Today, we are presenting a new type of TOTP hardware tokens — USB Programmable token that displays the OTP value as a QR code and also can send the current OTP value over USB as a part of its HID emulation feature.

What is EVVIS-QR1?

EVVIS-QR1 is a hardware device developed primarily for Electronic visit verification (EVV) information systems (hence the name). It is a standards-based TOTP hardware token that can also be programmed over USB. The OTP generated is shown on the display both as regular digits as well as a QR image. Both features (OTP shown as QR code and HID keyboard emulation) are intended to make it possible to minimize typos when entering the OTP.

As the world rearranges into virtualized societal norms, the most convenient and simplified interaction for businesses or socially has come from video-based apps. Extensive use of these conferencing apps is trending Post COVID-19 pandemic. Statista.com has tracked the high number of video conference app downloads from AppStore and GoogleStore for the following:

The convenience of these apps is defined by their rich-features: video calling, ability to share screens, and interact in real-time.

The term IPTV isn’t that well-known outside the world of media and streaming. However, it’s most people have likely used it without even knowing what it is– and they’re likely to use it even more in the future.

IPTV is a huge part of the paradigm shift from traditional modes of broadcasting, including cable TV and radio, to internet-based streaming. It is growing at a steady rate in today’s internet-friendly landscape, with newer, better services and providers mushrooming every day.

Here’s everything you need to know about this concept, from the definition of IPTV to how to create your own IPTV service.

1. Introduction

How can I easily test my MongoDB multi-document transaction code without setting up MongoDB on my device? One might argue that they have to set it up first because in order to carry out such a transaction it needs a session which requires a replica set. Thankfully, there is no need to create a 3-node replica set and we can run these transactions only against a single database instance.

I strain to make the far-off echo yield
A cue to the events that may come in my day.
(‘Doctor Zhivago’, Boris Pasternak)

I’ll be honest: I don’t write in pure C that often anymore and I haven’t been following the language’s development for a long time. However, two unexpected things happened recently: С won back the title of the most popular programming language according to TIOBE, and the first truly interesting book in years on this language was published. So, I decided to spend a few evenings studying material on C2x, the future version of C.

Here I will share with you what I consider to be its most interesting new features.

You will learn and implement a microservice in COBOL without Mainframe. You will structure the project, manage dependencies, implement automatic tests and build virtualized execution environment. Finally, you will publish the microservice on GitHub under Continuous Integration workflow.

Static code analysis is most effective when changing a project, as errors are always more difficult to fix in the future than at an early stage. We continue expanding the options for using PVS-Studio in continuous development systems. This time, we'll show you how to configure pull request analysis using self-hosted agents in Microsoft Azure DevOps, using the example of the Minetest game.

Kotlin is a JVM compatible & Java interoperable language that is the most-encouraged language by Google for developing Android apps & production-grade systems. According to Snyk, over the last few years, Kotlin has gained a huge user and developer base for robust, and secure app development.

The user-base has been shifted from 2.4% to 5.4%, that is a growth of 130% in the user population. This population growth and increment in its usage has made it the second most popular JVM language, that is quite surprising.

The reason for Kotlin application development is its 100% interoperability with Java. Around 7.78% of the world developers use Kotlin as their primary coding language. According to insights.dice- Kotlin is used 96% for new projects and 36% for migrating applications from Java to Kotlin. You can use it directly with Java code to make it more efficient, and it works concurrently or without any issue.



Many benchmark android applications of startups to moonshots have been built using Kotlin. Various startups and brands like EverNote, Twitter, Netflix, Slack, American Express, Airbnb, Adobe, and many others from different industry verticals opted for Kotlin app development.

Do you like GitLab and don't like bugs? Do you want to improve the quality of your source code? Then you've come to the right place. Today we will tell you how to configure the PVS-Studio C# analyzer for checking merge requests. Enjoy the reading and have a nice unicorn mood.

Modern IDEs are very powerful tools that can help developers in all kinds of situations. Unfortunately, much of this power is often lost because many functions remain unknown to developers, hiding in the shadows.

