Bill Gates recently said he thinks Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake, but I'll bet if he saw the Control-Alt-Delete Knuckle Duster Ring he'd reconsider. Sure, programming Windows' universal Abort! command as 3 keys instead of one requires users to...press 3 keys instead of 1...but, like an unplanned 4th child, now that we have this duster of joy, this physical embodiment of the 3-finger salute, in our lives how could he ever regret having made it?

Designed and handmade by Etsy shop Joy Complex, the Control-Alt-Delete Knuckle Duster Ring isn't just a fitting gift for a geek, it's a terrific way to shut down the co-worker who won't stop yammering and the ex who keeps showing up to work things out.

And, no, I don't mean you should punch them in the face.

Just flash them the fist. Crtrl+Alt+Delete. A succinct way to say, WTF is wrong with you?! Stop what you're doing immediately, and go away!

Joy Complex will smith your Control-Alt-Delete Ring out of vintage steel, bronze steel, rough gray steel, or gold steel.

Muchas danke to Technabob.

Mlem, mlem. Keep snuggly warm inside this onesie while impersonating your favorite Yoshi sounds. Just the sounds, though. Please don't try and make your tongue stick out that far. $43.99

Smart home devices have exploded in popularity, with the leaders being smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo devices and the Google Home. Amazon’s most recent addition to its Echo line is the Echo Show, which features a 7-inch touchscreen to expand the capabilities of the smart speaker. A major selling point is that the Echo Show can bring you video search results, rather than audio-only responses.

That feature has taken a major hit, however. Google has removed access to YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show. The company cites a violation of its terms of service in how the Echo Show displays YouTube content. Though the specifics aren’t detailed, it likely pertains to the Echo Show not displaying core YouTube features, such as subscriptions and playlists. Google is sensitive to the inclusion and exclusion of these features, and has had issues with other companies (like Microsoft) utilizing YouTube in the past.

We’ve been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms. Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon.Google

Amazon has also issued a statement, which doesn’t mention any violation of terms of service.

Google made a change today at around 3 pm. YouTube used to be available to our shared customers on Echo Show. As of this afternoon, Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show, without explanation and without notification to customers. There is no technical reason for that decision, which is disappointing and hurts both of our customers.Amazon

The issue seems heated between the companies, and it remains to be seen if negotiators can work out a solution. If not, Amazon will suffer a major blow to the video functionality of the Echo Show.

Though one could believe that Google is trying to sabotage its smart home competitor, that’s likely more sensational than the actual issue. Nonetheless, it is intriguing to see Google taking such strong measures against Amazon.

Stay tuned for more updates.

So this jacket doesn’t just figuratively stink, it will literally stink too.

Shannon Liao, reporting for The Verge:

This past weekend, Showtime websites were found to be running a script that allows the sites to mine visitors’ extra CPU power for cryptocurrency, as pointed out by users on Twitter. The afflicted sites included showtime.com and showtimeanytime.com, but the script has since been removed following reports from Gizmodo and other sites.

The crypto mining Javascript is called Coinhive, and according to the site, it was made as an alternative to banner ads as a way for website owners to get around pesky ad-blockers. Ironically, some ad-blockers have now included Coinhive on the list of the banned.

This is like going to a restaurant and finding out the valets were using your car as an Uber while you ate.

Have a Daydream View headset and looking for new things to do with it? How would you like to browse the web with Chrome?

Chrome 61 will now let you view websites in virtual reality. According to Googler François Beaufort, you can try this out by loading Chrome 61 onto your phone and popping the device into your Daydream View headset.

With Chrome, you’ll be able to view and interact with any website in VR. You’ll be able to follow links and jump between pages in 2D and more immersive sites that support WebVR.

Google’s Daydream View headset has been around for about a year now, but VR itself is still in early days and so it’s always good to see more VR content come out. And while using Chrome in VR may not be the way that you’ll want to browse the web every day, it sounds like it could be a fun way to spend some time inside of a Daydream View headset.

