In space, no-one can hear you puzzle. They can’t hear you scream, either, as you draw up a new hand of cards, only to find the critical command you need to execute isn’t among them. Nor can they hear you swear as your latest run ends in ignominious failure. Again.

This is Assembly, a new digital adaptation of a card game from independent publisher Wren Games. The original could be played co-op or solo but on mobile you’ll only get the latter option. Good job there’s still plenty in this cunning puzzle game to entertain you.

The premise is that you’re on a malfunctioning satellite and need to use its glitchy systems to assemble an escape craft. In practice, it means you’re looking at a ring of twelve room cards. To win, you’ll need to get the matching module token in each room and lock it into place. The catch – of course, there’s a catch – is that when you deploy a module you get a random one and it’s placed in a random room.

Deploying modules is one of the commands you can issue each turn. A hand of three command cards you hold, drawn from a small deck, limits your choices of actions. You draw up after playing a command card but it’s a bitter bonus as cycling the command decks is also the game’s timer. Run through it three times and you’re dead. Other commands at your disposal involve moving those randomly-placed modules around. The simplest one swaps the position of any two. The others all rotate the ring of room cards either left, right or in the direction of your choice.

The random placement of modules and of drawn commands is the key that makes this simplistic setup blossom into a strategy/puzzle game. It sets up a fascinating tension. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and deploy a module where it needs to be, or where you can easily move or swap it. More often you’ll have more work to do to get it where it needs to be. The question is: how much randomness are you willing to risk?

For example, you want to push out modules if you’ve got the right cards for it. But on each reshuffle of the command deck, all the room blueprint cards swap around randomly. So there’s no point in moving them round close to when the timer expires. But the same command card that adds modules to the game also locks them in place. So push your luck too much and you won’t have the commands needed to benefit from any luck you might happen to attract.

Instead, it’s all about keeping a balance while praying to the RNG gods to give you a break. You’ll need to assess the card deck, timer, and module position and decide whether it’s worth swapping or moving cards around. You also have other choices at your disposal for emergencies. You can discard your whole hand to choose any command. And you’re also given a role, a one-off special power. Noah the Systems Engineer, for example, can lock three modules instead of the usual one.

Wren Games is a small studio who built this app themselves and it shows in the presentation. It’s functional but effective. There are a couple of annoying interface niggles, like having to dismiss the tutorial boxes every game. Sometimes the game allows you to select, but not carry out, illegal plays. The worst is the rotation dialog box whose unhelpful arrows make it look like rooms are rotating when in fact it’s modules that rotate. These are minor irritations but compounded by a lack of an undo button. Such frustrations are quite minor, though, when each game only takes around five minutes.

Despite this, Assembly does a surprising job of launching you into deep space. The ice-cold orchestral soundtrack and starfield background help a lot. But the theme meshes well with the straightforward mechanics. That makes it a tasty choice for bite-sized puzzling. Much of the joy comes from figuring out strategies to reliably beat the game, of course. Once you get there a choice of difficulty levels and the random factors provides decent replay value. It’s got all the pieces needed to assemble a satisfying conundrum to set yourself.

State & Local Governments are leveraging chatbots to engage citizens, make state and local services more easily accessible, and enable administrative operational activities in order to free up staff time to focus on more complex, mission critical initiatives. With tight budgets and expanded service responsibilities, leveraging technology becomes more important to state and local agencies than ever before.

Awarded for Best Application Serving the Public by the Center for Digital Government, the California Secretary of State’s Eureka Chatbot, developed in partnership with Microsoft, answers frequently asked business entity and trademark questions, helping to better serve approximately 400,000 customers who contacted the agency last year. Through Eureka, customers can ask questions like “How do I check my business filing status online?” and they will be linked to the California Business Search website where they can look up their business record and access documents for free.

Other state and local governments are implementing chatbots with a variety of citizen needs in mind:

• Of the 3,000 calls central IT receives each week in one state, 45-50% are for password reset. In response to this, the State Deputy CIO is building the first chatbot in the state, which serves employees statewide to automate their password reset. It is integrated with Microsoft’s ServiceNow, which improves service levels by creating, reading, and updating records stored within the system, including incidents, questions, users, and more.
• Two other state and local governments are building Q&A bots for central IT operations and are working toward a bot-of-bots approach, so the public can access information. Citizens will eventually be able to transact with 30+ county departments and agencies through the main county web site. This one stop shopping uses Azure Dispatch to route queries appropriately i.e. ‘property tax’ query goes to Assessor while ‘sales tax’ goes to Business Licensing.
• Another state is building their Q&A bot leveraging Eureka code/docs with the goal of allowing the public to access information and perform transaction across the 15 state departments/agencies they support. The first project is for the Department of Higher Education, servicing college students and parents with information about financial aid.

