iPad now under the DMA, then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-29/apple-s-ipad-hit-by-eu-s-digital-dominance-crackdown

Cue: lots of screaming from the usual suspects.

@Chancerubbage @WarnerCrocker Only if it has an AI. Otherwise I’m not interested.

Column! Just say no: not every piece of tech needs subscriptions and AI • https://www.stuff.tv/features/just-say-no-not-every-piece-of-tech-needs-subscriptions-and-ai/

@HauntedOwlbear @ianbetteridge You’re… not helping.

Tsk. I blink and a decade has passed.

@ianbetteridge Someone recently suggested retrogaming meant the PS3. And then I had to have a little sit down.

Literally every day now, mini-G comes home from school and at least one boy will have been an arsehole to her to some degree. She’s 9. But, hey, ‘boys will be boys’.

Last time we mentioned this, we were told she ‘needs to be more resilient’. When we suggested victim blaming wasn’t good, we were told things will get worse at secondary. When we said, OK, what specifically should she do, we were told… she should be more resilient. She was shouting today. The boy just carried on being a dick.

@serichards At this point, it’s relatively mild. That’s the problem. The boys are mostly just being really obnoxious. But they know what they are doing. And mini-G has already had her PE kit once nicked and ‘hidden’. (We never found it – had to buy another.) And this kid’s started mucking about with her lunch bag now. So: email into the school today. We’ll see how things go.

@serichards Mini-G is tiny – one of the smallest in the year. One of the boys is a year older and massive. So from a physical perspective, she’s massively outmatched. And that’s what some of the boys are now doing – using their size to intimidate. (They’re also starting to flirt with sexual intimidation and making the girls doubt themselves more broadly, even though they don’t really know what they’re doing. That sort of shit should be stamped out. Instead: girls should be more resilient! FFS.)

Would quite like to file an article before, I dunno, midnight, but iCloud Drive has other ideas. Currently uploading at something like 100kb/sec.

I may have to bite the bullet, abandon iCloud Drive and return to Dropbox this year. I like the idea of seamlessness with all-Apple, but iCloud Drive is so consistently a bag of buggy, sluggish shite.

You know Apple has a tech problem when your 9yo is complaining about the HomePod you bought to replace a *first gen* Echo. (She’s unhappy how Siri “isn’t fun”, “doesn’t give you good answers” and that it is triggered far too often when you’re just talking. I’m also deeply unimpressed with it from a playback standpoint. Takes far too long to respond to devices. Mind you, I’ve also of late found my two Apple TVs are also less responsive than they used to be. Not sure what’s going on there.

If you don’t already own Retrospecs, go and buy Retrospecs, because it’s wonderful. And then read my interview with John about how the app came to be. https://www.tapsmart.com/apps/classics-retrospecs/

From: @Middaparka
https://mastodon.social/@Middaparka/112156345123966376

I find it curious that this is even possible, given that Wordle itself was a straight rip of Lingo, which itself was in part based on existing mechanics. Games build on other games. The NYT denying that stops others from having the success Wordle itself enjoys.

From: @helvetica
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@helvetica/112057219275560466

@dmoren Congrats! Amazing it’s still online, albeit in the Wayback Machine! (That thing is magic.)

I think I have my first paid piece in the loft (a funny back page for web design mag Cre@te Online on Flash). I was mostly paper-only for my early years.

Oddly, writing was my second career too. I got made redundant during the dot com crash, kind of fell into tech writing and never clambered back out. (Which is perhaps why, over 20 years later, I still have a massive case of imposter syndrome…)

9yo has to stay in at breaktime tomorrow. Told us in floods of tears.

But why? Because the class’s reading books are always checked on Tuesday, so she religiously fills hers in in Monday. Yet this week, they were done on Monday by a TA, so she’s been ‘punished’ for only doing one day of reading. She reads every single day: school books; library books; comics; magazines.

This… does not seem the way to encourage a child. But with wonderful timing, it’s parents’ evening tomorrow…

This is a TA who’s been with my kid for over two years now. She knows her. Every single week, she has a clean reading record. Fuck knows what she was thinking, but Mrs G and I are very much not happy.

The kid also got an achievement badge today and this totally ruined her evening. She now thinks she doesn’t deserve the badge because she didn’t do the homework she actually did. FFS.

Teachers have it really hard, but sometimes I could just scream.

@ianbetteridge EU will surely fight back on that. And Apple *really* doesn’t want free apps and indies elsewhere, does it? And it hates emulators.

I’m wondering at some point if we’ll discover Tim Cook once had a REALLY bad day with Retroarch config files.

Anyone know what’s going on with GameClub? It seemed to be frozen in time for ages. Then it was reported that Take-Two bought it, after which point… nothing happened.

I know Eli Hodapp in the past remarked that new releases weren’t moving the needle, hence so few new games arriving. But GameClub is such a weird proposition now to be, having been static for so long.

(Honestly, I wish Apple had eaten it and rolled the games into Apple Arcade.)

And there it is. Amazon Prime Video to have ads unless you pay extra. And the usual PR rubbish about how this is somehow great for the user. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/26/24015595/amazon-prime-video-ads-coming-january-29

(For the record, I basically never play the press card. I always deal with companies like anyone else would. Very occasionally someone will recognise my name and it’ll be obvious I didn’t get standard treatment. But in this case, I no longer know whether it’s ‘safe’ for users to hold accounts if the support system is so twitchy. So I’ve asked for clarification on triggers, etc. It’s absolutely not OK to get an email from any org’s support, reply, and for that reply to be bounced as spam.)

The Mozilla fun continues. I replied last night. The reply bounced. Flagged as spam by Mozilla’s system. OK, I thought. Perhaps it’s because the person asked for a bunch of links. I took them out. Another notification failure.

I tried one more time. A single-line response. Notification failure.

So it’s now impossible for me to deal with this problem, because Mozilla’s support system is terrible. I’ve now escalated this to press, given that such a support failure is a red flag IMO.