To celebrate the launch of audiobooks on Google Play last month, Google is offering a free audiobook of your choice to at least some Google Home owners.

Check the email that you registered with your Google Home to see if you received the offer.  It’s just a matter of clicking through and selecting your audiobook from there. The offer is only valid through February 9th, so make sure you get in and take advantage of it soon.

I’m considering my options at the moment, so if any of you have any great recommendations I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Matthew Petti writes for America about an interesting community:

A strip mall 15 minutes down the highway from Manhattan is the last place I expected to hear the language spoken by Jesus Christ. But northern New Jersey is one of the places where Syriac Christians, driven from the Middle East by violence and persecution, have come to call home over the past few decades. If Jacob Hanikhe has his way, it will also remain one of the few places where Aramaic, an ancient tongue found throughout the Talmud and Gospels, is a living language.

Syriac, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians—their chosen name varies by denomination, but most recognize themselves as part of the same ethnic group—originally hail from the Middle East, where their Aramaic dialects were once the dominant language. Forced into diaspora by both ethnic and religious conflicts, the Syriac Christians in New Jersey, who number about 2,000 families and are mostly members of the Syriac Orthodox Church, have created Syriac establishments ranging from language schools to restaurants. They are now attempting to balance the American Dream with preserving their faith and reviving their ancient culture.

Petti describes the sad history of the Syriac community in the Middle East and the history of the language itself (“It spread across the Fertile Crescent … during the Assyrian Empire and attained the status of a world language under the Persian Empire and remained dominant well into the Islamic era”), then turns to local history:

Deacon Yildiz fled Turkey with his family in 1979. One of his Syriac friends in America knew Mor Yeshue Samuel, who was the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Jerusalem before leaving for the United States during the 1948 war and becoming the first Syriac archbishop of the United States and Canada. (He was also famous for helping discover the Dead Sea scrolls.) Archbishop Samuel hired Deacon Yildiz as a deacon and Aramaic instructor for a congregation in New Jersey.

The official history of the Syriac Archdiocese for the Eastern United States says that a deacon from Mosul named Micha al-Nakkar “probably settled in or around Boston” in the 1840s. Larger groups of Syriacs came over in later decades, as silk weavers from Tur Abdin moved to Rhode Island to work in the silk mills there. The archdiocese’s history says that their children often went into highly educated fields like law and engineering.

Deacon Yildiz says there has been a Syriac community in New Jersey dating back to the mid-19th century, and it has made some enduring contributions. Taw Mim Semkath, an Assyrian school in Beirut, Lebanon, established by immigrants to New Jersey, is “the oldest known Syriac Orthodox organization that is still functioning,” according to the archdiocese. Naum Faiq, a major neo-Aramaic literary figure and Assyrian nationalist thinker, came to New Jersey in 1912, where he wrote for and founded a variety of Aramaic publications. One of them, called Huyodo, is still printed by the diaspora in Sweden as Hujådå. […]

Nationality quotas imposed in the 1920s all but ended Syriac immigration to America until such quotas were banned by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. During that period many Syriacs fell out of touch with their homeland and culture, but some family ties remained strong—even across long distances.

It turns out “the head of the entire Syriac Orthodox Church, His Holiness Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, started his career in New Jersey,” and there’s promising news about the younger generation: “many who had been disconnected from their Aramaic heritage are rediscovering it.” I hope the community flourishes and keeps the language alive. (Thanks, Trevor!)

According to the latest report, YouTube TV has over 300,000 subscribers already, but it could be getting quite a few more as the service launches on another range of products.

After being delayed in late 2017, the YouTube TV app is now officially available for a select number of Roku-branded streaming devices. Here’s the list of supported devices:

• All Roku TVs
• Roku Ultra
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus
• Roku Streaming Stick
• Roku Express Plus
• Roku Premiere
• Roku Premiere Plus
• Roku 2
• Roku 3
• Roku 4

YouTube TV is currently available across 80 different metro areas in the United States. The subscription service costs $35 per month to start, and with that customers get access to over 40 networks. There are premium channel options, including Showtime, but that will add to the monthly cost with individual packages.

The YouTube TV app has been rolling out to more devices pretty regularly, with the latest update bringing the service to specific LG- and Samsung-branded smart TVs.

For owners of the supported Roku device that want to try YouTube TV, the app can be found in the Roku Channel Store beginning today.

If you have a Roku device, do you plan on trying out YouTube TV?

