Nuclear Monster

  • Daniel Jalkut:

    If you’re a Safari user and you’ve updated to the Safari 9 or OS X 10.11 beta, you may have noticed a minor change in the default keyboard shortcuts for the app.

    In Safari 8 and earlier, keyboard shortcuts combining the Command key and a number, e.g. Cmd-1, Cmd-2, Cmd-3, would open the corresponding bookmark bar item. So if you arranged your most-frequently-visited sites in the first few bookmark bar slots, you could easily jump to those pages by muscle memory thanks to these shortcuts.

    In Safari 9, these shortcuts now switch to any open tabs you have in a Safari window. This will come as a surprise to folks who have gotten used to e.g. using Cmd-1 to quickly jump to e.g. Google News, or Yahoo Stocks.

    I was happy to read that Safari is finally going to let you swap tabs with the same hotkey shorts as every other browser. It’s been a frustration for years to swap tabs in a different way from every other browser.

    Now Firefox just needs top to drop the cmd/control+shift+P shortcut for private browsing, because you might not want to accidentally print out whatever you’re attempting to privately browse.

  • Ian Birnbaum:

    Halo 3 is coming to PC. Eight years after Master Chief’s last great multiplayer playground hit the Xbox 360, it’s coming alive, for free, on the PC–but not at the hands of Microsoft. Or Bungie. In one of the strangest things to happen on PC this year, Halo 3’s protracted PC birth is coming from a group of modders transforming the free-to-play, Russia-only beta Halo Onlineinto their favorite Halo game.

    For years, Halo was a crucial console-exclusive system-seller for Microsoft. When it finally came to the PC again earlier this spring but was region-locked, fans moved fast. They created Eldorito, a mod that cracked the Russia-only restriction within a week of Halo Online’s reveal. Named as a portmanteau of El Dorado, the name of the Halo Online executable, and Dorito, Microsoft’s favorite corporate sponsor, Eldorito has been programmed over the past few months by a group of between ten and twenty modders. Because Halo Online is built over the top of a more-or-less complete version of Halo 3’s engine, the Eldorito modders have been working to pull what they really want from the shell of Halo Online: Halo 3 on PC. I spent a week chatting with one of the modders to learn more about a project that, for better or worse, is the only version of Halo we’re likely to get on PC any time soon.

    […]

    When asked if releasing a mainline Halo game on PC would hurt Xbox One sales, the same source issued a non-answer. “It’s about delivering on the right Halo experience to meet expectations for PC gamers. We’re excited to be bringing Halo Wars 2 [a sequel to Halo Wars, the 2009 RTS] to both Windows 10 and consoles in fall of 2016. Additionally, PC gamers will also be able to stream gameplay from Halo 5: Guardians on Xbox One to their PC using Windows 10.”

    Basically: PC gamers are welcome to play Halo on PC, as long as they purchase an Xbox first. That seems to suggest that, at least in Microsoft’s eyes, Halo on PC really would have an impact on Xbox sales.

    Microsoft’s largest gaming platform, Windows, is still a second-class citizen to Xbox. Every new feature of Windows 10 for gaming is Xbox-branded or related. I understand that Xbox-as-a-braaaaaand is a big thing they’re putting lots of money into, and the Xbox hardware and software has worked better together than any other Microsoft product, but it doesn’t make it any less absurd to shovel console and computer playing together into this one brand. Keep gamertags and achievements in your programs, Xbox streaming is interesting, but no other developers or publishers are going to use your gamertags and achievements on Windows after the Games for Windows Live fiasco.

    I almost wish that Microsoft would at least more actively try to destroy Windows for gaming to force Valve’s hand to move to Linux & SteamOS instead of this death-by-a-thousand Xbox-huge blunders like this Russian-only Free-to-Play Halo. It feels like Microsoft thinks that Windows gamers can’t be trusted with the full experience if it isn’t streamed from an Xbox.

  • After trying a bit of Pico-8 I was still craving another fantasy micro-computer. That’s where TIS-100 comes in:

    TIS-100 is an open-ended programming game by Zachtronics, the creators of SpaceChem and Infinifactory, in which you rewrite corrupted code segments to repair the TIS-100 and unlock its secrets. It’s the assembly language programming game you never asked for!

    The website and all of the other information about TIS-100 are very intimidating at first glance to anyone making a purchasing decision. Doubly so for non-programmers and who the heck writes assembly today unless they’re writing code for embedded systems?

    Well it turns out that you don’t even need to know the barest level of programming to get started with TIS-100, the instruction set is so limited that it could fit on a three-by-five card and the way it starts out is kind of similar to that old Pipe Dream game where you’re trying to manage the flow of water by placing pipe parts and junctions. The difference in TIS-100, at the start at least, is that you’re managing a flow of data using written instructions instead of pipe pieces.

