According to the story linked below, an Amazon Fire Kids tablet was apparently used to spy on somebody, to listen in on Alexa devices in the house, and possibly access other personal information.

Since Amazon says that the device in question was deregistered and they don’t know how it could have gotten access, and since I haven’t done a any digging into the story myself, I don’t know if all the claims in the post are correct/accurate.

But still, it does bring home the fact that what you see in spy/thriller movies theses days might not all be fiction and that we have to be very careful about what we connect to our network of devices and how we dispose of old devices …

https://practical-tech.com/2023/06/13/how-an-amazon-fire-kids-tablet-was-allegedly-used-to-stalk-a-security-pro/

#Amazon #Security #Spying

The ActivityPub federation on my server must have suddenly caught up or something (or there was a slew of activity from @gruber) but I suddenly got a whole lot of posts in my feed from Gruber in reply to responses from people on his post on Apple’s Vision Pro …

I found it interesting reading, just to see all the different responses and Gruber’s take on things. But I also was left wondering how somebody like Gruber deals with all of these strong (at least it feels strong) feelings directed towards him …

I wrote something about SharePlay a few days ago and got somebody telling me how SharePlay was “dystopian” 😛 It feels a bit jarring, at least to me, to just talk about tech because you find it interesting to have somebody disagree with you vehemently. My general approach to things is, if you love it (and it doesn’t harm you or anybody else) then that’s your right, I don’t need to love it too, but I’ll always fight for your right to love/like it.

But to have somebody disagree with something that wasn’t aimed at them and to spend time trying to convince me that I was wrong (or so it felt) just felt a bit strange. But I guess that’s what being on the Internet is?

I just don’t get this kind of thing that much. So I just wonder how it feels when you are John Gruber and you get so many varying kinds of arguments (or just comments) from hundreds, if not thousands, of people?

Not sure I’d have the mental bandwidth for it 🙂

#Reflections #OnlineDiscussions #Responses #BeingOnline

I have a Python script which posts a protest post to Twitter every day using their API — it’s a political thing related to Sri Lanka that nobody else probably cares about 😛 (And that’s my only activity on Twitter for months now …)

Today, the script stopped working. I go to the Twitter developer dashboard and my app which was used by the script is no longer there. It also looks as if I can’t create a new app/project.

So I don’t know if this is a temporary outage, or another change in direction, but it looks as if using the free API (even if it is only to post 30 tweets a month and not 1,500) is out — at least for the time being.

I guess the slow collapse continues?

#Twitter #API #NonFunctional #TwitterCollapse

One my fellow #DoctorWho fans will hopefully enjoy.
Prints here: https://mark-tisdale.pixels.com/featured/tardis-in-the-rain-london-mark-tisdale.html

#DigitalArt #Painting #London #BigBen #Tardis #FediGiftShop #MastoArt #MarkOnArt

It is kind of surprising that it took Reddit self-destructing for the Star Trek communities there to join the federation.

Hey folks! I've opened a bunch of new beta testing slots for @radiant, my Mastodon app for iPhone.

Get them while they're hot 🔥

I'd love to get any feedback and find any new bugs before I submit a day zero v1.0.1 update to App Review.

Boosts / reblogs appreciated 🙏

https://testflight.apple.com/join/ZIPbEz2e

#MastodonApps #MastodonClient #IndieDev #SwiftUI #iOS

Without knowing anything about gameplay, and based purely on first-impressions, “Star Wars Outlaws” and “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” look interesting.

The fact that they are both available for PS5, Xbox, and PC doesn’t hurt either 🙂

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-outlaws
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/avatar/frontiers-of-pandora

Guess we’ll find out if they are any good sometime towards the end of this year and the beginning of the next (hopefully)?

#Games #StarWars #Avatar #Console #PC

Dear ACL Community, If you are PhD student, postdoc or are preparing for your PhD right now after http://M.Sc., we invite you to share your experiences and thoughts on working in the field of NLP. We plan to present the main results of this survey at the upcoming ACL'23 , Toronto & in a future publication, of course always in anonymous form. The online survey will take about 5 minutes to complete. To participate, please click on this link https://lnkd.in/gzmRhamu
#NLPRoc

Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, and James Earl Jones, who provided the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars in 1977, met for the first time on a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Installed iPadOS 17 on my iPad and thought that I discovered a new setting “Use Large App Icons” only to realize that it’s there on iOS 16 too 😛

For some reason, I never noticed this setting. But it’s rather useful when you’re as old as me and icons aren’t that easy to see. So, just mentioning in case there are others who didn’t know about this setting.

The Settings app section is different in iOS 16 — I believe it’s called “Home Screen & Multitasking” instead of “Home Screen & App Library” but the setting is the same.

#iPadOS17 #Apple #iPadOSBeta #LargeIcons
Screenshot of the “Home Screen …

When Apple first introduced SharePlay a couple of years ago, I was certain that this was to support their to-be released AR headset 🙂

But then time passed and nothing much appeared to happen with SharePlay. In fact, I had almost forgotten about it since adoption of SharePlay seemed to be mostly limited to streaming service apps or music apps, and that was about it ... Even amongst streaming apps, the ones I used like Neflix or Amazon Prime did not have SharePlay.

