Established Field Guide favorite IFTTT (If This Then That) has a new pro subscription, giving you more options and more features than before for $10 a month (though you can actually set your own price for the first year). It’s something for power users to consider adding to their digital subscriptions.

For the completely uninitiated, IFTTT basically connects services together—Spotify and Slack, Gmail and Dropbox, Instagram and Pocket—so you can have triggers in one service lead to actions in another service. A simple IFTTT applet could be getting an email every time there’s a public tweet tagged with a specific location.

Here’s everything you can do with the new Pro subscription.

In addition to executing applets faster, the new IFTTT Pro plan lets you put together multiple actions and multiple triggers in the same applet, create routines with multiple steps, and introduce queries and conditional logic. That means applets can be much more complex, if you need them to be. Those on a free IFTTT plan will be limited to three applets in the future.

Once you’ve signed up to access the Pro features, you can start building your applet by clicking Create from the main screen on the web. You begin with two basic If This and Then That blocks, and you can use the Add buttons to pick your services: When you click into a service, a choice of different triggers or actions appears.

Select Feedly as your trigger, for instance, and the available triggers include a new article saved for later, a new highlight, or a new article in a board. If you choose a service that you haven’t previously connected to IFTTT, then you’re going to need to provide your login credentials and allow access as well.

What’s new with a Pro subscription are the Plus buttons underneath the If This trigger and the Then That action. Click on these buttons and you can add queries to refine your applet and multiple actions at the end of it. With a little bit of experimentation you should be able to work out what you can do with these extra fields.

Queries are intended to enable you to add more context and information to an applet, which then affects whether or not it gets triggered, and again you’ve got a host of different options and services to pick from—example queries would be the current weather forecast or the current price of electricity.

For example, it can be useful to apply a filter so an IFTTT only runs at a specific time of day or on a specific day of the week. Or, you might want to have an applet that’s triggered by a Google Calendar event, but only with a certain keyword in the title. These are the sorts of granular controls you can apply as you build up your applet.

Some technical and coding know-how is required to get the most out of the query and filter features, but it’s not difficult to pick up: IFTTT has put together a helpful guide that will take you through the time of day filter, and several others, here. Once you’ve got a grasp of the basic syntax and structure, you can adapt it for your own needs.

As you close out the applet creation process, you might be asked to add some specifics about how the action is carried out, depending on what you’re building. A lot of the triggers that IFTTT supports will come with so-called ‘ingredients,’ or types of data that are mined from the connected service.

Say you’re using an applet to add all of your finely honed tweets to a Google Sheet. As you build the applet, you can choose which of the tweet’s ingredients are included: the time and date it was created, the username it was tweeted from, a URL leading back to the tweet, the text of the actual tweet itself, and the tweet embed code. All of these elements can be included or excluded and ordered as required.

All of these settings can be configured at any time through your IFTTT dashboard, and all of your applets can be turned on or off whenever you like. You can also manage your account through the IFTTT apps for Android and iOS, though you can’t dig into the construction of your applets in quite as much detail as you can through a web browser—when you’re creating applets, it’s best to do it in a desktop web browser.

The easiest way to understand how IFTTT and IFTTT Pro works is just to dive in and work through some examples. IFTTT provides a few examples itself, so you can see how the queries and filter code in particular can be used. You can, for example, send an alert when you hit your daily distance goal in the Fitbit app—but disable the alert on certain days, and change the wording when the weather isn’t good.

You can also use IFTTT to turn on a SmartThings lightbulb based on the amount of available natural light—data obtained through a query run through a Tempest Weather System. When your custom brightness threshold is met, the lights turn on. (IFTTT works with a bunch of other smart home platforms as well.)

Another official example from IFTTT sets an applet to run once a day, using Date & Time as the trigger and Weather Underground as a weather forecast source. If the outlook is good, you’ll get a reminder to go for a run added to your Google Calendar, which is the main action in the applet.

