Heraclitus of ages past surmised that, at heart, fire is the fundamental element of things. In other words, all things are beset by constant change. That philosophy has been boiled down to the saying ‘no man steps in the same river twice’. Sure enough and true to its name, no one plays the same game of Fluxx twice, for the party game is an ever-mutating affair. Its cavalcade of rules and action cards mean upsets are the norm. Fluxx been a standby filler game for ages now, and the app has always been a serviceable one. Thanks to a new 64-bit version, the game is back from the grave. It plays like a breeze but lacks the pep and polish most party games need to shine.

Fluxx has a metagame built right into its rules. Most of the cards in the deck tweak what’s possible and required on a ‘normal’ turn. ‘Draw X’ and ‘Play X’ are the usual culprits, with some rascally limits on hand size and Keepers popping up here and there. Most crucially, the Goal of the game itself is also a moving target: the winner is the player who, at the end of their turn, has Keepers in play matching those described on the goal card also in play. It’s a lock and key system which always gets jumbled up, since the same player who has the required Keepers rarely has the corresponding Goal. It’s a right mess trying to line up the victory conditions. The deck just reshuffles and play marches on interminably until someone wins. I’ve had games done on the first turn (my maiden voyage on the app was like this, somehow) and games which last an hour. The bedlam is entirely the point.

It’s manageable, just. And the app is well-organized, with big, bold icons and buttons for the UI. The game is mostly about timing and holding back strategic options for last-ditch switch plays. Fluxx has a story-like quality because even in lightning-fast rounds of the play, things feel stretched out and even long-winded. So if a million betrayals and thefts happen, the injury and insult is leavened by the game’s rapid-fire changes. Easy come, easy go makes for easy-going players.

Fluxx is in excellent company. There are a few playing-deck games about changing rules and guessing rules, like Mao and Eleusis. (Sidenote: The latter game was the seed inspiration for Zendo, another game published by Looney Labs) The conceit of changing rules feels nominally ‘clever’ without actually adding any difficulty. It’s not really that sophisticated, but it is good for a laugh, and I enjoy the volatility and uselessness of deep planning. Fluxx never puts on airs, it never promises a grand or thoughtful experience. Just some good old-fashioned sloppy fun. It’s a little old-school, though, and there are plenty of other short games which do pack in some mental crunch-time, even in just twenty minutes. As far as comparisons go, you might like Fluxx if Munchkin or Exploding Kittens are up your alley. It’s also useful as a kind of pressure-release valve for when the gamer brain wants to get its fix without too much strain involved.

Now, all of this might sound like one long back-handed compliment. Au contraire, my friend. Fluxx simply has settled into an unusual and somewhat dated niche, that of the insane, anything-goes filler. One of the most egregiously Type-A dudes I know loves Fluxx to pieces, though, so you never know who might become a fan. You play the game, or rather the game plays you, more than a bit. Technically part of the appeal of Fluxx is that it has a million different versions, with decent themes and comic-style art for all of them. The mix-and-match aspect isn’t present in the app, though, unfortunately. The regular deck of cards is plenty robust from a gameplay standpoint, strictly, but it’s missing the flair that Chthulu Star Trek Anatomy Mega-Fluxx has. This boast is only half in jest.

For all its zaniness, the game really is quite simple and shockingly devoid of decision-making. Depending on your breed of gamer, flat decisions might be an absolutely deal breaker. For the omnivore it’s no big. Far from a knock on Fluxx’s design, this straightforwardness makes it a great beer-and-pretzels game. Low mental overhead means extra presence of mind for banter and the hey-how-are-ya catchups which are part and parcel of why tabletop gaming is fulfilling. Systems and socialization in the same package. Fluxx fits in the flow of life, what with its playtime and light ruleset.

Well, on the socializing front Fluxx as an app oversells and under-delivers. Because there is only one physical index to track the game’s state, people’s attention wanders just a tad too much. If there’s much food, drink and merriment to be had, a lonesome iPad is bound to get lost in the shuffle. So while Fluxx is a great party game, the app itself won’t make a splash at those same parties. Whereas with a deck of cards spread out on the table, there are constant reminders of what’s going on. It seems a cruel paradox, but I find light-weight games have a harder time justifying their app versions, because the book-keeping and portability gains are offset by this reduced social presence on the table.

One could argue, fairly, that this reviewer has been rather hot-and-cold on the most pressing issue: is the Fluxx app any good? Well, the answer depends (fluctuates, even?) on what kind of void it is meant to fill. It’s certainly good for a bit of nostalgia, or shooting the breeze, and must be said that the game’s online play options are good. But as an app for premeditated play-sessions, the digital Fluxx has lost some of its spark.

