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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 11th, 2024

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  • Thanks for the question, it actually made me look for the api. Looks like I misremembered it, and there aren’t actually any exposed APIs for developers regarding attention. Internally it’s used by iOS for checking when you’re looking at the screen for faceID and keeping the screen lit when you’re reading.

    There are APIs for developers that expose the position of the users head, but apparently it excludes eye information. Looks like it’s also pretty resource intensive, and mainly for AR applications.

    The faceID / touchID api essentially only returns “authenticated”, “authenticating”, and “unautheticated”. The prompts / UI are stock iOS and cannot be altered, save showing a reason.








  • Non- tech: I’m a psychiatrist, generally working with offenders in hospital and prisons. The clinical work is always interesting, and im usually thankful for openness at which people spill their life stories to me.

    Tech: I’ve kinda thought myself software development since I started working as a doctor. There’s just too much inefficiencies in the way we work clinically day-to-day due to the sheer amount of defensive practice inherent in the health system. Started off with personal tools to “assist” the electronic systems in place. But since then I’ve launched and maintained a number of digital clinical tools in a few local hospital which I’m pretty proud of.



  • For the backend I used the ADO library to create a MSAccess DB on a shared network folder. Then it’s a matter of using VBA to generate SQL commands to same library to read / write records from the DB.

    For the frontend, I use VBA to generate a HTML document from the fetched data. For the IE control in a user form, you can then write the HTML to it. During this process you can bind local VBA variables to any of the html elements in the page.

    A common flow would be:

    • User clicks an element in a table
    • simple JS on the page does some calculation, stores a value in a hidden input and clicks it.
    • the user form variable detects the click in the monitored element, reads the changes, and acts on it.

    I also have VBScript to act as the launcher by copying the excel file to the local machine, and launching the local copy. This solves the concurrency issue.


  • I can really emphasise with Samir. Working in healthcare I’m basically limited to just the Office applications. However in the past few years I’ve been able to cook up solutions by reading / writing to file based databases, and using VBA to generate and bind to HTML contents on the fly for the built in IE11 instance. It’s as close to getting to some kind of web-stack within the confines of IT Sec in healthcare.