Data artist Josh Begley edited together a 5m30s video of every concussion suffered in an NFL game this year. I was barely able to get through this…I had to pause a couple of times. From an article about the video at The Intercept:

The NFL has done a masterful job at mainstreaming the violence of the game, so that fans and spectators don’t feel too bad about what’s actually happening out there. No single word has protected the NFL from the true costs of this violence more than “concussion.” That word puts a protective barrier between us and what’s really going on out on the field.

It’s not a headache. It’s not “getting your bell rung.” You don’t have a bell. It’s a traumatic brain injury. Every single concussion is a new traumatic brain injury. In addition to the torn ACLs and MCLs, in addition to all of the horrible broken bones, the NFL diagnosed at least 281 traumatic brain injuries this season. And no document has ever quite displayed the horror of it all like “Concussion Protocol,” a film by Josh Begley and Field of Vision.

The backwards slow-mo technique is a bit off-putting at first, but as Greg Dorsainville noted in the video’s thread:

If it was in forwards it would be like any big hits package you see in an espn highlight show where we celebrate the football and hit and not mourn the result of the moment: a human in pain, disorientation, and slowly killing themselves.

Having big second thoughts on watching the Super Bowl this weekend, karma offsets or no. (via @harmancipants)

Before they start to sing Toto’s Africa, the Angel City Chorale perfectly imitates a thunderstorm by rubbing their hands together, snapping, and stomping their feet. You might want some headphones for this one. What a cool effect.

Update: This performance is likely a reference to a 2008 performance of Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile, a vocal group from Slovenia.

Their thunder is definitely better. (thx, scott)

Update: Ok, this appears to be the original choir thunderstorm by the Kearsney College Choir.

As Rion said when she sent me this link, “I’d never run into them before but now I can’t believe how many Toto/rainstorm videos there are on YouTube”. (thx, rion)

shoutout to my fellow plant owners 

instagram / facebook

Starting with Java, a robust built-in class library is practically a default feature of modern programming languages. Why struggle with OS-specific behaviors, or with writing your own code, or managing a third party library to handle problems like accessing files or network resources.

One common class of WTF is the developer who steadfastly refuses to use it. They inevitably reinvent the wheel as a triangle with no axle. Another is the developer who is simply ignorant of what the language offers, and is too lazy to Google it. They don’t know what a wheel is, so they invent a coffee-table instead.

My personal favorite, though, is the rare person who knows about the class library, that uses the class library… to reinvent methods which exist in the class library. They’ve seen a wheel, they know what a wheel is for, and they still insist on inventing a coffee-table.

Anneke sends us one such method.

The method in question is called thus:

if output_exists("/some/path.dat"):
    do_something()

I want to stress, this is the only use of this method. The purpose is to check if a file containing output from a different process exists. If you’re familiar with Python, you might be thinking, “Wait, isn’t that just os.path.exists?”

Of course not.

def output_exists(full_path):
    path = os.path.dirname(full_path) + "/*"
    filename2=full_path.split('/')[-1]
    filename = '%s' % filename2
    files = glob.glob(path)
    back = []
    for f in re.findall(filename, " ".join(files)):
        back.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(full_path), f))
    return back

Now, in general, most of your directory-tree manipulating functions live in the os.path package, and you can see os.path.dirname used. That splits off the directory-only part. Then they throw a glob on it. I could, at this point, bring up the importance of os.path.join for that sort of operation, but why bother?

They knew enough to use os.path.dirname to get the directory portion of the path, but not os.path.split which can pick off the file portion of the path. The “Pythonic” way of writing that line would be (path, filename) = os.path.split(full_path). Wait, I misspoke: the “Pythonic” way would be to not write any part of this method.

'%s' % filename2 is how Python’s version of printf and I cannot for the life of me guess why it’s being done here. A misguided attempt at doing an strcpy-type operation?

glob.glob isn’t just the best method name in anything, it also does a filesystem search using globs, so files contains a list of all files in that directory.

" ".join(files) is the Python idiom for joining an array, so we turn the list of files into an array and search it using re.findall… which uses a regex for searching. Note that they’re using the filename for the regex, and they haven’t placed any guards around it, so if the input file is “foo.c”, and the directory contains “foo.cpp”, this will think that’s fine.

And then last but not least, it returns the array of matches, relying on the fact that an empty array in Python is false.

To write this code required at least some familiarity with three different major packages in the class library- os.path, glob, and re, but just one ounce of more familiarity ith os.path would have replaced the entire thing with a simple call to os.path.exists. Which is what Anneke did.

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Checks and balances are a good thing. �

The post Internet’s Down appeared first on Underfold Comics.

VLC is a super popular media player app, and for good reason. With support for most file types and a ton of features, it’s everything a techie could want in an app. That is, aside from Chromecast support.

