The Python backslash ('\') is a special character that’s used for two purposes:

1. The Python backslash can be part of a special character sequence such as the tab character '\t', the newline character '\n', or the carriage return '\r'.
2. The Python backslash can escape other special characters in a Python string. For example, the first backslash in the string '\\n' escapes the second backslash and removes the special meaning so that the resulting string contains the two characters '\' and 'n' instead of the special newline character '\n'.

Try it yourself in our interactive Python shell (just click “Run”):

The backslash \ is an escape character–if used in front of another character, it changes the meaning of this character. For example, the character 'n' is just that a simple character, but the character '\n' (yes, it’s one character consisting of two symbols) is the new line character. We say that it is escaped.

So how do we define a string consisting of the backslash? The problem is that if we use the backslash, Python thinks that the character that follows the backslash is escaped. Here’s an example:

We want to print a string consisting of a single backslash, but the backslash escapes the end of string literal \’. Hence, the interpreter believes the string was never closed and throws an error.

The correct way of accomplishing this is to escape the escape character itself:

print('\\')

>>> \

This is exactly what we want to accomplish. the first character \ escapes the second character \ and therefore removes its meaning. The second character \ is therefore interpreted as a simple backslash.

Starting from next week, Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in Japan will be able to enjoy Celeste – in its entirety – at no extra charge.

The game is the latest to be offered up in a string of free, limited-time releases available to subscribers, which has already included the likes of Fire Emblem Warriors and Dead Cells. Celeste will become playable from 12:00 JST on 18th May, and players will be able to access it up until 18:00 JST on 24th May, providing them with a full week to play as much or as little as they like.

For anyone who likes what they see and wants to add the game to their library on a permanent basis, a sale will also be held. During the promotion, Japanese players will be able to buy the game at 50% off (1,080 yen instead of 2,160 yen).

If you’re not from Japan but want to try Celeste for yourself, there are workarounds. We made a guide on the topic for the Fire Emblem Warriors offer, and the same tricks will apply for Celeste when the promotion goes live. Celeste’s an absolute cracker by the way, so we’d urge you to pick it up regardless:

The Nintendo Life Review: “Celeste is an exemplary amalgamation of style, mechanics and character. A devilishly brilliant action platformer with enough skill required to excite genre purists and the speed running community, while at the same time featuring a breakdown of gameplay elements to customize and cater for all audiences.”

Pose Animator is a free and open source implementation showcasing how you can animated an SVG avatar using either webcam driven face and bone data, or from analyzing a static image.  On the GitHub repository, Pose Animator is described accordingly:

Pose Animator takes a 2D vector illustration and animates its containing curves in real-time based on the recognition result from PoseNet and FaceMesh. It borrows the idea of skeleton-based animation from computer graphics and applies it to vector characters.

This is not an officially supported Google product.

The GitHub page also includes two demos.  The first one showcases using a camera to control an avatar, while the second one showcases how to accomplish the same thing with a static image.  Please note there a currently a couple bugs that need to be addressed if you build this from source yourself, with the resolution details available here.  I also walk through the process of building and running Pose Animator in the video below.

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By Mikey Campbell
Monday, May 11, 2020, 03:07 pm PT (06:07 pm ET)

Apple’s widely rumored over-the-ear headphones, tentatively dubbed “AirPods Studio,” will boast a few novel features including head and neck detection, according to a report on Monday.

Apple’s Beats Solo Pro headphones.

Citing sources familiar with Apple’s plans, 9to5Mac reports an upcoming “AirPods Studio” model will use embedded sensors to determine when and how the headphone is being worn.

Similar to in-ear detection on AirPods and AirPods Pro, the capability reportedly determines whether the unit is on a user’s head or neck to allow for automatic content playback functions like pausing, restarting or shutting down the headset. For example, the headset might pause playback when a user places the device on their neck and resume playback when flipped back up to a head-mounted position.

A second set of sensors, presumably located in or near the rumored accessory’s ear cups or on its headband, is able to discern a user’s left and right ears for automatic stereo channel allocation. Whether the parts are proximity sensors, optical sensors or accelerometers is unknown. The implementation could mean there is no “wrong way” to wear the device.

