Ask Paul: January 20 (Premium)

Hola from Mexico City, Mexico. My wife and I are heading to Puebla tomorrow, so Ask Paul is a day earlier than usual. Let’s dive in.

Pascal

erichk asks:

Paul, you were a big Pascal guy from what I can tell. I’ve recently started messing with it again. I’ll cut to the chase: Were you equally as frustrated by the semicolon requirements? My gosh, I thought C was tricky, but Pascal takes it to another level.

I’m curious what environment you’re using and, I guess, why you are doing this. But the short version is that Pascal was specifically designed to “encourage” good programming practices, which is a cute way of saying that it demands good programming practices. And among the ways it does this is via its strict programming style (and strict type checking) requirements. Like most people, I started with BASIC, but Pascal was my second language, and I came to really appreciate its strictness. You can kind of follow a linear path from C to JavaScript in the opposite direction. Classic Visual Basic was also ridiculous in many ways, as a language.

This isn’t related to your question per se, but my first introduction to Pascal was via a high school teacher who was so terrible I started zoning out and did poorly in the class. Years later, I experienced Apple Pascal via the Apple IIGS and then Borland Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, and that renewed my interest. And years after that, after having used Visual Basic and Visual C++, I was introduced to Borland Delphi and its Object Pascal language. Gary, my mentor, was so impressed by this that we went on to write the Delphi 3 SuperBible. I wanted to send that old high school a copy.

I don’t have a very wide experience with modern programming languages, but as a logical, C-based evolution of Object Pascal, I feel like C# lands at about the right place with regards to style and requirements. That it was created by the genius who co-created Turbo Pascal and Delphi is perhaps not coincidental.

Activision aftershocks

sabertooth920 asks:

Sony may have been hurt by the Activision purchase, but, is the real loser Google. Had they bought Activision it would have made Stadia instantly relevant. It’s a shame, the technology behind it is excellent, but in typical Google fashion, they didn’t go all in.

I was saying on Windows Weekly this week that 2022 is going to be busy year for the videogame market and that Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will have many, many ripple effects. With regards to Stadia specifically, yeah, Google’s usual hands-off nonchalance isn’t going to cut it, and there are already signs that the firm is moving away from a direct consumer offering to using Stadia as the back-end technology for third-party services. The irony, of course, is that Stadia, technically, is really good.

But one senses that Google isn’t all-in. That Google/Stadia has never come up as being interested in Activision is telling, I think.

Xbox Cloud Gaming on PlayStation

lvthunder asks:

Do you think they will put the XBox Cloud stuff on Playstation like they put Office on the Mac, iOS, and Android?

Phil Spencer has been very vocal about Sony copying Xbox Game Pass and its Xbox Cloud Gaming option, but I have this memory of him saying some time ago that he wanted to actually bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (then called xCloud) to PlayStation as well. And what I’ve found is an interview from August 2021, where he implies that Nintendo and Sony would block such a thing.

Spencer: “We have no plans to bring [the Xbox app, which would provide Xbox Cloud Gaming] to any other kind of closed platforms right now, mainly because those closed platforms don’t want something like Game Pass. There’s a ton of open platforms out there for us to grow in:  the web, PC, and mobile. So all of our focus, frankly, is on those platforms.”

I would love to see that change, but I doubt the recent news has made Nintendo or Sony more likely to allow this.

Pixel problems

yoshi asks:

Any good news on the Pixel front? Has the update fixed most of the issues?

Sadly, no. I upgraded my Pixel 6 Pro as soon as the update was available, and while I’ve been using the iPhone 13 Pro a lot more while here in Mexico, I did spend an entire day with the Pixel to see if I noticed anything. And to see how the cameras compared.

I like the Pixel 6 Pro camera better overall, and I wrote a bit about that. Both are great, and both have some advantages over the other. But if it was a camera test, I’d choose the Pixel.

But with regards to the update, no improvements to speak of. The slow/unreliable fingerprint reader remains slow/unreliable. And the adaptive display brightness feature is just as terrible as it was before. That is what I’ve noticed.

Given this, and given that others have seen improvements, I’m thinking about factory resetting it and just starting over. This is easier to do now since I’ve got the iPhone, so I will probably do that soon. But there are issues that can’t be fixed in software. The Pixel is too large and heavy to me, and one of the things I do like about the (non-Max) iPhone is its smaller size. I don’t like the Pixel’s curved display. The wireless charging is too slow overall (though that could be at least somewhat fixed in software, I bet).

I wish there was one phone that nailed it all (for me). The iPhone and Pixel both do things well. And there are things about each I don’t like. Day-to-day, I guess the iPhone is still the clear winner. But the Pixel’s strengths, especially in photography, are still a draw.

I’ll reset it and see what happens.

Custom domains for Microsoft 365 Family

simont asks:

Google is finally getting rid of my Google Apps/Workspace Legacy plan after 10 free years. Since I have Microsoft 365 Family plan, I might as well move my email to a custom Outlook.com. Any suggestions/articles to make this a semi-pain-free experience.

