Month: July 2023

Xikang Province

2025年7月18日2023年7月31日 by gledos

31_1 — Source: commons.wikimedia.org，A n old map of the Republic of China published in 1926 (the 15th year of the Republic of China), showing the “Chuanbian” area

31_2 — Source: commons.wikimedia.org，Xinya New Geoscience Society’s 1936 “Pocket Map of China” – Xikang Province

31_3

Xikang Province, abbreviated as Kang, was established in 1939 and abolished in 1955. Its predecessor was the Chuanbian Special Administrative Region established in 1914.

Kang refers to Kham, a region originating from Tibetan traditional culture. After the Qing dynasty conquered the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Emperor Yongzheng adopted a divide-and-rule strategy for the greater Tibetan area, splitting Kham with Dartsemdo (now Kangding) as the boundary. The western part was governed by the Dalai Lama, and the eastern part was assigned to Han Chinese territory.

The capital of Xikang Province was initially set in Kangding. However, the Xikang Provincial Establishment Committee was established in Ya’an and stayed there for more than a year after the province was established. So, Ya’an can also be regarded as half a provincial capital.

During the subsequent Second Chinese Civil War, Xikang Province was the last mainland province fully controlled by the Republic of China government. However, after the Battle of Xichang in March 1950, Xikang Province (excluding Qamdo) was occupied by the government of the People’s Republic of China. Later, the capital of Xikang Province was set in Ya’an, but Qamdo in Xikang Province was separately designated as Qamdo Prefecture, which was then incorporated into the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Finally, in 1955, Xikang Province was abolished for unknown reasons. The only publicly available information is the Resolution on the Abolition. The area includes Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Ya’an City, Panzhihua City, western Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, and western Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture.

Criticism of the Company

2025年7月18日2023年7月30日 by gledos

Wikipedia has a category of entries called “Criticisms of companies“, such as Criticism of Microsoft, Criticism of Google and Criticism of Amazon, which are full of negative information about these companies, such as monopoly, tax evasion, privacy violations, censorship, and labor treatment issues, etc.

It can be said that if a company does not have this entry, it cannot become a giant company, but there is indeed a giant company that does not have this entry, which is Apple. To be precise, it does not have it now, because at the beginning of 2023, someone disassembled the Criticism of Apple Inc. entry into “neutral” Environmental impact of Apple, Marketing of Apple Inc. and Apple supply chain.

However, the disassembler did not have enough time to maintain it, which led to the direct disappearance of relevant content on government surveillance and censorship, and the redirection of criticism of Apple to the Apple company homepage, which would only confuse readers who jumped from other entries.

The Offense and Defense of Tracking Beacons

2025年7月18日2023年7月29日 by gledos

AirTag is a low-power Bluetooth beacon, using the Bluetooth 4.0 protocol, which enables the beacon to broadcast unidirectionally, rather than requiring pairing and connection before use. The Nintendo Switch can be woken up from standby using the Home button on the wireless controller, which is also based on this principle, as the controller broadcasts specific communication.

AirTag’s technology can be traced back to 2013, when Apple launched iBeacon, a near-field positioning technology solution, for commercial marketing purposes, such as automatically pushing coupons upon arrival at a store. However, this business model does not seem to have become mainstream, so Apple used this technology, plus the crowdsourced Find My network, to create the AirTag tracker.

The principle of the crowdsourced Find My network is that the devices of participants scan for nearby AirTags. If an AirTag is found, the location and other information are uploaded to Apple’s servers. The owner of the AirTag can then use the crowdsourced Find My network to help track the AirTag’s location. This places some requirements on the number of iPhones; if the area is sparsely populated or the mobile phone penetration rate is too low, the crowdsourced Find My network will not cover it, and it will be useless.

AirTag can be used to find your keys, vehicles, etc., but some people also use it as a tracking tool. Apple’s solution to this is to let iPhone users know “An AirTag Found Moving With You“, but Android and other system users were not considered by Apple until December 13, 2021, when Apple provided Tracker Detect software for Android users.

The principle is that every network device has a MAC address, and Bluetooth is the same. The system or software can analyze the MAC address of the received Bluetooth device to know if a device is tracking it.

However, you may have seen a “MAC address randomization” prompt or option when connecting to Wi-Fi, and AirTag also has this function. Fortunately, AirTag’s MAC address is repeated. Open-source software AirGuard exists on Android to counter-track, but if the tracking beacon has a non-repeating MAC address randomization function, then it is difficult to prevent. Fortunately, no one has Apple’s huge crowdsourced Find My network.

