Medicare Cost Data and the Pixel

Extensive cost data for medical procedures has recently been released. I thought it might be interesting to explore it, and out of curiosity try to do so on the Pixel. Unfortunately, this highlights why ChromeOS still needs some work.

The spreadsheet cannot be uploaded to a Google Sheet, because it has more than 400 thousand cells. Oops. A second option was fusion tables, but fusion tables is unable to geocode addresses split into multiple columns. In fact, Google's recommended solution is to download and modify the file on something other than a Chromebook using Excel.

I was expecting problems with programming given the lack of editors, IDEs and build tools, but not basic spreadsheet tasks!

More Pixel

After more Pixel use, I have encountered two minor issues with easy solutions to share.

Firstly, the clock was off by two hours this morning. Since it was previously correct, and the timezone was set properly, I suspected an underlying NTP problem. But I found this thread suggesting that the timezone setting is ignored in favor of the (unset) apps domain timezone setting. After setting the domain timezone, the time was correct again.

Secondly, hiding Gmail labels by dragging them into the "More Labels" section doesn't work. I found this thread explaining that the cause is the new "Touch-enabled" inbox view, and switching back to "Comfortable" returns the familiar behavior.