- So fyi, the way you hook it there is what makes the preview flicker in System Settings.
You check if the screen is locked, and if not, kill the host. But screen is not locked in System Settings. So basically, you're killing the host process every 2 seconds (and macOS, at least in Tahoe, restarts it, it doesn't in previous macOS versions).
That's also what causes your issues with "Options" not working (because you killed the instance that was linked to that button). The way we workaround it usually is to hook a system event.
You can check https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal
Look for handleWillStopNotification and com.apple.screensaver.willstop
- Ha, you do the exit trick too then, I just missed it.
FYI that works 99% of the time, but for some people it sometimes crashes (because we exit our host container - legacyScreenSaver.appex - and sometimes if you do it at a wrong time things just hang).
- That's super cool, congrats on releasing it ! It's a feature that some people periodically ask me to add in Aerial, but I never got to it. Piping from yt-dlp to AVFoundation is definitely the way to go.
I was gonna warn you about a bug in macOS 15+ where your screensaver stays around after you go back to the desktop, but for some reason your code seems to avoid that issue. I'm not quite sure how, as you don't hook stopAnimation or any event apart from the deinit. But it works, so, massive kudos, I'll have to try and understand why !
- Interestingly in french we use "condamné" for sentenced, and for any kind of sentence (even a fine).
We don't ever use "sentence" in a legal context (it still exists but is old fashioned), things diverged quite a bit it seems between those languages.
- It was the name of Intel's x86 64bit flavor : https://www.edn.com/intel-working-on-yamhill-technology-says...
- Awesome stuff !
I've been trying to make a library/cli to set the wallpaper/screensaver to use in the next version of Aerial (https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/PaperSaver) on individual screens and been toying around a lot with that whole WallpaperAgent subsystem (and obviously everything Aerial like the manifests, etc, before that), so I may have some insights/questions if you have time ?
From what I've seen there are multiple parts to the way that macOS subsystem works :
- Apple fetches the manifest (json file) with their own videos in (only) 240FPS
- It gets ingested in '/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Aerial.sqlite' for some reason
- Apple pulls the videos in '/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4KSDR240FPS' but renames them through a UUID (despite them having individual keys in the JSON)
Adding videos and sections in System Settings, you can do by manipulating that sqlite and killing WallpaperAgent (or maybe something else) before doing it, but as far as I remember (I only toyed with that part last year during Sequoia beta, so probably misremembering), macOS will periodically pull the manifest again and (fairly often) erase all your changes.
As far as I know, what you select then gets saved per screen/space in `~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.wallpaper/Store/Index.plist` (with a lovely Base-64 coding thrown in for fun).
The last part to this is a SystemWallpaperURL key stored in `~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.wallpaper.plist` which I believe (not 100% sure), contains the "special" video that gets played on a cold boot login (as far as I know it's a separate state from the "classic" Lock Screen).
So if I may :
- Do your videos show up on a cold boot too (that separate state I mentionned?) or just the "classic" Lock Screen? My rough guess is the cold boot lock screen can only display videos that are on the System Volume that's mounted before the user volume, so that one is probably fully out of reach.
- How hard did you have to workaround working with restricted paths ? Apple (for some good reasons) restricts hard access to files in user folders, and at that point the only safe place I can reasonably find (outside of containers, but that's a whole other story with screensavers) is `/Users/Shared`. Are you using that folder too?
- Are you messing with the sqlite db, or are you injecting via a reversed engineered api?
- Did you try editing `~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.wallpaper/Store/Index.plist` to set your video wallpapers or are you just relying on them being integrated in System Settings?
Since Sequoia, right now Apple broke the way we could set a screensaver via terminal. I got that part working (setting per screen/space) in PaperSaver, but the wallpaper part (basically just switching to another user selected image, not even a video, but this has to be done per space for which we don't have a public api for), I can't seem to get quite right yet, so any insight you have on that would be welcome. Take care and again awesome effort on your launch, this is a non trivial system with so many pitfalls, it takes a bunch of dedication to make it work with so many subtle problems in every corner.
