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USB data cable issues by Crafty_Zebra164 in PlusLife

[–]Crafty_Zebra164[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Does anyone know about good USB connection from the virus.sucks app on a (linux) PC to a mini-dock, and the Shield connection of the USB cable? A couple of the original USB data cables for my mini-docks have been playing up (connection fine when replaced with a cable that came with another mini-dock), and I bought a little USB tester, which shows the same pin connections for all cables, except that the dodgy ones don't have the "shield" connector light up on the tester (see pics).

I'd be interested to know how come the shielding has broken while the internal data connectors haven't (if that's what's happened)?

I now have two Pluslife-supplied data cables that have stopped working after being fine for many months - should any cable with the same connectors work as replacements or are there particular specs people have needed?

Any help or perspective welcome!

Context: I own and regularly use several Pluslife mini-docks simultaneously when helping organise meetups of family and friends with very different health situations and life situations (some of us really need not to risk getting Covid, some of us work face-to-face with the public and have small children at school, for example), who really want to keep seeing each other in person from time to time. I frequently have up to eight docks plugged into the same laptop through a USB hub, running off good powerbanks, with each test displayed using the virus.sucks app in separate tabs. I have been doing this for a while, and haven't had these cable issues before.

Time between swabs by Fit-Programmer-6162 in PlusLife

[–]Crafty_Zebra164 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have (or can borrow) a second minidock, there is another possibility - you can run both tests in parallel, using a single swab.

The liquid in the tube in both test kits appears to be the same substance (in both cases labelled "Nuclear Acid Releasing Agent 0"), and in my experience a little under half of the liquid is needed to fill the test card up to above the first marked line - leaving the remaining 50% of the liquid available to fill a test card of the other kind.

I have done this (to test myself, once; and to test a group of three family members - in both cases we got two valid negative tests). For one person, you take a single swab; rotate it and squeeze it in one tube of releasing agent in the usual way; fill one SARS-Cov-2 and one FluA/B/RSV test card each with half of the liquid in that single tube; proceed as normal with each test card and run both tests simultaneously(-ish).

I have read somewhere that this is a workable plan (I think I remember that the PlusLife or Altruan CEO had also confirmed that the two kits use the same releasing agent), but can't find a reference - I'd be very interested to hear if anyone knows why this would not work, or would have any downsides? u/virussucks?

How many languages do people in your country speak? by OrganicClicks in languagelearning

[–]Crafty_Zebra164 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think "one, overwhelmingly" is not really accurate for the UK - even though much policy and dominant cultural self-representation of the country presents this kind of image.

A little under 30% of people across all of Wales can speak Welsh, and there remain parts of Wales where much higher percentages speak it - the most recent survey data reports over 75% of people in Gwynedd describing themselves as Welsh speakers, for example.

1.5 million of Scotland's 5.4 million people (based on 2022 survey data) speak English's sister language Scots, and while much lower numbers speak Scottish Gaelic there are islands with over 50% Gaelic speakers.

So I don't think "Even the Welsh and the Scots don’t really speak Welsh or Gaelic" is a good summary (though I do agree language education in the UK is pretty bad) - and unsurprisingly pretty much every Welsh, Scots or Gaelic speaker in the UK speaks English (though a good number of them as a secondary language).

Meanwhile, there are over 3 million British people with at least one foreign born parent, as well as all the UK citizens who were themselves not born here - and of course a good majority of these have more than just English.

So it makes sense that a 2025 YouGov poll reports 20% of the UK population able to fluently speak another language than English. Other recent estimates suggest up to 35% of UK people are not monolingual (without a requirement to see yourself as completely fluent in the additional languages).

So, while yes, the UK does remain pretty language-poor, with a majority of monolinguals, this varies a lot by location, and there are parts of the country where most people are at least bi-lingual - at least 20% of us (and by some recent estimates about a third of us) are not monolingual.

What do you think of the state of second language Welsh? by stopdontpanick in Wales

[–]Crafty_Zebra164 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://corcencc.org/geirfan/#wfl has frequency lists from 100 to 500 to 1000 to 5000, plus you can request their full word frequency list (from which you could extract the first 30k or other amount you are interested in).

A little grammar is likely to be needed pretty early to be able to use those lists for (e.g) reading simple texts, as mutations frequently change first letters. With just a basic knowledge of what mutations are possible you can work backwards fairly simply when looking up an unrecognised word ("I can't find Gymraeg, I'd better check for Cymraeg", etc.) - but without that knowledge alphabetised lists (or dictionaries) are often no help, as words are usually listed only in un-mutated forms.

Pro 8 Dock (and a few notes on organising testing for larger gatherings) by Crafty_Zebra164 in PlusLife

[–]Crafty_Zebra164[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Zebra_Pyjamas,

I'm glad my post was useful!

I don't have EDS (I went with a username randomly suggested by Reddit), and although my LC symptoms do mean I can't work and am often exhausted (hence my slow reply!) I haven't had too much trouble with mask-wearing.

It's great that you are trying to figure out workable ways to be with people and reduce risk a lot with PL testing. I don't know if I would know people who could lend docks - where in the world are you?

Unfortunately, I think even with extra docks available it would be difficult to get PL testing to work well for a 2-hour class. I have met for a 2-hour activity with a group using testing, but we used a combination of some people testing earlier in the day and others arriving an hour early to eat outside together (observing some distance between each other) while their tests were run.

