Hi! Do you remember blogs? Well, this used to be one. Now it just serves as an archive for my multiple Twitter accounts.
Why Safari is the only Apple software that doesn’t get slower year over year
It’s basically a matter of deciding it.
First I saw this photo in my RSS reader and I thought — see, that’s the way to do it, just hide an activity tracker inside a leather strap and get stupid bloggers to quote your press release which inappropriately calls it a smartwatch. Then I opened the article, saw the flip side and oh god the humanity why.
1956: A 5MB hard drive being loaded onto a PanAm plane. [pic.twitter.com]
I want to believe I’d have found Gone Girl just as gross if I hadn’t read the arguments against it beforehand. I hate that I can’t be sure. (Good, short article on why this movie’s awful.)
Via @macdrifter, fun audiophile stupidity! “More organic,” “musical intent,” “hint of glaze,” “infrasonic.”
I’d really like for a future version of iOS to implement a level of push notifications that don’t disappear from the lock screen until they’ve been acted on — reappearing after you unlock and lock again. I wouldn’t mind if they’re reserved for Apple’s own apps, such as Reminders, to prevent abuse. Remind me until I’ve actually done it.
A chaques soldes Steam je me fais avoir et j’achète des jeux Unity qui ne sont pas foutus de gérer correctement le pad sur Mac.
Start typing a tweet in Safari. Want to check something on Google before posting. Nope. (Short of installing another browser.)
Too many Dragon Age quests begin with a great premise but devolve into collecting objects and reading. MMO design without social elements.
Can an animal’s name help protect it? [scientificamerican.com] by @WhySharksMatter [pic.twitter.com]
Your scientifically accurate horoscope for 2015 [media.boingboing.net] [pic.twitter.com]
Elon Musk on Mars colonization
‘The absence of any noticeable life [in the universe] may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. […] Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’
Judging from other recent quotes from Musk, he must be thinking that an easy explanation for the disappearance of all those other civilizations is that they invented artificial intelligence and it wiped them out. But then you still have to find a reason why those AIs wouldn’t be visible in the sky (and why they haven’t wiped us out yet). What if, instead, what happens to all intelligent civilizations is that they invent virtual reality, and become shut-ins just as they were about to start colonizing space?
“But the [Apple] software quality has taken such a nosedive … that I’m deeply concerned for its future.” [marco.org]
Apparently all is not sunshine and roses on the Google Play Store either [phandroid.com]
Disney make use of table layouts in their emails, shows a representation of a character with images disabled. [pic.twitter.com]
Interesting fact: Only 5% of Monument Valley installs on Android are paid for. 40% on iOS. There’s a sneak peak of data!
Common cold ‘prefers cold noses’, where low temp impairs parts of the immune response [bbc.com]
Nobody summarizes the Apple developer community blogging zeitgeist like @mjtsai [mjtsai.com]
Microsoft launches a new non-Windows candybar phone under the Nokia name
I’m completely and thoroughly confused.
Killing that wyvern was like killing a magnificent giant cat. It felt as bad as winning a fight in Shadow of the Colossus.
I’m quite pissed off that I had to abandon two companion sidequests in Dragon Age: Inquisition because they involved waiting a few hours for Farmville-like timers to expire. (As if that game weren’t too long already.)
J’ai rêvé que je retournais en école d’ingé pour avoir finalement mon diplôme. Et mon premier cours était un cours de gym #multipletrauma
Watch 24 episodes of Friends superimposed on each other and played simultaneously [theverge.com] [pic.twitter.com]
Great characters. Great dialogue. Serviceable story. All the things you expect from a good Bioware game are there; sadly, it’s all drowned under a huge heap of (gorgeous) open world that turns the game into a complete slog. It’s hard to blame Bioware for overcompensating after the public reaction to Dragon Age II, but the end result is a sad, sad waste of talent and time that mostly left me feeling drained.
Skyrim works as a huge open world because it’s designed, from top to bottom, as a solitary experience. It’s you against the world, traveling across the continent with melancholy music as your sole companion — or maybe you get a single partner, but then you are two lone wolves traveling together; you don’t expect much in the way of conversation from her, and in the end you’re just using her as a pack mule. (Side note: I’m so tired of limited inventory.)
Inquisition, on the other hand, pits you as the leader of a huge organization, offers long conversations with each of your followers, and then launches you into large open worlds… alone except for the company of three automatons programmed to spout a couple of lines every twenty minutes.
That model works fine for the linear mission structure traditionally used by Bioware’s games (and still seen in Inquisition’s most successful sequences): your party is focused on the mission, ready for combat at all times, so it makes sense for everyone to be mostly silent. That doesn’t work in an open world, where you can be walking around for hours, harvesting herbs and looking for collectibles, with three mindless drones shadowing your every move, their lack of actual interaction with you making it only more evident that you are, paradoxically, alone. (To the point that they disappear the moment you climb onto a horse. Hello, JRPGs of the 1990s.)
That’s only made worse by the fact that ranged combat is very MMO-y — which is to say, boring. I always play ranged classes, and only realized ater playing two-thirds of the game that all of those open-world random encounters would have been a lot more enjoyable if I’d played as a warrior (thankfully I was then able to specialize as a Knight-Enchanter and wield a magical sword).
As a result, every time I unlocked a new location and it turned out to be an open world, I was cursing the gods instead of thanking them. And that’s a shame, because the visuals were gorgeous, and the environments wonderfully designed. But I almost ended up not finishing the game at all.
So, in summary: you can’t make a game that’s both Skyrim and Mass Effect, so just pick one.
And another tip: if you’re going to make a 90-hour game, maybe it doesn’t need to have the same villain from beginning to end? Because it’s really hard to make a single menace work over such a long runtime. (As a reference, 90 hours is exactly five seasons of Buffy, which switched the main antagonist almost every half-season.)
