I think Nintendo’s official Switch Pro Controller is brilliant. It’s a full-size pad with large face buttons, textured handles and a transparent shell that reveals a circuit-inspired pattern underneath. The accessory isn’t without its faults, though. The D-Pad, while a huge improvement over the left Joy-Con, is a bit stiff and spongy for my tastes. I also dislike the digital triggers, which barely depress, and the seriously steep $70 asking price.

The Switch has many third-party controllers to choose from, but none of them have impressed me like the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+. Terrible name aside, it’s an almost perfect pad that works not only with Nintendo’s hybrid console but Windows, macOS, Android and Raspberry Pi too.

Let’s start with the hardware. 8BitDo has rightfully earned a reputation for building modern, high quality controllers that ape those released for classic systems such as the NES and Sega Genesis. The SN30 Pro+ is clearly based on the iconic SNES controller, with a cross-shaped D-pad on the left, oblong start and select buttons in the middle, and circular A, B, X and Y inputs on the right-hand side. The "dogbone" design has been enhanced, however, with handles, analog sticks and two additional buttons — with a star and 8BitDo logo respectively — that, by default, act as the Home and Share shortcuts on the Switch.

It’s a stylish look that deftly balances Nintendo’s heritage with modern video game sensibilities. The controller also comes in three kickass color schemes: matte black, a SNES-themed grey and lavender, and a Gameboy-inspired cream and mulberry. I’ve been playing with the SNES variant but would happily own and display all three on my bookshelf.

Ergonomically, I prefer the SN30 Pro+ over the official Switch Pro Controller. The handles are longer and don’t dig into my palms as much during long play sessions. I like the symmetrical analog sticks, too, which ape Sony’s DualShock 4 — the other pad that I probably spend the most time with. The face buttons depress nicely and the D-Pad is practically identical to the one that shipped with the original Gameboy and SNES controller. It’s a simple, but proven design that works across a range of titles including Tetris 99, Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and the entire Nintendo Switch Online library of NES and SNES games.

The SN30 Pro+ is lighter than the Switch Pro Controller, which worried me initially. The first time I picked it up, I was reminded of every cheap and horrifically made third-party controller I had to endure as a child. The SN30 Pro+ doesn’t flex, creak or generally feel like it’s about to disintegrate, though. My initial fears quickly dissipated, therefore, and I appreciated its scant weight whenever I threw it into my backpack.

Unlike the Switch Pro Controller, the SN30 Pro+ has analog triggers that know how far you’ve pressed them. That’s handy for select games like Trials Rising where you need to carefully ramp up your acceleration. I also appreciated the deeper pull distance in Fortnite and first-person shooters such as Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. I don’t think the triggers improved my performance — I still haven’t won a game of Fortnite — but it made me more comfortable and, therefore, happier playing games competitively.

To my delight, the SN30 Pro+ has a removable battery pack. It lasts 20 hours on a single charge, which is only half the playtime advertised by the Switch Pro Controller. Still, I appreciated its flexibility. If you suddenly run out of juice and don’t have access to a power outlet, you can switch to AA batteries instead. It’s a useful backup for camping trips and long-haul flights that only offer a single USB port for charging your various gadgets.

You can wave the SN30 Pro+ around to perform basic motion controls. The experience is obviously inferior to a pair of Joy-Cons, but I didn’t have any problems waggling the pad to recharge my beam katana in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. The SN30 Pro+ has rumble, too, though it’s not the special "HD Rumble" that Nintendo offers with its Joy-Cons and Switch Pro Controller. 8BitDo’s alternative also doesn’t have NFC — if you love and frequently use Amiibo to unlock extras on your Switch, that might be a dealbreaker.

To use the controller, you’ll need to go through the slightly long-winded syncing process. There are four different button combos that turn the pad on: Y and Start (Switch), B and Start (Android), X and Start (Windows), A and Start (macOS). Secondly, you’ll need to press and hold the pair button next to the USB-C port. The four LED lights at the bottom of the pad will then cycle to indicate that it’s hunting for a companion piece of hardware. Finally, on the Switch, you have to open the Change Grip/Order menu and, if required, hit the shoulder buttons. For all other platforms, the controller will appear as an available Bluetooth device.