Do you have a Daydream View headset?

Poet and English professor Seth Abramson recently published a Twitter thread about his current understanding of Donald Trump: his deliberate terrorization of the American public, lack of policy positions, corruption, and keen understanding of America as “a chaos machine” that “spits out attention, headlines, sometimes money” when you feed it. I think Abramson is right about Trump in many respects and I’ve included a few excerpts below…it was difficult to pick out what to highlight.

We need to never again discuss this man with respect to policy — it’s become more than clear in 9 months that he holds no policy positions.

So if you support Donald Trump because of any view you claim he holds, I don’t ever want to hear from you again. The man holds no views.

There is no position Donald Trump has ever taken that he has not, at some point in the past or present, taken the opposite position to.

…

But the most important thing is this: this is the first U.S. president to systematically and willfully terrorize his own populace daily.

His changeability is intended to keep us anxious and on guard. In fact, he’s admitted publicly, many times, that this is a tactic of his.

His corruption is equally studied: his business model has always been “get away with what you can,” and that’s exactly how he’s governed.

…

It’s *more* than that he’ll go down in our history as the worst president we’ll ever have — he’ll go down as one of our greatest villains.

Benedict Arnold tried to betray America for a prior sovereign — Trump is trying to *torture* a nation that was good to him his whole life.

Have you noticed a change in your mood since January? I mean a change you can’t seem to escape? Anxiety, anger, fear, confusion, doubt?

The most ubiquitous man in your nation is trying to poison you daily — because it gives him power — and no one’s stopping him from doing it.

I’m not using hyperbole: you’re under attack. A deliberate, unprovoked, systematic, and — yes — evil attack. And it’s working. We’re losing.

…

Because the last thing — of the three I mentioned — humans look for in a crisis is hope, and he’s systematically taking *that* away as well.

We don’t have hope future elections will be fair. We don’t have hope our government is working in our interests. We don’t have hope we can trust and love our neighbors and they’ll trust and love us back. And we don’t have hope things will start to make sense again.

Abramson finishes by saying that we need to focus on “legally, peacefully and transparently” removing Trump from power. I’m probably going to get some email about this post,¹ so I might as well go all in here with a ludicrous-sounding hunch² I’ve had about Trump since before the election: not only will he not resign or be impeached (for Russia ties or otherwise), he will refuse to leave office under any circumstances. He will attempt, with a non-zero chance of success, to stay in power even if he’s not re-elected in 2020.

Obviously, this is ridiculous and will not happen. What about laws and precedence and democracy and social mores, you’ll say! And you’d be correct. But Trump’s got more than 3 years to lay the groundwork to make it seem normal for him to do this…and Fox News and the Republicans will let him and aid him if they can. (I mean, if you’re America’s increasingly authoritarian & extremist minority party struggling to stay in power, making the sitting Republican President not subject to an election is far more effective than suppressing the votes of likely Democratic voters through gerrymandering and voter ID laws.) Sure, we’ll be outraged about it, but we’re outraged about him anyway and that hasn’t seemed to matter in a significant way yet.

Ok, that’s nuts, right? Could never happen in America, yes? But watching Trump as President over the past few months, is it really that difficult to imagine him going full OJ here when confronted with losing his powerful position? Instead of Simpson being driven around LA in the white Bronco by Al Cowlings followed by a phalanx of police cruisers, on January 20, 2021, it’ll be Trump locked in the White House with Senator Kid Rock, taunting the military via Twitter to come in and get him.³ That sounds more plausible than Trump genteelly hosting the incoming Democratic President for tea in what USA Today calls “the 220-year-old ritual that has become a hallmark of American democracy: The orderly transition of power that comes at the appointed hour when one president takes the oath of office and his predecessor recedes into history”. Aside from “power”, not a single other word in that sentence even remotely describes anything Trump has ever cared about.

