Category Archives: Computers

State moving to new public access data portal

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Back in October 2012, the State of Hawaii launched a new website, data.hawaii.gov, which was described at the time as “an important new tool that will help to transform government and increase public accessibility to public records.”

It was part of Governor Neil Abercrombie’s attempt to upgrade the state’s technology infrastructure in a way that would increase public access to government data by gathering it in a central online portal.

It was run by Socrata, which had also been selected for the federal government’s data.gov website offering access to datasets from federal agencies.

Now the state’s contract with Socrata is due to expire in August, and the officially launched a new data portal last month on a platform developed by a Socrata competitor, OpenGov. The new portal can be found at opendata.hawaii.gov.

At least one agency has run into an apparently unexpected technical glitch that has created a new problem.

The Hawaii State Ethics Commission processes thousands of public filings each year, including annual financial disclosure and gift disclosure forms filed by state employees and public officials, along with lobbyist registrations and disclosure of lobbyist expenditures. Although some of these financial disclosures are confidential, many others are meant to be publicly accessible for inspection.

Until recently, its lists of disclosures were available for viewing and downloading via the state’s data portal. This provided the public with the ability to ask and answer more complex or focused questions. Rather than simply being able to view the expenditures disclosed during a particular year by a particular organization’s lobbyists, it was simple to download the data and look at trends over a period of years. I used the data to rank organizations by the amounts they spend on lobbying, and update those lists over different time periods.

But when the latest deadline for lobbyist disclosures passed, I discovered the data is no longer available for downloads.

So I sent a query to the commission, and received a prompt reply from Executive Director Dan Gluck.

From what I understand, we used to have all our data in Socrata, which you could download, but we’ve been migrating everything over to Salesforce. Our new e-filing system uses Salesforce, so this way, people file their forms (in Salesforce) and then they’re available on-line without us having to tinker with them too much. We’ve also been migrating our old data into Salesforce so that everything’s in one place. The downside is that I don’t think that you can download the data on the public side like you could with Socrata….

The remaining Socrata datasets will be taken off-line in August, I think, so if you’re interested in that data, you may want to download that now.”

Gluck also said the commission staff can download the datasets into Excel or CSV files on request, so hopefully this will at least retain the same level of accessibility that has existed in recent years.

In any case, I immediately contacted the Campaign Spending Commission, and was relieved to find out campaign-related data will continue to be readily accessible going forward.

According to an email from Tony Baldomero, the commission’s associate executive director, “our datasets will still be available to you and the public for download. There’s no change to this in the horizon.”

“The Commission’s candidate and noncandidate committee datasets which you can access on data.hawaii.gov can already be found on opendata.hawaii.gov for you to access,” Baldomero said in an email. “We will continue to have our datasets on both open data sites until data.hawaii.gov is phased out by the State or until our separate contract with Socrata ends.”

See also:

“Browsing the State Ethic Commission’s online disclosure system,” iLind.net, July 3, 2019.

Rolf at MacMouse Club gives new life to another old Mac

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I have to give a plug to Rolf Nordahl, the Head Cheese at MacMouse Club, who offers Mac-related services, upgrades, and repairs. I turned to him a couple of weeks ago in a last-ditch effort to breath new life into an older Mac laptop (a 13″ MacBook Pro 2013 vintage that was experiencing serious “issues”). And Rolf was so successful that I want to give him a shout out. If you have an Mac that isn’t operating properly, or is just dated and running slower than it should be, check in with Rolf and you just might be surprised. I certainly was both surprised and pleased by the results.

Here’s the long version of my story. At some point over the last year, I noticed that my well-used laptop no longer closed cleanly. Instead, when closed, there was a small visible gap where the upper and lower case no longer fit exactly right. At first, I didn’t worry about it, but I did start thinking about replacing it.

While considering a new computer, I checked and found the nearby Apple Store would give me a trade-in of several hundred dollars for this computer. Great, I thought. Then I saw the small print explaining that the trade-in offer did not apply if the computer showed any warping or swelling. The failure to close properly looked like evidence of warping, even if relatively minor.

But then I had to admit that there was a certain amount of swelling, which I only noticed because the laptop had started to wobble a bit when sitting on a flat surface because its the bottom of the case was starting to warp. I had seen this before. Back a decade or so, the battery of an older Mac laptop that was no longer being used started swelling and eventually broke through the cover of the battery compartment. Luckily, it didn’t burst info flames as others had reportedly done.

So now I worried that my MacBook Pro wasn’t just getting old, it was getting dangerous.

So I bought a new computer. I would have recycled the old one if the Apple Store had been open. But in the meantime, I wondered whether a battery replacement could make the old computer useable again. So I called Rolf.

