Here’s a random story if ever there was one: a parakeet has managed to faithfully recreate all of the little bleeps and bloops that can be heard while navigating the Nintendo Switch home menu. And it’s utterly fantastic.

Not content with copying mainstream phrases like ‘who’s a pretty boy, then?’, this parakeet has proudly stated its allegiance to the gaming community by talking in – what we like to call – Switch language. If you listen carefully, you might recognise all the familiar jingles from the system’s home menu – such as opening up your profile and checking your friends list – and even the sound made when scrolling through your games at high speed.

We’d love to see it take a crack at the GameCube loading screen, but this is still pretty cool nonetheless. If you’re reading, little parakeet, we salute you.

We’ll have absolutely no negativity shared towards this wonderful bundle of feathers and joy in the comments below.

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Unlike conventional subscriber identity module (SIM) cards, which are used to authenticate a user’s identity with a mobile service provider, an eSIM is permanently embedded in a device, eliminating the need to acquire physical SIM cards from a carrier. “We saw that this device was able to take advantage of eSIM technology, which is uncharted territory in our industry,” says Olsen. “We’ve envisioned this for a long time because it’s easy to lose physical SIM cards. And with the eSIM and Microsoft Intune, we can send up to 20 SIM profiles to one client so that we can find the right profile for the region where we’re flying and quickly activate it.” In addition, because the eSIM is non-removable, there are no issues in matching the various physical SIM card sizes to devices.

A tough job
EFB devices need to be tough. Flying through sub-zero temperatures in Norway during a brutal winter one day and landing in the searing heat of Dubai the next, demands a device that can stand up to temperature extremes. Even in a climate-controlled cockpit, devices are subjected to direct sunlight and cold because of their placement.

These devices must also remain stable and reliable regardless of exposure to rapid decompression. Among the requirements that are mandated by various regulatory bodies, including the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), EFB devices must also have fail-safe power sources. For Olsen, Microsoft provides an advantage, as it maintains a dedicated lab for meticulous device testing. “Microsoft provides decompression testing for devices that are used as EFBs,” he explains. “Rather than testing the devices myself, I get all the relevant results directly from Microsoft.”

Lighting the way
Screen brightness is a vital factor in an always-on cockpit environment. Pilots need a responsive, easily-adjustable screen to match fast-changing conditions. EFB data must be easily visible in bright sunlight or during the gloomy darkness of a night flight. “It’s really amazing to see the difference of the Surface Pro LTE screen in different light conditions,” Olsen states. “When you’re working with 2,500 pilots, you’ll always have extremes of opinion in what lighting level works best, so the ease of adjusting the screen is essential.”

Beyond brightness, another important screen factor is its sensitivity and accuracy. Crews use Surface Pro with LTE Advanced in tablet mode, so touch sensitivity is paramount, and Norwegian Air Shuttle calibrates screen sensitivity on devices every two to three months. Unlike previous devices, Olsen finds that the touch sensitivity of the Surface Pro with LTE Advanced doesn’t fade over time—an important factor for crews who may be flying in turbulent weather and require instant screen responsiveness without taking time to recalibrate or repeat an action when every second counts.

Johan Gauermann, Deputy Director of Flight Operations at Norwegian Air Shuttle states that “Our team of pilots really appreciate the value of our EFB Application in combination with the global LTE Connectivity of the Surface Devices. We train thousands of pilots, and they become effective Surface users quickly. The bright display at high altitudes and responsive touch screen work for everyone.”

Synchronising EFBs around the world
Ensuring that all devices around the world are updated is also extremely important. The Norwegian team is working to perfect the next advancement in its device strategy—using Windows Autopilot Deployment to load Windows 10 and manage updates with self-service provisioning. Olsen looks forward to shipping Surface Pro with LTE Advanced devices around the globe, using Windows Autopilot to ensure that each device is configured to his exact specifications. “We’re taking our EFB provisioning to a new level with the possibilities we see in current Microsoft solutions,” he says. “Wherever I send the device, I can be sure that through the Intune portal and Windows Autopilot, it will be set up exactly as we want: all the settings, eSIM profiles, and software.”

With hundreds of planes to provision with EFB devices and the requirements for consistently high performance, Norwegian Air Shuttle puts a premium on reliability. Olsen looks for well-made devices that will last, and he doesn’t compromise on performance. The capabilities of Surface Pro with LTE Advanced was, according to him, the icing on the cake:

“We tested devices that were far more expensive,” he describes. “Price isn’t an issue for the right device. Only one device provided the best value—the performance we need at a reasonable cost that ticked every box on the list, plus LTE. We anticipate a huge benefit within the next year when our entire fleet is equipped with Surface Pro LTE.”

For more information, please visit Microsoft Customer Stories.

After 72 hours of intense battles, the final Splatoon 2 Splatfest results have now been tallied up. Chaos reigns supreme as Pearl takes out the victory, with a 3-0 win over Marina’s Team Order. Below is the full breakdown:

In the video below, courtesy of Nintendo Life contributor Gonçalo Lopes (Team Order), you can see how the aftermath unfolds.

