Rui Carmo
January 18^th 2022, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7B ※

Well, there goes the quiet post-Xmas period. $68.7 billion is nothing to sneeze at, and is another bold step into a market that just keeps on growing.

Although I’ve never been a fan of their top franchises (some of which, incidentally, were Sony staples), I’m really curious to see what this will mean for Game Pass (beyond the obvious possibilities for backfilling the catalogue even further with decades of past releases).

Rui Carmo
January 17^th 2022, at breakfast · 2 min read

Gemini

I stumbled upon the gemini:// protocol the other day, and went down that particular rabbit hole over the weekend so you wouldn’t have to (although I might actually recommend it).

If you’ve never heard of it, it’s meant to be a modern middle-ground between gopher and HTTP, and uses a space-centric, whimsical terminology: sites are “capsules”, there’s a nice aggregator called Antenna, and many related tools, software packages and the like borrow from familiar space exploration terms.

The Good Bits

It uses an extremely simple TLS-wrapped protocol on (unprivileged) port 1965 (which is when the first Gemini mission went to space) that essentially only supports fetching a piece of content at a time.
It relies on a very simplified Markdown-esque text format instead of HTML.
There is no Javascript. No CSS, nothing beyond the raw markup. No cookies, either.
The experience is really good in polished clients like Lagrange, and there are plenty of terminal-based clients (which are a natural fit).

Overall, I like the experience of reading unfettered markup that is not part of the noisy, ad-ridden, mainstream Internet, and I’ve found a few aggregators, search engines and reverse proxies that make it easy to find interesting content even if a lot of it has an idealistic “undernet” feel to it.

For someone like me who mostly consumes news via RSS feeds and uses Reader Mode to declutter news sites whenever possible, it is quite pleasant to wander through Gemini sites.

As usual, there are lists of all kinds of resources. But Lagrange, in particular, makes it very pleasant to read Gemini sites on my iPad mini, and is a fully cross-platform app for handling gemini:// URLs that I would recommend as a starting point.

The Annoying Bits

Sessions and authentication are largely MIA (you can use cllient certificates, but that isn’t all that flexible), with some clever hacks in some servers and clients.
text/gemini markup is very limited from an authorship perspective. It does not support inline links or any text emphasis/formatting whatsoever (up to and including tables), which I don’t think is ideal for either long form or documentation.
There are no inline images or any sort of rich media besides links. Some browsers do render media inline (upon clicking), so you can sort of work around it, but in the end it feels just… Too cut down.
There is essentially zero page content metadata (no Last-Modified, nothing you can use for caching, even), which feels like a lost opportunity to make some things (like blogs) a lot easier.
The protocol does not have the concept of byte ranges or pipelining (i.e., getting specific byte indexes out of the content or issuing multiple requests over the same socket connection), which makes it very slow (TCP handshake + TLS handshake for each page). OK, fine, most capsules are likely hosted in tiny machines and you don’t have inline media and hence no sub-requests, but…

Overall, I think they’ve gone too far in simplifying the protocol.

The absence of a Content-Length header, for instance, is just asking for trouble (Gemini’s sister protocol, Titan, hacks that into URLs), plus I’d like to have some pre-fetching for tackling slow networks, and the provision for zipped bundles of content as “books” isn’t exactly it.

Since I’m currently around halfway through converting all of this site’s content from Textile to Markdown (which means I’ve yet to slog through around 4500 pages), I am particularly attuned to the idea of simpler, “lesser” formatting for the sake of maintainability and readability (and this site’s design is already pretty minimalist), but I wish they’d trimmed less things down.

Otherwise I might even adopt it and put up a test server, if only for the thought experiment (although it would be a massive step back now that I’ve migrated to a static site hosted off Azure storage).

But it is certainly intriguing, and I will be keeping an eye on it.

Rui Carmo
January 15^th 2022, at teatime · 6 min read

Notable Media of 2021

The Expanse’s final episode aired yesterday and it was a great end to a decent week, so I decided to do a reprise of last year’s take on the stuff that struck my fancy throughout the intervening year, even if there’s a little less to write about this time.

