XScreenSaver 5.42


XScreenSaver 5.41 5.42 is out now, including iOS and Android.

  • New hack, Handsy. I modeled and animated it by "hand", heyyo. I tried considered using the Leap Motion Controller API to snapshot real hands, but that device is crap at detecting poses with any precision.

  • I rewrote Unknown Pleasures: it's a true waterfall graph now. I eagerly await someone figuring out some interesting real data to feed into it.

  • BSOD Solaris is far more accurate. DVD added.

  • Dali Clock works again, both the screen saver and the Mac app. Also rotation works again in the iOS app. (It is a longstanding Apple tradition that you have to rewrite the mobile rotation code from scratch every 18 months.)

    (Oh, wait, apparently while Apple accepted my submission of Dali Clock to the Mac App Store, they rejected the bug-fix update to the iOS App Store, because the anonymous $1/day contractor in some third-world call center hellhole has decided that it has "minimal functionality". Awesome. Appeal in progress.)

  • Fonts are better on X11. I fixed them in 5.39 but then broke them again in 5.40, oops.

  • Saver settings work again on macOS 10.14.

  • Plugged many memory leaks on Android and iOS. On the mobile platforms, freeing memory at exit matters, since the savers all run in the same address space. It's not an issue on the desktops, because the process goes away at exit.

  • If you're on Linux, and the xscreensaver daemon is setuid, then we can implore the kernel's out-of-memory killer to pretty please not unlock the screen. It might work, maybe.

  • MacOS has an upgraded Sparkle (the "Check for Updates" library). Let me know if the auto-update works.

    Update: It did not work in 5.41. I have released 5.42 to hopefully fix this...

  • The DMG is now "notarized" and "stapled" by Apple, which I think means that on 10.14 you should be able to open it without getting the "unknown developer" dialog. (It is a longstanding Apple tradition that you must re-learn how to do codesigning every 18 months.) Again, let me know if it works.

  • The Android version is back in the Google Play store. I had stopped updating that because somehow I lost the signing key. To get it back in the store I had to change the Application ID (from org.jwz.xscreensaver to org.jwz.android.xscreensaver). This means that to upgrade to the new one, you will probably have to manually delete the old one first, just this one time.
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Are super-yachts the best places to keep your art collection?

In theory, works are no more at risk on a super-yacht, where temperature, humidity and light are maintained by a full-time crew of up to 50 people, than in a house.

This summer, the mega-yacht Equanimity, belonging to the 36-year-old Malaysian businessman Jho Low, was first seized in Bali. Low, who is now a fugitive, is accused of stealing billions from his country's sovereign wealth fund 1MBD and using the money to buy real-estate and yachts, as well as an art collection that at one point contained a $39m painting by Basquiat as well as works by Van Gogh, Monet, Calder and Rothko. "We don't know if valuable art was on the yacht," Watson says. "But the insurance brokers probably do."

In a similar case, Vijay Mallya, the former chairman of India's largest brewer, who has also been charged with financial misconduct, had his yacht -- the Indian Empress -- seized in Malta. Although the boat was sold in September for €35m, a number of items that were on board, including valuable paintings, were spirited away before they could also be seized, according to Watson.

Such cases raise interesting questions in a world where yachts, often with a complex web of ownerships, transport valuable art from one jurisdiction to another. In 2015, for example, French customs officers seized Picasso's Head of a Young Woman (1906) from Adix, the Spanish billionaire Jaime Botín's yacht. Although it was moored in Corsica, He argued that it was sailing under a British flag and was thus in the UK's jurisdiction, but this held no sway with Spain's judges, who deemed the work a national treasure and Adix subject to Spanish law.

Hoist the Black. Also, apropos of nothing, Rhode Island school district hires collection agency over unpaid lunches. "The district lunch program cannot continue to lose revenue," Votto wrote.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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