Me and my girlfriend had a but of a small photoshoot with our cat today. He was making all kinds of poses on the sofa, so we instantly got our cameras out. It also gave me an excuse to use my relatively new Fujifilm XT100, with my brand-new Fujinon XC35mm F2 lens.
The light was behind us, which didn’t help, and the blanket on the sofa was pretty reflective. However, I did get a few that I liked. So here are my favourites, which have been slightly adjusted in Lightroom.
Josh Constine, writing about ‘ZoomBombing’ over at TechCrunch:
The world is vulnerable to a new type of trolling as people turn to Zoom video calls to feel connected amidst quarantines. Jerks are using Zoom’s screensharing feature to blast other viewers with the most awful videos from across the internet, from violence to shocking pornography.
That’s just what happened today on the WFH Happy Hour, a popular daily public Zoom call hosted by The Verge reporter Casey Newton and investor Hunter Walk. Suddenly, dozens of attendees were bombarded with disturbing imagery. A troll entered the call and screenshared Two Girls, One Cup and other horrifying sexual videos. Attempts to block the attack were thwarted as the perpetrator simply re-entered the call under a new name and screenshared more gross-out clips. The hosts ended the call rather than subject viewers to the assault until they could stop it.
To be honest, this is a clear example of why you shouldn’t really have communication channels freely open to the public internet, if you don’t want to risk the chance of seeing something you don’t like. However, I probably would have found it pretty funny. But then again, I do enjoy a bit of dark humour.
While I found the situation pretty funny, there was something I would like to point out in the article that I do not agree with:
The problem stems from Zoom’s policy that “The host does not need to grant screen share access for another participant to share their screen.”
Surely that’s not the source of the problem, the “problem” is simply allowing unrestricted access for participants to share any source of video. Who’s to say you couldn’t offend[1] someone via a webcam.
Not that offence actually matters. It exists solely in the offendees head, and that is the only place where it has any effect. ↩
Filip Hodas, a 3D illustrator, has created some fantastic pieces of art depicting various dystopian worlds featuring pop-culture icons.
A few of my favourites:
(All photo credit obviously goes to Filip Hodas)
There are 2 parts to this collection:
He also created another great collection titled “Cartoon Fossils“. But that’s not all, I highly recommend following him on Instagram for more of his work.
That headline may seem a tad scrambled, but it’s all true. Here is a YouTube channel which features videos of retro cameras, in various different places around the world.
For example, here is a Kodak Six-20 by Lake Garda in Northern Italy:
Jeff Perry just shared a massive collection of icons designed for use with Shortcuts:
After having the idea of making custom Siri Shortcut icons less than 24 hours ago I am very excited to share with you my Alphabet and Numbers Icon Pack.
[…]
This icon pack is exactly how it sounds, custom icons that go from A-Z and 0-9 in various colors with both white and black backgrounds. There are 10 color options for the white background and 10 color options for the black background. In total there are 720 icons to choose from.
It’s super impressive that this was generated just using Shortcuts, with help from the Toolbox Pro app! I’m downloading these right now, and adding them to the icons I have from the MacStories Pixel collections.
Under the hood the icons that are generated are from SF Symbols, Apple’s massive collection of configurable symbol icons. So I’ll be interested to see if this collection can be expanded upon in the future.
If you’ve ever wanted to do something in Git via the command line, but you’re just not quite sure what the command is. Or you roughly know what you want to do, but don’t know where to start, then Git Explorer is the perfect tool.
All you need to do is select from of them 19 options after “I want to”, and that can be something like “I want to compare two commits” or “I want to configure”. Then you get further options to refine the query, and it shows you the exact command you need.
For example, if you wanted to remove multiple branches that matched a certain pattern, then you just need to select these options:
I want to
Then you get told the command:
git branch | grep <regex pattern> | xargs git branch -D
And also a helpful note to help you understand it:
e.g. git branch | grep “-” | xargs git branch -D will delete all branches that have ‘-‘ in their names or git branch | grep -v “master|staging” | xargs git branch -D will delete all branches except staging and master.