    TIS-100 ups the challenge fairly quickly by moving on to more difficult puzzles where you have to transform the data in some way while it is moving through the system. Still, I think that anyone who appreciates puzzles could enjoy this game, and shouldn’t be intimidated by the programming and the aesthetic of the website. It’s only $7 to try it out via Steam or Gog and it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

  • Seinfeld2000 in the intro to their interview with Wayne Knight:

    Look. i like to “goof around ” a lot on social media. But when youre talking to a screen & stage legend like Wayne Knight who is ENSCONSED in the seinfeld universe and emblazoned in popular cutlure, its time to get serious. im glad i did bc the result is honestly one of the best interviews in journalism history.

    This interview with the actor behind Seinfeld’s Newman character has the best ending to any celebrity interview, and is overall the best celebrity interview ever published by a website.

  • There is this draft of an essay I’ve been trying to write for a few weeks about how people don’t understand what free speech is. It isn’t something afforded to users of private websites. Private websites have choices in what they host beyond the legalities of their locality.

    When a user is banned from a private site for any reason their free speech rights haven’t been trampled because it isn’t their government doing the banning. When content is deleted from a website because a government tells them to, then their free speech rights have been violated. That’s the extent of it.

    Whenever any person, business, or project runs a website where users can submit comments or pictures or any kind of content there is a responsibility to moderate that content and remove anything that is at a minimum illegal. Most sites go the extra step of trying to encourage healthy discussion by attempting to remove trolls and other forms of harassment and objectionable content.

    In order to do that, sites have policies or rules that members must adhere to. It makes it much easier if instead of a community manager saying “this isn’t allowed” and banning a user, the site has a set of rules to point to and enforce. Good community managers want these policies and rules to be a tool of last resort. Usually the first level of escalation should be a private conversation with someone if their content isn’t completely out of line or spam.

    Here we are today in August of 2015 and Reddit has been operating with minimal policies in place for a little over a decade.

    This is a site where users choose what communities to join and read by subscribing to each subreddit community that they want to read and participate in. Subscribing and unsubscribing also changes what appears when that user visits the Reddit.com front page. Normally those communities are about interesting or fun topics like interviews with celebrities or useful subjects like cats and video games. Sometimes reddit even hosts surprisingly reasonable debates on subjects that people think are impossible to discuss like gun control, abortion, or even who the best Star Trek captain is. Reddit is what you make of it as a user.

    Reddit isn’t just some site hosted by someone who loves these things, it is a business in San Francisco with over 70 employees.

    Unfortunately Reddit is also what the people running the site make it, and for years Reddit has hosted hatespeech alongside the cute cat pictures and other interesting content. The most recent and popular subreddit community for racists was called Coontown. It was exactly what you would expect, diatribes about how terrible anyone is who isn’t white alongside terrible images and links to other racist materials. There was no reasonable discussion, just the same stupid old racism enabled by today’s most popular community site, Reddit.

    When I found out about this I couldn’t believe it. How could anyone at Reddit know about this and continue to host the racists at their cost and without feeling maybe a little strange about doing so? It’s their choice. I couldn’t personally continue working somewhere that did that, and I had removed the link to the ioquake3 reddit community from ioquake3.org.

    Today Reddit finally banned that Coontown subreddit along with a few others and updated their policies.

    I was so relieved! I could delete the draft article about how shitty reddit is, and everything would be great from here on out. I thought that I could go back to reading reddit and linking to them from my other sites. Until I read more on the thread on Reddit about why they deleted it:

    Reddit screenshot

    Just in case that text in the image isn’t readable for you, here is the reasoning behind the decision for Reddit to ban Coontown:

    We didn’t ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. If we want to improve Reddit, we need more people, but CT’s existence and popularity has also made recruiting here more difficult.

    That is the comment from one of the original Reddit founders, the returning CEO, Steve Huffman.

    This is why nothing has been done for over a decade about the racists on Reddit. This is why the other objectionable sites on reddit are being placed behind a bogus click-through quarantine before you can read them. The spreadsheet finally ticked over and the cost to deal with these particular racists became greater than the continued benefit of hosting the racists. Not because the people running Reddit had any problem with racists, not because they support any kind of bogus form of free speech, they had a problem with the continued cost of doing business with the racists and shut off the thing that was losing them money.

    If the racists that come to Reddit for their community operations can find a way of doing so without costing Reddit more than Reddit earns from hosting the racists, they’ll be welcomed. Unbelievable.