The outcome is not necessarily as bad as Marina was expecting – with Pearl announcing the duo should break into new musical genres…at least until her solo career gets off the ground.

If you participated in the final Splatfest, be sure to collect your Super Sea Snail prizes in the main square. And if you’re wondering about the future of Splatoon series, check out our previous post from earlier this week.

Did your side win? Leave a comment below!

In the beginning there was dual boot, it was the only way to have more than one operating system on the same laptop. At the time, it was difficult for these operating systems to be run simultaneously or interact with each other. Many years passed before it was possible, on common PCs, to run an operating system inside another through virtualization.

Recent PCs or laptops, including moderately-priced ones, have the hardware features to run virtual machines with performance close to the physical host machine.

Virtualization has therefore become normal, to test operating systems, as a playground for learning new techniques, to create your own home cloud, to create your own test environment and much more. This article walks you through using Virt Manager on Fedora to setup virtual machines.

Introducing QEMU/KVM and Libvirt

Fedora, like all other Linux systems, comes with native support for virtualization extensions. This support is given by KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) currently available as a kernel module.

QEMU is a complete system emulator that works together with KVM and allows you to create virtual machines with hardware and peripherals.

Finally libvirt is the API layer that allows you to administer the infrastructure, ie create and run virtual machines.

The set of these three technologies, all open source, is what we’re going to install on our Fedora Workstation.

Installation

Step 1: install packages

Installation is a fairly simple operation. The Fedora repository provides the “virtualization” package group that contains everything you need.

 
sudo dnf install @virtualization
 

Step 2: edit the libvirtd configuration

By default the system administration is limited to the root user, if you want to enable a regular user you have to proceed as follows.

Open the /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf file for editing

 
sudo vi /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
 

Set the domain socket group ownership to libvirt

 
unix_sock_group = "libvirt"
 

Adjust the UNIX socket permissions for the R/W socket

 
unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"
 

Step 3: start and enable the libvirtd service

 
sudo systemctl start libvirtd

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
 

Step 4: add user to group

In order to administer libvirt with the regular user you must add the user to the libvirt group, otherwise every time you start virtual-manager you will be asked for the password for sudo.

 
sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)
 

This adds the current user to the group. You must log out and log in to apply the changes.

Getting started with virt-manager

The libvirt system can be managed either from the command line (virsh) or via the virt-manager graphical interface. The command line can be very useful if you want to do automated provisioning of virtual machines, for example with Ansible, but in this article we will concentrate on the user-friendly graphical interface.

The virt-manager interface is simple. The main form shows the list of connections including the local system connection.

The connection settings include virtual networks and storage definition. it is possible to define multiple virtual networks and these networks can be used to communicate between guest systems and between the guest systems and the host.

Creating your first virtual machine

To start creating a new virtual machine, press the button at the top left of the main form:

The first step of the wizard requires the installation mode. You can choose between a local installation media, network boot / installation or an existing virtual disk import:

Choosing the local installation media the next step will require the ISO image path:

The subsequent two steps will allow you to size the CPU, memory and disk of the new virtual machine. The last step will ask you to choose network preferences: choose the default network if you want the virtual machine to be separated from the outside world by a NAT, or bridged if you want it to be reachable from the outside. Note that if you choose bridged the virtual machine cannot communicate with the host machine.

Check “Customize configuration before install” if you want to review or change the configuration before starting the setup:

The virtual machine configuration form allows you to review and modify the hardware configuration. You can add disks, network interfaces, change boot options and so on. Press “Begin installation” when satisfied:

At this point you will be redirected to the console where to proceed with the installation of the operating system. Once the operation is complete, you will have the working virtual machine that you can access from the console:

The virtual machine just created will appear in the list of the main form, where you will also have a graph of the CPU and memory occupation:

libvirt and virt-manager is a powerful tool that allows great customization to your virtual machines with enterprise level management. If something even simpler is desired, note that Fedora Workstation comes with GNOME Boxes pre-installed and can be sufficient for basic virtualization needs.

Santorini is an incredible abstract strategy game. Yes, it rehashes the old truism ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ as its tagline, and its artstyle is rife with chibi-style Greco-Roman mythical figures, but trust me, every part of this syncretic approach works. Abstracts have a habit of punching well above their weight, and this one will twist your brain in knots. On a 5×5 grid, players take turns moving figures and placing buildings, step by step, the iconic ivory-and-azur builds of the island Santorini. It is a skillful game with a rich, cutesy presentation.