It took awhile for the controller to sync up with my Switch. Thankfully, you only have to go through this process once on Nintendo’s system. For all subsequent play sessions, you can just press the Start button and the controller will instantly connect.

I was a tad disappointed that the SN30 Pro+ can’t turn on the Switch itself. It’s a small nitpick, but I love that with the Switch Pro Controller I can start playing Splatoon 2 or Super Mario Odyssey without standing up and walking over to my Switch Dock.

The SN30 Pro+ has one huge trick up its sleeve that makes up for almost all of its shortcomings: customization. Through the 8BitDo Ultimate Software, you can remap any button and create custom profiles. I created a simple one for the Switch, for instance, that swapped A and B around. (At long last, the face buttons line up with the ‘confirm’ and ‘cancel’ commands on my PS4.) Another window lets you change the ‘dead zone’ around each analog stick and the exact point at which a trigger registers your input. You can even set up macros that let you activate tricky combos with a single button press. (I shamefully used this to create a Hadouken shortcut.)

You can only switch profiles through the app, which is currently exclusive to Windows and Mac. For me, this wasn’t a problem — I used the controller’s default settings most of the time — but I can imagine how frustrating this would be for people that have game-specific profiles.

The SN30 Pro+ has a few other weaknesses. It doesn’t have a headphone jack like, for instance, PDP’s wired Faceoff Deluxe+ controller. I would have loved a simple carry case, too, to protect the pad on the road. And, at the time of writing, the pad doesn’t support PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iPhones and iPads, though 8BitDo has hinted that it’s working on support for iOS 13.

Otherwise, the SN30 Pro+ is phenomenal. It’s a true alternative to the Switch Pro Controller that makes sensible compromises. NFC and HD Rumble? I’ll happily sacrifice those for a better D-Pad and triggers. The customization options — while overkill for me — are brilliant and I love that I can also use the pad with my Android smartphone, MacBook Pro, and any gaming PC or Raspberry Pi-powered retro console I decide to build in the future. For $50, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you own a Switch Pro Controller, I would recommend buying one as your Player Two or Three pad. And, like me, you might find that you prefer it over Nintendo’s official offering.

Source: 8BitDo SN30 Pro+

via Engadget
8BitDo’s SN30 Pro+ is a near-perfect Switch controller

This describes four different methods for getting data into a Vue frontend from a Laravel application. From simply echo-ing data directly directly into components, to setting up jwt-auth and using JSON Web Tokens with axios to authenticate API calls.
via Laravel News Links
Four ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue

Managing the logs in a centralized repository is one of the most common best practices in the DevOps world. Application logs, system logs, error logs, and any databases logs also will be pushed into your centralized repository. You can use ELK stack or Splunk to visualize the logs to get better insights about it. But as a SQL guy, I wanted to solve this problem with Bigdata ecosystem(use SQL). As a part of that process, we can relationalize unstructured data in AWS Athena with the help of GrokSerDe.

Here S3 is my centralized repository. I know it will not scale like ElasticSearch, but why should I miss this Fun. For this use case, Im going to rationalize the SQL Server Error log in AWS Athena. Let’s take a look at the SQL server’s error log pattern.

2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      UTC adjustment: 0:00
2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      (c) Microsoft Corporation.
2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      All rights reserved.
2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      Server process ID is 4152.

Its looks like

yyyy-mm-dd space hh:mm:ss:ms space User space message

But sometimes, it has many lines like below.

2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (RTM) - 14.0.1000.169 (X64) 
  Aug 22 2017 17:04:49 
  Copyright (C) 2017 Microsoft Corporation
  Enterprise Edition: Core-based Licensing (64-bit) on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter 10.0 <X64> (Build 14393: ) (Hypervisor)
2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      UTC adjustment: 0:00
2019-09-21 12:53:17.57 Server      (c) Microsoft Corporation.

If you see the 2nd, 3rd line we have the only message. And we know these all are just for information purpose, we’ll not get any useful information with that. Also as a part of Data cleansing, we should clean up some unwanted lines to make this relationalize.

I can consider the below format for my relationalize structure.

