We recently interviewed Akash Angle on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

Who is Akash Angle?

Akash is a Linux user who ditched Windows some time ago. An avid Fedora user for  the past 9 years, he has tried out almost all the Fedora flavors and spins to get his day to day tasks done. He was introduced to Fedora by a school friend.

What Hardware?

Akash uses a Lenovo B490 at work. It is equipped with an Intel Core i3-3310 Processor, and a 240GB Kingston SSD. “This laptop is great for day to work like surfing the internet, blogging, and a little bit of photo editing and video editing too. Although not a professional laptop and the specs not being that high end, it does the job perfectly,” says Akash.

He uses a Logitech basic wireless mouse and would like to eventually get a mechanical keyboard. His personal computer — which is a custom-built desktop — has the latest 7th-generation Intel i5 7400 processor, and 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM.

What Software?

Akash is a fan of the GNOME 3 desktop environment. He loves most of the goodies and bells and whistles the OS can throw in for getting basic tasks done.

For practical reasons he prefers a fresh installation as a way of upgrading to the latest Fedora version. He thinks Fedora 29 is arguably the the best workstation out there. Akash says this has been backed up by reviews of various tech evangelists and open source news sites.

To play videos, his go-to is the VLC video player packaged as a Flatpak, which gives him the latest stable version. When Akash wants to make screenshots, the ultimate tool for him is Shutter, which the Magazine has covered in the past. For graphics, GIMP is something without which he wouldn’t be able to work.

Google Chrome stable, and the dev channel, are his most used web browsers. He also uses Chromium and the default version of Firefox, and sometimes even Opera makes its way into the party as well.

All the rest of the magic Akash does is from the terminal, as he is a power user. The GNOME Terminal app is the one for him.

Favorite wallpapers

One of his favorite wallpapers originally coming from Fedora 16 is the following one:

And this is the one he currently uses on his Fedora 29 Workstation today:

If you use your Linux desktop and never open a web browser, you are a special kind of user. For most of us, however, a web browser has become one of the most-used digital tools on the planet. We work, we play, we get news, we interact, we bank… the number of things we do via a web browser far exceeds what we do in local applications. Because of that, we need to be cognizant of how we work with web browsers, and do so with a nod to security. Why? Because there will always be nefarious sites and people, attempting to steal information. Considering the sensitive nature of the information we send through our web browsers, it should be obvious why security is of utmost importance.

So, what is a user to do? In this article, I’ll offer a few basic tips, for users of all sorts, to help decrease the chances that your data will end up in the hands of the wrong people. I will be demonstrating on the Firefox web browser, but many of these tips cross the application threshold and can be applied to any flavor of web browser.

1. Choose Your Browser Wisely

Although most of these tips apply to most browsers, it is imperative that you select your web browser wisely. One of the more important aspects of browser security is the frequency of updates. New issues are discovered quite frequently and you need to have a web browser that is as up to date as possible. Of major browsers, here is how they rank with updates released in 2017:

1. Chrome released 8 updates (with Chromium following up with numerous security patches throughout the year).

2. Firefox released 7 updates.

3. Edge released 2 updates.

4. Safari released 1 update (although Apple does release 5-6 security patches yearly).

But even if your browser of choice releases an update every month, if you (as a user) don’t upgrade, that update does you no good. This can be problematic with certain Linux distributions. Although many of the more popular flavors of Linux do a good job of keeping web browsers up to date, others do not. So, it’s crucial that you manually keep on top of browser updates. This might mean your distribution of choice doesn’t include the latest version of your web browser of choice in its standard repository. If that’s the case, you can always manually download the latest version of the browser from the developer’s download page and install from there.

If you like to live on the edge, you can always use a beta or daily build version of your browser. Do note, that using a daily build or beta version does come with it the possibility of unstable software. Say, however, you’re okay with using a daily build of Firefox on a Ubuntu-based distribution. To do that, add the necessary repository with the command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Update apt and install the daily Firefox with the commands:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install firefox

What’s most important here is to never allow your browser to get far out of date. You want to have the most updated version possible on your desktop. Period. If you fail this one thing, you could be using a browser that is vulnerable to numerous issues.

