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OBS Studio 28.0 Released with HDR, Native Apple Silicon Support & Lots More

If you stream video and audio online in 2022 you’re probably using OBS Studio. It’s free and open source software to stream to Twitch, YouTube and plenty of other services that have been created and gone out of business in the decade that OBS has been around. Today OBS Studio 28.0 came out with native Apple Silicon support on Macs since 2020 with M1 and M2 chips, the start of support for HDR (mainly on Windows, unfortunately), and lots more including a major update to the appearance of OBS.

I stream every day on Twitch and using an Intel version of OBS Studio on a Mac through Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer for running Intel binaries on Apple Silicon has been alright, but native support for the M1 hardware in my laptop I’m on will mean OBS runs more efficiently and is potentially less likely to kick on the fans. Unfortunately, one of the biggest features for Apple Silicon users, more support for hardware-based encoding, is still waiting for macOS Ventura which won’t be out until later in the year.

OBS Studio 28.0 is free directly from the developers for Windows, macOS, and Linux,  at OBSProject.com. A lot of things changed in this release so I recommend reading the full release notes here and note that some plug-ins may need to be manually updated to support Apple Silicon. The OBS project has a guide for OBS Studio 28.0 plugin compatibility here and you may want to check for and backup installed plugins in these locations. Note that for the first few hours after this release the download link for macOS on OBSProject.com still points to the Intel (x86-64) version of OBS Studio. You may need to download the Apple Silicon (arm64) download directly from the bottom of the release notes page on GitHub.

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XScreenSaver Turns 30

Jamie Zawinski noted the 30th anniversary of XScreenSaver’s version 1.0 release with the original USENET post and more bits of fun trivia although he notes that version 1.0 of XScreenSaver is missing. XScreenSaver must be one of the longest continually updated software projects out there, it has great stuff from the past like your flying toasters and almost everything else including more modern screen savers that reference things like one of our current pandemics.

The main competitor to XScreenSaver in the screen saving space was After Dark by Berkeley Systems but that was a commercial software  package for Macs and Windows computers hasn’t been updated since 1996 although you can emulate old versions and I was surprised to find out you can buy modern macOS versions of three of the After Dark screen savers. Even more surprising is that if the Wikipedia page for After Dark is to be believed, Microsoft may own the rights to After Dark after Activision is acquired.

XScreenSaver is a free download for macOS, X11-based Linux systems, iOS, and Android. XScreenSaver is unavailable for Windows.

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software

Ryan Gordon Building a Media Player in New Video Series

Ryan “icculus” Gordon is building what he calls a simple media player with SDL in C over a series of videos, embedded above. It’s fun to watch smart people demonstrate how to solve problems and the description for each video links to a blob of code changes that Gordon makes over the course of the video.

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1Password Announces Cryptocurrency and NFT Heel Turn

1Password has been the password manager I’ve recommended to anyone who isn’t using one for years. It is relatively easy to use, seems reasonably secure, and available on most of the platforms you’d want it to be on. I won’t be recommending 1Password for much longer if AgileBits, the company behind 1Password, sticks with the plans that AgileBits’ Matt O’Leary announced support for today:

We’re making it easier for Phantom wallet owners to save their account password, secret recovery phrase, and wallet address in 1Password. Phantom is a digital wallet that lets you manage cryptocurrencies, tokens, and NFTs built on the Solana blockchain.
This is the first of many partnerships that we’ve been working on in the cryptocurrency space. It’s always been our goal to make it easier for everyone, regardless of their technological proficiency, to protect everything that’s important to them. And for an ever-growing group of people, everything includes digital assets.

[…]

Here at 1Password, we want to help secure everything that’s important to you, including your cryptocurrency wallets. We believe your keys and recovery phrases deserve the same level of protection as your credit and debit card numbers, medical records, and everything else you have stored inside 1Password.

Know someone who thinks crypto is too complicated or overwhelming? So do we. Most people don’t know what a recovery phrase is, or what will happen if they lose it. We know that getting started and securing your hard-earned investments should be simpler. That’s where 1Password comes in.

1Password has always been a place to store wallet addresses, private keys, and login credentials for cryptocurrency exchanges. But with the Save in 1Password button, it’s now easier than ever for Phantom wallet owners to gather and protect this information. We’ve also created a new item type for cryptocurrencies in 1Password, with clearly-labeled fields for everything you might want to store.

Let’s be clear: NFT’s and cryptocurrency are a grift that operate like pyramid schemes. They need fresh new buyers so that the people at the top of the pyramid can cash out. Once new users buy in they quickly become evangelists for the scheme because that is also the only way for them to cash out. Like regular capitalism, only accelerated to the point where there isn’t even the illusion of legitimacy and there is no purpose for these grifts except to provide a way to cash out for people higher up in the pyramid. Capitalism theoretically turns work into a roof over your head and food on a table. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs can’t pay rent or buy food, they have to be converted back into actual money which is going to be tough to do when the traded value of many cryptocurrencies have been tanking and will continue to be volatile and unreliable for everyone who is at the bottom and can’t afford to pump the market.

Even the ads during the Super Bowl didn’t help prop up the fraud to stop the slide and now that’s what AgileBits has decided to get behind. AgileBits are sinking their reputation alongside cryptocurrency grifters. There have already been other cuts that AgileBits have foisted upon their users like switching away from native applications to Electron web apps and pushing users towards toward subscriptions & AgileBits’ online password vault service instead of using another cloud file hosting provider. It seems like much of this is driven by the venture capital money that AgileBits took back in 2019 after operating for over a decade without giving up control of their business.

Support for grifts like cryptocurrencies and NFTs will likely be the final straw for my use of 1Password and I am going to stop recommending it if AgileBits don’t change course in response to the backlash they’re receiving.

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software

Raspberry Pi OS Gets 64-bit Support

The Raspberry Pi lineup of single-board computers has had a few improvements lately with a new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 that ended up being similar in performance to the Raspberry Pi 3. Finally, the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian), is getting official 64-bit support despite the hardware being capable of 64-bit instructions since 2016’s Raspberry Pi 3.

The post on the official site breaks the update down in a little bit more detail, but as someone who uses Raspberry Pi devices for a ton of odd jobs, it is nice to know they’re finally a little bit more up-to-date and applications will be able to address more than 4 gigs of RAM with this update. I’ve run into a few pieces of software that I want to run on a Raspberry Pi 4 that require a 64-bit ARM operating system, and compatibility workarounds aren’t always available unless you’re willing to spend hours of time recompiling things like this is Slackware in 1998 so this should be a welcome change for anyone else who has run into these corner cases and wants one less barrier to doing all the weird crap you can do with a Raspberry Pi, though it ultimately may not help emulated or native games on the Pi that much.