But this year, it appears that SharePlay is back with a vengeance 😛 Check out the following WWDC session to find all the new functionality being added to SharePlay:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10239/

My Favourite? SharePlay over AirDrop so that you can start shared activities with people in the same room by just bringing your phones together — no need to start a FaceTime call!

The thing I don’t know at this point is, will SharePlay work if there is no network (or at least, no Internet)? I’m guessing not, but I’m curious to find out.

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SharePlay #SharedActivities #VisionPro

Even if you are not looking at translating your app to support other languages, you owe it to yourself to take a look at String Catalogs in Xcode 15 🙂

With String Catalogs it’s easy to set up number and noun agreements (1 book vs. 2 books) or noun adjective agreement for languages which have gendered nouns (such as French, Spanish, Portuguese) very easily.

Just for the number-noun agreement part, I used to litter my code with ternary operators. But it’s so much easier to set up with String Catalogs. And that part is the least of the functionality of this new feature 🙂

Check out the following WWDC 2023 session to find out more:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10155/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #Strings #Grammar #StringCatalogs

Sometimes, you know something exists (like Xcode Playgrounds) and how to use it, and yet fail to see the possibilities in terms of how you can integrate that thing with your regular workflow 🙂

The “Prototype with Xcode Playgrounds” session was such an experience for me 😛 I watched the session and immediately realized that there were so many ways that I could have used Xcode Playgrounds in the past to make my work easier!

Give it a watch, I’m certain you won’t be disappointed …

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10250/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #XcodePlaygrounds #Prototyping

I’m curious, does anybody use (or have ever used) SharePlay?

When it was announced a couple of years back, I was like “This is Apple’s initiative to bring shared media consumption to their AR headset when it arrives!”. But it doesn’t seem to have gone that way? I don’t think I’ve seen much adoption of it …

I can’t use it personally since it requires FaceTime (at least for video, I think?) and FaceTime does not work in the UAE 😛 Plus, our other use case, sharing videos while on a plane wouldn’t work either …

I know some of the streaming service apps have SharePlay integration but I don’t believe the ones I use, Netflix and Amazon Prime, do 😀

So I’m curious, is anybody else using SharePlay a lot (or even a little bit)?

#Apple #SharePlay #VideoSharing #MediaConsumption

It’s interesting to me how some people see Apple as not being capable of any wrong, and others see it as not capable of doing anything right 😛

Why get so worked up (one way or the other) over a corporation? They are not there to make friends, they are just trying to sell products and make money. Sure, if you love their products, by all means talk about it and how good they are. But don’t get so fanatical that you think that everything they do has to be right. Look at everything critically …

And the same thing applies to fans of Google or Meta too … It’s just that I run across Apple fans way more than I do the others 🙂

#Fans #Fanatics #Antics #Reflections

New SwiftUI changes — @Observable is going to make life so much easier … once I can actually use it in my work apps that is 😛

I have a lot of computed properties in my objects and updating the UI when those value changes has sometimes been a bit of a challenge. But no more! I’m looking forward to being able to use @Observable!

More info here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10149/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SwiftUI #Observable #NewStuff

BREAKING NEWS! I am looking for a pixel art tile artist for my game. I am paying real $$$.

https://terribletoybox.com/tile_artist

#pixelart #jobs

One more cool Xcode 15 beta feature — well, at least “cool” for me since I love ticking things off a list 😛

You can bookmark things in your Xcode project and then mark them off one by one as done. Saves me having to put down all the stuff I want to fix in a separate file 😀

#WWDC #Apple #Xcode15Beta #Bookmarks
A screenshot of the Xcode 15 be…

So, I mentioned Xcode 15 beta console logging in my previous post …

With just NSLog statements (and without extra metadata options turned on) the console looks like the first screenshot.

But if you switch to unified logging (so that you can specify the type, subsystem, and category) for each log message, and then turn on the relevant metadata options in the Xcode 15 console, then the console logs look like the second screenshot 🙂

So much better, right? And it’s so much easier to filter too! I think, I’m going to find it hard to go back to Xcode 14.x now … 😛

#Apple #WWDC2023 #Xcode15Beta #Console #Logging
Bare console logs from Xcode 15…
Xcode 15 beta console logs for …

I want to start using Xcode 15 beta right now just for the console logging 😀

I was using NSLog (for the metadata) but had not moved on to using full-on logging because there didn’t seem to be a huge advantage (till now) with regards to how I used the Xcode console … that was until now 😛

The first screenshot shows console logs from Xcode 14.x for one of my projects.

The second screenshot shows console logs from Xcode 15 beta for the same project with no changes.

So much cleaner and easier to read, right?

But it doesn’t stop there! If you actually use the unified logging system instead of NSLog and tag your log messages with the type of log message, the subsystem and category, the console logging gets even more useful — and a lot more easier to filter.

I’ll post about that in another post once I’ve updated my project …

#Apple #WWDC2023 #Xcode15Beta #Logging #Console
Console logs in Xcode 14.x for …
Console logs in Xcode 15.x for …