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The Pokémon Company has announced it will end the Pokémon Duel mobile service on 31st October 2019.

When these services are taken offline, certain parts of the game will no longer be playable. Players will also be unable to purchase any new Diamonds from today onwards but are still able to request a refund. The ability to purchase the Player Pass will also be removed.

Here’s a message from The Pokémon Company about the closure of the service:

Pokémon Duel game service will be terminated as of 10/31/2019 at 01:59 (UTC).
For details on the end of service, please see the in-game Information.
Thank you for your support. We realize that it’s not long until the end of service, but we hope you’ll continue to enjoy Pokémon Duel to the very end.

Pokémon Duel rolled out here in the west on Android and iOS in 2017. We gave it six out of ten stars and found it to be oddly compelling despite some questionable design choices.

Did you ever get around to playing this mobile game? Are you sad to hear the service is closing? Leave a comment down below.

You might have encountered a few advertisements the past year trying to sell you a password manager. Some examples are LastPass, 1Password, or Dashlane. A password manager removes the burden of remembering the passwords for all your websites. No longer do you need to re-use passwords or use easy-to-remember passwords. Instead, you only need to remember one single password that can unlock all your other passwords for you.

This can make you more secure by having one strong password instead of many weak passwords. You can also sync your passwords across devices if you have a cloud-based password manager like LastPass, 1Password, or Dashlane. Unfortunately, none of these products are open source. Luckily there are open source alternatives available.

Open source password managers

These alternatives include Bitwarden, LessPass, or KeePass. Bitwarden is an open source password manager that stores all your passwords encrypted on the server, which works the same way as LastPass, 1Password, or Dashlane. LessPass is a bit different as it focuses on being a stateless password manager. This means it derives passwords based on a master password, the website, and your username rather than storing the passwords encrypted. On the other side of the spectrum there’s KeePass, a file-based password manager with a lot of flexibility with its plugins and applications.

Each of these three apps has its own downsides. Bitwarden stores everything in one place and is exposed to the web through its API and website interface. LessPass can’t store custom passwords since it’s stateless, so you need to use their derived passwords. KeePass, a file-based password manager, can’t easily sync between devices. You can utilize a cloud-storage provider together with WebDAV to get around this, but a lot of clients do not support it and you might get file conflicts if devices do not sync correctly.

This article focuses on Bitwarden.

Running an unofficial Bitwarden implementation

There is a community implementation of the server and its API called bitwarden_rs. This implementation is fully open source as it can use SQLite or MariaDB/MySQL, instead of the proprietary Microsoft SQL Server that the official server uses.

It’s important to recognize some differences exist between the official and the unofficial version. For instance, the official server has been audited by a third-party, whereas the unofficial one hasn’t. When it comes to implementations, the unofficial version lacks email confirmation and support for two-factor authentication using Duo or email codes.

Let’s get started running the server with SELinux in mind. Following the documentation for bitwarden_rs you can construct a Podman command as follows:

$ podman run -d \ 
 --userns=keep-id \
 --name bitwarden \
 -e SIGNUPS_ALLOWED=false \
 -e ROCKET_PORT=8080 \
 -v /home/egustavs/Bitwarden/bw-data/:/data/:Z \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 bitwardenrs/server:latest

This downloads the bitwarden_rs image and runs it in a user container under the user’s namespace. It uses a port above 1024 so that non-root users can bind to it. It also changes the volume’s SELinux context with :Z to prevent permission issues with read-write on /data.

If you host this under a domain, it’s recommended to put this server under a reverse proxy with Apache or Nginx. That way you can use port 80 and 443 which points to the container’s 8080 port without running the container as root.

Running under systemd

With Bitwarden now running, you probably want to keep it that way. Next, create a unit file that keeps the container running, automatically restarts if it doesn’t respond, and starts running after a system restart. Create this file as /etc/systemd/system/bitwarden.service:

[Unit]
Description=Bitwarden Podman container
Wants=syslog.service

[Service]
User=egustavs
Group=egustavs
TimeoutStartSec=0
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman run 'bitwarden'
ExecStop=-/usr/bin/podman stop -t 10 'bitwarden'
Restart=always
RestartSec=30s
KillMode=none

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now, enable and start it using sudo:

$ sudo systemctl enable bitwarden.service && sudo systemctl start bitwarden.service
$ systemctl status bitwarden.service
bitwarden.service - Bitwarden Podman container
 Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/bitwarden.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
 Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-07-09 20:23:16 UTC; 1 day 14h ago
 Main PID: 14861 (podman)
 Tasks: 44 (limit: 4696)
 Memory: 463.4M

Success! Bitwarden is now running under system and will keep running.