• Year – Integer
• Month – Integer
• Day – Integer
• Hour – Integer
• Minute – Integer
• Second – Integer
• User – String
• Message – String

We can convert this into a Grok pattern for this.

%{YEAR:year}-%{MONTHNUM:month}-%{MONTHDAY:day}\\s*%{TIME:time} %{LOG_LEVEL:user}\\s*( )*%{GREEDYDATA:message}

Create the table in Athena:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `sql_errorlog`(
  `year` string , 
  `month` string , 
  `day` string , 
  `time` string , 
  `user` string , 
  `message` string )  
ROW FORMAT SERDE 
  'com.amazonaws.glue.serde.GrokSerDe' 
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( 
  'input.format'='%{YEAR:year}-%{MONTHNUM:month}-%{MONTHDAY:day}\\s*%{TIME:time} %{LOG_LEVEL:user}\\s*( )*%{GREEDYDATA:message}', 
'input.grokCustomPatterns'='LOG_LEVEL \[a-zA-Z0-9\]*') 
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
OUTPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION
  's3://bhuvi-datalake/sql-error-log/'

The table got created. I used a custom pattern for pulling the user column.

Query the data:

SELECT *
FROM "default"."sql_errorlog" limit 10;

SELECT *
FROM "default"."sql_errorlog"
WHERE message LIKE '%shutdown%';

SELECT *
FROM "default"."sql_errorlog"
WHERE message LIKE '%Login failed%'

SELECT concat ('Server started at: ',year,'-',month,'-',day,' ',time) AS StartupTime
FROM "default"."sql_errorlog"
WHERE message LIKE '%Server process ID is%';

This is just a beginner guide, you can play around with windows logs, linux syslog, if you are a DBA then you may like to use this for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB logs.

BONUS: Regex Serde

If you are a developer, then regex might be easy for you. You can create a table with Regex Serde. Thanks to LeftJoin Who helped to write this Regex

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `bhuvi`(
  `date` string , 
  `time` string , 
  `user` string , 
  `message` string )
ROW FORMAT SERDE 
  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.RegexSerDe' 
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( 
  'input.regex'='(.*\\-.*\\-.*)\\s+(\\d+:\\d+:\\d+.\\d+)\\s+(\\S+)\\s+(.*?)$') 
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
OUTPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION
  's3://bhuvi-datalake/bhuvi-1/'

References:

1. Manage the SQL server workload with Customer Cloudwatch metrics.
2. AWS Athena Grok Serde.

via Planet MySQL
Relationalize Unstructured Data In AWS Athena with GrokSerDe

If you have been around MySQL for any length of time, you are probably aware that choosing the correct data types and optimizing your schema are actually important tasks.  A few years back at Percona Live 2016, I gave an introductory talk on schema review and optimization. Here’s the video:

I was thinking about that talk in the context of some of my current clients.  Though I had worked on extremely large database deployments during my earlier tenure at Percona, it was often more of an outlier.  Now, working as a Technical Account Manager with our largest clients, it is much more common.

The Fundamental Problem

I’d like to expand my thoughts on the “choosing the smallest data type you can” principle from my 2016 slides through the lens of a few of my 2019 clients.  I gave an example of two copies of the same table (a simple 4 column, 3 index table with ~4 million rows), one using a bigint for the primary key and one using a regular unsigned int for the primary key:

[root@sample-host plive_2016]# ls -alh action*ibd
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 908M Apr 7 16:22 action_bigint.ibd 
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 636M Apr 7 16:23 action.ibd

In this example, there was almost a 30% space savings associated with using the smaller data type.  Obviously, at the scale of 1GB of space, this is trivial. One comment I made during the talk references the adage “storage is cheap”.  While this can be true at a certain scale, I’m seeing this thinking break down more frequently with my largest clients.

