i finally fixed the invalid mail server certificate issue with my android phone using the gmail app. i managed to get incoming mail working by changing the IMAP server from mail.iamtonyang.com to homie.mail.dreamhost.com. but when i do the same for the SMTP outgoing server using homie.mail.dreamhost.com, it'd throw a "certificate not valid" message and wouldn't allow me to continue until i changed the server. what ends up happening is i cancel the edit and revert back to the non-working state. the weird thing was it wouldn't even give me the option of selecting the port and security type.

however i figured out yesterday that if i use a different outgoing SMTP server name - in my case a made up master.mail.dreamhost.com - the gmail account setup will sort of spin a little bit but gives me a different error, saying it couldn't connect to the server. that's totally normal since the mail server doesn't exist, but what happens next is it then gives me the option to finally set the port and security type. when i enter homie.mail.dreamhost.com it finally accepts that server, but the only security option is none, meaning my messages and username/password would be transmitted in the open, in danger of being intercepted and hacked. but that was the best i could do.

finally i discovered the solution this morning. there's no mention of this technique online, except i read somewhere that the gmail app won't give you the option of updating the certificate like in other mail apps (like apple mail or any computer-based mail programs). the only way to get around this is to erase the mail account and then add it again. i tried it with one account already and it worked, but i couldn't figure out way. then i tried it with my main mail account. incoming is easy, just set the IMAP server to homie.mail.dreamhost.com. however, when i got to outgoing, inputting homie.mail.dreamhost.com doesn't at first. i have to enter a false mail server to trigger the gmail app to give me port/security option. once that shows up, i add homie.mail.dreamhost.com as the SMTP server and the security choice now works because a new account won't have a mismatched certificate.

i continued working on the dementia clock. i downloaded jos lazet's alzheimer's clock source code last night. it's very straight-forward, just an html document with corresponding js (for the code) and css (stylesheet) files. i changed the font size, made the clock 12-hours, and added some chinese to the date. i copied the files onto my pi zero and displayed it in the chrome browser. the only thing left to do was to set it up in kiosk mode in chrome and have it autostart on login.

now that there are 2 restaurants around the corner (zoe's and manoa poke), it means there are two dumpsters. i noticed something when the dumpster truck came by this morning to empty the dumpsters: one of the dumpsters has a missing drain plug. as there are a lot of ongoing construction projects all along the beacon street area, the number of rats seen scurrying during the night and even daytime has gone up. a dumpster with an open drainage hole is a rat magnet. i want to report it, but i don't know to whom. the dumpster company, whose number is on the dumpster itself? or the restaurant?

after work today my parents went to my 2nd aunt's place in the afternoon to help her assemble their sofa which arrived this morning (she had just gotten back on saturday from a caribbean cruise). afterwards they swung by my place so i could go with them on a costco supply run. we stopped at michael's first where my mother picked up some more pink yarn as well as red-white-blue yarns for knitting some patriots hats. costco was the most empty i've ever seen it on this monday afternoon. we bought a combo pizza for dinner before we left.

instead of returning straight to belmont, we had to make a stop at the cafe, because my sister called earlier, saying there was something wrong with the heat at my grand uncle's place. i followed my father to their basement where he knocked on the duct work a few times with the flashlight before the furnace started working again. he said there's a flap with a sensor that must've gotten stuck from too much dust or simply old. my sister came down to see as well. later i went to her place to look for hailey but she was gone. we found her later, trying to go upstairs. when i saw my aunt at the cafe she gave me a wooden carved elephant she bought in haiti (she wasn't quite sure where, one of the caribbean islands). she also asked if i could put all her vacation photos onto a thumb drive.

the pizza was lukewarm at best by the time we finally made it to belmont. in hindsight, we should've put the whole thing in the oven and toasted it a bit to warm things up. earlier i'd set up the broken foscam webcam in my living room. from my parents' place i was able to remotely turn on and off the lights, using the webcam video feed to verify it actually worked. my mother told me she's become a fan of breakout kings (currently on netflix) after i introduced her to the 2-season series yesterday.

i showed my father the dementia clock mockup on my laptop, running chrome in full screen mode. i got rid of the original rectangular border around the text, it wasn't necessary. he suggested that the time of day (e.g. "evening") should be the largest element on the page because it was the most important. second largest was the time display itself, changed to red to simulate a traditional LED clock. we also changed the time of day so it was in chinese instead of english: 早上, 下午, 晚上, 半夜清晨. the "overnight" time period was adjusted from midnight to 7am, and the text (半夜清晨) would appear in yellow to make it even more noticeable, because that's typically the time my grand uncle would wake up and confuse early morning with evening.

i tried copying my aunt's photos before we left belmont, so i could return her camera. but she had a lot more photos on her 32GB memory than i anticipated - 16GB - because apparently she likes shooting videos. it didn't matter anyway, because the thumb drive she gave me was only 4GB, not enough space to fit everything (there was already photos on the drive as well, so there was only 1.5GB of empty space). with that i went with my father to the cafe to pick up my aunt and to drop me off at my place. my father decided to take me home first, because he needed to return to my aunt's place to do some final installation work on her couch.

the only change i made to the dementia clock code was to make the overnight text (半夜清晨) appear yellow. the rest of the evening was spent configuring the pi zero so it'd run the localized html file in kiosk mode. i made changes to my autostart file (sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart):

i also installed unclutter to hide the cursor: sudo apt-get install unclutter. this is different than the way i created an autostart when i worked on my rtsp video feed project. i think this way is slightly less elegant because it still needs to log into the raspbian desktop before it will run the page in chrome kiosk mode. i don't have access to my other pi0 (it's currently turned off at the cafe) so i can't peek at those settings to see what i did there. regardless, it still works, once in kiosk mode, it stays on screen indefinitely.