Tonight on GeekNights, we consider documentation. Client documentation, user guides, service runbooks, developer notes, and the like. We've previously covered Documentation Systems, as well as in a game design lecture on game rules.

In the news, Rym finally dressed up as Zed from Zardoz, Facebook's name change to "Meta" isn't fooling anyone, a theoretical unicode-based attack on compilers is being patched, Roblox had a massive outage, and the LIRR is now able to run trains into Grand Central Terminal, a feat of engineering in the making since 1963.

This is also the 16th anniversary episode of GeekNights! We started on October 31 2005, and we made "beta" episodes well before that!

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the Leopard that is social media. It is difficult to summarize the myriad ways that social media has materially harmed society despite its great promise. From Orkut to Facebook to Twitter, it's been a destabilizing force. In the (possibly too on-the-nose) news, Facebook had a major global outage today (see our episode on outages), Facebook has a whistleblower revealing terrible revelations about the harm Facebook causes, a new tool can reveal who actually owns companies, and Europe is looking to (rightly) standardize on USB-C for charging electronic devices (much to Apple's discomfort).

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the video camera. In the news, there is drama at Freenode, Audacity won't gather telemetry data, Spotify is getting podcast transcription, and Samsung seems to have given up on upcycling.

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the humble remote control. We are some of the youngest people who remember having screens and other devices without remote controls, and they changed things in more ways than you might have expected. In the news, Apple is going after Itch.io in its ongoing fight with Epic, Steam rejects some games but not others without clear rules, Facebook rejects adaptive clothing ads, Microsoft changes its old icons, and a major US fuel pipeline was shut down by ransomware.

Tonight on GeekNights, we bring you a technology news roundup for April 2021. Apple announces several things, Apple must face a lawsuit over whether or not people "buy" things, early results show promise for a new malaria vaccine, capitalism is keeping the COVID vaccines from widespread global use, Honda will stop selling combustion engines by 2040, Fujitsu software wrongly sent people to prison, Elon Musk's tunnel is worthless garbage, chip shortages are getting worse, Signal pwn3d Cellebrite, the University of Minnesota is now banned from contributing to the Linux kernel (their apology was not accepted), a driverless Tesla killed two people and burned so bardly firefighters couldn't put it out, Roku and Google are beefing (another reason why the HTPC is superior to all other streaming devices), this streaming device points a camera at you to literally spy on you, and lab-grown salmon meat is a real possibility!

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the current world of laptops and tablets. The world is changing, and laptops are increasingly becoming desktop replacements or niche devices. Don't take our advice from how to buy a laptop in 2008, and internalize how long ago 2012 was. (This was Rym's first laptop). In the news, Yahoo Answers shuts down forever, destroying a treasure trove, LG exits the smartphone business, and Nvidia unveils a server-room ARM CPU.

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider how multi-factor authentication works. We've previously talked about single Signon, biometrics, the levels of security & privacy, and the like, but we've never actually talked about how TOTP and other multi-factor authentication schemes work.

In the news, the ship is no longer stuck, New York opens up vaccines to everybody, fake ai-generated and fake stolen-profile-photo twitter accounts are spreading Amazon's anti-union propaganda, and the Free Software Foundation has ruined its reputation by bringing Richard Stallman back on board, with many others joining the denouncement. Also note that there is a vulnerability in 2FA keys that allows cloning them.