Actually, you know what? Just don’t make a 90-hour game at all, because that’s insane.
Our guide to why the UK’s iTunes App Store suddenly raised its prices today. In short: because tax law. [po.st]
Ou alors je choisis la solution de facilité et je fais suffisamment de sport pour pouvoir mettre une photo de mon torse à la place
“Gotham 7.5K: A Rare High-Altitude Night Flight Above NYC”
New York like you’ve never seen it, literally.
If Apple now approves games with “not compatible with iPhone 4” in the description, maybe it’s time already to implement that as metadata.
When’s the last time Firefox was the first to implement a good new idea? I love how Javascript dialog boxes are now shown within the page.
“Why Women Stay Quiet at Work”
Look at how Apple’s only non-white-dude VP is an external hire.
It only took two rejections for me to finally understand the sentence “Keyboard extensions must provide Number and Decimal keyboard types.”
Gillian Anderson on the Nerdist podcast
❤️ #xfiles2015
A raccoon trying to eat cotton candy [i.imgur.com]
Une rame de ligne 1 sur la 14. Tout déboussolé par les couleurs claires et la luminosité, obligé de googler pour voir si je deviens fou.
Rhaaa ça fait des mois que je suis en clavier anglais sur mon iPhone et j’avais oublié que c’était pour ça qu’il n’y avait pas l’apostrophe.
Correlation is not… oh wait, yes. Yes it is. [pic.twitter.com]
“Disneyland Measles Outbreak: It Is Indeed a Small World After All”
While I have, of course, zero hesitation about the utility and safety of vaccination, I could never quite understand why everyone made such a big deal of anti-vaxers — surely they were just putting their own health in jeopardy, so it’s their own business? (Well, and that of their kids, but, you know, kids, who cares, not I.) But:
Two of the Disneyland cases were too young to be vaccinated – the first dose is recommended at 12 months – so those parents never had the choice to protect their children from measles.
Okay, that’s a given, but, more importantly, here’s the part I was unaware of, even though it’s obvious as soon as you think about it:
No vaccine is 100% effective, however, and even the measles vaccine, with effectiveness approaching 100%, cannot prevent every person who receives it from catching the disease if they’re exposed. In a population where nearly everyone has been vaccinated except those who have medical reasons not to be, though, the disease can’t travel as far, so cases are contained before they turn into outbreak.
Deuxième fois que ces incapables de Grindr refusent de prendre en compte mon réabonnement apres paiement. Je ne peux pas être le seul ?!
“Google’s Secret Study To Find Out Our Needs”
Sometimes Google’s tradition of being driven by research is awesome.
It takes 3 hours to convince an innocent adult they committed a violent crime as a teenager: [mirr.im] [pic.twitter.com]
The rumors of an iPad stylus are intensifying right as I was resolving not to give Apple money for a watch #justwhenithoughtiwasout
I will never be truly happy until we are living in this hilarious dystopia [pic.twitter.com]
The Surface Hub, the gigantic 4K touchscreen, is a crazy future dream of a device [theverge.com] [pic.twitter.com]
“Our Exclusive Hands-On With Microsoft’s Unbelievable New Holographic Goggles”
I’m curious. Doubtful. Eager?
It’s easy to imagine how the ideal Oculus headset works, and that I want it. But this description of HoloLens sounds too good to be true.
“These are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light” — [vimeo.com]
Yeah right, Apple, I’m gonna spend all of this month’s App Store earnings on a call to California so I can find out what bogus reason you have to reject my app that you can’t commit to in writing.
Russell T Davies talks about his writing “process”. Sound familiar to anyone else? [pic.twitter.com]
YouTube’s offer to @zoecello—put your whole catalog on our free streaming service with ads, or we block your channel. [zoekeating.tumblr.com]
Il n’y a pas assez de drogues sur Terre pour me permettre de supporter tous les chieurs qui se posent au milieu de la piste juste pour être là au cas où on ferait l’appel.
I used to work in Photoshop while listening to podcasts. I hardly ever use Photoshop anymore (mostly due to flat design), so I just don’t know what to do to keep myself busy, and productive, during that time. Can’t be programming, because that’s verbal, and my language center is occupied.
“Research reveals humans really can smell fear”
(via awfully produced but sometimes informative podcast Invisibilia)
Mélanie Thierry is kind of amazing in The Zero Theorem, but the Terry Gilliamness really gets in the way of an intriguing script.
An interesting Quora - What’s the difference between a dev working in Paris vs. the Bay Area? via @roxannevarza [quora.com]
Premier billet acheté sur Capitaine Train. L’interface est trop simple et fluide, je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser par réflexe que ça va forcément foirer quelque part. Ils envoient même un .ics par mail pour ajouter automatiquement le trajet dans son calendrier ! Ce qui me permet de réaliser que je me suis trompé de mois dans la date du retour. Heureusement que j’ai pris un billet non échangeable, c’est moins cher.
To put Apple in context: more than 1% of the world population bought an iPhone in the last quarter [pic.twitter.com]
The Guest is absolute shit, but seeing Matthew Crawley as a (hot!) U.S. war veteran is priceless. And he’s not the reason it’s shit.
If the iPad was produced by any other company, it would be considered a huge success. More revenue in calendar 2014 than McDonalds.
This thing, but for humans. I would buy the one made for humans. [pic.twitter.com]
Jack Dorsey tweetstorming his profound satisfaction that Twitter’s users have had to constantly work around its obsolete character limit. Please tell me he was being passive-aggressive?
The scorpion that can detach its anus and no longer poop [phenomena.nationalgeographic.com] @edyong209 reports.
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