Asides

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Today, I decided that my project was going to be setting up a multisite installation and moving my hosted WordPress installations into a single home. Hopefully, I’ll be moving my wife’s site soon as well; if you see any weirdness, please let me know.

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You might have noticed that I am trying, with some recent success, to write or at least link to things I think are interesting each day. It’s possible you saw me say this recently:

I realized that in my daily work, I’m in with WordPress 100%. I’m looking at the Dashboard, I’m digging in to the guts of it as best I can, and I’m just using it. All. Day. Long.

When that happens, it’s easy for me to forget that I have this platform here that is enabling the people I’m working with to do really amazing things—and it enables me to say stuff, too. I understand why it’s difficult for people who work with WordPress technically to keep up a regular blog; by the end of the day, it’s kind of hard to look at it and be creative with your own thoughts.

I sat down to write something longer for the first time in a long while, and then wrote that tweet not long after. There are things you shouldn’t have to rediscover.

Speaking your mind, sharing your interests, and dogfooding what you work with every day aren’t among them.

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So my PlayStation 4 arrived today, and I’ve spent a little bit of time playing with it. Some quick bulleted thoughts on it so far:

Hardware

  • The DualShock 4 is a great controller. The analog stick is still in the wrong place, but it’s leagues better than the DS3.
  • The box itself is really small for launch hardware; it’s smaller than my PS3 Slim. And it’s really aesthetically pleasing.
  • It wins the simplicity award; as few ports as possible and really easy to connect.
  • I wish Sony would lose its apparently institutional fear of IR ports for use with universal remotes. It pretty much guarantees I’ll use the One for movies.

OS/Dashboard

  • The home UI is kind of a disaster. It’s like they took the PS3’s XMB and the Vita’s menu system and just mashed them together. That’s not a good thing.
  • Service integration is pretty painless, though it’s a notable omission that you can’t push your video to YouTube.
  • That said, the Twitch integration for broadcasting is badass.
  • I don’t always want to drop my screenshots to Twitter or Facebook; my friends don’t always need these updates. I may make a new Twitter account just for my PS4, which defeats the purpose.
  • The activity stream (“What’s New”) for your account and your friends’ accounts is a cool idea and looks really neat—but it’s way too busy.
  • Vita and/or iOS screen linking works well and especially on Vita is really cool.

Games

  • It would be nice if there were some that reviewed well and that I’m not buying on Xbox One instead.
  • Except for Resogun, which is pretty cool.
  • But losing Driveclub as a launch game probably hurt. (I don’t even know if it’s any good.)
  • Offering Cross-Buy on some games that I’ve bought on PS3/Vita already is really nice of them even if it’s to play the games I’ve already played.

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Avinash Kaushik:

Adobe was hacked recently and of course someone smart is going to analyze the data to find insights. My favourite one was the top 20 passwords used by Adobe users.

38 million records were lost by Adobe, though the original number was said to be 2.9 million. 1.9 million people used 123456 as their password!

Here’s the image he included with his post:

36

Yes, people are stupid and these are ludicrously bad passwords. Shame on them.

But shame on Adobe for allowing users to set these kinds of passwords in the first place. Regardless of the hack, these are easily guessed passwords and could have led to account compromises without too much work.

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I would say “let’s celebrate the return of hockey,” but:

  1. Preseason hockey isn’t really hockey and it’s barely televised so whatever
  2. Baseball is still going and I live in a city that actually will have a team playing in October

Canada’s off the hook, though; their two teams (the Jays and the Mariners) aren’t within shooting distance of the playoffs, and this is still the part of the year when Canadians convince themselves that their respective teams have a chance at the Cup.

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For some reason, this was today’s album of choice. I remember there being a bunch of talk about how this eponymous album “wasn’t really Metallica” when it came out due to the change of style.

I wonder if anyone would have thought that (or at least talked about it as much) had they know what Load would be like then.

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Tiny Cartridge reminded me of this quote from John Gruber’s most recent post regarding the 3DS and Nintendo’s level of doomed-ness:

A kid asking “What’s a Nintendo?” may sound preposterous to the ears of an adult weaned on Mario and Zelda, but trust me, put an iPad Mini and a 3DS on a table next to each other, and most kids today will reach, if not jump, for the iPad. If you don’t see that as an existential threat for Nintendo, there’s nothing I can say that will change your mind. A Nintendo that doesn’t make games for iOS is a Nintendo that doesn’t reach today’s kids; a Nintendo that doesn’t reach today’s kids is a Nintendo with no future.

I’d argue this is a bit out of touch; I don’t know too many parents who don’t see a big, big difference between a $169 3DS XL ((The 3DS XL is the model I’d argue anyone who wants a 3DS should purchase.)) (or especially the 2DS’s new $129 price point) and an iPad mini that retails for a minimum of $329. ((And I ask my children to save their money and purchase the devices themselves. They get $5 a week in allowance, so my son’s diligence in saving for his 3DS was commendable.))

I said earlier today that these devices are in different markets; the price points simply underline that.

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So…

I was going to make some kind of awesome quip about how this was going to be really hard because Hull’s Twitter account is either done 90% of the time while completely stoned, or some kind of weird performance art, but the account is gone from Twitter. (Really; I was going to include some prime example Tweets. There were a lot of them.)

Example of the kind of chatter this is provoking:

We’ll miss you, @2ndBestHull.