test messages from our Hikvision DVR over GMail using TLS/STARTTLS on port 587 of smpt.gmail.com!
The confirmation of the successful email sending operation.
“TESTING SUCCEEDED.”

A very important note

In the password field, we did not use the password of the Gmail account! We used an Application Password! It is crucial that you activate 2-factor authentication and then create an application password, or else you will not succeed in logging in on your Gmail through your HikVision DVR/NVR.