Month: October 2018

Keychain Access Regression

In OS X before Mojave, Keychain Access had a full Preferences screen, and let you put an icon in the menu bar. Most importantly, from that icon you could Lock Screen instantly and securely.

Well, here's the Preferences now:

keychain_access-mojave

And there's no way to restore this or get equivalent functionality.

I noticed this because the screen saver didn't engage in its hot corner, so went to look for a safe lock, and now… what am I supposed to do?

Goddamn it, Apple. Did you rewrite some shit in Swift and that's why nothing works and security has been job NaN since Leopard?

[Update: As noted by @tewha, There is now a lock screen entry under  menu, where nobody ever looks for anything, and it has a shortcut, which is an improvement. I take back nothing about Keychain Access being wrecked.]

Gamer Migration

As noted in Google Minus, G+ shutting down hurts a large RPG community. Over the last few days, most have settled on a startup called MeWe as a replacement. Couple videos on the topic:

I've been trying it out, and it's not bad, it's a functional forum, except for: No public posts (which they're working on), and the very annoying chat popups (which you can disable from notifying you, but can't hide entirely). I don't know if it's going to survive very long, but they're ideologically motivated to privacy and not being Facebook, which is good.

It's unnerving, though, how fast everyone coalesced on this obscure service. There weren't a lot of other good options, though. Facebook is evil, Diaspora doesn't really support the kind of sharing and consistent timeline people need, old-style forums are, as I noted, run by shitty people.

Some people made really weird suggestions, like Youtube or Twitch, posting everything as a video and comments on it? Oh hell no.

I Miss CoverSutra

My second-favorite Mac app ever (after BBEdit) was CoverSutra — MacWorld review, make sure you have ad-blocking. Alas, it didn't keep Soaps in silks and champagne as she deserved, and she shut down and went to work for Apple.

The key feature here is: It watches iTunes, and shows the cover art with artist/album/track name overlaid or under, small enough to fit in a corner of the screen. So I can unobtrusively see what's playing when I hit shuffle. There were some nice keyboard controls in CS, but I mostly just needed the labelled icon.

I've had some variation on this since the '90s, when xmms would sit in the bottom of my screen, often minimized to a 16x160 or some such tiny bar with track name.

iTunes itself has a "mini-player" with cover art, but it doesn't show the artist/album/track name at all, and it's hard to click on without hitting a forward/reverse button. You can turn on notifications, but then that's annoying, a popup every 3 minutes.

When CS finally broke in Sierra, I switched to TunesArt, which was a mediocre but functional equivalent. When I upgraded to Mojave, TunesArt broke, and the developer is absent.

I have found only two sorta-kinda CoverSutra replacements that are still working. The one I'm currently using is BarTunes (free on Mac App Store), which has a comically flyspeck-sized album preview in the menu bar, and I have to click on it to see the track name; but it seems to work. The flyspeck cover is sometimes identifiable, like Asobi Seksu's Citrus has this unmistakable tangerine cover, but in that case I'm probably familiar enough to not need a hint as to what's playing.

There's also SkipTunes ($2.99 on Mac App Store), which has a desktop preview that apparently doesn't show cover art or track name, so WHY? Haven't bought it yet.

I'd happily pay much more for a working app so I don't have to code this myself.

Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland Movies

No zombies or magic, just people in a plausible near future shithole like we'll have by 2100. Ordered by how much I like each film, not so much plausibility or rotten fruit reviews.

  1. Hardware
  2. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
  3. Waterworld (watch it for Dennis Hopper)
  4. A Boy and His Dog
  5. Blood of Heroes
  6. Tank Girl
  7. Steel Dawn
  8. Rick & Morty S3E2 "Rickmancing the Stone"
  9. Delicatessan
  10. Six-String Samurai
  11. The Quiet Earth
  12. Mad Max Fury Road (very silly)
  13. Mad Max
  14. Road Warrior
  15. It Comes at Night
  16. The Postman
  17. The Road
  18. City of Ember
  19. Snowpiercer
  20. Various Twilight Zone post-apocalypse episodes, never used for anything but a punchline.

Not Seen Yet:

  • The Bad Batch
  • The 5th Wave (may break the "no magic" rule)
  • The Rover
  • Man Down

New Apple Watch

It's surprisingly hard to get a photo of something on your wrist, and you don't wanna see that much arm hair anyway, I get like Bigfoot as the winter approaches. The black-and-Mountain-Dew-yellow Nike+ band is nice and very light and airy, half the weight of the old rubber band, but the M/L strap fits with only one stopper hole left, and I do not have extra-thick wrists; some people aren't going to fit these.

Going into winter when I can wear a watch all the time, it's going to be interesting to get back in the habit. As a physical device, it's still very nice. I'll see how my walk/jogging goes tomorrow.

A lot of the new watch faces have weird "complication" positions, a smiley-face mouth and dot eyes, etc. The old Modular face has dots that no longer work with some apps; Dark Sky just shows an icon and then gives up. After a while now it's shown back up. There's a new Modular Infographic face with a really pretty Earth view, and Dark Sky shows more info in the dot there. But I can't add Nike Run Club to that face, only Apple's dumb Workouts app. So I'm still using the old Modular face and the less-capable dots.

