TechpadinTech News Face ID Finally Learned About Masks iOS 13.5 shipped this week with the big COVID exposure-notification API everyone's covering, but the small fix I actually noticed was Face ID giving up faster when you're wearing a mask. May 22, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Zoom Bought Keybase, I'll Believe the Encryption When I See It Zoom bought the encrypted messaging startup Keybase to build real end-to-end encryption into calls, but between my daily five-meeting slog and the usual waiting-room chaos, I'm skeptical it'll be as simple as flipping a switch. May 14, 2020·3 min read
TechpadinTech News Hubble Turns 30 and I Finally Looked Up Hubble turned 30 this week, and after NASA dropped its anniversary photo I dragged my own janky telescope out to the backyard to see what I could find. April 25, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Another 60 Satellites, Another 3 AM Alarm SpaceX launched another 60 Starlink satellites early Wednesday morning, and I watched it at 3 AM like a crazy person. Some notes on satellite trains, quarantine insomnia, and why I have complicated feelings about this. April 23, 2020·3 min read
TechpadinTech News Circling May 27th NASA just put a real date on the calendar for the first crewed launch from American soil since 2011, and somehow that landed harder than anything else in this week's news. April 17, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Fourteen Hours Into Midgar and I Have Complaints Final Fantasy VII Remake came out this week and I burned a chunk of lockdown getting reacquainted with Midgar. Some thoughts on the install size, the pacing, and why splitting one game into several still bugs me. April 11, 2020·3 min read
TechpadinTech News Even Google Won't Let Its Own Staff Use Zoom Right Now Google quietly told employees this week to stop using Zoom on their work laptops over security concerns, which is a weird thing to watch happen while the rest of us are stuck using it every day. April 9, 2020·3 min read
TechpadinTech News NYC Just Banned Zoom From Classrooms, and I Think They Aimed at the Wrong Target NYC's Department of Education told schools to drop Zoom for Microsoft Teams this week. After a month of using Zoom daily myself, I think the city panicked and punished the wrong thing. April 8, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Zoom's Bad Week Zoom had a rough week: a Facebook data-sharing bug in its iOS app and a wave of "zoombombing" incidents that even got an FBI warning. A closer look at the smaller stories inside the bigger Zoom boom. March 31, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Half-Life: Alyx Is Out and I Have Nothing to Play It On Half-Life: Alyx came out today and it's apparently incredible, which doesn't help me since I don't own a VR headset and neither does most of Steam right now. March 23, 2020·3 min read
TechpadinTech News Animal Crossing Launched at the Worst Possible Best Possible Time Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out yesterday, the same week the whole state got told to stay home, and the timing is doing more work than the reviews are. March 21, 2020·4 min read
TechpadinTech News Watching MWC Fall Apart, One Company at a Time MWC 2020 didn't die all at once — it died company by company over about a week. Some thoughts on watching that unfold, and on Samsung proving two weeks earlier that you don't even need the Barcelona stage anymore. February 20, 2020·4 min read
