./foo/bars.log

Everyday spies

I came across this USB Phone Charger Camera on Amazon.com and realized just how cheaply and discretely anyone can spy on someone.

There are a lot of other hidden cameras devise like this alarm clock or this smoke detector. And there are dozens more that can be hidden or masquerade as other objects on websites like SpyTechStop.com.

Besides worrying about big companies spying on us through our mobile devices and aggregating our online activities, I’m starting to worrying that everyday people are spying on us in the real world, too.

20 Years of Haiku

Haiku remains one of the few remaining non-Unix open-source operating systems available today. It has gone beyond just maintaining binary compatibility with old BeOS code to becoming a powerful, workable operating system of its own.

Apple online store 2021 redesign

Apple has redesigned their online store and brought back the concept of a store homepage

The Apple online store homepage currently functions like someone just exported a Figma prototype and published it. It might look great when framed perfectly, but fails when a desktop window is resized to be larger or smaller than that perfect demo window size.

Hot Take on the Windows 11 Preview

Windows 11 has been officially announced, and it didn’t really meet my expectations. Judging from the work that has gone in to UI tooling for developers, I was expecting a cleaned up, slimmed down, refined operating system. Instead Windows 11 doesn’t seem all that different from Windows 10 except the addition of another design system layer and deeper integration with Microsoft cloud services.

Journey in to Cryptocurrency

Last week my new Windows PC with an RTX 3080 finally arrived, and I was lucky enough to get a 3080 before the limited hash rate version came out, and getting one without the hash rate limit got me thinking about digging in to cryptocurrency again.

This isn’t the first time I’ve dipped my toes in to the waters. My interest in cryptocurrency always seems to perk up when I get a new GPU, but after some playing around I concede that mining generate too much heat in my room for Texas summers, cryptocurrencies aren’t currently viable for normal transactions, or it is too speculative if I just wanted to exchange dollars for cryptocurrencies instead of mining them.

AmigaOS 3.2 Released

Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is very pleased to announce the immediate availability of AmigaOS 3.2 for 68K based Amigas.
AmigaOS 3.2 comes packed with well over 100 new features, dozens of updates that cover nearly all AmigaOS components and a battery of bugfixes that will undoubtedly solidify the user experience.

Also this month, there has been some progress on the production of new Amiga 500 cases. The top shell mold had it’s first injection test.

How to cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked (/s) to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was released 7 years ago.
It’s parsing something. Parsing what? Untangling the disassembly would take forever so I decided to dump some samples from the running process using x64dbg. Some debug-stepping later it turns out it’s… JSON! They’re parsing JSON. A whopping 10 megabytes worth of JSON with some 63k item entries.

It’s surprising that this issue had never been considered worth it to be fixed by Rockstar. I do think 63,000 items loaded via JSON is excessive, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable given the size and scope of GTA online.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars

NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the now barren red planet.
While the agency has completed other missions to Mars, the $2.7 billion robotic explorer, named Perseverance, carries scientific tools that will bring advanced capabilities to the search for life beyond Earth. The rover, about the size of a car, can use its sophisticated cameras, lasers that can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks and ground-penetrating radar to identify the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that may have thrived on Mars when it was a planet full of flowing water.

What a great day for science. Missions like this lift my spirits.

NASA did a great job not just with the mission but with engaging with and including everyone at home. NASA Pre-landing Simulation is a cool visualization to play with, and they also have some great resources for kids. My daughter and I made paper helicopters from their Landing Toolkit website while we watched the stream on Youtube.

ReStuff

StuffIt is the de-facto standard for file archiving and compression on Mac OS before OS X. Most old Macintosh software is preserved in StuffIt format, but a format change in StuffIt 5 makes archives created in this version unreadable in older versions of StuffIt. Since StuffIt 3.5 is the last version that works on System 6, many archives cannot be opened on compact Macs running System 6.
ReStuff is a SaaS that automatically converts StuffIt version 4 & 5 archives to a format readable in StuffIt 3.

This tool solves a big problem I’ve run in to getting software for my vintage gear.

Joshua Stein also has a C Programming on System 6 video series where he’s trying to make an IMAP client for System 6.

Audion 4.0

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.
Today, we’d like to give you the chance to experience these faces yourself on any Mac running 10.12 or later.
Now, this isn’t a full-fledged return of Audion. It can play music files and streams, but it doesn’t have playlists, and we’re not offering support for it. Its primary purpose is to view faces in the converted format. In addition, we’re releasing the source code to document how these faces work and an archive of converted faces.

I love seeing the Audion icon bounce to life on my dock again.