10 ways to make laptop battery last longer

Paraphrased from a Right Choice magazine article with my own opinions:

1. Keep the brightness of the screen as low as possible. If portability & long battery life are important for you then buy a laptop with a lower screen size. The laptop's biggest power drain is the screen.
2. Disable Wi-fi and Bluetooth when not needed
3. Unplug all external devices
4. Run only as many programs as you need. If you have a 100 browser tabs open, your battery life will be about 1 hour shorter.
5. Lower or turn off the volume
6. Keep the laptop in a cool place and avoid propping it on a pillow as this blocks airflow to the fan, causing it to heat up.
7. Defragment your hard drive
8. Clean the battery's metal contacts. Clean contacts increase the energy efficiency. Always clean them when the battery is fully-drained, and use a cloth that's only slightly damp, to avoid electric shocks and short circuits. 
9. Shutdown or hibernate your laptop instead of putting it on standby if you're going to be away for long hours
10. Turn off unwanted programs or processes that work in the background.

From Wired magazine: In order to squeeze as much life out of your lithium-polymer battery, once your laptop hits 100 percent, unplug it. In fact, you should unplug it before that. Battery University states that a battery charged to 100 percent will have only 300-500 discharge cycles, while a battery charged to 70 percent will get 1,200-2,000 discharge cycles. So  ideally charge batteries to 80 percent then let them drain to about 40 percent.

Related:

• HOW TO prevent Skype from auto-starting after Windows boots
• HOW TO speed up your Windows PC
• Highest voted questions (with answers) tagged Laptop Battery on the Super User Stack Exchange Forum

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Learnings in S/W Engineering from the HealthCare.gov website fiasco

It cost at least $400 million to put together the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov website. What went wrong?

The PM perspective (from Don’t Blame IT for Obamacare’s Tech Troubles):

Blaming programmers, coders, and project managers for disgraceful design flaws and technical turmoil is too easy and obvious. Crap rolls downhill. Look deeper. The underlying truth for virtually every large system’s implementation initiative is that success demands leadership and oversight that holds itself accountable for assuring best practice. Good governance, not superior technical chops or ready access to alpha geeks, is how you build complex systems that deliver reliable and resilient value for money. Good governance provides oversight, insight, and foresight. Emerging problems are flagged sooner; project leaders present their testing protocols and outcomes; and updated expectations are clearly communicated throughout the enterprise. Contingencies are constantly reviewed and appropriately revised. That’s what serious systems developers do.

Web Performance Engineering perspective

Top Performance Problems:

• Too many HTTP Requests (46)
• Overuse of JavaScript (12 files total, 166K compressed, 464K uncompressed)
• Use of large offsite web fonts
• Poor caching of resources
• Use of offsite third party widgets
• Slow TTFB times
• Uncompressed images (251K total, 75K could be saved losslessly)
• Use of SSL resources on non-secure page
• Unminified JS and CSS files

to be continued...

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TWIL - Week #29

This Week I Learned:

Browsers:

• The auto-fill feature in Chrome also fills hidden fields.
• Like in Nigeria, the top three browsers in India (UC, Opera Mini,Nokia Xpress) are proxy browsers —browsers that leave the interpreting and rendering to the server and only show the resulting page. This process saves their users a lot of money, both because an old device is sufficient to run a proxy client, and because they essentially get one image instead of a full web page, which leads to low data usage.

Security:

• eBooks have one feature that can't be found in print: the ability to have live hotlinks embedded in the text. And that presents an open field for scammers to spread malware.

Science:

• The technical term for the physiological study of laughter is the not-so-funny-sounding word, gelotology. In terms of what we find funny, there seems to be three general categories of what makes us laugh. 
• The incongruity theory suggests that it is humorous when logic is turned on its head, as when a joke or story takes an unexpected turn, or when non-sequitors are used.
• The superiority theory (aka Schadenfreude) focuses on laughter that arises at someone else's mistake or misfortune, as when a cartoon character slips on a banana peel or has an anvil drop on them out of the sky. 
• The relief theory posits that laughter arises as a relief to pent-up emotions or passing danger.

India:

• Overseas workers from India are expected to send back home $71 billion this year. Remittances exceed the country's earnings from information-technology exports. China is the No. 2 recipient of remittances after India, at $60 billion, according to the World Bank. (Source: WSJ)
• Only three per cent individuals pay taxes. Of this number, the government earns more than half from those earning Rs 20-25 lakh (Rs 2-2.5 million) or more, annually. Officially, there are only 42,800 individuals in the department’s records who have declared taxable income of over Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million). (Source: Rediff)
• India has the highest petrol-price-to-income ratio in the world.