NB: Always put your regex pattern in quotes
I use Git via the command line myself, but there’s always the odd scenario where I can’t quite figure out the command or proper syntax, so this website will be perfect for me. It’s going straight into my bookmarks.
It’s time for Text Case to receive its first update for 2020. Only a relatively small one this time, but it brings with it two new formats, and some work under the hood that should go unnoticed.
The new formats are quite straight forward:
Straight Quotes. This does the opposite of the “Smart Quotes” format, and converts all curvy quotation marks to the simple straight versions.
Slug. A bit of a weird one if you’re not already aware of what a slug is, but essentially it’s the more human-readable part of a URL that identifies what the page is. For example, a blog post will have a slug usually based on the title of the article. So this format will strip out all non-alphanumeric characters, and separate each word with a hyphen.
This update also contains a few extra things that shouldn’t be noticed, for example the way the UI is managed, and rounding corners, etc. It looks the same, except it’s done in a much more reliable way.
There is another less-than-tiny update to the UI that you may notice, and that is the gradients at the top of each format in the list view. These are now slightly more prominent.
Links
I’m guessing you would have noticed the 2020.1 version number, this is something I’m adopting from now on with all of my apps. The format will simply be YEAR.INCREMENT, where this is the first update to Text Case in 2020.
The updates to Text Case have been quite small and more incremental updates recently, and that I think is down to the maturity of the app. There’s not that many text transformations that people do regularly enough to need it in an app such as Text Case, and there’s only a limited amount of ways you can interact with the app.
So until there’s an advancement in iOS/iPadOS/macOS I can take advantage of, I would expect the updates to continue being small tweaks, and the occasional new format.
In the mean time I should really be working out what app I’m going to be building next!
In October, we introduced Project GEM, a new mobile experience that our hardware, software and cloud teams have been building and testing for the past few years. Our vision was to invent a mobile computing paradigm that more seamlessly integrated with people’s lifestyle needs. Despite our best efforts, we’ve now taken Gem as far as we can and regrettably have no clear path to deliver it to customers. Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.
I was intrigued when Essential first announced their phone in 2017, enough to write an article about it.
It’s interesting to read what I wrote in that post nearly 3 years ago:
While I don’t think this phone will be for everybody, it’s another competitor, and that can only be a good thing for the industry.
In principle I like the Essential phone, but I just can’t imagine myself switching to Android (this is a deeper problem I’ll expand upon in the future). I would of preferred it to run a separate operating system, but I do respect the amount of work that would take to build, not even thinking about the app ecosystem.
However it is a step in the right direction for Android phones, which I believe was started by the Google Pixel. In my mind, android phones were all about quantity, and not necessarily being the best devices. But it’s started to take a different course, and it’s only for the best.
Ryan Christoffel, writing at MacStories:
As first spotted by Steve Troughton-Smith, release notes for the latest beta build of Xcode include a major development: Mac apps can soon be included as universal purchases with their iPhone and iPad companions.
I think this has been a long time coming, and we’ll probably start to see even more unification of the App Stores soon.
From a personal perspective this is also quite interesting. As I have a universal (iOS and iPadOS) version of Text Case, and also a separate macOS version. So right now you need to pay separately for each version. Selling them as one entirely universal app would either mean giving one away “for free”, or increasing the price. Alternatively, a bundle may be the better easy to go.
It’s getting close to Pokémon Day on the 27th February, and Pokémon have teamed up with Google to let people vote for their favourite Pokémon.
You just need to search “Pokémon Vote” on Google to get to the poll, and once you’re there you’ll be able to vote for your favourite Pokémon from each of the 8 regions (Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, Alola, and Galar). It includes all 890 Pokémon from there National Pokédex in Sword/Shield.
Here’s what I voted:
Find more details on the Pokémon blog.