Fortunately, the latest update to the beta channel offers experimental Chromecast support. Being both experimental and in the beta app does mean that the functionality is imperfect, but it’s a big step towards official casting to the app and that’s awesome news.

There are also other additions to the latest beta like Chromecast and Samsung Dex support, so check out the app for your video playing needs! To join the beta channel, download the app and head to the beta sign up page and you should get the beta version later that day.

Alcatel is known for its relatively decent budget phones. In fact, some of them are arguably good choices in the budget market. However, it always seems like some of these “budget” companies have some sort of security scandal. Let us not forget Blu’s recent incident.

Now it’s Alcatel’s turn. Its devices have Alcatel’s own gallery app that is updated via the Play Store. It’s a basic app with only file access permissions, which is what you’d expect from a stock gallery app.

In November, the app was updated via the Play Store to an entirely different app called “Candy Gallery -Photo Edit,Video Editor,Pic Collage” by Hi Art Studios. Putting an unknown app onto a user’s phone without their permission is bad enough, but the app also requests tons of permissions including SMS, phone state, device ID, location, account info, WiFi networks, and a whole huge list of others.

Let’s be clear here. There is no excuse for this kind of bait and switch, and a strange app that has access to all of these permissions and information doesn’t belong on a smartphone without a user’s express permission. Owners of Alcatel agree, as shown by the flood of one star reviews on the app.

If you own an Alcatel device and have been affected, head to app settings and disable this app and use Google Photos in the meantime. And in the future, be wary of Alcatel. This has been the case for over two months and the company has not made any moves to fix it.

According to writer G. Willow Wilson, living in an authoritarian society does not look like “something off the Syfy channel”.

It’s a mistake to think a dictatorship feels intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does. I’ve lived in one dictatorship and visited several others—there are still movies and work and school and shopping and memes and holidays.

The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries.

How does a society go from a democracy to an autocracy? It’s like that line of Hemingway’s from The Sun Also Rises about how to go bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.

Until one day we wake up and discover the regime has decided to postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other. Or until it can ‘ensure’ that the voting process is ‘fair.’

I don’t know about you, but Trump and the Republican Congress working to “postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other” seems like a completely plausible scenario. I would not be surprised if we see conservative pundits start floating this idea, slowly normalizing it over a matter of months until it seems like a plausible option. After all, it’s much easier for Republicans to remain in office if they got rid of those pesky elections (in lieu of gerrymandering and voter ID laws).

Update: In a poll from August 2017, 56% of Republicans polled said that they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump and Republicans in Congress were in favor of it. (via @taestell)

Bootstrap, one of the most popular front-end frameworks among web designers, recently launched its very eagerly awaited version 4! Let’s take a look at what’s new, what’s been removed, and what you can do with it.

We never stopped believing, and hope you didn’t either! Bootstrap 4.0.0 has finally landed! https://t.co/zFAOxpyhvD

— Bootstrap (@getbootstrap) January 18, 2018

Version 4.0.0

This iteration of Bootstrap, according to Mark Otto and the team, is a “major rewrite of the entire project”. That promises a lot of improvements, and also suggests there’s a lot to get your head around if you’re planning to migrate existing projects to this new version. There are no “breaking changes”, but there’s a lot to take in. Time to jump in and examine the most important features.

Bootstrap 4 is Here!

1. New: Flexbox by Default

Traditionally Bootstrap’s layout has been powered by float-based styles. In recent versions a flexbox alternative was made available, but given its widespread browser support flexbox is now the master of Bootstrap grids. The CSS technology behind Bootstrap grids doesn’t make a huge difference, but flexbox does offer more flexibility than floats, so flexbox-based grids do come with a few more options. For example, using flexbox means you can define one column and have its siblings automatically resize around it.

2. New: Focused Browser Support

The move towards favouring flexbox actually prompted another change: browser support. Bootstrap v4 has officially dropped support for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and iOS 6. This effectively means your Bootstrap websites will only be supporting IE10+ and iOS 7+. Worth taking note of.

3. New: LESS to Sass

Fans of Sass will be pleased to hear that Bootstrap is now officially a Sass-first project. If you download the Bootstrap source you’ll find a folder called “Sass” in which you’ll see all the necessary partials. “_variables.scss” contains all the variables and settings you’ll need, then “bootstrap.scss” houses all the @import directives, allowing you to customise your Bootstrap installation by including or excluding whichever components you wish.