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MS currently has 21 apps on Google Play, incl. Wordament!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Wordament, my favorite word game, is available as an Android app.



Wordament is an addictive MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game built by 2 Microsoft-ies using the Google App Engine.



I found it funny that the Content Rating for this app is Low Maturity

Microsoft currently has 21 apps on Google Play. Among them, SkyDrive, Bing & Lync 2013 apps are highly rated.

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Review: uCertify PMI PMP v-5 Online PrepKit

uCertify is a provider of test preparation software for 400+ IT certification exams from 18 different Testing agencies including Microsoft & PMI. uCertify offered me access to an online PrepKit in exchange for an unbiased review. I tried their PrepKit for the PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) course and found it to be comprehensive and useful.

For me the best part of the PMP v-5 online PrepKit is the collection of 710 Practice Questions with full explanations. Besides that, there are 110 Interactive Quizzes & a Pre-Assessment Test. The Practice Questions can be taken in Test, Learn & Review mode. There is also review study material based on the Fifth edition of PMBOK which includes Tips & Flash Cards to highlight points important for passing the PMP exam. Test history & performance analytics reports help in gauging your progress, identify the areas you have mastered and help you focus on areas which need improvement to pass the actual exam. The PrepKit is a a confidence booster and great complement to the PMBOK Guide which is essential reading.

There are some grammar issues here and there but as the course material is continuously updated, they will probably go away. The test interface is neat but not accessible with the keyboard. It could have been beneficial to navigate through the practice questions & tests with arrow keys. To their credit however, the site is responsive and well-designed. It is easy to jump to topics of interest easily. The PMP v-5 online PrepKit costs USD 139.99 or INR 7606.47. As it requires Internet to access, you will also have to factor in Internet costs but that's probably a non-issue these days considering its ubiquity.

Will this PMP v-5 online PrepKit help you pass the exam? I don't know. Certification watchdog CertGuard rates it well. Also considering that they offer a 100% money-back guarantee and have decent study material and lots of practice questions, it is worth trying out. uCertify offers a free evaluation version of its Prepkits with limited features.

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TWIL - Week #28

This Week I Learned:

Web:

• Google crawls for websites. Shodan crawls for devices. The Shodan search engine crawls the internet looking for devices, many of which are programmed to answer. It has found cars, foetal heart monitors, office building heating-control systems, water treatment facilities, power plant controls, traffic lights and glucose meters. It has become a crucial tool for security researchers, academics, law enforcement and hackers looking for devices that shouldn’t be on the internet or devices that are vulnerable to being hacked.  Its creator & sole operator, 29-year-old John Matherly says "I don’t consider my search engine scary. It’s scary that there are power plants connected to the internet". Matherly hopes Shodan leads to more transparency and public shaming of companies that are selling vulnerable systems
• Google is extending its Vulnerability Reward Program to include "key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Internet".
• Since more and more websites are trying to tailor their content to you, you may get caught up in a digital “filter bubble” and not get “exposed to information that could challenge or broaden [your] worldview”.
• Everywhere you go online, you’re tracked; a lot more than you might suspect. Web tracking isn’t 100% evil, but websites certainly track you a ton, so it’s worth informing yourself what they use that information for. (The above 2 links & a few others are from the post "100 incredible things I learned watching 70 hours of TED talks last week" on A Year of Productivity blog. The author of the blog has licensed all original content under an Attribution 3.0 Unported copyright license and encourages his blog readers to steal his posts.)

Science:

• Bees have been around for 50 million years, but they recently started dying en masse because of “parasitic mites, viral and bacterial diseases, and exposure to pesticides and herbicides”.
• Tropical cyclones are formed in eight basins - Northern Atlantic, Northeastern Pacific, North Central Pacific, Northwestern Pacific, Northern Indian Ocean, Southwestern Indian Ocean, South and Southwestern Pacific and Southeastern Indian Ocean. Each basin has a different naming system. In the North Atlantic Ocean, Northwest Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line and South Pacific Ocean, they are called hurricanes. Typhoon is the name given to a tropical cyclone formed in the North west Pacific Ocean west of the dateline. In the southwest Pacific Ocean and southeast Indian Ocean, its called a severe tropical cyclone.  Naming of cyclones started in early 20th century when an Australian forecaster named the cyclone after politicians whom he disliked. Now, cyclones are given names contributed by member nations of the World Meteorological Organisation. The new names include those of men, women, flowers and so on. In the North Atlantic and Northeastern Pacific, feminine and masculine names are alternated in alphabetic order during a given season. (Source: Times of India)

Numbers:

• 66% of the U.S. is obese 
• This year, there are 1426 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes. 960 of them are self-made, while the rest inherited their wealth. 
• About 0.7% of individuals world-wide are millionaires - about 32 million people. They control 41% of world's wealth (Source: WSJ)
• 35% of Russia's wealth is in the hands of just 110 people.

