I’m pretty sure I’ll buy Hollow Knight: Silksong as soon as it comes out.

Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry surprised fans this morning by announcing a full sequel to 2017’s bug-filled metroidvania game, called Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Hollow Knight is a cool, atmospheric, and thoughtfully crafted game. I’m only a couple hours into it, and have just developed my skills enough to feel that it isn’t too hard anymore. (I just beat a huge boss that I failed to default a half dozen times already.) It is amazing to think that it was created by only two people. Hopefully the sequel will succeed and Team Cherry will continue making great games.

Per the New York Times:

In a televised announcement in the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said he was signing the declaration to protect the country from the flow of drugs, criminals and illegal immigrants coming across the southwestern border from Mexico, which he characterized as a profound threat to national security.

Does this mean I can stop work for the day?

Seriously, though, this is the ultimate abuse of office—the sort of thing that turns a republic into an empire.

Yesterday was my son’s second birthday. The family had a great time celebrating him last night. He hates the “Happy Birthday” song, though, and cried right through it. For his birthday party on the weekend, we might need to play his favorite song, “Uptown Funk”, instead.

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” There is actually a Wikipedia page about this phrase!

School was canceled due to snow, so it is a full house today. It didn’t actually snow until about 11:00 here, so canceling school looked like a mistake to me when I woke up this morning.

In 2001 I paid $14.99 for a lifetime account at VFEmail. I used it as my primary email host for a short time, as it was a pretty inexpensive IMAP email host back in the days when getting IMAP support outside of college or corporate email systems was quite rare. I stopped using it because it would go down from time to time, which is frustrating. I now use it only to get status emails sent by my home server (FreeNAS), which are relatively unimportant and anonymous. I keep thinking about using it more, because I love pure IMAP email, but now I am glad I did not.

I saw today that mail could not be fetched, and I found out that VFEmail was hacked, and everything for its US customers (including me, of course) has been destroyed. This is the message on the home page right now:

!!!ALERT!!!! Update Feb 11 2019 www.vfemail.net and mail.vfemail.net are currently unavailable. We have suffered catastrophic destruction at the hands of a hacker, last seen as aktv@94.155.49.9 This person has destroyed all data in the US, both primary and backup systems. We are working to recover what data we can.

That is just devastating. Fortunately for me, I am not very much affected by the data loss, but I wonder how the other customers must feel.

VFEmail is a very small company. Originally it was just one guy. I feel really bad for him (or them, or whoever is running it now). I hope it can recover.

Per TechCrunch:

As is typical, much of that increase can be attributed to mobile gaming, which accounted for more than half of this per-device average. However, more substantial growth took place in the categories outside of gaming — including those categories where subscription-based apps tend to rule the top charts, the firm found.

I bet app spending is going to go up each year for the next few years, partly because people will spend less on hardware upgrades, and partly because software is becoming way more important than hardware in mobile now that the market has matured.

John Gruber’s take is dead on. For privacy reasons, there is no way I’ll buy an Eero now.

I keep thinking that I should use my iCloud email address for “personal” email, and my Gmail address for “junk” email, but I keep realizing that I have almost zero “personal” email to handle these days.

My daughter was moved to a higher math class on Monday and is doing well so far. I am so proud of her!

🎵 While I’ve been working this morning, I have been listening to Apple Music’s “Vibes” playlist on my big Marshall Bluetooth speaker (no headphones for a change). It’s good working music: laid back, but not too slow, varied, and modern.

I miss Katie Floyd’s presence on the “Mac Power Users” podcast, but I really enjoy the interaction between (new co-host) Steven Hackett and David Sparks. They meld very well together.

At every meal now, my almost-two-year-old son cries out “Hey Siri! Play ‘Uptown Funk’” several times before giving up. I am so glad I never bought a HomePod for the kitchen.

Parenting tip: I wholeheartedly recommend putting your baby to sleep at their bedtime, rather than an hour afterwards. Trust me. 😀

I had to look up Apple’s documentation on the Responder Chain once again tonight. SplitViewControllers and overall view containment are great features, but are requiring me to move my methods around a little bit. I am feeling good about my SwiftoDo Desktop rewrite, though. I am almost done coding the core functionality. Just a few more big features left to code before I put more work into user preferences and, basically, making everything super nice and customizable.

For a few hours today, Overcast’s podcast recommendation engine thought I could speak fluent Spanish. Sadly, I cannot.

I will be very surprised if iOS 13 does not contain a system dark mode, and all the new system colors and colors API that debuted on the Mac last year. I think it may have a huge impact on iOS design, though, which may be a reason why the default system design is going to get an overhaul, too.

Does OneDrive work very poorly with iOS Files integration, or is it just my experience?

I hope that iOS 13 brings a Files app update that will add direct access to file shares. Until then, I will use a utility that I found today: FE File Explorer. It is a clean and polished file explorer that connects to Apple and Windows file shares, as well as some cloud services. It is a good image player, audio player, and video player as well. The Pro version integrates with the Files app as a data provider, too. I am impressed.

🎵 It’s an “Automatic for the People” day for me. That amazing R.E.M. album has been the soundtrack to deep work for me since 1992. The 25th anniversary edition (man, I’m old!) has live tracks for most of the tracks, which makes it a fun listen.

Sometimes, as a developer, I get stuck. This week, I have been stuck by some kind of endless loop or retain cycle that rears its head when I try to access a lazy-loaded class property within a subclass of NSDocument by two child view controllers. Everything worked flawlessly until I added that second view controller. I am at my wits end, and it’s all my fault.

I have tried to access that property only synchronously via a dispatch queue. I have tried making the property not load lazily. I have tried a bunch of other workarounds over the past half-week, but the one that is working is to delay one of the view controller’s accesses of that property by zero seconds (which moves the call to the next run loop). That is a hack, but necessary right now for me to continue developing the app.

I think I’m going to stick with my workaround until the new view controller is completed. After that, I probably have to rip up a bunch of clever code and find a simpler, more straightforward way to set everything up in my NSDocument subclass and its window controller.

I both downloaded Night Owl and created an Automator application to toggle Dark Mode on my Mac. I think I prefer the Automator application, because I can call it with Spotlight Search, which is how I open all my apps.

I love WNYC’s American Standards. I put it on every evening when I put my son to bed, and he has started asking for each night.

Spotify’s reported offer to buy Gimlet Media for an estimated $200 milliion makes me think that the podcasting market is really a lot bigger than I had previously thought.

Podcasting is a small industry, with an ad model that generated an estimated $315 million in 2017. Digital video ads, by comparison, generated $11.9 billion in the same year. But it is growing quickly, which makes it attractive to some platforms and publishers (including Vox Media) who are interested in tapping new revenue streams.

I think the $315 million annual podcasting revenue estimate is low. I bet that advertisers are at the point where they all agree that podcasting’s mix of old school, host-read ad reads, and new school analytics and targeting, are making it a really good deal for advertisers. I expect a lot more podcast network deals in the next year or two.

I want to link blog, it all my thoughts lately about articles I have read have been: “this is so stupid”. Obviously, I have to read less of the news and pick up something else.