The Problem Magnified at Scale

As an illustration, one of my clients is running roughly 10,000 Percona Server instances in their sharded deployment.  These servers are running on bare metal with above-average hardware (for performance concerns). While that sounds like a lot of servers (and it definitely is), you also have to take into consideration other operational concerns such as backups.  For the sake of some easier math, let’s assume the following:

• 5 servers/shard
• 500G data directory
• 5 backups of each shard (various time ranges such as daily, weekly, monthly)

Using those numbers as an estimate, one would be looking at roughly the following for space:

• ~4.7 petabytes storage for running instances (SSD)
• ~6 petabytes storage for backups (HDD)

The Business Impact on Large Deployments

Suddenly, at that scale, the 30% space that seemed trivial in my example seems a bit more important.  Let’s run some numbers based on the current $/TB pricing of SSD and spinning HDD with the 30% reduction in space:

• SSD Savings ~ $140,000
  • $100/TB Cost
  • 30% of 4.7PB = 1.4PB
• HDD Savings ~ $46,000

• • $25/TB Cost
  • 30% of 6PB = 1.8PB

Saving 3 petabytes of storage would reduce the raw storage costs by nearly $200,000.  On top of the actual capital costs of 3PB of storage, you have to consider server count, power, and maintenance (among others) which would increase this cost significantly.  Clearly, this is just a theoretical example of the potential impact a small mistake like picking the wrong data type can have on the overall infrastructure cost at scale. Generally, by the time a company reaches this scale, these sorts of optimizations have already been made and we need to start looking deeper and more creatively at other alternatives.

While this is definitely an oversimplification of calculating storage costs based on raw hardware prices, it does beg the question: even though it may not seem important now, why not ensure your schema is optimized before it becomes an expensive problem to fix!

For a more holistic view of how optimizations such as this one can save you money, check out our Database Management Savings Calculator or reach out to us for a more thorough review.

via Planet MySQL
Why Database Schema Optimization Matters

If you’re upgrading to a new iPhone from an old one, or from an Android device, then you need to take steps to make sure that Google Authenticator continues to work as you’d expect.
via AppleInsider
How to move Google Authenticator to your new iPhone

$ composer require envant/fireable

class User extends Authenticatable {  use FireableAttributes;   protected $fireableAttributes = [  'status' => [  'approved' => UserApproved::class,  'rejected' => UserRejected::class,  ],  ]; }

class User extends Authenticatable {  use FireableAttributes;   protected $fireableAttributes = [  'email' => EmailUpdated::class,  ]; }

via Laravel News Links
Laravel Fireable Attributes

Riddle me this: You’re out somewhere and you need to hop on a wifi network with a new device. You realize you have the wifi password saved on your laptop, but not on whatever device you’re looking to connect. And you’re either too lazy to ask for the password again, or you have no way to acquire it in your present condition.

What do you do? Easy. Pull out your laptop and look it up. Here’s how:

Windows

To find a saved wifi password, you have a few options. First, you can pull up a Command Prompt and type in this somewhat-complicated string:

netsh wlan show profile [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK] key=clear

You’ll want to replace the [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK] part with, well, the name of whatever SSID you’ve connected to. When you do, and hit Enter, you’ll see the password for said wifi network in the “Key Content” listing of the Security settings field—it should be pretty apparent.

If you’d like to try another way, you can pull up your passwords via the Windows 10 Settings app. Launch it, click on Network & Internet, scroll down a bit and click on Network and Sharing Center, click on the blue “Wi-Fi” link next to the “Connections:” field, click on “Wireless Properties,” click on the Security tab, and select “Show characters.”

There are other utilities you can try to get your passwords in an even simpler manner, but I should note that Windows Defender might not like them very much. At least, that was the case when I tried downloading Nirsoft’s WirelessKeyView—surely a harmless program, but one that makes Windows Defender freak out once it finishes transferring to your system.

Mac

On macOS, revealing up a saved wifi password is simple. First, you can pull up Terminal and type in the following:

security find-generic-password -wa [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK]

Same deal as before: Replace [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK] with exactly what it says. You’ll next have to authenticate into your system as an administrator, but once you do that, the password for whatever wifi network you typed in should appear within Terminal.

You can also just dig through Keychain—specifically, the Keychain Access application—to sniff out a saved password. Launch the application and click on the System Keychain in the upper-left corner. Find the wifi network you want to look up and double-click on it.

When you do, you’ll see a box that looks like the following. Click “Show Password” to do just that—after you authenticate yourself, of course.

via Lifehacker
How to Reveal Your Saved Wifi Passwords in Windows or macOS

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today’s list is headlined by a new round of discounts on Amazon devices, including the company’s Fire TV Stick streamers, Fire tablets, and Kindle e-readers, among others. The catch? Most of the discounts are for Prime members only.