Adding LetsEncrypt

It’s strongly recommended to run your Bitwarden instance through an encrypted channel with something like LetsEncrypt if you have a domain. Certbot is a bot that creates LetsEncrypt certificates for us, and they have a guide for doing this through Fedora.

After you generate a certificate, you can follow the bitwarden_rs guide about HTTPS. Just remember to append :Z to the LetsEncrypt volume to handle permissions while not changing the port.

Photo by CMDR Shane on Unsplash.

As Microsoft strives to support the digital transformation of organizations and enterprises around the world, we continue to drive innovation and expand into new geographies to empower more customers with Office 365, the world’s leading cloud-based productivity solution, with more than 180 million commercial monthly active users. Today, we’re taking another step in our ongoing investment to help enable digital transformation and societal impact across Africa with the general availability of Office 365 services from our new cloud datacenters in South Africa.

Office 365, delivered from local datacenters in South Africa, helps our customers enable the modern workplace and empower their employees with real-time collaboration and cloud-powered intelligence while maintaining security, compliance, and in-country customer data residency. The addition of South Africa as a new geography for Office 365 increases the options for secure, cloud productivity services combined with customer data residency in 16 geographies across the globe along with three additional geographies also announced.

In-country data residency for core customer data helps Office 365 customers meet regulatory requirements, which is particularly important and relevant in industries such as healthcare, financial services, and government—where organizations need to keep specific data in-country to comply with local requirements. Customer data residency provides additional assurances regarding data privacy and reliability for organizations and enterprises. Core customer data is stored only in their datacenter geography (Geo)—in this case, the cloud datacenters within South Africa.

Customers like Altron and the Gauteng Provincial Government have used Office 365 to transform their workplaces. This latest development will enable them—and other organizations and enterprises adopting Office 365—to ramp up their digital transformation journey.

“Altron is committed to improving our infrastructure and embracing a strategy to become a cloud-first company to better serve our customers and empower our employees through modern collaboration. We’ve noticed a tangible difference since making the move to Office 365.”
—Debra Marais, Lead, IT Shared Services at Altron

“Office 365 is driving our modernization journey of Government ICT infrastructure and services by allowing us to develop pioneering solutions at manageable costs and create overall improvements in operations management, all while improving transparency and accountability.”
—David Kramer, Deputy Director General, ICT at Gauteng Provincial Government

Microsoft recently became the first global provider to deliver cloud services from the African continent with the opening of our new cloud datacenter regions. Office 365 joins Azure to expand the intelligent cloud service available from Africa. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, the next generation of intelligent business applications, are anticipated to be available in the fourth quarter of 2019.

By delivering the comprehensive Microsoft cloud—which includes Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365—from datacenters in a given geography, we offer scalable, available, and resilient cloud services to companies and organizations while meeting customer data residency, security, and compliance needs. We have deep expertise in protecting data and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements, including offering the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry.

The new cloud regions in South Africa are connected to Microsoft’s other regions via our global network, one of the largest and most innovative on the planet—spanning more than 100,000 miles (161,000 kilometers) of terrestrial fiber and subsea cable systems to deliver services to customers. Microsoft is bringing the global cloud closer to home for African organizations and citizens through our trans-Arabian paths between India and Europe, as well as our trans-Atlantic systems, including Marea, the highest capacity cable to ever cross the Atlantic.

We’re committed to accelerating digital transformation across the continent through numerous initiatives and also recently announced Microsoft’s first Africa Development Centre (ADC), with two initial sites in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria. The ADC will serve as a premier center of engineering for Microsoft, where world-class African talent can create solutions for local and global impact. With our new cloud datacenter regions, the ADC, and programs like 4Afrika, we believe Africa is poised to develop locally and scale for global impact better than ever before.

Learn more about Office 365 and Microsoft in the Middle East and Africa.

By Joe Robinson 24 Jul 2019

Released a few weeks back, SHADERed is a free and open source editing environment for developing shaders, both HLSL and GLSL.  SHADERed enables you to create shaders on the fly with a real-time view of the results.  Currently it is Windows only, but the code is currently being ported from D3D to OpenG+SDL so this could change in the future.

Features of SHADERed include:

• instantly see changes
• vertex, pixel and geometry shaders
• render states
• audio file support
• load obj 3d model files
• load your own textures into shaders
• render results to render texture (or screen)
• create and edit your own input variables
• shader statistics
• code editor with compilation and error reporting
• custom themes and templates

SHADERed is available on Github here.  The code is available under the liberal MIT license.  Compiled binaries for Windows are available here.  Check the video below to see SHADERed in action.

Design Programming