Fantastic choice.

External link: Doctor Who’s 13th Time Lord to be a woman

I completely missed this when Agile Bits introduced their new 1Password.com product (which, admittedly, I didn’t really pay attention to), but standalone licenses for 1Password are no longer being marketed. If you want one, you have to email Support to get one.

As someone who’s bought multiple versions and upgrades of 1Password over the years, I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, if there are genuine technical limitations caused by supporting standalone versions with local vaults, and the new platform provides a truely better experience, then great. On the other, I’m always wary of putting all my eggs in one basket… if Agile Bits were to suffer some catastrophe tomorrow then my standalone 1Password 4 and local vault wouldn’t be affected in any way at all. I’m mostly fine with the security aspects, as from what I can tell, even if they were to be breached, all a hacker could get would be an encrypted binary of your data.

Something for me to think about, I guess.

External link: 1Password Support Forum Thread

A powerful recount of Coraline Ada Ehmke’s terrible treatment at GitHub. Please take some time to read it.

I think back on the lack of options I was given in response to my mental health situation and I see a complete lack of empathy. I reflect on the weekly one-on-ones that I had with my manager prior to my review and the positive feedback I was getting, in contrast to the surprise annual review. I consider the journal entries that I made and all the effort I put in on following the PIP and demonstrating my commitment to improving, only to be judged negatively for the most petty reasons. I think about how I opened up to my manager about my trauma and was accused of trying to manipulate her feelings. I remember coming back from burying my grandmother and being told that I was fired.

…

GitHub has made some very public commitments to turning its culture around, but I feel now that these statements are just PR. I am increasingly of the opinion that in hiring me and other prominent activists, they were attempting to use our names and reputations to convince the world that they took diversity, inclusivity, and social justice issues seriously. And I feel naive for having fallen for it.

This isn’t the first time GitHub have run afoul of having a toxic internal culture. Perhaps ironically, it appears from my view that it was the “corporate” controls implemented after the previous fallout, combined with cultural issues and inexperience of how those controls are meant to be applied that led to the horrible experience.

I’ve done Staff Management in companies hundreds of times the size of GitHub; I recognise every tool and process mentioned in Coraline’s recount, and have been part of them numerous times. Each instance in this retelling seems to be a perversion of what is meant to be applied. Tools designed to help and protect everyone in involved in the process were turned against the party with the least power.

After my last post, I came across some discussion about implementing JSON Feed, and whether using a template is a good way to implement JSON Feed in a site. The concensus seems to be “No,” with one of the authors of the spec weighing in. For the most part, I do agree – a template is more likely to break under some edge case than a proper serializer – but until there is more support for the spec I see it as a pragmattic short-term solution. So proceed at your own risk for now!

I can’t take credit for this – I found the code below (from vallieres) after a quick search for adding feed.json to Jekyll without plugins. The only thing I’ve added is the sitemap front-matter which will exclude the output file from our sitemap.xml

---
layout: null
sitemap:
  exclude: 'yes'
---
{
    "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
    "title": "{{ site.title | xml_escape }}",
    "home_page_url": "{{ "/" | absolute_url }}",
    "feed_url": "{{ "/feed.json" | absolute_url }}",
    "description": {{ site.description | jsonify }},
    "icon": "{{ "/apple-touch-icon.png" | absolute_url }}",
    "favicon": "{{ "/favicon.ico" | absolute_url }}",
    "expired": false,
    {% if site.author %}
    "author": {% if site.author.name %} {
        "name": "{{ site.author.name }}",
        "url": {% if site.author.url %}"{{ site.author.url }}"{% else %}null{% endif %},
        "avatar": {% if site.author.avatar %}"{{ site.author.avatar }}"{% else %}null{% endif %}
    },{% else %}"{{ site.author }}",{% endif %}
    {% endif %}
"items": [
    {% for post in site.posts limit:36 %}
        {
            "id": "{{ post.url | absolute_url | sha1 }}",
            "title": {{ post.title | jsonify }},
            "summary": {{ post.seo_description | jsonify }},
            "content_text": {{ post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
            "content_html": {{ post.content | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
            "url": "{{ post.url | absolute_url }}",
            {% if post.image.size > 1 %}"image": {{ post.image | jsonify }},{% endif %}
            {% if post.link.size > 1 %}"external_url": "{{ post.link }}",{% endif %}
            {% if post.banner.size > 1 %}"banner_image": "{{ post.banner }}",{% endif %}
            {% if post.tags.size > 1 %}"tags": {{ post.tags | jsonify }},{% endif %}
            {% if post.enclosure.size > 1 %}"attachments": [ {
              "url": "{{ post.enclosure }}",
              "mime_type": "{{ post.enclosure_type }}",
              "size_in_bytes": "{{ post.enclosure_length }}"
            },{% endif %}
            "date_published": "{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}",
            "date_modified": "{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}",
            {% if post.author %}
                "author": {% if post.author.name %} {
                "name": "{{ post.author.name }}",
                "url": {% if post.author.url %}"{{ post.author.url }}"{% else %}null{% endif %},
                "avatar": {% if post.author.avatar %}"{{ post.author.avatar }}"{% else %}null{% endif %}
                }
                {% else %}"{{ post.author }}"{% endif %}
            {% else %}
                "author": {% if site.author.name %} {
                "name": "{{ site.author.name }}",
                "url": {% if site.author.url %}"{{ site.author.url }}"{% else %}null{% endif %},
                "avatar": {% if site.author.avatar %}"{{ site.author.avatar }}"{% else %}null{% endif %}
                }
                {% else %}
                "{{ site.author }}"
                {% endif %}
            {% endif %}
        }{% if forloop.last == false %},{% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
    ]
}

Lately I’ve found myself enjoying the YouTube channel Outside XBox (and their sister channel, Outside Xtra). Normally what will happen is I’ll put a YouTube video on the TV as “background noise” and it ends up playing videos from the same channel for a few hours; in this case I ended up going down a rabbit hole of their Hitman videos. Whether it was the normal play throughs, the challenge modes, or the “3 ways to play”, I was hooked and wanted to play the game for myself. But I refuse to pay full price for a game that’s been out for a while, so it sat on my Steam Wishlist until last week, when it was discounted by 60% on the evening before the Steam Summer Sale.

I finally got round to playing Hitman today, and so far I’d say it’s got the potential to be the first game to really hold my attention in since Metal Gear Solid 5. I loved Hitman 2, and kept tabs on the ups and downs of the series after that, so having another game in the series feel as good as that one did is certainly welcome.

So far I’ve only completed the prologue missions (though I did replay the very first mission several times), so these are very early impressions. Fingers crossed the game holds up as I get further through it!