- My point was, a lot of the early corporate support were smallish companies built specifically around Linux. RedHat is the perfect example of that, it started as a university project to make a distro.
It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).
I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.
Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.
- > You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.
It kinda did though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation !
The corporate support you mentioned arrived years after that.
- Definitely a cool idea ! Some feedback on your page :
The "See it in action" section doesn't really show it in action ? There's a picture but it's abstract, is it representative ? Are there multiple styles ? Is it just an image or a video ? Just looking at this I don't really know. Consider putting a gif/video preview in there so we get a better idea and/or add multiple examples ?
It got more confusing when I got below and saw the "How to use" > "visualize" section below where you have a mountain picture ? So which is it ?
Also maybe add video somewhere when you mention mp4, for non tech users. Visualization (which you use a lot in your text) doesn't convey that to me, but just my 2 cents!
- About the swap, I can see how it happened with the new design code, make layers, put the transparent one below, and they didn't want to have the left side higher than the right one for reasons?
To me the bigger issue is by not having it go to the edge, it really breaks the one face/two face original design.
And it looks worse somehow in dark mode (but to be fair, everything is worse in dark mode right now in beta1, but Safari is the one that needs discussing) : https://ibb.co/CLhJ4XM
- Installed iOS, iPad and macOS yesterday, some things are quickly obvious :
- In general, it always looks worse on dark mode
- The glass transparency effect is too local. It looks only at what's exactly below, so if you have two icons side by side in Control center on iPhone, one may show dark and the next one light, making you think one is active and the other one is inactive. It's pretty clear they wrestled with icons being too transparent so they blurred them a bunch, but it just makes it worse in those cases.
- It does have sensible defaults for (most) 3rd party icons that are flat, by adding some reticule on the flat logo to make it pop and look less out of place.
- The textfield contrasts can be horrendous. If you try to add a sky background to macOS messages (the first choice), the textfield is white text on lightly colored background. In Safari, if you have one of the default desktop background, you can get grey text on blue grayish background. There's absolutely no contrast and it's clear that they will have to address it.
- Safari for macOS takes the contrast issue above and pushes it to 11. It tries to reintroduce the universally hated concept of "the webpage takes over your browser window" but makes it worse. It's horrible enough to have your tabs and icons change color from white to black if you tab from say hacker news to github, but they've added a very slow (and buggy) animation for the UI on top. So while the tab switches immediately, the UI on top slowly morphs from white to black. Absolutely infuriating (and can't be disabled in beta 1). You also can't really see the selected tab in dark mode on a webpage with a black background.
In summary, some things look ok but in general it's really rough. The finder icon sums it best, they had a concept (transparent layers), and tried hard to shove everything through it, never stopping to question if maybe the concept needs adjusting when it clearly didn't work. I expect a bunch of changes, as is it's really rough.
- Not op but having played Rebirth, while overall very good, it suffers from the classic case nowadays of adding repetitive "chores" to do around maps, to artificially increase the length of the game with little purpose.
So far (only 6 hours in, but some friends who went further confirmed), Expedition 33 seems to steer away from that, being a lot more story driven.
It also has, by far, the greatest prologue I've seen in a game.
Worse thing so far, the UI in the menu does take a second to get. Particularly the selected state is way too subtle and a bit confusing at first.
- > But at what cost? Arianespace hasn't publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch, although it's likely somewhere in the range of 80 million to 100 million euros, about 40 percent lower than the cost of an Ariane 5. This is about 50 percent more than SpaceX's list price for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch.
I'm slightly surprised it's only 50% more expensive than a dedicated F9 launch. I would have thought it to be much worse. Non reusable means low cadence : there are only five Ariane 6 flights scheduled for 2025. Commercially, it's not great, but the article goes on explaining the importance of having a pure EU solution.