India:

• In India which has a total population of over one billion, only 50 million people have passports which is a mere five per cent of total population, around 30 million people pay taxes and over 150 million people have driver licence. One of the reasons for setting up the Aadhaar program is to give everybody an ID. 
• ICICI Bank actually has a page on its website informing that "customers found to be offensive in their interaction with us will be required to close all their relationships with ICICI Bank".
• The first book of the bestseller Shiva Trilogy, "The Immortals of Meluha" by Amish Tripathi was self-published.

Everything else:

• We don’t feel fear because of a potential loss of income or status, we feel fear because we’re afraid of being judged and ridiculed.
• If you’re arguing with someone to win the argument, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. You should be arguing to learn.

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HOW TO highlight a Province within a Country with Google GeoChart

After deprecating Image Charts within Map Charts, Google has added Geochart & Geomap as part of the Google Visualization API. A Geochart is rendered within the browser using SVG or VML while Geomap is rendered using an embeddable Flash player. Both types of maps don't allow dragging or scrolling.

I adapted a code sample meant to show a chosen State in USA to highlight a chosen State in India.

You can adapt the original sample to make it work for any country. You have to use the ISO 3166-2 Province/State codes (example: India) for the Country you choose.

Also see:

• Google Maps Driving Directions gadget - useful for a "Contact Us" page
• Display region, route or location with Google Static Maps
• HOW TO visualize approximate radial distance from a fixed point on a map
• A geography game made from a mashup of Picassa & Google Maps

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My first impressions of Nexus 7 tablet

I've been using the Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi, 16 GB) tablet for the last ten days and I'm impressed. I plan to use it primarily as an e-book Reader to clear off at least a part of the pile of e-books I've collected over the years.

Current prices of Kindle devices in India (click to enlarge image)

I had to take a call between buying a Kindle or Nexus 7 but the superior hardware specs of  Nexus 7 (NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core Processor, 7-inch HD Display) and the relatively cheaper price made me fall for it. (I bought my Nexus 7 on Flipkart for INR 9999. For the next few days it will be going for less than Rs. 9000 as part of their Diwali Cyber Sale promotion)

Thankfully, Amazon offers their Kindle app for Android devices which makes reading Mobi & Kindle  (AZW) files on Nexus 7 as good as reading it on Amazon's own Kindle. It's a 22.49MB download for Nexus 7 (the size of the app installer varies according to device). This app also helps you sync up your reading with other devices that support Kindle.

The Kindle app has the Send to Kindle by E-mail feature that lets you send documents to your Kindle as an email attachment.

Kindle Personal Documents Service supports the following file types.

• Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
• HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
• RTF (.RTF)
• Text (.TXT)
• JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
• Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW)
• GIF (.GIF)
• PNG (.PNG)
• BMP (.BMP)
• PDF (.PDF)

These files can be combined into a compressed ZIP (.ZIP) file. ZIP files are automatically opened by the conversion service, converted to the Kindle format, and stored in Your Kindle Library.

To convert your personal PDF documents converted to the Kindle format, type "convert" in the subject of the e-mail when you send your personal documents to your Send-to-Kindle address.

The conversion is not immediate but you get a status report by email upon completion. A few of the many PDFs that I emailed to my Kindle account could not be converted. I wonder if there is anything about the contents of the PDF (images?) that causes the conversion to fail.

Another interesting feature of the Kindle app is that it can learn your reading speed and tell you what percentage of the book still remains and provide an estimate of the time you would need to finish the book based on your reading speed.

One thing I sorely missed in Nexus 7 was the lack of a file explorer. Owing to the popularity of the Android platform, there is no dearth of information. I was quickly able to find out that ES File Explorer (4.08MB) was a free, popular file manager with several other features.

(Update 28/Oct/2013) Right Choice magazine gives Nexus 7 a score of 72 (In its tests, iPad with Retina Display which sells for ~32K gets the highest score of 82)

click on image for enlarged view

I'll keep updating this review with more of my findings.

