SHIMANO CONNECT Lab to be Discontinued

I received an email from SHIMANO at the end of March announcing the termination of their cycling training platform, CONNECT Lab:

We regret to inform you that the SHIMANO CONNECT Lab will end on March 31, 2027.

Prior to the end of the service, certain functions will no longer be available according to the schedule below.

■ End of Availability for Certain Features
As of May 26, 2026, the activity transfer function from E-TUBE RIDE to SHIMANO CONNECT Lab will no longer be available.

■ Scheduled End of Service March 31, 2027

As an owner of a SHIMANO power meter, this is disappointing. While many of the analytical services offered by SHIMANO CONNECT Lab are available via Garmin Connect, Strava, and Intervals, none of those services support Force Vector analysis, which is one of the primary functions of the product. I even went so far as to download GoldenCheetah but this appears to be a hot mess that doesn’t want to run on macOS 261.

Force Vector analysis
Force Vector analysis

Strangely, I can’t find any public mention of this termination on the SHIMANO website. SHIMANO, shamefully, seems to be leaving their customers in the lurch.

Footnotes

  1. It’s not notarised and required special permissions to run via Settings -> Privacy. Once those permissions were granted, it still didn’t launch because it couldn’t “find the R libraries”. ↩

Linked

'A Good Mac Studio is Hard to Find'

Stephen Hackett, at 512pixels.net:

It’s not just the Mac Studio; it’s easy to build a Mac mini that won’t ship until August. That is bad news if you need a new Mac desktop on short notice. These long delays are not impacting all Macs, though, as the iMac and notebooks seem to all have much better shipping dates.

I don’t need a new Mac desktop (mini or Studio) on short notice. I have, however, been looking for a Mac mini for Gobbler development. 95% of development is done on my MacBook Pro and I’ve tried to replicate the development environment on my gaming PC through Windows Subsystem for Linux. It’s close, but not the same.

Regardless, pricing up any Mac mini results in a delivery estimate way into the future. My thinking is that this is due to Apple running down what’s left of M4 stock with an M5 refresh delayed due to memory shortages.

Linked

Earth in the Rear View Mirror

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft's window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn. Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft's window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn. Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

Auroras along the North and South poles, the Sun about to peek out, and Venus visible in the bottom right. Amazing.

The photograph was taken with a Nikon D5, for those wondering.

Featured

The BBC's RSS Feed

Due to the incorrect way the BBC’s RSS 2.0 feed handles guids, RSS readers are repeatedly left displaying duplicate articles.

Let’s have a look at why this happens with a sample article from their feed:

<item>
    <title>
        <![CDATA[
            'We fell off the face of the earth': Dad-daughter duo who took on 7,500 miles for TV
        ]]>
    </title>
    <description>
        <![CDATA[
            Molly Clifford and her father are part of this year's line up for the BBC's Race Across the World.
        ]]>
    </description>
    <link>
        https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9951jrr18no?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss
    </link>
    <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9951jrr18no#3</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:19:07 GMT</pubDate>
    <media:thumbnail width="240" height="135" url="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/240/cpsprodpb/bb22/live/0bdf4fa0-2db9-11f1-934f-036468834728.jpg"/>
</item>

Specifically, let’s focus on the guid:

<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9951jrr18no#3</guid>

What I’ve seen the BBC doing is incrementing the suffix after the # and, as per the RSS 2.0 specification below, RSS readers tend to treat each incremented guid as a new entry:

guid stands for globally unique identifier. It’s a string that uniquely identifies the item. When present, an aggregator may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.

The above article has been fetched by Gobbler twice and the title had changed between fetches:

guidtitlecontent hash
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9951jrr18no#2’We fell off the face of the earth’: Dad and daughter raced across world but had to keep it secreta8159e96
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9951jrr18no#3’We fell off the face of the earth’: Dad-daughter duo who took on 7,500 miles for TV17cbc6b7

Strictly speaking, the RSS 2.0 specification doesn’t prohibit a guid from changing. Additionally, there are no update semantics available (e.g., an updatedDate element) in the 2.0 specification. So, in this scenario with a change of title, an incremented guid is almost justifiable.

However, this isn’t always the case. Let’s look at a different example in the Gobbler database:

guidtitlecontent hash
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv1q9gz39do#0How English-only condolences undid one of Canada’s top CEOs8845f9d6
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv1q9gz39do#1How English-only condolences undid one of Canada’s top CEOs8845f9d6
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv1q9gz39do#3How English-only condolences undid one of Canada’s top CEOs8845f9d6

Gobbler has fetched this article three times. The article hasn’t changed at all: same title, same content, and same published date1, all validated by the content_hash. This is simply not justifiable. There is no reason to change the guid if the article hasn’t changed.

What could the BBC do differently?

First, don’t change the guid when the article content hasn’t changed. Just don’t.

Second, if the article has been updated, use <atom:updated> in the <item>. The feed declares the Atom namespace and already uses it:

<atom:link href="https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/uk/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>

Lastly, and this is a bit of a stretch goal, put the full content of each article in the feed instead of a summary.

Footnotes

  1. I couldn’t fit everything in the table. ↩

Linked

'Apple Lays Groundwork for Ads in Maps on iOS 26.5'

Juli Clover, Macrumors:

Businesses in the U.S. and Canada will be able to show ads in search results and at the top of a “Suggested Places” section in the app, which is new in iOS 26.5. Suggested Places displays recommendations for locations to visit based on trending places nearby, recent searches, and more.

Ads in the Maps app will have a clear “Ad” label, much like the ads shown in the App Store search results.

I have no issue with ads in Maps. I would also have no issue if Apple brought back iAd, presumably as Apple Ads, for third-party apps. I would drop AdMob pretty quickly, if Apple Ads proved competitive with AdMob.