Yeah, I saw that. I guess it’s understandable that Google is finally pushing out the legacy free plans.

Regarding custom domains on Microsoft 365 Family, I’m kind of a unicorn in that I paid for now-dead Microsoft services like Windows Live Custom Domains and Outlook.com Premium and so my custom domain is grandfathered in and still works with my original Hotmail account. (One wonders if this will be cut off at some point too.)

However, Microsoft does still offer a personalized email address feature for those with an Office 365 Home or Personal subscription. And you can manage your domain by signing in to Outlook.com and going to Settings > Premium > Personalized email address. For that original Hotmail account, I can see that my custom domain is there and working, but I can’t manage it because you have to use GoDaddy now. And that’s your first hurdle: you can use this feature, but you have to register and manage the domain with GoDaddy (or move an existing one there).

So that’s the first step: check out that interface in Outlook.com (and get ready to sign-up for GoDaddy if you’re not already a customer).

Smartphone as a webcam

wright_is asks:

Regarding your travel set-up, people were talking about taking a “real camera” and using it as a webcam as well. Obviously, that is not how you work. But… Have you looked at using your smartphone as a webcam? They generally have a better camera as the Logitech webcam you use. Possibly a bit awkward and you’d probably need to find a way to position the phone, but it might save on one item to carry with you.

Yes, I have looked into this. And any modern smartphone would provide a much better picture than the Logitech C920 for sure. But the issues with this kind of setup are problematic. I’d need a tripod of some kind with a phone mount, and it would have to sit behind the laptop. And at our current Airbnb, and at most hotels I’ve visited, there isn’t enough room for that. And the tripod would be another thing I’d have to carry around. The C920, for all its mediocrity, is at least small and light. A smartphone would need some kind of software interface as well. I can’t recall now what I had tried, but it was iPhone-based and didn’t work well.

That said, I could also completely change the way I do things. I don’t have to be in front of a laptop to do a podcast. I could just use the smartphone on the tripod and use the Teams or Zoom app right on the phone. It’s an interesting idea, but there are other problems with regards to connecting a microphone to the phone too.

Ultimately, I keep falling back on this: if I could just get a laptop with a great webcam, I wouldn’t need an external camera of any kind. I think this is the year that happens.

Account security

crunchyfrog asks:

I have always been big on advanced security so I tend to apply MFA on all of my important accounts using either code generators or preferably physical security keys … In the last few years I have opted to start using physical security keys which seems to be a great way to secure accounts but I have trouble with those as well which is my main issue to ask here … I would imagine you must have some strong security setup on your accounts and would like to know your take on these issue.

First of all, apologies for truncating your question. There is a lot of good information in there, and I’ve gone through some but not all of the same steps as you have over time. Anyone interested in what’s happened with physical security keys over time should read it.

I use two-step/multi-factor authentication on every account that offers it and strongly recommend that everyone do so. And I’m happy to see that important accounts that don’t, like Amazon, are at least starting to do basic security checks, as happened when I tried to sign in to the site from Mexico. This is the minimum, for sure.

I’ve experimented with some of the same solutions you’ve tried, like Google Titan and various Yubikeys. But as you’ve noticed, these have some issues and can be ponderous. So right now, I’m just smartphone/authenticator-based on my accounts. I think the next step will be moving to a third-party password manager like 1Password and doing something to obfuscate/randomize/complicate/change all my passwords. But this is a daunting thing to do. Which is why I’ve been procrastinating. In the good news department, most browsers offer basic password compromise alerts so one can stay on top of that, and mostly what I’ve seen is that the issues I’ve had are with older/non-used accounts.

This is probably a good area for future research and writing. I will check in with my security and identity expert friends and see how or if the best practices have evolved. By which I mean, what do they do to protect their own accounts? I will find out.

Walled gardens

darkgrayknight asks:

Hey Paul, I was not thinking Microsoft would take up so many major game studios and content; it is becoming the Disney of Gaming. I really hope they go with a more open, platform agnostic view for their game studios. Do you think they will or is there still some entrenched “only on our system” thinking from the long console war with Sony? They have opened up so much in other areas, I am hoping it rubbed off in the Xbox realm.

This is important enough that I wrote about it in Rethinking Videogame Exclusives (Premium) but as to what I think will happen, yeah. I do think there will be some Xbox-only and Xbox-first behavior in the short term.

But as videogames evolve to include cloud streaming services, game exclusivity makes less sense. For example, five years ago, an Xbox exclusive game would only play on one version of the Xbox console. Today, Xbox exclusivity can include (but doesn’t always) console, PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone, iPad, and web. It doesn’t include PlayStation or Switch, however, and that’s too bad. But “exclusive to Xbox” today is a lot less restrictive than it used to be. By comparison, “exclusive to PlayStation” is literally exclusive.