Also see:

• 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones
• There is an app for that?
• AnandTech: Google Nexus 7 and Android 4.1 - Mini Review 
• AnandTech: The Google Nexus 7 Review

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Free APIs, online services to generate screenshots of web pages

I've graded the answers to this StackOverflow question about APIs & online services to generate screenshots of web pages based on whether the service can be used directly without any API key or require a key:

No key required:

• immediatenet.com
• kwout API (generating screenshots is not the primary intent of kwout so it doesn't directly give you an image to save)

Requires (free) API access key:

• Browshot API
• GrabzIt
• thumbalizr API (Simple syntax to use the API: http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://mvark.blogspot.in&width=250)
• ConvertAPI (Free 500 one-time credits)

There are also online tools can generate screenshots of websites:

• Browsershots.org
• WebShots Pro
• ShrinkTheWeb
• Amit Agarwal's Screen Capture tool
• GrabzIt

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TWIL - Week #27

This Week I Learned:

Programming:

• ASP.NET's Request Validation feature is not enough to avoid XSS 
• It is possible to inject values in a drop down list.  Developers shouldn't trust input. Anything sent by the client should be suspect, there's no guarantee that it's what you expect, and it must be validated on the server before acceptance.

India:

• Commenting on the scale of biometric date captured for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) program, Nandan Kilekani, the UIDAI head, calls India the tech capital for biometrics. UIDAI is yet to finalize breach of disclosure and liability policies in case Aadhar’s biometric data are compromised or stolen. The UIDAI is a lean organisation with less than 300 people (but lots of vendors).
• The voluntary use of public transport once in a week is part of Oil Minister Veerappa Moily's fuel conservation campaign launched this week, which aims to save $5 billion oil import bill.  Moily saved Rs 40,000 in fuel cost by taking public transport to office. One of the many perks that Members of Parliament and some Government "servants" enjoy is free fuel.
• Currently, of the 35 women in the Bihar Assembly of 243 members, roughly 70% have husbands who are politicians. The trend of politicians using their wives as a front to keep their seats safe started in 1997 when Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, facing arrest by the CBI in the fodder scam, stunned political circles and 'shocked' his wife Rabri Devi by asking her to step out of the kitchen and occupy the chair he was going to quit. A mother of nine, Rabri Devi was a housewife unlettered in politics until then, but continued in office for over seven years. Like Yadav, other politicians in Bihar see the elevation of their wives as the best way to keep the power in the family. (Source: Times of India)

Trivia:

• Benjamin Franklin swore by "air baths", which was his term for sitting around naked in the morning, whatever the weather. Franklin was chronically disorganised.

Everything else:

• FB Reader & Kindle are free Android apps that allow you to open both PDF & Mobi files.
• Google has developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is applied to all Street View images. This means that if one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk) or an identifiable license plate, our technology will automatically blur it out, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified. If our algorithms missed something, you can easily let us know.

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HOW TO prevent mixed content warning in web pages

What is a Mixed Content Warning?

This blog post explains it well:

HTTPS-enabled sites require all resources on the page, including the ads, to be SSL compliant to protect the user against man-in-the-middle attacks. If an HTTPS page loads an HTTP resource, the page is considered mixed content, and the browser displays a mixed content warning (like the padlock with warning triangle in Chrome). 

New browser releases like Firefox 23 are starting to block mixed active content (scripts) but still display mixed content warnings for mixed passive content (images).

The mixed content warnings vary in aggressiveness among browsers. 

One way for developers to fix this issue is by using a Protocol Relative URL.

A Protocol Relative URL is just like a regular URL except that you leave out the protocol prefix:
 //mvark.azure-mobile.net/client/MobileServices.Web-1.0.0.min.js

A protocol relative URL is just a URL without the scheme. For example //billpatrianakos.me is a protocol relative URL. These types of URLs are meant to be hit by a browser only. The point is that a browser can fetch a resource from whatever protocol the site is telling it to use.

You get the automatic use of HTTPS on secure pages and avoid the overhead of HTTPS on non-secure pages.

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What's common between Kovid Goyal & Antony Lewis?

Kovid Goyal

Antony Lewis

They are both PhDs in Physics and creators of free software applications that have been downloaded by millions.

Kovid Goyal is the creator of calibre,  a comprehensive suite of utilities for managing/converting/viewing e-books and news in digital formats while Antony Lewis is the creator of WordWeb,  English dictionary, thesaurus and word finder program for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android and Mac OS X.

The free version of WordWeb has been downloaded over 5 million times while calibre has been downloaded by 18 million people.

calibre is released under GNU GPLv3 as the author did not want people creating proprietary software based on my work

WordWeb is free subject to very unique licensing terms:

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if

• You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period

• AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

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TWIL - Week #26

This Week I Learned:

Browsers

• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (formerly known as Portable Firefox and commonly known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox that can run from a USB flash drive, CD-ROM, or other portable device on any Windows computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine. The program does not require Firefox to be installed on the computer, nor does it leave personal information on the computer or interfere with any installed versions of Firefox, though installation on a hard drive is possible. Personal settings, bookmarks, and any installed extensions and themes are stored on the flash drive along with Firefox Portable. This allows the user to move from computer to computer without losing application settings.