Linked

'Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App'

This is an interesting, if occasionally alarmist, security analysis from atomic.computer of the White House’s new flagship application.

The major findings:

Finding 1: A Russian-Origin Company Executes Live JavaScript Inside the App (Six Times)
Finding 2: GPS Tracking With No Feature Justification
Finding 3: The Privacy Manifest Is Provably False
Finding 4: OneSignal Can Remotely Toggle Location Tracking and Privacy Consent
Finding 5: The App Strips Privacy Consent Banners
Finding 6: Minimal Security Hardening
Finding 7: Dormant Over-the-Air Code Push
Finding 8: Full Behavioral Intelligence Pipeline

Finding 1 is an absolute embarrassment. Shoddy workmanship of the highest order.

Finding 2 has an important caveat:

Whether this code path is actively enabled at runtime would require network traffic analysis, but the capability is compiled into the app and the always-on location permission is requested.

You shouldn’t be surprised to know that I’m not going to install the app to find out if a location permission prompt is actually presented. So I’ll generously give the benefit of the doubt.

Finding 3 is either a manifest lie or an egregious oversight from the developers. Regardless, how it got through App Review is what puzzles me. There are SDKs in the White House app that require a manifest. It’s astounding to me that Singapore Buses has a more robust Privacy Manifest simply by declaring the use of UserDefaults.

Finding 4 is technically misleading:

These are standard OneSignal SDK features, but the implication is significant: OneSignal’s servers can remotely enable or disable GPS tracking and change whether privacy consent is required, all without an app update, without Apple review, without the user knowing. It’s a light switch for location tracking, and it’s not in the White House’s hands.

OneSignal, published yesterday:

For location to be active in any app using our platform, two separate things must happen, both of which are outside of OneSignal’s control:

  1. The developer must explicitly enable it. […]

  2. The user must grant permission at the operating system level. […]

Finding 5 is unforgivable. (Ironically, it probably makes websites easier to use as I’m quite sick of the cookie consent banners.)

I’ve recently spent a lot of time working on many of the security control issues listed in Finding 6 for Gobbler. Again, it’s not surprising that the White House app ships with such a lax security posture.

Finding 7 isn’t much of a finding. Something exists but isn’t turned on.

Finding 8 isn’t much of a finding, either. This is just what OneSignal does.

My problem with this app is one of trust. And, to be clear, that problem of trust lies with Apple. They have a web of guidelines that should have prevented this app from ever being released. They’ve pitched their brand on user privacy and routinely bust smaller developers for not having just the right entry in their Privacy Manifest.

And yet, here we are, with a White House app that doesn’t declare anything with regards to its data capture practices.

To whom and when do App Review Guidelines apply?

Linked

Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro

Chance Miller, 9to5 Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

I never saw anyone buy one. I’ve never met anyone that owned one. I’ve never been less surprised by a decision.

Linked

Sony Increasing PS5 Prices

From the PlayStation blog:

With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we’ve made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally. We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide.

The PlayStation 5 Digital launched in the UK at £359.99 in November 2020. The same console is currently £389.99 on Amazon. The new RRP is £519.99, a £160 increase over its launch price from almost six years ago.

It’s easy to think that this price increase is simply a result of RAM shortages, but Sony’s CFO, Lin Tao, said they’d secured sufficient supply, via Outlook Respawn:

Speaking during a Q3 fiscal earnings call this week, Sony Chief Financial Officer Lin Tao addressed the industry-wide panic regarding the global RAM shortage. Tao assured investors and fans alike that the company has secured the minimum memory inventory needed to meet demand for the next fiscal year, effectively shielding the PS5 from the skyrocketing component costs currently plaguing the tech world.

That was just six weeks ago. More likely this increase is due to the US-Israel conflict with Iran, and the pressure it is placing on the semiconductor supply chain. Sony attributing the increases to the global economic landscape gives them just enough cover to say nothing at all.

These price increases are effective from 2nd April. If you’re in the market for a PlayStation 5, now’s the time to get it.

PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading

There’s not much worth quoting in this PC Gamer article but I do want to draw your attention to three things.

First, what you see when you navigate to the page: a notification popup, a newsletter popup that obscures the article, and a dimmed background with at least five visible ads.

Welcome Mat
Welcome Mat

Second, once you get passed the welcome mat: yes, five ads, a title and a subtitle.

A bit of article
A bit of article

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

Bandwidth bonanza
Bandwidth bonanza

We’re lucky to have so many good RSS readers that cut through this nonsense. 1

Footnotes

  1. NetNewsWire, Unread, Current, and Reeder, to name a few. ↩

Making RSS Discoverable is Hard

Let’s talk about the BBC.

The BBC surface a bunch of RSS feeds if you know where to look. However, in an RSS reader if you try to follow bbc.co.uk or bbc.com, you’ll invariably get a “No Feed Found” error (or equivalent). Why? Because the BBC don’t surface these feeds under the hood in the <head> element of the HTML, which is what they should do. It’s at this point where RSS becomes difficult and where users drop out.

In these scenarios, my idea was to use Gobbler’s knowledge of feeds available on those domains. If someone put bbc.co.uk into the address bar, Gobbler would surface http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/business/rss.xml (BBC News UK) if it knew an RSS feed existed.

Easy to code, easy to implement, and adds immediate value for discoverability. So, why have I pulled it?

Respecting private feeds.

I subscribe to publications where I receive a unique, private RSS link, that contains articles that I’ve paid for. Imagine a scenario where Gobbler surfaced that URL? It would completely undermine said publication’s business model.

I still think there is merit in the feature. I just need to find a way to not surface the wrong URLs.