Structural search and replace is one such pair of features. They can be extremely useful in situations where a whole variety of other functions can’t quite get the job done.

In this post, I will present some of these situations and go beyond artificial cases by demonstrating examples of real code from two projects:

1. 3D-engine for game development, jMonkeyEngine, which is an example of a big, interesting project.
2. My own pet project, plantuml-native-image, where I experiment with compiling PlantUML into native executable code using GraalVM Native Image.

In fact, it is this second project that encouraged me to write this post but I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first...

I'm not going to discuss global things like design patterns and so on, as there's enough literature on that topic. Instead, I'd like to attract your attention to some small things that still affect lucidity and maintainability of a code.

Polluting code with 'test-only' methods or access modifiers

First of all, if you give access to something that shouldn't be used in production code, it gets used sooner or later. Just because it exist. The argument that it's an internal stuff doesn't work as it absolutely shouldn't be matter, writing you a library or isolated project! Treat people who will add anything to your internal codebase the same way as if they use your existing code as a different library.

Thus, if for some reason in test, you need to call something that should not be called on prod — use reflection or whatever else but do not expose it in production code! And there's no reason to afraid of reflection for test proposes, at the end, you using Mockito, shouldn't it be bad in that case as well?

There are various programming languages available but it is difficult to choose the best one when it comes to our own project. And sometimes we even get stuck between the different languages when we have to make a choice among them.

PHP has surely become the most ubiquitous language for the world today. Being around for a while, PHP is ruling the market, with expectations to dominate for years to come. Therefore, irrespective of the size of a business, PHP remains the first choice to get a sturdy and customizable website created.

However, It is important to understand that PHP is an art (Scripting language), you need to hire an artist (developer) to yield the best from it.

Choosing the best from the pool of more than 5 million PHP developers is a tedious task. Even more when you’re a noob into this industry. Apart from language skills, there are multiple other factors, such as budget, skills, experience that influence the decision to hire a particular remote PHP team.

One of the most relevant scenarios for using the PVS-Studio analyzer is its integration into CI systems. Even though a project analysis by PVS-Studio can already be embedded with just a few commands into almost any continuous integration system, we continue to make this process even more convenient. PVS-Studio now supports converting the analyzer output to the TeamCity format-TeamCity Inspections Type. Let's see how it works.

Retinal detachment is a formidable eye disease that, without surgical treatment, most often results in complete loss of vision.

The human eye can be compared with the device of the camera, the lens of which is the cornea with the lens, and the film is the retina, an extremely complex multi-layer structure that is connected to the visual divisions of the brain with the help of nerve fibers. Therefore, we can assume that the retina is a part of the brain.

Retinal detachment most often takes the patient by surprise — before it appears, a person may have excellent vision and may not present any complaints. The speed of propagation of the process is quite rapid, the treatment in the majority of cases is surgical.


The timeliness of the operation gives a chance to preserve vision; in Germany, according to the standard, the operation must be performed within 24 hours after the diagnosis. There are no such standards in Russia. But for each patient, I say that retinal detachment is “like fresh frozen fish” — in a couple of days it’s already “not the first freshness”.

Can you imagine what a person feels who does not see or almost does not see the world around? This condition is called blindness — the inability to perceive visual stimuli due to pathological disorders in the eye itself, in the optic nerves or in the brain. In 1972, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the following definition: a person is considered blind if the sharpness of central vision under conditions of maximum correction does not exceed 3/60. With this vision, a person in daylight conditions with maximum optics correction is unable to count fingers from a distance of 3 meters.

So for such cases, the idea of ​​electrical stimulation of the retina or visual cortex was proposed, the creation of a prosthesis that, by the mechanism of action, simulates the actual processes of transmission of electrical signals.


There are several variants of electronic implants, each year new ideas appear, but the term and the Bionic Eye itself were developed by Daniel Palanker, a staff member at Stanford University and his research group Biomedical Physics and Ophthalmic Technologies.

The implantation of the Argus II bionic eye model (by the way, the only model that has an EU brand, but not certified in Russia) was performed in Russia in July 2017 for one patient. And from all sources of television broadcasting we heard — now a person will be able to see the world as before. Hundreds of people are asked to put a bionic eye, and some also ask to “implant” the chips for super-vision.

