In SF for work. Time to start blogging again, albeit probably only weekly, and probably only a short-form list of links to things I think are interesting.

Hammerspoon

Desktop automation for OSX, in Lua. Easy scripts to position windows, fire commands, and respond to events (e.g. wifi changes, hotkey combinations).

Potentially useful as an opsec tool; a sufficiently configured laptop might lock if the wifi network changes (among other things). (Remember: DPR was caught at a library, and even though his HDD was encrypted, they managed to grab him away from it so it was left open and therefore unlocked.)

(Though if you’re in that much trouble already… yikes.)

webvr.info

Chrome can run WebVR at 90 FPS making web browsers a viable platform for VR development. Given the ease of using the network from a browser (xmlhttprequests / web sockets / etc) this is pretty cool, at least for prototyping.

Latest builds seem to support full SteamVR (including the SteamVR controllers) and there’s even a hardware emulation plugin if you don’t yet have VR gear (or like me, are away from it for a time)

Lunar Language

I’m fascinated by new programming languages, especially those that break some of the fundamental conventions of most languages (chiefly: that code goes in files, and that the files relate in some way to the structure of the code)

Lunar is interesting in that it’s a hybrid of visual and text. A lot of languages that go down this road err on the side of visual or flow-based programming (Blueprint in Unity, for example) - which I find limiting and slow to work with (lots of mouse-clicking)

Lunar looks fairly (dare I quip…) ‘pie-in-the-sky’ but I’m eager to try it.