Rui Carmo
January 11^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

Some European carriers are blocking Apple's Private Relay ※

This is hardly surprising if you consider many telcos are terrified of becoming dumb pipes and rely on traffic inspection (and zero rating) of various kinds to manage access to things like media streaming services (which they throttle), their own self-care systems (which rely on manipulation of HTTP headers in transparent proxies rather than doing authentication in a truly secure way) and keeping track of DNS requests for profiling (there are a lot of privacy concerns that telcos skirt every now and then for the sake of “securing their network”).

So it’s no wonder they’re throwing up FUD, lobbying and outright blocking the service due to “technical limitations” rather than letting customers use it and bypass all the spaghetti they put together since the WAP days of walled gardens.

It’s not going to be a nice, happy little service roll-out, and the telcos will never own up to being on the wrong side of the matter–or of history.

Rui Carmo
January 9^th 2022, in the evening · 1 min read

Today Marks 15 Years Since Steve Jobs Unveiled the Original iPhone ※

If you wanna feel old in the mobile industry, this is a great yardstick since there is at least as much history behind the iPhone announcement as there is after it, and in some ways it’s quite surprising to realize that the pace of innovation has actually slowed comparatively to the bubbling cauldron of the early 2000s.

I remember getting e-mails and watching a video of the event while I was at Vodafone and realizing that everything we had on the portfolio was essentially dead in comparison – and the ensuing weeks (and months) of shock and denial inside the industry were an amazing thing to witness (and, again, something I should probably write about some time).

Also, it bears reminding that there was a lot of pre-announcement history and rumors. Sadly, I lost most of the links from my iPhone timeline pages over the years, and some day I’ll dig through older backups and try to restore them, but the from announcement to launch page has a lot of interesting things…

Rui Carmo
January 8^th 2022, in the evening · 1 min read

Early January Checkpoint

Been back at work for a week and am actually not terribly excited about it. In fact, the running joke bouncing listlessly from neuron to neuron is that it took me most of the week to wade through enough notes and e-mails to remember what my job actually is these days.

Rui Carmo
January 4^th 2022, at breakfast · 1 min read

BlackBerry OS Services End of Life ※

Today RIM pulls the plug on BIS and the last remaining traces of the BlackBerry relay/application services, which signals the end of an era in many ways.

As a former Product Manager for BlackBerry (and mobile e-mail) at Vodafone, I used RIM devices for many years and amassed a number of tales that I really should write up sometime.

I still wish we’d had those “I Survived the BlackBerry Storm” T-Shirts done.

It was one hell of a product launch (in short, I persuaded our CMO to only order 200 units for launch and saved us from the utter disaster that launching that device - their iPhone “killer” - turned out to be, and that was only the very tip of the tale…).

Rui Carmo
December 30^th 2021, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Arcane ※

Finally caught up with this and binged all 9 episodes, to the realization that it is a masterpiece of modern animation (and completely watchable even if you’re blissfully unaware of League of Legends).

The story is intense, but the reason the characters grow on you isn’t the drama–it is the exquisite detail in facial animation and expressiveness of every little motion, played against beautiful backdrops and soundtrack that just beg to be watched on a luscious AV setup.

Can’t wait for the next season.

Rui Carmo
December 28^th 2021, at late afternoon · 7 min read

2021 In Review

We’re now two years into a (still) evolving pandemic with entirely too many plot twists, but life goes on and I’ve been trying to push that into the background. And given the season, I think I should put together another list of noteworthy things that came to pass in much the same vein as last year.

Rui Carmo
December 26^th 2021, at night · 4 min read

670 Days Later

Now that Christmas has come and gone (with varying results as people scrambled to test centers to figure out whether it was safe), I think another short update on the COVID situation in Portugal is warranted as the Omicron variant takes a firm hold.

Rui Carmo
December 22^nd 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

(mac)OStalgia ※

This is amazing. I do miss the clarity and sparseness of this era of UI design, if only because windows and controls actually made efficient use of screen real estate instead of being 50% padding and cutesy spacing.

Rui Carmo
December 21^st 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

elementary OS 6.1 ※

Version 6.1 looks like it has a nice set of quality of life improvements, including fixes for some of the issues I had–most notably a new window switcher.