Learn more about how you can build a chatbot like Eureka.

By Roger Fingas
Monday, March 18, 2019, 01:53 pm PT (04:53 pm ET)

2019 iPad Air and mini models do support the Crayon, Logitech’s cheaper alternative to the Apple Pencil, according to Apple.

A product page for the Crayon lists the stylus as working with the new iPads, as well as 2018’s “budget” iPad. It’s incompatible with 2018 iPad Pros, however.

The Crayon shares some features of the Pencil, such as automatic connection, palm rejection, and pressure sensitivity. Its main feature though is its price: $69.95, almost $30 less than the first-generation Pencil, and over $59 less than the second-gen model. The latter is intended for iPad Pros only.

Missing from the Crayon are tilt functions or the ability to tap its side for selecting different modes.

The Crayon was originally launched a year ago as an education-only product. It took several months for sales to open up to the public.

The updated Air and mini models are largely performance upgrades, with few feature or cosmetic changes. Enhancements include a larger 10.5-inch display on the Air, A12 processors, True Tone displays, up to 256 gigabytes of storage, and first-generation Apple Pencil support.

Learn how to locate files in this tutorial from our archives.

It’s not uncommon for a sysadmin to have to find needles buried deep inside haystacks. On a busy machine, there can be hundreds of thousands of files present on your filesystems. What do you do when you need to make sure one particular configuration file is up to date, but you can’t remember where it is located?

If you’ve used Unix-type machines for a while, then you’ve almost certainly come across the find command before. It is unquestionably exceptionally sophisticated and highly functional. Here’s an example that just searches for links inside a directory, ignoring files:

# find . -lname "*"

You can do seemingly endless things with the find command; there’s no denying that. The find command is nice and succinct when it wants to be, but it can also get complex very quickly. This is not necessarily because of the find command itself, but coupled with “xargs” you can pass it all sorts of options to tune your output, and indeed delete those files which you have found.

Location, location, frustration

There often comes a time when simplicity is the preferred route, however — especially when a testy boss is leaning over your shoulder, chatting away about how time is of the essence. And, imagine trying to vaguely guess the path of the file you’ve never seen but that your boss is certain lives somewhere on the busy /var partition.

Step forward mlocate. You may be aware of one of its close relatives: slocate, which securely (note the prepended letter s for secure) took note of the pertinent file permissions to prevent unprivileged users from seeing privileged files). Additionally, there is also the older, original locate command whence they came.

The differences between mlocate and other members of its family (according to mlocate at least) is that, when scanning your filesystems, mlocate doesn’t need to continually rescan all your filesystem(s). Instead, it merges its findings (note the prepended m for merge) with any existing file lists, making it much more performant and less heavy on system caches.

In this series of articles, we’ll look more closely at the mlocate tool (and simply refer to it as “locate” due to its popularity) and examine how to quickly and easily tune it to your heart’s content.

Compact and Bijou

If you’re anything like me unless you reuse complex commands frequently then ultimately you forget them and need to look them up.The beauty of the locate command is that you can query entire filesystems very quickly and without worrying about top-level, root, paths with a simple command using locate.

In the past, you might well have discovered that the find command can be very stubborn and cause you lots of unwelcome head-scratching. You know, a missing semicolon here or a special character not being escaped properly there. Let’s leave the complicated find command alone now, relax, and have a look into the clever little command that is locate.

You will most likely want to check that it’s on your system first by running these commands:

For Red Hat derivatives:

# yum install mlocate

For Debian derivatives:

# apt-get install mlocate

There shouldn’t be any differences between distributions, but there are almost certainly subtle differences between versions; beware.

Next, we’ll introduce a key component to the locate command, namely updatedb. As you can probably guess, this is the command which updates the locate command’s db. Hardly counterintuitive.

The db is the locate command’s file list, which I mentioned earlier. That list is held in a relatively simple and highly efficient database for performance. The updatedb runs periodically, usually at quiet times of the day, scheduled via a cron job. In Listing 1, we can see the innards of the file /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron (both the file’s path and its contents might possibly be distro and version dependent).