Finally, the report claims pairing the headphones with an iPhone or Mac “unlocks,” or triggers, customizable equalizer settings. Specifically, users can adjust frequency settings in three increments: low, medium, and high. While not as granular as other offerings, frequency customization would be a welcome addition for professional users looking for a more neutral frequency curve than current bass-heavy consumer configurations.

Today’s report lines up with Apple’s recently published patent covering ear detection, which details methods by which sensors can determine when a headphone is being worn on the ears. A second patent application published last August relies on capacitive sensors and machine learning algorithms to detect headphone orientation for automatically assigning left and right channel output.

Apple is widely expected to introduce a set of over-the-ear headphones under its own branding, and not that of Beats, later this year. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo was first to predict the move in 2018, saying the extension of the company’s wearables business will build on wireless and noise canceling technology established by the popular AirPods line.

Subsequent rumors pegged a summer 2020 launch date for the supposed “AirPods Studio,” with a retail price of $349.

Now more than ever, artificial intelligence is proving its value in helping businesses across sectors address and adjust to massive change, disruption and unpredictability.  

On June 2, Microsoft will host an AI virtual summit to bring together industry leaders and experts to discuss the benefits of putting AI into action. 

During the event, you’ll hear how business leaders are using AI to respond to and recover from recent challenges, as well as examples of game-changing solutions to problems spanning business, government, education and other areas.  

Mitra Azizirad, Corporate Vice President of AI & Innovation at Microsoft, will kick off the event with a keynote on the value of creating an AI-powered organization. 

Register here to attend Imagining the Future: Microsoft AI Virtual Summit, where you’ll learn: 

• What it takes to become an AI-powered organization; 
• The power of AI for manufacturing and supply chains; 
• How AI is advancing health and medical services; 
• Microsoft’s approach to responsible, inclusive, trusted AI; and 

• How enterprises can focus on immediate requirements while creating their own AI futures. 

View a full agenda or register for the event. You can also join Microsoft on LinkedIn on June 2 at 9 am PT to view the livestream of Mitra Azizirad’s keynote. 

In a previous article, you explored how to control the firewall at the command line in Fedora.

Now you are going to see how to see how add, remove, and list services, protocols and ports in order to block or allow them.

A short recap

First, it’s a good idea to check the status of your firewall, see if it’s running or not. You do this, as we previously learned, by using the state option (firewall-cmd ‐‐state).

The next step is to get the zone for the desired network interface. For example, I use a desktop that has two network interfaces: a physical interface (enp0s3), representing my actual network card and a virtual interface (virbr0) used by virtualization software like KVM. To see what zones are active, run firewall-cmd ‐‐get-active-zones.

Now that you know what zone you’re interested in, you can list the rules for the zone with firewall-cmd ‐‐info-zone=FedoraWorkstation.

Reading zone information

To display information for a particular zone, run firewall-cmd ‐‐zone=ZoneName ‐‐list-all, or simply display information for the default zone with:

[dan@localhost ~]$ firewall-cmd --list-all
FedoraWorkstation (active)
target: default
icmp-block-inversion: no
interfaces: enp0s3
sources:
services: dhcpv6-client mdns samba-client ssh
ports: 1025-65535/udp 1025-65535/tcp
protocols:
masquerade: no
forward-ports:
source-ports:
icmp-blocks:
rich rules:

Now, let’s explore the output. The first line is showing which zone the following information applies to and if that zone is currently in use.

The target : default simply tells us this is the default zone. This can be set or retrieved via the ‐‐set-default-zone=ZoneName and ‐‐get-default-zone.

icmp-block-inversion, indicates if ICMP requests are blocked. For example if the machine responds to ping requests from other machines on the network. The interfaces field shows all interfaces that adopt this zone.

Handling services, ports, and protocols

Now focus on the services, ports, and protocols rows. By default, the firewall will block all ports, services and protocols. Only the listed ones will be allowed.

You can see the allowed services are very basic client services in this case. For example, accessing a shared folder on the network (samba-client), to talk to a DNS server or connect to a machine via SSH (the ssh service). You can think of a service as a protocol in combination to a port, for instance the ssh service is using the SSH protocol and, by convention, port 22. By allowing the ssh service, what you’re really doing is allowing incoming connections that use the ssh protocol at default port 22.