Even if you don’t go deep into the query and filter coding aspects of IFTTT Pro, being able to run as many applets as you want with multiple actions might make the subscription worth your while. It really depends whether you need more from the apps and services that you use every day—and whether IFTTT has deep enough hooks into them to give you more functionality and features than you get by default.

Let’s build a datatables component that allows a person to search, filter, sort and manipulate the query string. This component will demonstrate the power of Livewire, as building a datatables component the traditional way would require a significant amount of JavaScript.

View the source code for this episode on GitHub.

Published on Sep 16th, 2020.

POTD: A-10 Thunderbolt II with GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Rotary Cannon

Posted 5 mins ago in Defense, Photo Of The Day with No Comments
Tags: a-10, GAU-8, Thunderbolt

Photo Of The Day

– Flying above is a U.S. Air Force

A-10 Thunderbolt II

assigned to the 51st Fighter Wing during a RED FLAG-Alaska over the Yukon Training Area in Alaska in 2019. As you may know, the A-10 Aircraft is what happens when you build a gun that you want to fly around with. In this case, the gun is the

GAU-8 Avenger 30mm rotary cannon

, and they also managed to find some space to add some bombs and missiles depending on the mission.

British Army Staff Sgt. Robert Leonard, British Army Headquarters 1st Artillery Brigade Joint Terminal Attack Controller, views a feed from an A-10 Thunderbolt II

The GAU.8 is one of the most powerful aircraft cannons ever flown.

Republic of Korea Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) observe as an A-10 Thunderbolt II provides close air support (CAS) during RED FLAG-Alaska 19-2 in the Yukon Training Area.

All pictures by U.S. Air Force, photo by Senior Airman Isaac Johnson.

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If you were watching the virtual 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards last night, you no doubt caught the debut of a new trailer for WandaVision, the first standalone series to be released in Phase Four of the MCU. The studio offered a sneak peek last year during D23 Expo 2019, Disney’s annual fan extravaganza. Lacking any actual footage, that teaser was just snippets of The Dick van Dyke Show interspersed with snippets of the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) from the various MCU films. At the time, I was skeptical of the concept, but this new trailer is quite promising and gives me hope that Marvel can pull it off.

WandaVision is meant to be a kind of sitcom/epic superhero mashup, with Kat Dennings reprising her role as Darcy from the Thor films, alongside Randall Park reprising his Ant Man and the Wasp role as FBI agent Jimmy Woo. Kathryn Hahn (Crossing Jordan) will play a “nosy neighbor,” and Teyonah Parris (Mad Men) plays a grown-up Monica Rambeau, daughter of Carol Danvers’ BFF Maria Rambeau, introduced in Captain Marvel. Within the MCU timeline, it takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame, and its events will directly tie in to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, currently slated for a 2022 release. 

Per the official description: “WandaVision will follow the story of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany’s superhero characters, the Scarlet Witch and Vision. The series is a blend of classic television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Wanda Maximoff and Vision—two super-powered beings living idealized suburban lives—begin to suspect that everything is not as it seems.”

During last fall’s New York Comic-Con, Tom King mentioned that the show would draw on the 2016 comic book limited series by King and Gabriel H. Walta, The Vision. In that storyline, Vision “creates” a wife and two children and settles into a seemingly idyllic suburban life in Washington, DC—but things soon take a darker turn. (There’s also a comics storyline in which Wanda creates a world where everyone gets their heart’s desire, so reality-warping is certainly within her canonical powers.) The studio also released a few set photos earlier this year that confirmed rumors that WandaVision would feature the live-action debut of S.W.O.R.D. (the Sentient World Observation and Response Department), a subdivision of S.H.I.E.L.D. charged with handling alien threats to Earth.