I’m still running Windows 11 on my Lenovo, but it’s nice to know this is available when I go back to using it as a dedicated Linux machine.

Rui Carmo
December 20^th 2021, in the morning · 3 min read

The Christmas Halo Effect

It’s looking like we’re going to be in for a rainy Christmas this year, so couch surfing seems like a given, and some light gaming is in order. I have a bazillion things on my personal backlog, but… I need to relax a little, so traipsing around a Forerunner ring again is much more appealing than any of them right now.

Rui Carmo
December 18^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

The Notchmeister ※

This is delightfully, whimsically insane, completely free, and will also work on Macs without a notch, thereby providing great amusement to all concerned.

I miss the days when we had all sorts of zany and weird desktop utilities. The web (and app stores) killed a lot of that inspired hacking, but fortunately not all of it.

Rui Carmo
December 16^th 2021, late night · 3 min read

Unreal Thoughts

I’ve been watching the discussions and interviews about the Matrix Awakens Unreal 5 demo (which, sadly, is not available on Game Pass), and I have thoughts about it. And they’re ambivalent, but likely not in the way you would expect.

Rui Carmo
December 16^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Swift Playgrounds 4 ※

Well, this is interesting. Finally, the ability to build simplified iOS apps on iOS devices.

Might be, oh I don’t know, maybe late?

But it might turn out to be useful for small projects or building POCs, although it is a far cry from what people like me really wish for (a sandboxed UNIX userland with standard CLI tooling).

‘Tis the season, so I’ll try to be jolly about it.

Rui Carmo
December 8^th 2021, in the evening · 9 min read

The Bored Programmer's Ambilight

Although I abhor RGB lighting in PC builds, I’ve always been fascinated with Philips TVs and the Ambilight feature, of which there are dozens of hacky clones.

Rui Carmo
December 4^th 2021, in the evening · 17 min read

My Mid-Life Crisis M1 MacBook Pro

Yes, I got myself an M1 MacBook Pro. A week or so before my birthday I decided to bite the bullet, take some of the money I’ve been putting aside and just order one, and it arrived a few days ago. This was actually around a week before the original estimate if my memory serves me correctly, so global logistics haven’t packed up yet.

Rui Carmo
December 4^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

Tiny Emulators ※

I came across this the other day and forgot to make a note of it. There are some crazy, wonderful (and classic) emulators in there, but the true gems are the light-up electronics diagrams with corresponding state dumps as code runs.

Rui Carmo
December 4^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

Quake 1 gets its first content update in 25 years ※

This new “Horde mode” sounds fun. I wonder if it can somehow be made to run on older installs…

Rui Carmo
December 1^st 2021, in the evening · 8 min read

Building a Now Playing Display

Today’s a bank holiday, so I decided to spend a little while having fun. As it happens, yesterday I came across this neat “Now Playing” desktop display build, and since I have an official 7” Raspberry Pi LCD on my desk for controlling my lights, I decided to do something similar, but to display what’s currently playing on Plex (since I use PlexAmp for my music collection).

Rui Carmo
November 28^th 2021, late night · 3 min read

My Quest for Home Automation, Part 5

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, but it tends to be the time around which I take out our Tasmota-based smart outlets and set up the heaters again, and I guess it’s also a good time to document all the latest changes.

Rui Carmo
November 26^th 2021, in the morning · 2 min read

640 Days Later

A little over a month since my last update on how COVID is panning out in Portugal, I think it’s time to have another look at things.

Rui Carmo
November 22^nd 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

More memory leaks in Monterey 12.0.1 ※

I have as yet been unaffected by any of these since I don’t use custom cursors or rely on the Finder search for anything of consequence, but I suspect the only reason I’ve escaped the Control Center one is that I turn off my machines every day.

Either way, I don’t see any of them as acceptable in a mature operating system that should be tested up the wazoo by now, let alone one where system frameworks and language design have always made programmers superlatively aware of all kinds of resource allocations.

Rui Carmo
November 21^st 2021, in the evening · 1 min read

Taking Stock

I recently celebrated another orbit around our otherwise rather unremarkable star, so I decided to take a day off, play around with some gadgetry and spend a few evenings doing… nothing much for a change except cleaning up loose ends.