Huge chunks of the world wide web were down last night for about an hour due to Fastly's CDN network shitting the bed. Sites like Twitch, StackOverflow, Amazon, Reddit, news sites like CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times and a few UK government websites just didn't load. Fastly hasn't said why but it was probably a botched config or patch. I was surprised to see that so many sites use Fastly, which isn't even that big of a CDN compared to say, Cloudflare or Akamai. A single attack on either one of those CDNs would have an even bigger impact, or relief, depending on your view on society's use of the internet.
Panic's adorable monochrome portable gaming device with a crank handle, the Playdate, is very close to release. Pricing starts at US$179 and pre-orders will ship early July, with a wider release later this year. The US$179 also includes 24 games (12 more than previously promised) from popular indie developers like Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) and Zach Gage (Spelltower), plus more games available at a later date, including one from Lucas Pope (Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn) called Mars After Midnight. You can view the entire "Playdate Update" on YouTube. Hopefully someone I know buys one and lets have a turn cranking it for a few hours.
Jeff Bezos, his brother and a third person to be decided via charity auction (currently at US$3.8m), are gonna head up into space for 3 minutes on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket on the 20th of July - only a few days after he officially quits as CEO as Amazon. He will also be the first human to fly on the rocket, so there's a decent chance we will get to watch the world's richest man die in a giant ball of flames in the sky, live on TV. Brings new meaning to eating one's own dog food, hey? Unlike SpaceX's rockets, the whole point of New Shepard is space tourism, with the craft designed specifically for taking rich people up, letting them gaze upon Earth through big windows, then bringing them home safely. New Glenn is Blue Origin's answer for that market.
Monica Chin's rant on The Verge begging Apple to put macOS on the new iPad Pro is absolutely correct. The iPad Pro has the exact same SoC, in the same thermal envelope (i.e: passively cooled) as the MacBook Air. For all intents and purposes, they're same damn device, just the iPad Pro lacks a keyboard! Apple could make a killer all in one device that's your tablet, your laptop and your desktop. Pretty much a Surface Pro, but better. My preference would be for iOS mode to be the default, but when docked with certain devices (bring back the Duo Dock!) it switched to macOS. Maybe that's not the classiest way of doing it, but I'm sure the big brains in Cupertino can figure out how to merge the best of iOS and the best of macOS into a single killer device.
📻 Degenerate - The Jesus and Mary Chain
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.