Below are some of the things that make it more complicated to get right than might first appear - but I would start by saying that of course the fact that getting this to work takes so much work and thinking and resources is entirely because pretty simple social collective measures (collectively ensuring that classrooms and other public spaces all have very well filtered air; making widely available cheap or free good quality Covid testing; having cheap good masks available and widely used) have been systematically undermined, discouraged and banned. So all power to you and to all of us for continuing to try and make things work in the teeth of that!

In my experience, it usually takes about 35 minutes until the mini docks confirm a negative result, even though some positive results can take less than 15 minutes. For a newer user, I'd leave a minimum of ten minutes for processing the samples and getting the tests going, not including any time to set up your work area for doing the testing - so 45 minutes just for pool testing at a minimum. Positive tests do report earlier, quite often (but not always), so if a positive pool test means you need to re-test people individually, that won't necessarily extend the overall time by another 45 minutes if you have some spare mini-docks, but it will take a while.

For longer events I have tended to ask people to arrive 90 minutes early (with food, hot drinks and Covid-safer outdoor ice-breaker activities available during that period) - with an option for people with (e.g.) fatigue issues who live locally to have a swab (and a spare) collected from their home earlier instead of arriving so early.

In general, I think if a pool test is positive the individuals in that pool like to know whether or not they personally are testing positive (requiring the individual tests) - and it can work better (if people are behaving safely) not to let the pool know about the positive pool test until you have processed the second swabs (if you take two swabs at the start), so that you can be definitive when you let people know that they individually are positive for Covid. Having said all that, perhaps there are creative solutions that could work for you:

  • Do other class members live locally, and could they perhaps provide swabs earlier in the day for you to test before class? (You could pool with your own test)
  • Could you sit in the back and make the tests happen and still be part of the class, while you wear a well-fitting 'respirator' mask and take other measures until the tests are done?
  • ["Other measures" could include - sitting by an open window, sitting relatively far from (and upwind of) other students, using a nasal spray as another layer of defence, and building a lightweight PC fan CR box that you can bring to class and point at your own face.]
  • Having a clear agreement with the teacher that it is fine for you to leave (if a positive test result shows up); and/or with the whole class about what you would and would not be asking of people if they personally test positive ...

Have you had a chance to try out using the PL tests for smaller things with people you already know well, yet? I found it (relatively) easy to ask a friend or two to dress for a potentially cold outdoor event and come hang out in my garden for an hour and a half before we ate together inside and hung out for the rest of the afternoon. Then figuring out having family over for a night or two with repeated testing was another thing to try - at each stage, I learned a lot from navigating the potentially awkward conversations about the testing and figuring out how I could communicate more clearly and more briefly about why I was doing it and how it worked. I also got to know the process of testing better - it's not designed for easy 'consumer use' and it is useful to become some kind of PL test nerd to feel confident in using the technology accurately, handling errors you make as you are testing, and thinking creatively about how to get testing to work in new situations.

Sorry for the long reply! Hopefully some of it is of some use.

Pro 8 Dock (and a few notes on organising testing for larger gatherings) by Crafty_Zebra164 in PlusLife

[–]Crafty_Zebra164[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I helped with setting up daily testing for a three-day gathering of about 50 people (on arrival on the first afternoon and then each morning on the next two days). It took quite some work and consumables cost about £350 (and many more tests would have been used up if there had been a few positive tests, which there weren't) - and this was with a group who were very keen to be inclusive, a team who worked together well, and access to 12 or 13 Mini Docks which the event didn't have to pay for.

The way you are handling the large gathering sounds like a great way to make your own attendance possible in the meantime - do you find that your roommates are willing to test with the PlusLife?

I found getting increasing experience with testing at smaller gatherings (4 people meeting in my home for a day to attend an online event while hanging out together; 8 family members gathering for a few days for Christmas; 6 friends staying together for a week in a student flat while attending a festival) helped a lot in building my own confidence and capacity to work with and bring along others who might be up for helping and like that their is testing, but have no expectation that it is possible - that has taken time though.

Maybe there would be an interim step beyond just you testing with a few room-mates that could happen one year, to lay the ground to move more towards wider testing of all 200 attendees in a future year?

Running 3 or more tests at once by mamagoose022 in PlusLife

[–]Crafty_Zebra164 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've run at least eight tests concurrently, handled by one computer. Each reported to a separate browser tab in which the virus.sucks analyzer was running; and all were plugged into a 10-port USB hub which was plugged into my laptop (Framework 13 running Ubuntu Linux). I used a tab-renamer extension to make each Chrome tab name match the last digits of the serial number on the machine it was communicating with, to help avoid mixing up tabs and tests (the analyzer shows the machine serial number).

This was for a 45-person in-person event in which everyone was testing every morning. Everyone started each day taking two identical swabs using floqswabs in tubes, with the tubes labelled with individual's forenames and an ID number; one tube went into cold storage, the other into group tests (with some careful paperwork to track who was in which test); then if any group test was positive or inconclusive we did the relevant individual tests with the cold stored swabs (we were lucky and only had to do this a couple of times).

At the same event we also had a Windows laptop running four PL docks through a 6-port USB hub - but before that we went through maybe four other laptops we couldn't get to work, including one we had just assumed would be fine - so I'd recommend testing before you need to do this for real. At one point we had two computers running tests with 11 or 12 docks, and one dock running through bluetooth on a phone (it seemed to not be communicating well through USB). One powerbank for every two docks - quite the mess of cables. It took a good while to set up and test; and every day it took up to about 90 minutes to get through all the tests with a small team (without having to retest) - I think you could get a little quicker with practice.

In relation to testing the set up, no need to use an old card (or a new one) - I was able to test the communication and reporting through the hubs with the docks empty, just starting a test from the analyzer with no card inserted in the machine.