Web Excursions 2021-10-07
Switch OLED Review: Nintendo’s Nicest, Most Nonessential Upgrade Yet by Sam Machkovech
Many OLED panels on smartphones arrange their pixels in "PenTile" fashion to save energy.
Nintendo opts for the arguably less-efficient OLED square pixel layout.
This was clearly the right decision in terms of visual quality.
And I honestly can't recall Nintendo ever going this route with a portable device before.
When I mentioned that green pixels use less energy, you may have immediately recalled the original Game Boy's notoriously green panel,
which Nintendo chose for power considerations.
Switch OLED doesn't appear to include built-in preventative measures while playing in portable mode.
There are no menu toggles for things like pixel shifting,
and the system's "sleep" mode simply dims the console's screen if button input hasn't been registered for five minutes.
Worse, Nintendo absolutely buries a brand-new warning about this in its pamphlet—and nowhere else on the box.
I conducted a brute-force attempt to purge any retained pixels.
This required loading an all-white screen capture in the gallery interface with on-screen UI disabled for 15 minutes.
After that, I noticed reduced noise, but some fixed graininess remained on the screen.
I became more convinced that the issue wasn't OLED image retention. It was the OLED display itself.
Switch OLED includes Nintendo's first white Joy-Con controllers as an option,
with a wholly white TV dock to match,
and their coloration is nearly a Pantone-perfect match for the white tone found on Xbox One S and Xbox Series S.
The whiteness contrasts severely next to a PlayStation 5, as Nintendo's option offers a warmer glow compared to Sony's cooler, slightly bluer shade of white.
AMD: Windows 11 Slows Our CPUs Up to 15%, Patch Coming by tomshardware.com
AMD has announced that all of its WIndows 11-compatible processors can suffer from reduced performance in some applications when used with the new operating system,
with extreme outliers in eSports gaming titles dropping by up to 10–15%.
For applications, AMD says that the performance impact weighs in at 3–5%.
AMD's advisory says that the issue boils down into two categories.
First, the measured and functional L3 latency can increase by ~3X
Additionally, AMD's "preferred core" feature, which directs single-threaded applications to the fastest core on the chip, also might not work as expected.
AMD says it expects a Windows update to resolve the L3 cache issues, while a software update will remediate the problem with the UEFI CPPC2 preferred core technology.
A software update and a Windows Update are in the works to address the issues, with both expected to arrive in October 2021
StopTheScript by lapcatsoftware.com
Safari content blockers can't actually block inline JavaScript
What the rules do is block a web page from loading JavaScript files.
If a JavaScript file can't be loaded, then of course its code can't be run.
But if the JavaScript code is already inline on the HTML page, then it can't be blocked by the rules.
If you install StopTheScript, you may find it strange that the extension has no settings.
This is a technical limitation.
When a Safari extension is loaded into a web page, the extension's settings are not available immediately;
any settings must be fetched from storage, an async operation.
The problem is that the
<head>
of an HTML document may contain<script>
elements.If StopTheScript had to wait for settings to be fetched from storage, then it might be too late to stop the JavaScript from running already
[Note: which is why uBlock0 works best on Firefox, where it’s allowed to filter on the response before the browser starts parsing the DOM. See notes on 210410]
Thus, StopTheScript has to do its "magic" at the very beginning of the document load, even before elements of the are loaded.
This is why StopTheScript relies on Safari's own extension permission system.
Safari users can grant an extension access to specific websites, and only those websites.
StopTheScript stops JavaScript on the sites where it has access, but not on the sites where it doesn't have access, and site access is all controlled by the user
Technically I could ship the extension on the Mac, but it wouldn't work right.
The problem is that "run_at":"document_start" doesn't work right in Safari on macOS, a bug that I blogged about over a year ago.
There is a Safari extension bug that affects both macOS and iOS:
Safari's default preference "Preload Top Hit" breaks "run_at":"document_start".
Preload Top Hit is a nightmare not only for Safari extensions but also for your own privacy.
Opinion | Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin - The New York Times
there’s a strange provision in U.S. law
that empowers the Treasury secretary to mint and issue platinum coins
in any quantity and denomination she chooses.
Presumably the purpose of this provision was
to allow the creation of coins celebrating people or events.
But the language doesn’t say that.
So on the face of it, Janet Yellen could mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion
— no, it needn’t include $1 trillion worth of platinum —
deposit it at the Federal Reserve and draw on that account
to keep paying the government’s bills without borrowing.
Alternatively, Biden could simply declare that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution,
which says that the validity of federal debt may not be questioned,
renders the debt ceiling moot.
Gimmickry in the defense of sanity — and, in an important sense, democracy — is no vice.
Account deletion within apps required starting January 31 - News - Apple Developer
The updates to App Store Review Guideline 5.1.1 last June provided users with greater control over their personal data, stating that all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to initiate deletion of their account from within the app. This requirement applies to all app submissions starting January 31, 2022.
Apple requires account deletion within apps in AppStore starting January 31 | Hacker News
anarchogeek:
What about inmutable systems? My app (using scuttlebutt) creates an 'account' but it's located as crypto keys only within the app and apple keychain. Same is true for anything crypto.
gumby:
Wonder if this can be used to unsubscribe from The NY Times?