I’ve never been able to get into a flight simulator before, but I really want to check this one out. This is a fantastic in-depth look at it. Make sure to crank the resolution all the way up.
The party set off from Neverwinter with the supplies en route to Phandalin. They came across two dead horses in a choke point on the road. Hagnar went to briefly investigate, then returned to the cart, only to be ambushed by two goblins with one more sniping with arrows from the trees. Tarot charmed one, while Thunder cleaved the arm off another, leaving the third to run away as Hagnar sniped it in the back.
Thunder discovered that the horses belonged to Gundren and Sildar, and convinced the goblin Grok to bring them to where they were taken. While distractedly talking to Tarot, Grok failed to point out one of the traps, nearly causing Hagnar to fall into a pit. They arrived at the mouth of a cave, where Grok turned tail and fled.
Peering into the cave, the party noticed it was dark, so Azunyan lit Thunder’s axe bright pink with sparkles. This caught the attention of two goblin guards, who shot arrows at the party from a bunch of nearby thickets, hitting Hagnar. The party took shots at the two goblins, with Tarot slicing one’s throat and the other getting hit with a firebolt from Azunyan and a cleave from Thunder.
Heading into the cave, the group sees three wolves, and tries to tame them. Azunyan puts one briefly to sleep, and goes to calm the others, but one is only made angrier, which leads Thunder to quickly kill it. This drives the other into a rage, and the party decides this is more trouble than it’s worth, and heads deeper into the cave.
After a little while, they see a goblin keeping watch who notices the party and begins running off to alert the rest of the goblins. Thunder whips an axe at him and kills him instantly, knocking him into the river below. They decide to try to climb up a rocky embankment but it collapses, knocking Thunder unconscious as he falls into the river. Tarot tries to pull him out but gets dragged in as well. Hagnar and Azunyan pull him out with rope and they spend a couple hours helping him recover.
They head back into the cave, seeing the wolves, and the now conscious Thunder antagonizes the wolves with a face, which stirs the wolves into a frenzy, causing one to yank loose its chain. The party coerces it out of sight and kills it with a fire bolt from Azunyan and a scimitar shot from Hagnar. Azunyan then calms the other wolf, now all alone, and forms a solid bond with it.
I was a guest on The Icon Garden podcast today, talking about the newly announced SwiftUI, how it co-exists with other tools like React Native, and what it means for the future of native apps and cross-platform hybrid apps.
So Zoom runs a web server on your Mac (even after you uninstall the app), and that web server can launch Zoom calls via URLs, and those Zoom calls can default to having your camera open. Which apparently makes it very easy to embed something into a web page (or an ad) in an attempt to trick people into unwittingly opening a video chat.
Remote video exploits are one of the worst case scenarios of security vulnerability, and this is it. It looks like Zoom took over two months to start responding to it from the timeline, and if that’s true, it’s irresponsible security practice.
If you have Zoom installed on your Mac, check the “Patch Yourself” section of the article to block the functionality that allows this.
As of now my personal website should support WebSub on all pages, posts, and the RSS feed (basically everything linked in the sitemap). If you have the capability to subscribe to pages via WebSub, you should be able to point it at any page on this site and get notified when that page updates. That’s maybe not the most useful on individual pages, but it is useful for the home page, or if you want to be able to subscribe to individual tags or projects.
This should work well with social readers that let you subscribe to websites, at least in concept. To go with that, I’ve updated the microformats across much of the site to make them accessible to those readers. Things appear alright in web-based validators but I’ve been having trouble getting those changes to appear in the readers themselves. Hopefully that will fix itself as caches expire. But it’s one step further down the road of being a good IndieWeb citizen.
Behind the scenes, WebSub support is handled by Webmaster, my custom-built server that integrates with my Gatsby build system. When GitLab finishes building, it sends a webhook to Webmaster that signals that the site has changed, causing Webmaster to fetch the sitemap and scan the ETag of each file in it for changes. If any of those ETags are different from what’s already known, then that page has changed. The WebSub subscribers for that URL are fetched and notified with the changes. No WebSub hub necessary, but down the road I could switch to one pretty easily.
Checking out the IndieWeb Summit remotely and working on my personal website today.
With the impending release of the third expansion Shadowbringers, I’ve been rewatching this amazing documentary on Final Fantasy XIV, its very poor launch, and its reconstruction. It’s a fascinating tale, one that has probably never been attempted (and likely never will again).