#!/bin/sh nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems awk '$1 == "nodev" { print $2 }') renice +19 -p $$ >/dev/null 2>&1 ionice -c2 -n7 -p $$ >/dev/null 2>&1 /usr/bin/updatedb -f "$nodevs"

Listing 1: How the “updatedb” command is triggered every day.

As you can see, the mlocate.cron script makes careful use of the excellent nice commands in order to have as little impact as possible on system performance. I haven’t explicitly stated that this command runs at a set time every day (although if my addled memory serves, the original locate command was associated with a slow-down-your-computer run scheduled at midnight). This is thanks to the fact that on some “cron” versions delays are now introduced into overnight start times.

This is probably because of the so-called Thundering Herd of Hippos problem. Imagine lots of computers (or hungry animals) waking up at the same time to demand food (or resources) from a single or limited source. This can happen when all your hippos set their wristwatches using NTP (okay, this allegory is getting stretched too far, but bear with me). Imagine that exactly every five minutes (just as a “cron job” might) they all demand access to food or something otherwise being served.

If you don’t believe me then have a quick look at the config from — a version of cron called anacron, in Listing 2, which is the guts of the file /etc/anacrontab.

# /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron # See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details. SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=root # the maximal random delay added to the base delay of the jobs RANDOM_DELAY=45 # the jobs will be started during the following hours only START_HOURS_RANGE=3-22 #period in days delay in minutes job-identifier command 1 5 cron.daily nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily 7 25 cron.weekly nice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly @monthly 45 cron.monthly nice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly 

Listing 2: How delays are introduced into when “cron” jobs are run.

From Listing 2, you have hopefully spotted both “RANDOM_DELAY” and the “delay in minutes” column. If this aspect of cron is new to you, then you can find out more here:

# man anacrontab

Failing that, you can introduce a delay yourself if you’d like. An excellent web page (now more than a decade old) discusses this issue in a perfectly sensible way. This website discusses using sleep to introduce a level of randomality, as seen in Listing 3.

#!/bin/sh # Grab a random value between 0-240.

value=$RANDOM

while [ $value -gt 240 ] ; do value=$RANDOM

done # Sleep for that time.

sleep $value # Syncronize.

/usr/bin/rsync -aqzC --delete --delete-after masterhost::master /some/dir/

Listing 3: A shell script to introduce random delays before triggering an event, to avoid a Thundering Herd of Hippos.

The aim in mentioning these (potentially surprising) delays was to point you at the file /etc/crontab, or the root user’s own crontab file. If you want to change the time of when the locate command runs specifically because of disk access slowdowns, then it’s not too tricky. There may be a more graceful way of achieving this result, but you can also just move the file /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron somewhere else (I’ll use the /usr/local/etc directory), and as the root user add an entry into the root user’s crontab with this command and then paste the content as below:

# crontab -e 33 3 * * * /usr/local/etc/mlocate.cron

Rather than traipse through /var/log/cron and its older, rotated, versions, you can quickly tell the last time your cron.daily jobs were fired, in the case of anacron at least, with:

# ls -hal /var/spool/anacron

Next time, we’ll look at more ways to use locate, updatedb, and other tools for finding files.

Learn more about essential sysadmin skills: Download the Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career ebook now.

Chris Binnie’s latest book, Linux Server Security: Hack and Defend, shows how hackers launch sophisticated attacks to compromise servers, steal data, and crack complex passwords, so you can learn how to defend against these attacks. In the book, he also talks you through making your servers invisible, performing penetration testing, and mitigating unwelcome attacks. You can find out more about DevSecOps and Linux security via his website (http://www.devsecops.cc).

Were you a wizard or a knight? Either way, the results for the latest Splatoon 2 Splatfest have arrived. After a fierce medieval battle across the globe, Pearl and Marina can now confirm team wizard have won! Here’s full the breakdown:

If you happen to be on the winning side, don’t forget to pick up your Super Sea Snails from Inkopolis Square.

Did you participate in the latest Splatfest? Tell us below.

If you love games similar but slightly different to the Sonic the Hedgehog series, the 2D platform title Freedom Planet is well worth your time. The GalaxyTrail game started out as a Sonic fan made project and was eventually released on PC in 2014. It has since been ported across to multiple platforms including the Switch eShop.

The game’s publisher XSEED has now applied for an age rating (again), this time for both the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. As the previous occasion was for the game’s digital release, this second rating suggests a physical version might be on the way. Below is an image from the ESRB:

Would you be interested in adding a physical copy of Freedom Planet to your Switch library? Tell us down in the comments.