Referenced article: Binary Hick, Androids & AirTags. Oof.

Game Instructions

2025年7月18日2023年7月28日 by gledos

28_1 — Source: www.nintendo.co.jp，The North American manual for Super Mario Bros.

28_2 — Source: www.reddit.com，The manual for Civilization II

28_3 — Source: www.rockpapershotgun.com，Screenshot of the electronic manual for The Banished Vault

28_4 — Source: www.rockpapershotgun.com，The physical manual for The Banished Vault

Manuals used to be an important part of games, especially in the floppy disk, cartridge, and CD eras. For example, the plots of many NES games were presented through the manuals. In addition, there were instructions on how to play, such as the Super Mario Bros. manual introducing that holding B would allow you to accelerate (B-Dash). I used to play pirated versions without these instructions, so I didn’t know for a long time…

After that, paper manuals for games became less and less common, replaced by electronic manuals or built-in instructions within the game.

The reason is that with the development of the internet, it is not uncommon for a terrible gaming experience to occur without installing the game’s day-one patch, and there are even games that cannot be played normally until some time after release. Now is no longer the era when you need to consider that players do not have internet access.

Of course, there are also reasons such as environmental protection, cost reduction, and digital versions gradually becoming the player’s first choice. Another important reason is the immersion of the game. If the audience needs to read about characters and backgrounds not mentioned in the movie in order to feel the expression of the movie, it would be too fragmented.

However, this game culture will definitely be remembered by players. For example, the Civilization II manual has 195 pages and is really a book (UNESCO standardized recommendation defines 49 pages or more as a book).

The developers of The Banished Vault therefore used the manual as a core part of the gameplay, creating a resource management strategy game. You can view it in the game, but the layout is not optimized. If you want to better enjoy the game, you need to print it yourself or purchase a finished manual.

What You See Is What You Save

2025年7月18日2023年7月27日 by gledos

Internet Archive (hereinafter referred to as IA) is a well-known website. I first saw it in an article introducing website history. The blogger used IA as a tool to explore past web pages. But IA is not Prism and cannot easily grab all web pages. So how does IA grab web pages for everyone to access?

IA has its own automated machine heritrix3 to crawl some important websites. Then there is Archive Team, a team that archives web pages, using a crowd-sourced cluster program similar to SETI@home to specifically crawl websites. Finally, individual users save websites through the Wayback Machine provided by IA.

If no one saves it, future attempts to search will not yield results, so IA mentioned “If You See Something, Save Something“, “If you see something, save it.”

The above method is used when the web page still exists, but when the web page has become invalid, a more laborious method is needed, which is Google Cache. Usually, after the web page becomes invalid, you can still use Google Cache to check the web page traces for a period of time. At this time, you can save the cache. Usually Archive Today is used to save it, because IA does not easily save Google Cache.

It took about 6 hours to restore the Minister’s Activities page of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was recorded and erased, because IA has a small problem. Although IA can record a large number of web pages, if there is no link, it cannot find the content it needs, because IA’s web page search function is almost useless.

Minister’s activity page: https://rentry.org/qingang

Shaking Pixels

2025年7月18日2023年7月26日 by gledos

25_1 — Source: web.archive.org，st0ven wrote a dithering tutorial

25_2 — Simple red and green dithering, forming yellow

25_3 — Source: mario.fandom.com，Screenshot of the green pipe in 《Super Mario Bros.》

25_4 — Source: mattgreer.dev，Screenshot of 《Mega Man X4》

25_5 — Source: twitter.com，Screenshot of 《Super Mario Odyssey》

25_6 — Source: www.youtube.com，Screenshot of 《CS2》

25_7 — Screen-Door Transparency demo image

In pixel art, “dithering” is a common technique because early games had limited palettes or even monochrome screens. Interlacing colors can create a sense of smoothness.

It can even create new colors on CRT monitors or high-resolution LCD monitors, such as red and green producing yellow. The well-known FC game 《Super Mario Bros.》 also uses dithering to create highlights and shadows.

The semi-transparency effect of the Sega Saturn is incomplete, so some games implement semi-transparency through dithering. For example, 《Mega Man X4》 in the image has opaque grids on the Sega Saturn, while the PS1 has direct semi-transparency. However, the popular CRT monitors at the time had some haloing effects, which actually made it look like semi-transparency.

This dithering effect can still be seen in modern games, such as for semi-transparency of hair and semi-transparency of occluders. An open-source implementation of this technique is called Screen-Door Transparency.