In September 2018, the Verge posted a video that was designed to show people how to build a PC, which was full of errors and mistakes. Some were inconsequential or considered bad practice, like having bad cable management which might impede airflow but wouldn’t necessarily impact performance. Some would cause performance problems but not damage, like putting the GPU in the wrong PCI-e slot. And some issues could cause irreversible damage, like using the wrong screws on the radiator, which could potentially penetrate the radiator tubing and cause coolant leaks. The internet quickly began criticizing this video for its flaws, making parodies and reaction videos, and the Verge disabled the comments on the video before ultimately taking it down, amending the accompanying article noting that the video wasn’t up to their standards. Paul’s Hardware did a very good summary of the video and the reaction to it. The internet made fun of it for awhile, and everyone largely moved on. Until this week.
On Tuesday evening, Kyle from the YouTube channel Bitwit tweeted that the Verge had used YouTube’s copyright strike system to take down his reaction video. The Verge did not issue a statement or public comment to this, but about a day later, the claim was reversed after being disputed. According to Bitwit, YouTube disputed that the video fell under fair use for transformative purposes (which will go on to be disputed by the Verge later). They also took down a video from channel ReviewTechUSA which broke the original video down and added a lot of commentary to it. Before the videos were reversed, several large tech YouTube channels posted videos about the Verge’s actions, which appeared to outsiders like the Verge was trying to censor criticism, as the videos were both transformative, critical, and highly viewed.
This morning, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel finally issued a statement on behalf of the Verge. In it he says that the legal team at Vox Media (the parent company of the Verge) found these videos and decided that they were not fair use, and issued copyright strikes to YouTube under their own purview. Later, when he was notified of these strikes, he had them rescinded despite believing that the legal team was correct in thinking that they did not fall under fair use. He then spent the morning responding to tweets about the issue, including my own, which were almost entirely negative.
Now, I’ve generally liked the Verge and Nilay Patel’s work, and have defended him and his position strongly when I agree with him. And after thinking about it, in some ways I can understand where they’re coming from. If we assume they’re being truthful in their public statement, they saw some videos, they felt they were not fair use, they tried to take them down. But their process failed in a few fundamental ways.
The New York Times has written a great dive into mobile apps that harvest data off your device, such as location data. Many of these companies feel entitled to harvest and store your data for things like location when you give consent for location access, and are in the business of selling that data to advertisers.
The book ‘1984,’ we’re kind of living it in a lot of ways.
Bill Kakis, a managing partner at Tell All
I’ve been removing a lot of the native apps I’ve relied on recently in favor of mobile web apps. I won’t let Facebook run code natively on any device I own, precisely because I know they go out of their way to capture every scrap of data they can. Running Instagram in a mobile web browser provides a much stronger sandbox, limiting the amount of data they can steal dramatically.
Apple and Google have largely destroyed any real marketplace for paid apps that don’t need to rely on selling data, and app review mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to protect customers from it. They deserve a huge share of blame for the status quo being what it is.
The new iPad Pro is out and the review are pretty consistent. The hardware is amazing, but held back by the limitations of the software, and that software limitation prevents certain workflows from being viable. Every year that list seems to get a little shorter; Dom Esposito was able to produce his iPad Pro review for YouTube on it (in 4K, no less), Shawn Blanc is doing production photography work on an iPad and a Leica camera, and of course there’s Federico Viticci’s ever-evolving list of workflows to get the most out of the iPad’s multitasking capabilities. With Apple’s silicon team doing some of the best work in the industry, and with GeekBench scores rivaling laptops in bursts, it’s not hard to see why people want to replace desktops with these things; I’ve argued for three years (to the day, apparently) that the iPad Pro needs Xcode.
But there is one type of workflow that, for 8 years, has been difficult to hit on an iPad. Building software.
You don’t want to be limited by the availability of pre-programmed cartridges. You’ll want a computer, like Apple, that you can also program yourself.
Apple print ad, 1978
In many ways, this is a foundational part of the definition of a computer. Apple’s said as much in their ads. The Macintosh has always been an open, developer-friendly platform. And Apple has an excellent and compatible web engine in WebKit that developers can run web apps on. Apple’s history was one that helped small and large companies build Macintosh software, and with Cocoa helped many new developers (including me) build amazing apps for its general purpose computers. But in 2018, it’s an unsolved problem on iPads, one that is viable on competitor tablets like Microsoft’s Surface line and Google’s Pixel tablets. What’s holding it back?
