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Last year, I've cycled 4176 km, jogged 195 thousand steps, and walked (recording only started in December) 31 thousand steps. I'm proud of myself!😊

Every year, I submit my dentist's invoice for the dental cleaning to my health insurance, who covers a part of that. The invoicing has been outsourced, and I get a snail mail a few weeks later. At least that letter includes a login and password for their online portal, where a digital copy of the invoice can be downloaded, so I don't have to scan the original. (I communicate with the health insurance through unencrypted email. (Even signing the email confuses them, and they don't see the attached PDF. They offer encrypted messaging via their app, but the registration only was for my old mobile phone, and I didn't bother getting new credentials for the new one.)

The login (a 14-digit ID) changes each time, but the app wants me to change the password nonetheless. I don't know why it's changing all the time — dentist check-ups happen regularly every six months. (And each new calendar year I have to sign the delegation agreement again. Sigh. Bureaucracy.) It feels wrong, but maybe it's due to their integration, or for additional "privacy". Anyway, I have a password in my password manager, but the app doesn't allow me to paste this.

Well, fortunately, I just need to hit F12 to open the browser's web page inspector, locate the password box, and then remove the onpaste="return false" that suppresses the paste event. That's actually faster than typing my rather complex password twice.

They likely disallow copy-and-paste not because they hate password managers (what's to hate there? use one!), but to avoid support calls due to someone (mis-)entering a password and then copying it into the repeat field. (They offer to submit an email address for account recovery, but that's optional.) I wonder how effective that is, though — there are so many more ways to lose a password (and not being able to copy it out of the password field into (worst case) Notepad and not recognizing that the clipboard hasn't been updated is one sure way to lose the password).

The requirements on the password itself are benign: 10 characters, lower, upper, and digit, and shouldn't prevent the use of a password manager. So please, don't make it harder to use!

This year, I've cycled 4000 kilometers! It started in early February, when I extended the escorting of my daughter to her internship for my first tour, and greatly overestimated my physical capabilities on a trip of 48 km, the last 12 of which with cramps and exhaustion. I'd fallen behind with my training due to the pandemic and home office, but was intent on improving that. Through regular trips, I've rebuilt my stamina, discovered many beautiful new bike paths, and became really fond of cycling through the Schönbuch forest. My bike got an upgrade of its drive train during our vacation (but I eventually broke the gears in the hubs due to over-exertion; my poor old bike couldn't keep up with my strength).

I've tracked my mileage via the MapMyRide app, and entered the kilometers into my calendar, enabling my to leverage my scripting developed for time tracking at work to obtain a tally of the total distance:

$ khal ytd tally cyc
4029 km
--
Total effort: 36ed (213h) over 9.1 months (from 2024-02-05 until 2024-11-05)

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