2. Use A Private Window

Now that you have your browser updated, how do you best make use of it? If you happen to be of the really concerned type, you should consider always using a private window. Why? Private browser windows don’t retain your data: No passwords, no cookies, no cache, no history… nothing. The one caveat to browsing through a private window is that (as you probably expect), every time you go back to a web site, or use a service, you’ll have to re-type any credentials to log in. If you’re serious about browser security, never saving credentials should be your default behavior.

This leads me to a reminder that everyone needs: Make your passwords strong! In fact, at this point in the game, everyone should be using a password manager to store very strong passwords. My password manager of choice is Universal Password Manager.

3. Protect Your Passwords

For some, having to retype those passwords every single time might be too much. So what do you do if you want to protect those passwords, while not having to type them constantly? If you use Firefox, there’s a built-in tool, called Master Password. With this enabled, none of your browser’s saved passwords are accessible, until you correctly type the master password. To set this up, do the following:

1. Open Firefox.

2. Click the menu button.

3. Click Preferences.

4. In the Preferences window, click Privacy & Security.

5. In the resulting window, click the checkbox for Use a master password (Figure 1).

6. When prompted, type and verify your new master password (Figure 2).

7. Close and reopen Firefox.

4. Know your Extensions

There are plenty of privacy-focused extensions available for most browsers. What extensions you use will depend upon what you want to focus on. For myself, I choose the following extensions for Firefox:

• Firefox Multi-Account Containers – Allows you to configure certain sites to open in a containerized tab.

• Facebook Container – Always opens Facebook in a containerized tab (Firefox Multi-Account Containers is required for this).

• Avast Online Security – Identifies and blocks known phishing sites and displays a website’s security rating (curated by the Avast community of over 400 million users).

• Mining Blocker – Blocks all CPU-Crypto Miners before they are loaded.

• PassFF – Integrates with pass (A UNIX password manager) to store credentials safely.

• Privacy Badger – Automatically learns to block trackers.

• uBlock Origin – Blocks trackers based on known lists.

Of course, you’ll find plenty more security-focused extensions for:

Not every web browser offers extensions. Some, such as Midoria, offer a limited about of built-in plugins, that can be enabled/disabled (Figure 3). However, you won’t find third-party plugins available for the majority of these lightweight browsers.

5. Virtualize

For those that are concerned about releasing locally stored data to prying eyes, one option would be to only use a browser on a virtual machine. To do this, install the likes of VirtualBox, install a Linux guest, and then run whatever browser you like in the virtual environment. If you then apply the above tips, you can be sure your browsing experience will be safe.

The Truth of the Matter

The truth is, if the machine you are working from is on a network, you’re never going to be 100% safe. However, if you use that web browser intelligently you’ll get more bang out of your security buck and be less prone to having data stolen. The silver lining with Linux is that the chances of getting malicious software installed on your machine is exponentially less than if you were using another platform. Just remember to always use the latest release of your browser, keep your operating system updated, and use caution with the sites you visit.

For people with limited hand and arm mobility, it can be tough to play video games, which are generally controlled using small buttons and joysticks. And while some gamers and small companies have engineered hacks, major gaming companies have largely remained on the -sidelines—until now. Inspired by an internal hackathon and informed by work with groups like the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Microsoft developed the Xbox Adaptive Controller ($100), an oversize version of its classic rig designed to empower as many gamers as possible. Its main buttons, for example, are roughly 4 in. in -diameter—large enough to be pressed with an elbow or chin, if necessary. It also features ports to accommodate additional aids, like a foot pedal. Xbox designer Chris Kujawski urges others to follow suit: “We hope [our controller] becomes a catalyst for inclusiveness in the gaming industry.” —Samantha Cooney

Blazor 0.7.0 is now available! This release focuses on enabling component coordination across ancestor-descendent relationships. We’ve also added some improvements to the debugging experience.

