Podcast

Spam, Your Privacy, Cool Stuff Found & More — Mac Geek Gab 855

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · 1 Comment

What’s your spam workflow? How do you know if your favorite podcast is selling your data? Want to hear about some Cool Stuff Found? Good news, your two favorite geeks talk through all this and more! Listen as John and Dave answer your questions and do their level best to ensure everyone learns at least five new things each week. Press play and enjoy!

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Apple Shares ‘MySwimPro’ in Developer Spotlight

Andrew Orr ·

Apple has highlighted Fares Ksebati and his app MySwimPro in its Developer Spotlight. It provides aquatic workout videos for athletes.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started? That it’s really important to be consistent, that it takes time to develop, and that if you can just be a little bit better every single day, the compounding impact is absolutely insane. We’ve been at this for five years, which is more than 1,800 days, and we’re trying to be at least 1 percent better each day.

TMO Deals

Asus AC1900 T-Mobile Unlocked Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router: $79.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on an Asus AC1900 T-Mobile Unlocked Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router. This is a new, open box model, and it supports dual-band data rates of up to 1900Mbps, 3x faster than standard 802.11n routers. It also has 5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and please note that this router is not compatible with Aimesh or Mesh WIFI systems. It’s $79.99 through our deal.

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Jean Schulz Discusses Peanuts Partnership With Apple TV+ For The Snoopy Show

Charlotte Henry ·

On February 5, The Snoopy Show will arrive on Apple TV+. We’ve already seen a trailer for it. Jean Schulz, the widow of late Peanuts creator Charles M. Schultz, discussed the forthcoming series with Variety.

We are so happy to have this relationship with Apple TV Plus, because they were one of the only places we talked to who wanted to do new material and be under the guidance [of ] Creative Associates, our creative arm here — people who are steeped in the “Peanuts” lore… New material in creative cooperation with us. Yes, Pixar would do it; other people would do it. But it would be their own project, not a collaboration. I think that probably would be what everybody would want. They want to have control and want it to be what they think is salable. Our interest is in keeping it as true to “Peanuts” as we can — to the comic strip, to my husband’s kind of humor and the humanity that comic strip showed.

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Pixelmator Pro ML Super Resolution Now Removes WebP Compression Artifacts

Andrew Orr ·

Pixelmator Pro has a new update ready, version 2.0.4. It brings an improvement to its ML Super Resolution image upscaler. It can now remove compression artifacts from WebP files. Another improvement adds support for portrait masks in Apple ProRAW images.

Pixelmator Pro already supports the WebP file format and, as it gains more users around the web, it’s becoming clear that the WebP compression algorithm produces unique compression artifacts. ML Super Resolution has already been trained to remove JPEG artifacts when resampling images but, with today’s update, it can now remove WebP artifacts too.

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How Apple Improved iMessage Security in iOS 14

Andrew Orr ·

Project Zero, Google’s security team, reverse-engineered iMessage to see how Apple improved it in its latest OS 14 releases. Specially, how it has gained new protections against zero-day attacks using BlastDoor, resliding of the shared cache, and exponential throttling.

One of the major changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service which is now responsible for almost all parsing of untrusted data in iMessages (for example, NSKeyedArchiver payloads). Furthermore, this service is written in Swift, a (mostly) memory safe language which makes it significantly harder to introduce classic memory corruption vulnerabilities into the code base.

This Person Hacked His iPod to Stream Spotify Using Raspberry Pi
Cool Stuff Found

This Person Hacked His iPod to Stream Spotify Using Raspberry Pi

Andrew Orr ·

Guy Dupont recently hacked an old iPod to stream Spotify. He used a Raspberry PI Zero W and a custom UI built using Python. Additionally, he fitted a 1000 mAh batter into it, a motor for haptic feedback, and a 2-inch LCD Adafruit display. “My mother-in-law recently gifted me a bag of the family’s retired iPods. I had forgotten how good it feels to hold and use one of these things. Naturally, I decided to modify one. I wanted to supply some modern features (streaming, search, Bluetooth audio, etc), while paying homage to the amazing UX that Apple originally released almost 20 years ago.”