Notice, services that have the client word in their name, as a rule of thumb, refer to outgoing connections, i.e. connections that you make with your IP as source going to the outside, as opposed to the SSH service, for example, that will accept incoming connections (listening to connection coming from outside at you).

You can look up services in the file /etc/services. For example if you wish to know what port and protocol these service uses:

[dan@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/services | grep ssh
ssh 22/tcp # The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol
ssh 22/udp # The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol

You can see SSH uses both TCP and UDP port 22. Also, if you wish to see all available services, just use firewall-cmd ‐‐get-services.

Opening a port

If you want to block a port, service, or protocol, all you have to do if make sure it’s not listed here. By extension, if you want to allow a service, you need add it to your list.

Let’s say you want to open the port 5000 for TCP connection. To do this, run:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=FedorwaWorkstation --permanent --add-port=5000/tcp

Notice that you need to specify the zone for which the rule applies. When you add the rule, you also need to specify if it is a TCP or UDP port via as indicated above. The permanent parameter sets the rule to persist even after a system reboot.

Look at the information for your zone again:

[dan@localhost ~]$ firewall-cmd --list-all

FedoraWorkstation (active)

target: default

icmp-block-inversion: no

interfaces: enp0s3

sources:

services: dhcpv6-client mdns samba-client ssh

ports: 1025-65535/udp 1025-65535/tcp 5000/tcp

protocols:

masquerade: no

forward-ports:

source-ports:

icmp-blocks:

rich rules:

Similarly, if you wish to remove this port from the list, run:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=FedorwaWorkstation --permanent --remove-port=5000/tcp

The very same remove (‐‐remove-protocol, ‐‐remove-service) and add (‐‐add-protocol, ‐‐add-service) options are also available for services and protocols.

Photo by T. Kaiser on Unsplash.

At the end of last week, a “new” shooter called The Bullet: Time of Revenge appeared on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Unlike most games, it’s official eShop description is surprisingly brief, and it’s available as we speak for less than a fiver:

Become a Bullet – eliminate bad people using many kinds of weapons, exploring features like driving cars or tanks, flying helicopters or a jet plane. There are many achievements and unlockables that will help spread chaos in the city.

Despite seeming like a cheap and cheerful release on the surface, The Bullet: Time of Revenge has been causing quite the stink online since launch. It turns out that this new Grand Theft Auto-like release appears to be what’s known as an asset flip, whereby a developer can legally buy a pre-made asset pack, do nothing to change it other than give it a new title, and release it into the world to make a profit.

We actually ran a piece on the practice a few years ago when it became clear that prolific Wii U eShop developer RCMADIAX was simply changing the title screens on ‘game builder’ kits and selling them on Nintendo’s digital storefront.

In this case, the asset pack in question is known as Hammer 2 Reloaded, and anyone can go ahead and buy the full game and its assets for $50. The idea is that beginner game devs can buy to this to have a starting point and learn their way around customising an already-built world to make their own game. In this case, it appears the developers have simply bought the pack and uploaded the game as if it were their own. Here’s what Hammer 2 looks like:

Amazingly, this isn’t the first time this has happened; there have been numerous cases in the past where developers have purchased the Hammer 2 asset pack and released it under a new name, usually on Steam. Thanks to the licensing agreements found on these asset pack purchases, doing this is actually legal, but it never goes down well with gamers as you might expect. Seeing such a release pass through Nintendo’s quality assurance team is saddening, to say the least.

The game was talked about yesterday by popular YouTuber Jim Sterling, and ever since, Nintendo fans have been venting their frustrations online. Here are a few select comments we found:

The eShop is really close to becoming a clone of Steam ain’t it? No wonder Nintendo dropped their seal of quality a long time ago.

The eShop is already FLOODED with mobile ports and shovelware, now we gotta sift thru asset flips too?!

Nintendo just “flipped” the “switch” on quality control by green lighting this when it should have been gas lighted.

Do you think releases like this should make it onto Switch? Would you prefer the Switch eShop to celebrate originality over asset flips, or should any and all games be available? Share your thoughts with us below.

Thanks to Sup3Rmint for the tip!