Here’s what’s new in the Blazor 0.7.0 release:

• Cascading values and parameters
• Debugging improvements

A full list of the changes in this release can be found in the Blazor 0.7.0 release notes.

Get Blazor 0.7.0

Install the following:

1. .NET Core 2.1 SDK (2.1.500 or later).
2. Visual Studio 2017 (15.9 or later) with the ASP.NET and web development workload selected.
3. The latest Blazor Language Services extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

4. The Blazor templates on the command-line:

   dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates
   

You can find getting started instructions, docs, and tutorials for Blazor at https://blazor.net.

Upgrade an existing project to Blazor 0.7.0

To upgrade a Blazor 0.6.0 project to 0.7.0:

• Install the prerequisites listed above.

• Update the Blazor packages and .NET CLI tool references to 0.7.0. The upgraded Blazor project file should look like this:

  <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">
  
  
  
  
  
  <PropertyGroup>
   <TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework>
   <RunCommand>dotnet</RunCommand>
   <RunArguments>blazor serve</RunArguments>
   <LangVersion>7.3</LangVersion>
  
  
  </PropertyGroup>
  
  
  
  
  
  <ItemGroup>
   <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Browser" Version="0.7.0" />
   <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Build" Version="0.7.0" />
   <DotNetCliToolReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Cli" Version="0.7.0" />
  
  
  </ItemGroup>
  
  
  
  
  
  </Project>
  
  
  

That’s it! You’re now ready to try out the latest Blazor features.

Cascading values and parameters

Blazor components can accept parameters that can be used to flow data into a component and impact the component’s rendering. Parameter values are provided from parent component to child component. Sometimes, however, it’s inconvenient to flow data from an ancestor component to a descendent component, especially when there are many layers in between. Cascading values and parameters solve this problem by providing a convenient way for an ancestor component to provide a value that is then available to all descendent components. They also provide a great way for components to coordinate.

For example, if you wanted to provide some theme information for a specific part of your app you could flow the relevant styles and classes from component to component, but this would be tedious and cumbersome. Instead, a common ancestor component can provide the theme information as a cascading value that descendents can accept as a cascading parameter and then consume as needed.

Let’s say the following ThemeInfo class specifies all of the theme information that you want to flow down the component hierarchy so that all of the buttons within that part of your app share the same look and feel:

public class ThemeInfo 


{
 public string ButtonClass { get; set; }


}

An ancestor component can provide a cascading value using the CascadingValue component. The CascadingValue component wraps a subtree of the component hierarchy and specifies a single value that will be available to all components within that subtree. For example, we could specify the theme info in our application layout as a cascading parameter for all components that make up the layout body like this:

@inherits BlazorLayoutComponent





<div class="sidebar">
 <NavMenu />


</div>





<div class="main">
 <div class="top-row px-4">
 <a href="http://blazor.net" target="_blank" class="ml-md-auto">About</a>
 </div>



 <CascadingValue Value="@theme">
 <div class="content px-4">
 @Body
 </div>
 </CascadingValue>


</div>





@functions {
 ThemeInfo theme = new ThemeInfo { ButtonClass = "btn-success" };


}

To make use of cascading values, components can declare cascading parameters using the [CascadingParameter] attribute. Cascading values are bound to cascading parameters by type. In the following example the Counter component is modified to have a cascading parameter that binds to the ThemeInfo cascading value, which is then used to set the class for the button.

@page "/counter"





<h1>Counter</h1>





<p>Current count: @currentCount</p>





<button class="btn @ThemeInfo.ButtonClass" on‌click="@IncrementCount">Click me</button>





@functions {
 int currentCount = 0;



 [CascadingParameter] protected ThemeInfo ThemeInfo { get; set; }



 void IncrementCount()
 {
 currentCount++;
 }


}

When we run the app we can see that the new style is applied:

Cascading parameters also enable components to collaborate across the component hierarchy. For example, let’s say you have a TabSet component that contains a number of Tab components, like this:

<TabSet>
 <Tab Title="First tab">
 <h4>First tab</h4>
 This is the first tab.
 </Tab>