4. New: REM

In all places apart from media queries, Bootstrap v4 has dropped pixels in favour of relative units of measurement like rems. This makes the whole thing more scalable, so if you haven’t yet grown used to rem units now would be a great time to take a look at these resources:

• 
  CSS
  7 CSS Units You Might Not Know About
  Jonathan Cutrell
• 
  Responsive Web Design
  Comprehensive Guide: When to Use Em vs. Rem
  Kezz Bracey
• 
  CSS
  Why You Should Be Using Rem-Based Layouts
  Kezz Bracey

5. New: Additional Breakpoint Tier

Besides Bootstrap’s move away from float-based layouts, its responsiveness now also comes with an extra tier. From now on, you’ll be able to customise these five defaults:

$grid-breakpoints: (
    xs: 0px,
    sm: 576px,
    md: 768px,
    lg: 992px,
    xl: 1200px
) !default;

6. New: Reboot

The next notable change comes in the form of a new reset file. “Reboot” takes Normalize’s resets, which use only element selectors, then builds upon it with some opinionated class-based reset styles (you’ll find .table and .table-bordered buried in there with several others).

7. Dropped: Custom Builder

If you’ve ever downloaded an earlier version of Bootstrap you’ll be familiar with the online customiser. This tool allowed you to check and uncheck various aspects of the Bootstrap framework in order to create your ideal version.

Well, it’s gone.

Instead, Bootstrap now focuses on its own modular structure, allowing you to leverage Sass from your end, include only what you need, and compile your own deployable end result .

8. Dropped: Glyphicons

Bootstrap no longer includes Glyphicons. Instead, you’re advised to find your own favourites and include them in whichever way you see fit. The Bootstrap team themselves prefer the following sets, which we recommend you implement as SVG rather than using web font icons:

• Iconic
• Octicons

9. Dropped: Grunt

Previous versions of Bootstrap included Grunt support to automate many of the common tasks; that’s now gone. Instead, Bootstrap now comes with a bunch of npm scripts which you’ll find in the “package.json” file. You can use these to do things like watch your Sass files for changes, perform lint tests on your JavaScript, or just use run npm dist to do everything and compile a distribution version of your finished website. 

For more details on how Bootstrap and Node.js work take a look at the build tool docs, or check out the following tutorials:

• 
  Terminal
  The Command Line for Web Design: Grasping the Basics
  Kezz Bracey
• 
  Terminal
  How to Install NPM and Bower
  Kezz Bracey

Conclusion

Along with these major changes, there are a number of minor changes to the latest Bootstrap. Fans of components like panels, thumbnails, and wells will be disappointed to learn that these have been removed. However, they’ve made way for an all-encompassing component called the “card”, which is actually a big improvement.  You can read all about theses changes, and more, on the Migration page. 

Stay tuned for more Bootstrap 4 tutorials and courses on Tuts+, and I’ll see you next time!

Useful Resources

• Bootstrap 4 announcement on the Bootstrap blog
• getbootstrap.com
  
• Migration docs

This is one of two drawings that accompanied Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s US patent application for the Lego toy building brick. The application was submitted 60 years ago yesterday on Jan 28, 1958, an occasion that is celebrated annually as International LEGO Day. (thx, david)

SALT LAKE CITY | Friday, 26 January 2018 |

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued the following statement regarding the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA). 

Texts From Superheroes

For more superhero comedy check out our podcast, Talk From Superheroes.

Sharing local stories can be difficult, but Google wants to help alleviate that problem with a new app.

It’s called Google Bulletin, and the company bills it as a “free, lightweight” app that lets individuals post pictures, text, and even videoclips directly to the service. There is no need to launch a separate blog or website to post the content. Google says if you’re comfortable with taking photos and sending messages, then Bulletin should feel right up your alley.

Once a story is published to Bulletin, it can be easily discovered via Google Search and direct links, and the content can be shared via social media networks as well. The company sees this as a way for local communities to share stores in their area that some of the larger news agencies might miss.

Google Bulletin is being tested in Nashville, Tennessee, and Oakland, California. If you want to request early access and you live in one of those cities, you can do so right here. There is no word on when or if Bulletin will expand to other areas.

What do you think of the idea?

“Fake news” is kind of a catch-all family-resemblance concept that’s abused as often as it’s used with real insight. But I was impressed by Pope Francis’s clear definition, given as part of an official message by the Vatican to mark World Communication Day:

While President Donald Trump has often dismissed news outlets and stories as “fake news,” Francis defined it as “the spreading of disinformation online or in the traditional media. It has to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader.”

He added, “Spreading fake news can serve to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests.”

Francis’s main example of fake news? The serpent’s message to Eve and Adam about the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This example shows that “there is no such thing as harmless disinformation; on the contrary, trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences. Even a seemingly slight distortion of the truth can have dangerous effects.”

Maybe along with Bishop of Rome and father of the Church, the Pope would make a good public editor.