Many moons ago, MacMouse Club was located on South Street somewhere between the state courts and the old newspaper building on Kapiolani. As a Mac enthusiast, I used to stop in from time to time to check out whether anything new and exciting was in the store. If Rolf or his partner at the time, Mike “Big Mike” Palcic, were around, I could get both a Mac fix and a bit of political gossip as well.

So I gave Rolf call. Yes, he said the battery on this model is replaceable. And he could get the job done in just a few days, at a reasonable price, even though he had to special order the battery for overnight delivery. So I dropped off the computer and hoped for the best.

Long story short. Rolf called a day early to say that he had replaced the battery and then run it through a complete charging cycle, just to make sure all was well. And when I picked up the computer, I found that replacing the battery eliminated virtually all of the warping and swelling. A little bit of cleaning and it looked almost as good as new.

So instead of giving it back to Apple as part of their recycling program, my little laptop has gone to a friend who can make good use of it.

In any case, you can reach Rolf at (808) 921-8294. Tell him Ian sent you.

Times they are a changin’

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Back in 2006, when I was carrying a Mac laptop around town while I reported on various stories, I saw and quickly signed up to use Undercover, a service made it possible to track and locate your computer if it were to be stolen.

We loaded Undercover on several generations of laptops, and would get regular reports letting us know that they were still being actively tracked.

Then came the sudden announcement from Undercover’s parent company, Orbicule, that their service would shut down on January 1, 2020.

What led to the end of Undercover makes for kind of an interesting story.

This is from the company’s blog:

Why are we halting Undercover development

The main reason is that over the past 6 years, Apple has significantly increased security on macOS. While that’s a good thing in general, it makes it increasingly more difficult to reliably run hidden software like Undercover.

Another key point is that FileVault has become mainstream. This means that a thief won’t be able to access your files without your password – again a good thing. However, this also means that Undercover won’t be able to function properly, as third party developers don’t have access to the recovery partition that is being used when a thief boots your Mac without knowing your password. Only Apple has access to this recovery partition, where it can run FindMyMac.
Undercover (or any other third party application) can’t run on this recovery partition and will be useless if FileVault has been enabled.

A third reason is that with macOS Catalina, Apple is refreshing its FindMyMac app (now called FindMy) and will leverage its large installed base of Macs and iPhones to track stolen devices, even if they never connect to the internet. They do so by using Bluetooth connections of nearby devices that are connected to the internet. Again a great idea from Apple, but Undercover or any other third party application, do not have access to this functionality.

When launched in January 2006, Undercover was groundbreaking software. The fact that Apple has replicated Undercover-like functionality and embedded it deep into iOS and macOS shows the value of the theft-recovery genre that Undercover has pioneered. At this point, however, we feel that we can no longer deliver reliable software due to security restrictions, while having a hard time carving out a successful business model competing with free Apple software that is installed by default on every Mac and has access to system features that we can only dream of.

We’re proud of the literally thousands of stolen Macs that have been recovered thanks to Undercover. We’re also proud of the fact that Undercover helped bringing a little bit of justice in a world that’s often unfair. Undercover even provided critical evidence to arrest a drug gang.

We would like to thank you, as a user, for your continued support over the past 14 years. It has been a great journey!

– The Undercover Team

Don’t ignore the resources of your public library system

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Libraries are no longer just places where you go to borrow books.

The Hawaii State Public Library System is an invaluable resource, as it provides anyone with a library card now only a rich source of printed books and magazines, but also a portal into a huge digital library. All free to you.

There are links to newspapers (current and archived), depositories of state and federal documents. Lots of interesting stuff buried in here.

There’s a long list of databases accessible through the library website.

Scrolling through the list, there’s lots of general information. Then I got to two publications by Congressonal Quarterly, CQ Researcher and CQ Weekly. I subscribed to CQ Weekly for a while, but it got too expensive. Now I can read it for free. There’s the Foundations Directory, an excellent guide for researchers and journalists, among others. There’s a Hawaiian Legends Index, which I haven’t had time to explore yet. There’s a collection of Japanese-American Relocation Camp newspapers. Legal Information Reference Center. Morningstar Investment Research Center. There’s a search engine to search a variety of newspapers and magazines for any topic you’re interested in. There’s lots of science, medicine, health, history…It’s kind of a treasure trove.

I believe the libraries still offer access to Press Reader, which gets you to stories from newspapers around the world. The basic subscription if free using your library card number and PIN, and if you want the fancier options, you can upgrade your subscription as well.

Of course, you can still borrow physical books. Or you can also borrow ebooks or audiobooks, if that’s your preference.

Libraries (at least those on the east side of Honolulu) have also become bookstores. Hawaii Kai, Aina Haina, and Kaimuki have sections where used books are for sale at very low prices. I’ll plug Hawaii Kai, which opens its bookstore almost every day.

The Hawaii State Libary…if you start exploring, its collection will entertain and inform you for quite a while.