 @if (showSecondTab)
 {
 <Tab Title="Second">
 <h4>Second tab</h4>
 You can toggle me.
 </Tab>
 }



 <Tab Title="Third">
 <h4>Third tab</h4>



 <label>
 <input type="checkbox" bind=@showSecondTab />
 Toggle second tab
 </label>
 </Tab>


</TabSet>

In this example the child Tab components are not explicitly passed as parameters to the TabSet. Instead they are simply part of the child content of the TabSet. But the TabSet still needs to know about each Tab so that it can render the headers and the active tab. To enable this coordination without requiring any specific wire up from the user, the TabSet component can provide itself as a cascading value that can then be picked up by the descendent Tab components:

In TabSet.cshtml

<!-- Display the tab headers -->


<CascadingValue Value=this>
 <ul class="nav nav-tabs">
 @ChildContent
 </ul>


</CascadingValue>

This allows the descendent Tab components to capture the containing TabSet as a cascading parameter, so they can add themselves to the TabSet and coordinate on which Tab is active:

In Tab.cshtml

[CascadingParameter] TabSet ContainerTabSet { get; set; }

Check out the full TabSet sample here.

Debugging improvements

In Blazor 0.5.0 we added some very preliminary support for debugging client-side Blazor apps in the browser. While this initial debugging support demonstrated that debugging .NET apps in the browser was possible, it was still a pretty rough experience. Blazor 0.7.0 picks up the latest runtime updates, which includes some fixes that makes the debugging experience more reliable. You can now more reliably set and remove breakpoints, and the reliability of step debugging has been improved.

Give feedback

We hope you enjoy this latest preview release of Blazor. As with previous releases, your feedback is important to us. If you run into issues or have questions while trying out Blazor, file issues on GitHub. You can also chat with us and the Blazor community on Gitter if you get stuck or to share how Blazor is working for you. After you’ve tried out Blazor for a while please let us know what you think by taking our in-product survey. Click the survey link shown on the app home page when running one of the Blazor project templates:

Thanks for trying out Blazor!

What is this nonsense? The Weekender on a Thursday? Where’s the manager!? Oh right, that’s me… Due to some annual leave I’m taking over the next two weeks, you’re getting our usual weekly update on a Thursday.

Hope that doesn’t shatter your world views or anything…

What we’re up to

Following up on the Diablo Immortal announcement, we had Nick whip up a critical analysis on what that game needs to do right in order to compete with the already existing (and thriving) action-RPG genre on mobile. It’s not enough to just turn up with the IP, after all.

We also brought you an in-depth look at C&C Rivals’ beta version, ahead of its launch on December 4^th. Only one review this week – Squids Odyssey.

In terms of upcoming projects:

• A new guide on excellent games like Pokemon Go/Ingress Prime.
• Reviews of Royal Adviser & Football Manager 2019.
• Our Black Friday coverage will be continually updated through-out the week.

You’ll also have noticed we’ve been updating our strategy genre ‘Best of Lists’ through-out the week. We’ll probably be updating a few more as well through-out the rest of the month. Tomorrow, we’re kicking off our Black Friday sales coverage, as a few places are already getting a head start on that.

Meanwhile, in the mobile gaming…

Out Now

Only two projects caught our eye this week, and they’re both only on iOS. Sorry Android readers!

Black Paradox (iOS Universal)

Nothing screams science-fiction than time-travel and black holes, and arcade-shooter-roguelite thing Black Paradox is positively belting out its retro sci-fi imagery. You play as a Bounty Hunter who travels around in a space car, which you can upgrade with lots of weapons and power-ups.

You also get to unleash a killer move of the same name, apparently. It’s not our usual fare, but it’s colourful and provides plenty of content at a reasonable price. Pretty sure I played this game on my Commodore 64 as a kid, except you were Santa Claus.

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Endless Archery (iPhone)

Angry Birds may have been one of the early posterchilds for the F2P phenomenon, but it’s core gameplay offering was pretty solid. Throw a bird at a pre-made structure and try to cause as much devastation to get the most points. Endless Archery, while involving neither birds nor structures, feels like it might inspire the same kind of desire to master.