The trailer opens in the style of a wholesome 1950s family sitcom as “Twilight Time” by The Platters plays in the background. (Side note: I will forever be creeped out by this song after it was used in the 1998 The X-Files episode “Kill Switch,” co-written by none other than William Gibson.) ”This is our home now. I want us to fit in,” Wanda tells Vision, and voila! He suddenly has a more human appearance, just in time for dinner with the neighbors. But they find they can’t answer even the simplest personal questions: when they moved in, where they moved from, and of course, why they don’t have any children (it is the 1950s).

That’s the cue to shift into different eras of classic television in succession, including a brief glimpse of Monica Rambeau. It looks like showrunner Jac Schaeffer and the writing team are having a lot of fun with the concept, and that lighthearted energy dominates the trailer. “We are an unusual couple, you know,” Wanda says as we briefly shift back to the 1950s at the end. “Oh, I don’t think that was ever in question,” Vision replies. And it looks like this will be a most unusual series.

There’s no official release date yet, but WandaVision is expected to debut on Disney+ in December 2020. (The original plan was for a spring 2021 release, so we’re getting it a bit earlier than expected.)

Listing image by YouTube/Disney+

Apple’s latest mobile operating system introduces two new options that will delight anyone who doesn’t want to be wedded to Apple’s web browser and email apps. You can now set your own default web browser and email apps, but not every app supports the feature—not even Gmail.

I’ll explain.

As previously noted, app developers must update their apps in order to allow them to be considered as a potential “default” web browser or email client in iOS 14. Since Apple didn’t reveal last Wednesday’s iOS 14 launch was going to take place until last Tuesday, it’s no surprise that not every email client nor web browser has already been updated with the ability to be set as your default.

For example, you can set Edge, Chrome, or Firefox as a default browser, but not Brave (yet). For email apps, Hey, Spark, and Outlook can all be set as your default email application in iOS 14, but not… Gmail. Or not yet, which is surprising given that Chrome can be set as a default browser. (You’d think the updates that permitted this option would have gone hand-in-hand, but here we are.)

If you tap on an email link in Messages or Safari with Gmail as the only email client installed on your iOS 14 iPhone, you’ll see this prompt:

If you would rather not restore Mail, thanks, you can now either wait for Google to update Gmail to allow it to be set as a default email app—which it will surely do at some point soon—or you can use the following workaround.

Simply switch to using Chrome as your default web browser (if you haven’t already). When you tap on email links within the iOS version of Google’s browser, it’ll launch the Gmail app (if you also have that installed). I just tried it using one of the email links in my weekly Tech 911 column and it worked perfectly.

So, yes, you’ll have to use a Google product to be able to effectively use a Google product within iOS 14 (for now), and this trick will only work in Chrome, and not with any other email links you encounter on your iPhone or iPad. Still, it’s something; it actually confused me at first, as I thought that it meant the “Gmail as a default email client” feature had already rolled out—perhaps I had set it up and forgot? Nope. It’s just a Chrome quirk, though a welcome one.

KISSIMMEE, FL—Biden made a campaign stop in Florida this week to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month and reach out to his favorite voters: the Hispanics. In an effort to appeal to the voters, he performed a cultural celebration of Hispanic heritage by dancing in a sombrero and fake mustache, eating a burrito, and firing a pistola in the air.

“Hey there, fellow Latinx!” Biden said. “Before I begin, I would like to show you my Mexican celebration dance which I will perform to the tune of ‘La Cucaracha,’ Enjoy!” 

Biden then turned to a cassette player on the podium and pressed play. As the well known Spanish folk song began to play, Biden performed a dance in his traditional Mexican clothing he had recently purchased at a Spirit Halloween Store. Halfway through the performance, he yelled out, “You kids ain’t seen nothing yet! Watch this!” 

Biden then began to hop around and shoot an old fashioned Mexican pistola into the air. When he was finished, he sat down on the stage and ate a giant burrito for about 20 minutes.

When he was finished, the hall erupted in applause as the audience of several individuals stood on their feet to cheer the performance.

Biden knew he had nailed the performance, and that the Hispanic vote was in the bag. He was put back on ice in the basement until he is needed to go win over other ethnic groups.

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