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It's time for the annual reminder that today, 10th October, is World Mental Health Day.

Obviously, for many, every day is mental health day but it doesn't hurt to have a specific day to raise awareness.

As I always say on these days, talk to someone if you need to. A loved one, a friend, a health professional, it doesn't matter – just start the conversation. Don't suffer in silence.

And if someone chooses you as the one they want to speak to just listen. Don't judge, don't interrupt, be there to offer support and to show you care.

Everyone's circumstances are different so we cannot presume to know what someone is going through. What works for one may not work for another, may even trigger them, so be liberal with empathy but careful with advice.

Look after one another.

Word of the day: inveigh

• verb
  1. speak or write about (something) with great hostility

Like On Writing Toward Self-Belief – Bix Dot Blog...

blogging is writing yourself toward self-belief

The sensible, rational side of me (is there one?) says "Why? Don't do it to yourself!" But the geek in me, however, says "I really want to be able to log into my website with my fingerprint!" while maniacally laughing and wringing his hands.

It's just using some JavaScript to interact with the WebAuthn API on a supported device and browser, right? Right!?

What could possibly go wrong? 😆

Update OK, so it's a lot more involved than that. This looks beyond me.

I decided to try using part of the WebAuthn stuff to fudge fingerprint authentication but it was always generating the same user id regardless of which phone I was trying it on. Unhelpful.

I did a search and it transpires:

"Some authenticators, such as those that use built-in fingerprint scanners, may not be able to generate unique IDs for each user. In these cases, the authenticator will always generate the same ID for all users."

So much for taking a shortcut. I think I'll just stick to username & password.