Nuclear Monster

  • Within the past week Apple has discontinued the full-size 2018 HomePod and the 2017 iMac Pro. Both of these devices have replacements, but I imagine some people are a little disappointed that Apple doesn’t keep updating these devices and selling them as they worked for certain purposes.

    The 2017 iMac Pro was originally intended to replace the 2013 “trashcan” Mac Pro that Apple supposedly ran into “thermal constraints” with and never updated, and now the 2017 iMac Pro is replaced by the 2019 Mac Pro. The newer Mac Pro actually has room for expansion cards and hard drives but is also in a hideously expensive case and like previous iterations only supports high-end Xeon configurations. The newer Mac Pro also doesn’t have an M1 or other ARM-chipset-based option and instead uses an intel-based platform that may not remain in Apple’s lineup. Both the iMac Pro and current Mac Pro started at an eye-watering $5000. These devices have always been out of my reach but they’re priced similarly to other workstations with the same hardware at first, the difference being that Apple almost never drops the price over time. Still, the iMac Pro included a 5K display and a stand for the display. To outfit the current Mac Pro with a professional display from Apple you’re gonna need to take out another loan, Apple’s Pro Display XDR is another $5000 but it doesn’t even come with a stand for that price. You can just use a VESA mount? That’s $200.

    The 2018 HomePod was originally $300, that price seems insanely high but it was similarly priced to other high-end “smart” speakers from Sonos and other companies. Every review I read or heard had high praise for the HomePod’s audio quality and uniquely capable microphones for hearing request. For the past year or two the HomePod was often on sale for closer to $200. Just last year Apple released the 2019 HomePod Mini and at $100 and much smaller it is a very odd product compared to similarly sized smart speakers. In the past year, Apple has also made their Apple Music subscription music service accessible on some other smart speakers. All of these smart speakers have enormous privacy concerns, and send what they capture (intentional or not) back to their manufactures.

    Of the three major makers of smart speakers, Apple, Google, and Amazon, I trust Apple the most because they’re the only one of those three whose motive is selling devices (and now service subscriptions) to people and businesses. Google is primarily funded by being the middleman for advertising publishing and in some cases an advertising publisher on their own products. Amazon is primarily funded by being an online store that breaks their workers, a middleman for other stores, and handling high-availability network and other hosting services for thousands of businesses. They are all corrupted by the profit motive, none are truly trustworthy for that reason, and only Google has some workers in a new union. Facebook makes some similar devices and I have no idea how anyone trusts them at all when they have helped and profited from the rise of white supremacy and at least one genocide that I can think of. I am not kidding about the genocide. Facebook’s primary funding is also advertising from other advertisers to their users.

    All of these smart speaker devices seemed to be destined for replacement or destruction when either nobody buys smart speakers anymore or when one or more of the competitors in that market drops out and the other two follow suit.

    Here in 2021 with climate change barreling down on us, it seems insane to buy electronic things that don’t have a shelf life of more than 4 years. Apple will no-doubt continue to support the iMac Pro with software updates for years to come, but the writing is on the wall for both it and the original HomePod. When it comes to the iPhone line, those devices are supported with software updates for years longer than their Android counterparts and Mac hardware from 2013 is still supported with the current version of macOS, Big Sur 11.3.

    The Apple TV box has not received a hardware update since 2017, and Apple’s confusingly-named Apple TV+ subscription service and Apple TV app available on other devices and TV’s I would not be surprised if it is the next device to expire. Apple’s Apple Arcade game subscription service and Fitness+ fitness subscription service seem like the only things keeping that device around and some of the Apple Arcade games I’ve tried perform terribly on the Apple TV.

  • Bonesweeper in sweeping for bones mode.

    Cheese, the developer of Hive Time and other games, has released a new free or “name your own price” game prototype with the most metal name for a game post-Crüe Ball called Bonesweeper for Windows, macOS, and Linux. In Bonesweeper you’re a paleontologist searching for fossils at a dig site and trying not to break them, just like Minesweeper but with fossils and a dig site instead of mines and a minefield. Not very metal, but there is also an assembly mode where you can attempt to put together skeletons for a museum exhibition after you’ve found their fossils in the dig site.

    I’ve been playing the prototype of Bonesweeper and giving feedback on the design to the developer and it has gotten me back into this Minesweeper style of gameplay. It is very fun to solve the little puzzles of where a fossil might be and try to flag and avoid that spot but if you give up on a level or make a mistake it can be extremely satisfying to hear the crunchy sound effects of accidental fossil smashes Cheese created using food and other objects in his kitchen.

    Here’s a tutorial from the developer:

    It’s unclear at this time if the prototype will be developed further, but I think it is pretty fun as it is.

  • Selaco looks like a fun new sci-fi FPS and it is using the free-software GZDoom engine which is a very cool thing to see as a proponent of free software game engines. Check out the first trailer of the game’s combat above.

    Hopefully the developers of this retro FPS don’t milkshake duck themselves like Ion Fury and Brutal Doom did. It almost goes with the retro FPS territory at this point. Though it was impressive when Ion Fury also milkshake ducked the entirety of whatever the hell 3D Realms is at this point.

    Selaco’s YouTube channel also has a little bit more world building in the original announcement video:

    There’s no release date announced yet for Selaco, but the developer says it’ll have a Steam page soon and there will be a demo later this year.

  • The second in Tim Hunkin’s eight-episode series for makers, The Secret Life of Components, is up. This episode focuses on LEDs. A subject I finally know a tiny bit about because some mechanical keyboards can use them, but there is a lot more to learn from Hunkin about LEDs and he goes through a short bit of history through all the options out there to brighten up your projects that he uses in his arcade machines.

    One of the things I like about Tim Hunkin’s new demonstrations is that there is no artifice. This is just him in his workshop and he is playing with some components and is happy to share that joy for exploring with others. While it would be funny for a moment if this turned into your typical polished YouTube video and Hunkin was shouting out his highest tier patreon subscribers and saying “…if you liked this video, make sure to give it a like and RIIING THAT BELLL!” he isn’t catering to YouTube that way today and that is a nice change of pace. There’s nothing wrong with the people who do those things, it is the way to succeed on video at the moment and people listen to these calls to action, the systems are at fault for not allowing us to do the things that make us happy like making videos without worrying about the dollars coming in when we live in a time of utter surplus that is dominated by a very few billionaires.

    With this new video I’ve also noticed two great updates to The Secret Life of Components web page, the first is a schedule for the upcoming videos, the second update is that Hunkin is going to re-release the original Secret Life of Machines with some kind of AI up-scaling via tapes made from the original film recordings.

  • There’s a new 2D Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game in the style of the old side-scrolling beatemups from Dotemu and Tribute Games. TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge doesn’t have a release date yet, but there is a page up on Steam for it on Windows, and it will also come to “consoles”.