The core ruleset is wicked simple, but also stays true to abstraction as a genre by offering a robust challenge. Santorini’s masterstroke is to offer an additional layer that gives each player a unique power which breaks the normal scheme of things. Gaia has extra pieces for example, and Artemis can move twice. The game is satisfying even in its powerless, vanilla form, so mixing in these variations makes for a truly infinite challenge. In this, it reminds me of Cosmic Encounter as much as Chess. Both are helter-skelter in its variety, regimental in core procedure. Each turn a piece must move (either adjacently or orthogonally) and then build nearby. A piece can move at most one step up but can ‘jump’ any steps down. The game ends when one player advances their piece to the third level from a lower level. It can also, more rarely, end because the other player cannot make a legal move with either of their pieces. That’s the gist of it, barring certain edge-cases and power interactions.

I had forgotten how rusty I’d become and upon firing up the app for the first time I proceeded to lose to the temptingly-named ‘novice’ AI. A few times. This game has teeth, folks, and its bots will trounce the unwary. Re-learning good play was like revisiting Chess, or perhaps Cinco Paus. Certain patterns and rules of thumb emerge. The center is vitally important, one generally seeks the upper ground to gain the upper hand, and initial placements are almost never around the periphery of the board. It’s difficult to generalize beyond this, but after just a few thoughtful short play sessions, Santorini creates something like a flow state: pure challenge, effortless concentration. Can’t say I’m a grandmaster or that these bouts of time spent were filled with earth-shattering insights, but I can vouch that the flow means it’s an inviting game to lose yourself in.

It’s also an inviting game to learn. The system and rules are so simple as to appear plain, indeed many people bounce off abstracts because they seem ‘dull’, but Santorini has plenty of spirit and style. It’s a good game for kids to pick up, because it has a low barrier to entry and some whimsy to its presentation. Said whimsy belies an absolutely ironclad, zero-variance mental slugfest. ‘For kids’ means the highest praise, cool enough to attract fickle attention but clever enough to hold up over ages. There’s a metagame and deeper level of nuance behind power matchups, but the standard ruleset is extremely refined and punishing. The game has opted for a series of short videos to illustrate bite-sized examples of the game. There’s a mother-lode one for how to play, and a bunch of spin-offs which each explain a specific character’s power. The game also has really clean-cut iconography, with suggestive visual icons for a power above the ruletext and an eminently readable board. The color saturation and architecturally distinct levels make parsing the field at a glance a breeze. So, yeah, it’s polished.

It also has a decent online multiplayer, though here some features are lacking. You find matches either through random pair-ups, or by invitation only with a code. There is an ELO-based ranking system but no official ranked mode. Last but not least, all online multiplayer uses a 45 second turn timer. Usually that’s enough to speed things along without undue pressure, but one would hope that exceptions for particularly vexing turns were possible.

The single player ‘Odyssey’ mode is very fun, structured as a series of God-specific challenges with optional trophies to unlock. Your playstyle and strategic headspace probably has favorite gods and least favorite foes, so if nothing else, Odyssey is a nice way to sample the field. It’s kinda like Splendor’s challenge mode, creating artificial constraints the player has to solve creatively. The game isn’t drowning in content but it is dripping with replayability. Do note that more than a few of the gods are premium DLC, and that their respective parts of ‘Odyssey’ are also locked.

Here at Pocket Tactics, we’re deeply fond of our board game adaptations. Usually they’re a long time coming, and when they arrive they breathe new life into an older, august title. Well, even among these, Santorini is special. For one, its history stretches back a little further than most. It had pretty much become an obscure collector’s item, praised but unknown, from its 2004 self-published version until its 2016 Kickstarter gave it a new art style and high production values, along with widespread, cost-efficient distribution. The game has always been very good, only lately to have been given the just distinction of becoming well-known. It’s even better than most other adaptations, partially because the game is simple, so plenty of attention has been given to bells-and-whistles. There are sophisticated animations, unique effects for each god power, and a full-throated soundtrack.

Santorini is a picturesque dream of an island, and the game with its namesake is as good as it gets. It marries perfectly two distinct brands of appeal, the wildly imaginative to the coldly analytical. Enough beauty and wit are in this one to keep Santorini on a gamer’s homepage and daily rotation for a good while. Great for abstract die-hards, excellent for those just getting their toes wet. The DLC pricing is a smidge high, and the lack of asynchronous multiplayer a little disheartening, but these are trifling drawbacks to a paragon of what abstract board games can be.

The cross platform open source Java based game framework libGDX just released version 1.9.10.  If you are interested in learning libGDX we have a comprehensive tutorial series available here and a video series available here.  While the tutorials are a few years old, libGDX is a mature framework that has stayed relatively stable over time, so they should still be perfectly valid.  This release updates several of the dependencies to newer versions as well as an update to the Gradle build system.

Highlight details of the release include:

• GWT update to 2.8.2
• MobiVM release 2.3.7
• Lwjgl 3.2.1
• Lots of QOL and bug fixes for GWT backend
• Better iOS backend customization
• PixmapPacker features like NinePatch and whitespace stripping
• InstancedRendering support via Mesh and InstanceBufferObjects
• SCENE2D (Standard tweaks and improvements across the board)
• Gradle updates to latest

Full release notes and details are available here.

GameDev News LibGDX