1. I always get email about my Trump posts. Political posts on kottke.org are pretty unpopular and lose me readers every single time. Stay in your lane, Kottke!↩

2. Or perhaps “speculative fiction” is a better descriptor? I’m way too level-headed to actually believe this. Aren’t I?!↩

3. Seriously though, what is the enforcement mechanism surrounding the transfer of power here? The 20th Amendment covers the beginnings and ends of terms and what happens when there’s no president-elect. But what about if a sitting President refuses to leave office? A lot of this stuff is ritual, presumably because of course (of course!!!!) the President is supposed to be a decent person who will honor tradition and democracy. Does Congress decide what to do? Does the Secret Service? The Supreme Court? The military? Can you imagine the cries of “coup” from Trump and his supporters if a bunch of Marines storm the White House? OMG, he’d love it. ↩

There are a few different "traditional" ways of lazy loading of images. They all require JavaScript needing to figure out if an image is currently visible within the browser's viewport or not. Traditional approaches might be:

• Listening to scroll and resize events on the window
• Using a timer like setInterval

Both of these have performance problems.

Why traditional approaches are not performant?

Both of those approaches listed above are problematic because they work repeatedly and their function triggers **forced layout while calculating the position of the element with respect to the viewport, to check if the element is inside the viewport or not.

To combat these performance problems, some libraries throttle the function calls that do these things, limiting the number of times they are done.

Even then, repeated layout/reflow triggering operations consume precious time while a user interacts with the site and induces "junk" (that sluggish feeling when interacting with a site that nobody likes).

There is another approach we could use, that makes use of a new browser API designed specifically to help us with things like lazy loading: the Intersection Observer API.

That's exactly what my own library, Lozad.js, uses.

What makes Lozad.js performant?

Intersection Observers are the main ingredient. They allow registration of callback functions which get called when a monitored element enters or exits another element (or the viewport itself).

While Intersection Observers don't provide the exact pixels which overlap, they allow listening to events that allow us to watch if elements enter other elements by X% (configurable), then the callback gets fired. That is exactly our use case when using Intersection Observers for lazy loading.

Quick facts about Lozad.js

• Light-weight: just 535 bytes minified & gzipped
• No dependencies
• Uses the IntersectionObserver API
• Allows lazy loading of dynamically added elements as well (not just images), though a custom load function

Usage

Install from npm:

yarn add lozad

or via CDN:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/lozad"></script>

In your HTML, add a class to any image you wish to lazy load. The class can be changed via configuration, but "lozad" is the default.

<img class="lozad" data-src="image.png">

Also note we've removed the src attribute of the image and replaced it with data-src. This prevents the image from being loaded before the JavaScript executes and determines it should be. It's up to you to consider the implications there. With this HTML, images won't be shown at all until JavaScript executes. Nor will they be shown in contexts like RSS or other syndication. You may want to filter your HTML to only use this markup pattern when shown on your own website, and not elsewhere.

In JavaScript, initialize Lozad library with the options:

const observer = lozad(); // lazy loads elements with default selector as ".lozad"
observer.observe();

Read here about the complete list of options available in Lozad.js API.

Demo

See the Pen oGgxJr by Apoorv Saxena (@ApoorvSaxena) on CodePen.

Browser support

Browser support is limited, as the feature is relatively new. Use the official IntersectionObserver polyfill to overcome the limited support of this API.

Lozad.js: Performant Lazy Loading of Images is a post from CSS-Tricks

Late last week, Donald Trump called any NFL player who kneels during the national anthem protesting police brutality a “son of a bitch” (recall that this is the President of the United States we’re talking about here) and said they should be fired (Ha! He said his catchphrase! From that TV show!). Naturally, NFL players took exception to this and over the weekend, many many more players kneeled, sat, or no-showed during the anthem. And there were many takes, from political commentators and sports journalists alike. One of the best was from Dallas sports anchor Dale Hansen, who deftly cut to the core of the matter in a short monologue:

Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it’s an American’s right… But not this protest, and there’s the problem: The opinion that any protest you don’t agree with is a protest that should be stopped.

Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60’s had no right to protest an immoral war.

I served in the military during the Vietnam War… and my foot hurt, too. But I served anyway.

My best friend in high school was killed in Vietnam. Carroll Meir will be 18 years old forever. And he did not die so that you can decide who is a patriot and who loves America more.

The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem. They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise.

They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.

Here’s a text transcript…it’s worth reading or watching. See also Bob Costas’ interview on CNN and Shannon Sharpe’s comments.

Texts From Superheroes

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Matthew Panzarino, reporting for TechCrunch:

Apple is switching the default provider of its web searches from Siri, Search inside iOS (formerly called Spotlight) and Spotlight on the Mac. So, for instance, if Siri falls back to a web search on iOS when you ask it a question, you’re now going to get Google results instead of Bing.

Consistency is Apple’s main motivation given for switching the results from Microsoft’s Bing to Google in these cases. Safari on Mac and iOS already currently use Google search as the default provider, thanks to a deal worth billions to Apple (and Google) over the last decade. This change will now mirror those results when Siri, the iOS Search bar or Spotlight is used.

The search results include regular ‘web links’ as well as video results. Web image results from Siri, swiping down and searching within iOS and Spotlight will still come from Bing, for now. Bing has had more than solid image results for some time now so that makes some sense. If you use Siri to search your own photos, it will, of course, use your own library instead. Interestingly, video results will come directly from YouTube.

Apple is claiming they’re making this change for the sake of consistency. It has seemed a little odd that Safari’s default search engine (for queries typed in the location field) has always been Google, but Siri’s web searches have always been Bing. But I wonder how much of this was dictated by user experience and how much was determined by the business deal, which analyst A.M. Sacconaghi Jr. estimates has Google paying Apple $3 billion this year alone.

Also seems strange that Bing holds onto image search, and that video search will go to YouTube specifically, not Google video search. If I’m reading this right, when you ask Siri to search for video you won’t see any results that aren’t from YouTube.

Texts From Superheroes

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Mergers in the tech world are common, though the fast-flying rumors of mergers are far more prevalent. One persistent potential merger is that of T-Mobile and Sprint, the US’s third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers, respectively. The companies have connected multiple times in the past, though multiple attempts have fallen through. Over the past four months, however, the two companies have given the merger push renewed effort, and according to Reuters, deal terms are nearly finalized.

Though the merger talks are still private and tentative, the settling of deal terms is the biggest step in the negotiation process. Once deal terms are set, T-Mobile and Sprint can begin the due diligence process, with an official deal estimated to be complete by late October.

A major hurdle for the deal will be clearing the regulatory process. The new Trump administration has yet to encounter a significant merger with antitrust risk, and it remains unclear as to how the administration will treat it. The Obama administration was more reserved regarding big business mergers, but with the Trump administration’s business background and pro-job message, it could be more lenient regarding the merger.

Stay tuned for more updates as Sprint and T-Mobile continue merger talks.

Mattias Geniar:

A lot of (web) developers use a local .dev TLD for their own development. ... In those cases, if you browse to http://site.dev, you'll be redirect[ed] to https://site.dev, the HTTPS variant.

That means your local development machine needs to;

• Be able to serve HTTPs
• Have self-signed certificates in place to handle that
• Have that self-signed certificate added to your local trust store (you can't dismiss self-signed certificates with HSTS, they need to be 'trusted' by your computer)

This is probably generally A Good Thing™, but it is a little obnoxious to be forced into it on Chrome. They knew exactly what they were doing when they snatched up the .dev TLD. Isn't HSTS based on the entire domain though, not just the TLD?

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Chrome to force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS is a post from CSS-Tricks