But it's certainly a bit of a cope out to for Arianespace, while sovereignty is definitely becoming an issue, reading the article, it's pretty clear that they are pushing that PR angle a bit too hard. That allows them to shove aside the many many fumblings around reusability that happened in the previous years. They do have a new CEO since January, though.
It looks like they finally started assembly a few months ago for a "hopper" test vehicle for basically what would be a F9 class launcher (expected to be operational in the 2030s) : <https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Fu...>
ESA is also pushing for studying a heavier reusable launcher : https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Fu...
- > It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
- > including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
Brillant, sure, but not completely sure it was controversial or bold, they have stated that it was primarily included in Windows 3.0 to help people get used to the new paradigms (for Windows) of the mouse and drag and drop, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire
> People give Microsoft a lot of shit
Well they didn't help themselves by shoving ads and subscriptions in all of those games : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire_Collection...
- There are a few others yes, most are selected/adapted from original MC to be made more practical. A lot are around sous-vide (braised short ribs, potato purée, etc) so be aware of that. It's really a good starting point if you are open to sous vide (and if you don't, you're missing out on 70% of the book probably). There are a few recipes that use some unconventional ingredients like xantham gum, but they don't go extremely crazy with hydrocolloids from what I remember, and provide alternatives most of the time.
I think some absolutely underrated recipes are the soups - which require a pressure cooker. The caramelized carrot soup is one if not the greatest recipe imo in that book, and their other soup suggestions are also great. There's a bunch of other recipes around pressure cooking, and they are great too.
Sous vide lemon curd is also extremely good if you like lemon tarts. It's not a pastry book though, just like the original one, it's more focused on cooking.
- Yes and the app wasn't even that great in the beginning, trying to put you into a "flow" where you have to pick a recipe, pick the width of your food, pick doneness from pictures, etc... and at least back then, you couldn't adjust much afterwards, you were set in what it decided for you (and I disagreed with the durations).
There was also no manual mode where you could just say, I want 54°, beep me in 45mins but keep that temperature afterwards. It was just needless friction if you had the modicum of experience. And that's without the e-waste question if they didn't get bought out. I think they had committed to opening their app if they went under at the time (I could be completely misremembering that), but such commitments don't mean much.
I think seeing them pushing the control freak all the damn time was also the tip of the iceberg that got me to cancel my pass. Setting the "temperature" with a sensor below the glass seems completely futile to me as a concept on top of it. I just don't see a practical application for it, but maybe I'm missing something.
Doesn't look like they sell it here in France, it's really a baffling, absolutely overpriced product.
- It's a bit orthogonal but what I ended up doing is buying a dedicated polycarbonate sous vide bath (basically a rectangular container) so that I don't have to constantly mess with grabbing out my pressure cooker (which I used previously). I leave it on the counter of my kitchen as I sous vide 2/3 times a week. Some have lids, or you can get some balls to limit evaporation (I went with that solution).
I did have a Sansaire model from a previous Kickstarter that I reused for a while, but ended up replacing it with a bargain bin "KitchenBoss" from Amazon with no connectivity, just buttons and a screen but with a high wattage (1100W). At the time I wanted to get an Anova but that was out of stock.
I did have a bunch of other circulators including one I bought in 2012 that was basically a laboratory pid. The most important thing in my opinion is preheating speed, which is directly connected to how many watts it uses. Most compact models (including Anova's smaller models) have a lower wattage so, unless you don't care about time, I would definitely avoid those. I would go for a dedicated bath and a high wattage model. Anova is likely the best option but I find the basic KitchenBoss (no app) perfectly fine too.
- And it works a lot better with a thick cut (1.2+ cm), the contrast between a super glassy, not oily outside and fluffy, airy inside all throughout is really good.
For the same reason I would say, don't bother with thin cut with his air fryer version. Go thick or don't bother.
The efficiency came solely from the frontend which is a lot heavier on x86, and stay up longer because decoding is way more complex. The execution units were the same (at least mostly, I think, might be misremembering) so once you are past the frontend there's barely any difference in power efficiency.