Web Development

• To test a web app with multiple simultaneous sessions, you can create Profiles in Chrome and Firefox. In IE, you can use File > New session. 
• Despite increases in bandwidth, the load times of web pages has increased by 48% over the past two years. The average page load time of the top 100 websites is 11.3 seconds
• To compare how the print and screen view of a web page would look, in Chrome Developer Tools settings (right bottom corner),  Overrides tab, select the option "Emulate CSS media" and choose print or screen.

India

• Lawmakers turned lawbreakers  - Lalu Prasad (aged 65), Member of Parliament for multiple terms, Cabinet Minister and former Chief Minister of Bihar, has been convicted in the fodder scam that he took part in 17 years ago along with another former Chief Minister of Bihar. "Those involved (in the scam) were amply rewarded: Animal husbandry officer R K Rana, who purchased pigs from Ludhiana before falsely claiming half of them died near Varanasi, rose to become RJD MLA and then an MP." Rajya Sabha member Rasheed Masood (aged 67) has been convicted for fraudulently nominating undeserving candidates  including his own nephew to MBBS seats in 1990-91. (Source: Times of India)

Everything else

• Wolfram Alpha provides Personal Analytics for Facebook 
• Difference between GPS, GSM, GPRS with respect to location
• GPS is global position system, which uses timings from satellites to determine location. It has no relation to GSM or GPRS, except in the case of A-GPS (assisted GPS) which might use mobile data provided via GSM/GPRS to get a better starting point for your location which enables the GPS to have a better idea of which satellites are overhead where you are.
• GSM is a standard for mobile telephone and describes how the phone should communicate with the phone network to make and receive calls. It does not provide any location services in itself, but as GSM will communicate with mobile phone radio towers that are known and have a fixed location, you can get an approximate location by knowing which towers your phone can talk to and where they are.
• GPRS is an extension to GSM which allows packet switched data - mobile data, which can be used to access the internet. This does not provide any location services, other than that which can be obtained using GSM tower locations.

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FB & Twitter spam me with similar subject line

It is also funny that they landed one after another.

Related: Tweetcheero

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Book Review: PMP Rapid Review by Sean Whitaker; MS Press

The Project Management Institute offers the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification program. Even for experienced Project Managers, achieving the PMP credential requires significant effort. To pass the PMP Exam, not only a thorough study of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Fifth Edition, but also a good understanding of the project management stages (defined by 5 Process Groups) and project management topics (47 Processes in 10 Knowledge Areas, was 42 Processes in 9 Knowledge Areas in PMBOK Guide, 4th Edition) is required.

PMP Rapid Review by Sean Whitaker is a good exam-prep resource that summarizes & highlights the important topics of PMBOK Guide. There are plenty of questions and answers, some of them in true/false format, to recap your understanding of the essentials. The study material is interspersed with exam tips which point out things to note from the exam's perspective.

There are five chapters corresponding to the five Process Groups. The author has broken down the contents of each Process Group into Tasks. Though well-written, I found the book needlessly long. The content could have been better organized to avoid repetition of the title of the Tasks which don't really add any value. The author also plugs his other book "PMP Training Kit" by referencing it in the More Info section of most of the Tasks.

Though not as a sole resource, this book is a fine complement to the PMBOK Guide for the PMP exam.  I received a ebook copy of this book via the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Also see: Book Review: Head First PMP

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Windows Azure Mobile Services - Error: Table 'sometable' does not exist. - 404

Windows Azure Mobile Services provides a JavaScript client library that can be used to perform CRUD operations using HTML and JavaScript in a HTML5 web app.

There is a Mobile Services quickstart project to manage a TODO list that you can download from the Windows Azure portal. If you wish to create a custom table for a similar app, you have to first provide a table name within Windows Azure portal and set a permission level against each operation for the table (as shown in the diagram below).

click to enlarge image

Instead of doing this, if you directly create a table via the SQL Server Management Studio or the Silverlight-based Azure SQL Database portal, you will encounter the error Table 'sometable' does not exist. - 404 when you try to access this table using a script. 

To resolve this issue after you've created the table, you can go to the Mobile Services section in the Azure portal, select the Data tab and click on the Create option at the bottom. Give the table the same name as the one you've created outside the Portal and you should then be able to overcome the error. 

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