You fire arrows at distant targets by setting the angle and power of each shot, accounting for wind and the procedurally generated terrain. Even in real-life Archery is kind of cool and trying to master your shots in digital form should be no less engaging. It also comes with online leaderboards for never-ending humble brags.

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Updates

Both of this week’s updates actually dropped last week, so apologies for that.

Crashlands (Review) (iOS Universal & Android)

One of our favourite action-RPGs has gotten even better. The update last week added same-screen co-op, where player 2 plays as Juicebox. This works with both players using gamepads or just player 2 using a gamepad, more details on that here. There were a few other minor QoL changes as well.

Templar Battleforce Elite (Review) (iOS Universal & Android)

This was in last week’s Sales update, and from what we can tell it’s still going cheap on iOS if anyone wants to pick it up. The November 8^th update added a bunch of new weapons and changed some existing ones, as well as adjusting spawn rates of Xeno enemies.

Sales

We’re not reporting on any sales today as we’ll be kicking off a week-long sales guide to prepare you for Black Friday starting tomorrow. I’ve had a quick look – you’re not missing out on much, other than Icewind Dale being ridiculously cheap on iOS.

There’s not been a lot of Android love this week, but Door Kickers is also having a sale on Google Play, if you haven’t picked that up yet.

Seen anything else you like? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!

The folks over at Humble Bundle are running another bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble RPG Game Dev Bundle.  It’s a large collection of RPG Maker (don’t worry, they can be used outside of RPGMaker in your engine of choice) assets including sprites, tiles, sound fx, icons and more.  Humble Bundles are collections with different priced tiers, with a portion of the proceeds going to the content maker, a charity of choice (Child’s Play in this case) as well as to Humble Bundle themselves.  I normally full heartedly recommend Humble Bundles to people, but this time I must give a bit of a warning due to the attached license.

From the license:

4.1. A “Licence” means that the Seller grants to GDN (purely for the purpose of sub-licensing to the Purchaser) and GDN grants (by way of sub-licence thereof) to the Purchaser a non-exclusive perpetual licence to;

(a) use the Licensed Asset to create Derivative Works; and

(b) use the Licensed Asset and any Derivative Works as part of either one (1) Non-Monetized Media Product or one (1) Monetized Media Product which, in either case, is:

i) used for the Purchaser’s own personal use; and/or

ii) used for the Purchaser’s commercial use in which case it may be distributed, sold and supplied by the Purchaser for any fee that the Purchaser may determine.

That 4.1 b is going to be a huge deal breaker for many people.  If you are intending to use these assets for personal use, the license wont matter.  If you are looking to distribute your works however, do be sure to go over the license with a fine tooth comb, as that clause seems to limit you to a single product, commercial or otherwise!  There is a discussion of the bundle going on over on /r/gamedev if you are interested in learning more.

EDIT – An update on the licensing terms.  The publisher of the assets have reached out to me on Twitter to announce they’ve heard the complaints regarding the license and are updating it to be more developer friendly.  Additionally I signed up for the Humble Bundle partner program, meaning purchasing through the above link will help support the channel.

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Art GameDev News

In this GDC 2017 session, Plastic’s Michal Staniszewski discusses Bound, a game that features a contemporary dancer in a procedural world inspired by demoscene and modern art movements. 

Staniszewski showcases the iterative process behind the game, explaining how only 10 percent of the original design doc was implemented in the final product.

He focuses on instances when the ballerina character and procedural generation of the world were implemented, and how the outcome of those decisions were presented during emotional moments of the game. 

It was an insightful talk that’s still definitely worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

Steel Rats™ is Now Available on Steam and is 15% off!*

Wreck and ride in a visceral and ground-breaking evolution of the 2.5D action arcade genre, fusing destructive, octane-fuelled, motorbike combat and death-defying stunt gameplay, set in a visually stylised retro future world. Switch between four unique characters as you wreak havoc!

*Offer ends November 14 at 10AM Pacific Time