So what do we have today and can the dream to see the world come true after it has lost sight?

Imagine the situation — you live in peace, nothing hurts and does not blush, wear glasses or lenses, or do not use anything and see perfectly — and you accidentally get an appointment with an ophthalmologist. For example, because of conscription into the army, because of pregnancy, or just for a dispensary examination. And suddenly you will find out that your retina is “full of holes” or stretched and is about to break.

And they recommend you to “sew it on”. And you doubt — and this is exactly what you need? And how safe is it? But nothing bothers — then why? Or maybe they want to earn money on me? And the first thing you start is to read posts on the Internet, what a “independent” expert like Google will say.

And in the future everything depends on your discipline and attention to your own health. You can get to the ophthalmologist-laser specialist, who will be the last resort, and he will do preventive laser coagulation.

Or «forget it» for everything and continue to live as before — nothing bothers you. What is the risk?

Why do you need a CRM system? Well, it’s at least more convenient than keeping your client database in Excel. Why do you need CRM with VoIP? If you have ever interacted offline, you know you cannot do it without telephony (orders, delivery, support etc.).

But what prevents 80% of companies from trying out a CRM tool? If prices is the matter, we are offering a free CRM system integrated with the phone system and free PBX.

To anticipate questions about installation difficulty, CRM setup and contact import doesn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Friends, after a break, we resume publications on vision and technology to restore it. The pause was connected with my workload of operations and participation in conferences: in the near future I will publish a review of the most interesting technical innovations in ophthalmology that were presented at them, and today we will talk about astigmatism.


Modern statistics depressing. More than half of the world's population suffers from visual impairment, the most common problems are myopia and hyperopia. But ophthalmologists often diagnose another disease, the name of which is unfamiliar to many. Astigmatism is a defect in the optical system of the eye when the sharpness of the image is asymmetric vertically and horizontally. And the parallel rays of light passing through the eye are focused not into a point, but into the “eight”. For a person, this means that the visibility of the image becomes unsharp, and this often applies to both distant and close objects. As a result, instead of a normal image, a person sees a distorted image, in which some lines are clear, others are blurred. An idea of ​​this can be obtained if you look at your distorted reflection in an oval teaspoon.

Ophthalmologists say that almost two thirds of the world's inhabitants face such a problem. But since the degree of astigmatism may be small, many people practically do not feel any discomfort. It is difficult for doctors to identify a clear list of common symptoms indicating that a patient has astigmatism. In each case, they will differ. In the very early stages, it is often confused with tired eyes.

However, quite a few people need special treatment or correction of this disorder with the help of glasses, contact lenses or even surgery.

We know that nobody is immune to glaucoma.

The number of patients with glaucoma worldwide more than 100 million (!) People. Nine out of ten blind people live in developing countries, and two thirds of them could be cured, they begin to be treated on time.

Glaucoma is the second cause of blindness after cataract — up to 20% of all cases of the disease end with it. Some people do not know about the disease. Glaucoma is often detected at stage 2–3 or at the last, 4th stage, when it is often impossible to help a person. In Russia, glaucoma has recently become the first cause of irreversible blindness, overtaking injury and vascular eye disease.

Despite a serious breakthrough in the understanding of many of the problems of glaucoma over the past few years, it must be admitted that so far no effective methods have been proposed to prevent the disease, its early (fairly cheap method!) Identification and treatment methods that are widely available.

The trouble is that the prevention of this disease, we have long ceased. Previously, after forty, all Soviet people were sure to measure eye pressure once a year. In clinics there were professional examination rooms, people with elevated intraocular pressure were referred to an ophthalmologist. And so revealed about half of patients with glaucoma. Now there is nothing like this. Saving patients was the work of the patients themselves (that is, drowning people).


Since the treatment of glaucoma is just as dangerous as caving — you climb into the dark, and when and what falls on your head, science is unknown. But if you don’t fall, you will drown or suffocate yourself — there are options. When you guess where you are, it will be too late. Let me start with a number of rules described below.