A bunch of apps, Nike Run Club among them, require you to open the watch app, then the iPhone app, so they can set up. There's no other hint in the iPhone app or Apple's "Watch" app that this happens, you just have to know to do it.

The app screen with bubbles you move around but they don't stay where you put them, like a giant round Jenga game, is infuriating. It was a funny experiment on the original Watch, but now it's just stupid or neglectful.

The "artsy" faces are terrible. Kaleidoscope has a few colorful faces but it's like looking at sharp broken glass. Molten metal looks like dripping slime. Breathe is a simple pastel blue "flower" effect.

Motion has the same three butterfly, flower, jellyfish as years ago, Timelapse has the same half-dozen views; not bad, just kind of boring.

The Mickey®/Minnie® faces promote characters nobody cares about, just a corporate logo and mascot of draconian copyright laws. Plus Pixar Toy Story® faces, even more soulless corporate shilling. Where's Daffy Duck (or Bugs Bunny, but I'm more a Daffy)? I had a Snoopy/Woodstock watch as a child, and I'd love that.

It's painfully clear that there's no artists at Apple responsible for picking faces, designing cute iconic imagery, or designing the user experience for this thing, just engineers who all use Modular/Infographic, IVE-1138 who likes molten metal, and corporate lawyers who like Mickey Mouse®.

Get your shit together, Apple.

Google Minus

Actually kind of a pain in the ass: G+ has been a somewhat decent forum for OSR gaming discussions. The alternatives now are:

  • Discord. Fine for small groups, in fact one of the best chat/voice systems around. But the public gaming discords are like a game shop full of drunk gamers, with every asshole shouting at you in text AND voice. Fuck those guys.
  • Reddit, which is still full of Nazis, and they've been redesigning the site to make it impossible to read or post text, just browse through meme images. Fuck those guys.
  • Web forums, which are generally run by actual Nazis (rpg dot net) or screaming children, see Discord.

So I guess the conversation part is over, back to isolated gaming blogs, sometimes linking to each other.

As for Google, I mean, it's not like anyone expected privacy posting to G+. It's a fucking spyware program from the spyware company.

Site Redesign

As part of my site redesign, I'm moving everything off my old "markdamonhughes.com" and "markrollsdice.wordpress.com" domains into this site: Software Gallery, Tools, and RPG. Take a look at the front page, browse around, see if you like it. I'm open to advice at this point. I know I haven't done anything too weird with art and design yet, that's coming.

Content management in WordPress isn't trivial, but it's better than the ad-hoc pile of folders and PHP scripting I was doing. I'm still getting by with the standard media folder, but I'm usually disciplined about naming images so search works; there's advanced media manager plugins but I won't let it get to that point.

Many of the software pages are just "museums" right now. My iPhone software is not currently available (and likely never will be on the iPhone again; Apple's "everything is free" sabotage of developers means it's not possible to charge what software costs to make), but I will rerelease some of it as Mac/Marzipan ports when I get around to it. There's a couple of very cool apps like DungeonJournal (replacement for DungeonDice, but with a mapping & journaling tool!) that were never released properly, and I'd like to get those out. Brigand got adapted back into PerilarFK, so I'm not bothering with it.

I may import the old markrollsdice and dev blog/not-a-blog posts, still pondering on that.

Windows Schadenfreude

After my recent woes with iOS updates (and a completely trivial Mojave update), but always saved by backups (I eventually found my iTunes backup password in my old journal, and put it in 1Password), I sympathize, but also laugh in their direction:

NEVER let a system auto-update. ALWAYS have backups.

Anyone who lets their OS or software update without backing up first, is asking to have their files deleted. Anyone who doesn't maintain a couple backups, with at least one offsite, is asking to have their files deleted. I often say people don't learn about backups until after their first catastrophic data loss, and sometimes not then, but you can beat the curve and learn first.

I use a daily cloud backup, and a weekly to monthly full-disk backup with SuperDuper!. Many people like Time Machine, it doesn't fit my workflow well, but it's a good tool for non-technical users.

You may be thinking, "I don't use a Mac!", but the advice is the same for other (lesser) computers, and you need it more. Only the specific apps for backup will differ. I'm looking for recommendations.

Omens of Some Kind

In today's "waiting for the end times" news, the Good Omens miniseries trailer has dropped like… well, a thing that drops.

Adaptation looks very CW-ish, like that dreadful The Magicians show.

I don't mind Tennant as Crowley, I've dislike all the NuWho shows except Eccleston's series, but Tennant was fine in Broadchurch and Alias (er, "Jessica Jones"). The guy they've got for Az is the comically bad villain from Underworld, and a ton of garbage since, I have little hope for him doing more than hitting marks and repeating lines; it's hard to tell from a chopped-up trailer.

The book was good fun, maybe I should just reread it. I'm a Fifth Horseman fan, myself.