Still, that covers a whole lot of people, and a few of the discounts here either match or come close to the prices we saw during Amazon’s Prime Day event in July. The company’s

latest (and waterproof) Kindle Paperwhite

, for one,

is down to $90

, while the

entry-level Kindle

is down to $65. Both are $5 more than they were on Prime Day. At $50 and $30, respectively,

the Fire HD 8

and

Fire 7

are now matching their Prime Day prices and are still generally worthwhile choices for people wanting to spend as little as possible on a tablet. The

Fire TV Stick 4K

and 1080p

Fire TV Stick

aren’t as steeply discounted, meanwhile, but they’re both $15 off for those in need of a new streaming stick. The company’s

Cloud Cam

security camera and

Echo Show 5

smart display are significantly discounted for those who don’t have Prime, too.

The big caveat here is that Amazon is announcing new hardware of some sort next week. The company held an event last September where it mainly introduced new Echo devices and other smart home accessories, so it’s not certain that the Fire and Kindle devices here will be replaced, but there’s at least some chance that these discounts are designed to clear out inventory. Still, most of what’s here is a good value all the same. And if you’re not interested in having more Amazon in your life, we also have deals on Roku streamers, Logitech keyboards and mice, external hard drives, and more. Have a look at the full rundown below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Table of Contents

Top 10 deals of the day

Amazon device deals

• Prime only: Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K HDR media streamer for $34.99 at Amazon (normally $49.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Fire TV Stick 1080p media streamer for $24.99 at Amazon (normally $39.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Fire TV Recast (500GB) over-the-air DVR for $169.99 at Amazon (normally $229.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Fire HD 8 (16GB, ads) tablet – 8-inch 1280×800 for $49.99 at Amazon (normally $79.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Fire 7 (16GB, ads) tablet – 7-inch 1024×600 for $29.99 at Amazon (normally $49.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (8GB, ads) e-reader for $89.99 at Amazon (normally $129.99).
• Prime only: Amazon Kindle (4GB, ads) e-reader for $64.99 at Amazon (normally $89.99).
• Amazon Cloud Cam 1080p security camera for $89.99 at Amazon (normally $119.99).
• Amazon Echo 5 smart display for $64.99 at Amazon and Best Buy (normally $89.99).

Laptop and desktop PC deals

• Apple Mac Mini (late 2018) – Intel Core i3-8100B, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD for $699 at Amazon (normally $749.99).
• Samsung Chromebook Plus V2 laptop – Intel Core m3-7Y30, 12.2-inch 1920×1200 touch, 4GB RAM, 128GB eMMC for $399 at Best Buy (normally $449.99).
• Asus ROG Strix G gaming laptop – Intel Core i5-9300H, 15.6-inch 1080p 120Hz, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GTX 1660 Ti 6GB for $999 at Walmart (normally $1,299).
• Lenovo ThinkPad P53 mobile workstation laptop – Intel Core i7-9750H, 15.6-inch 3840×2160 OLED touch, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Nvidia Quadro T2000 4GB GPU for $1,484.45 (use code: THINKSEPT - normally $1,899).
• Dell XPS Tower desktop – Intel Core i7-9700, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for $949.99 at Dell (use code: DTXPSAFF1 – normally $1,399.99).
• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8-core/16-thread desktop processor for $197.99 at Amazon and Newegg (normally $239.99).

Video game deals

Gaming deals

TV and home entertainment deals

Electronics deals

Accessories and miscellaneous deals

• LEGO Ideas NASA Apollo Saturn V 21309 kit (1,900 pieces) for $99.99 at Amazon (normally $119.99).
• Instant Pot Ultra (6qt) electric pressure cooker for $83.77 at Amazon (normally $109).
• Anker PowerPort Atom III wall charger – 60W, 45W USB-C PD, 1x USB-A for $31.99 at Amazon (normally $42.99).
• Anker Roav Viva smart car charger – Alexa, 2x USB-A for $19.96 at Amazon (clip 11% coupon – normally $35.99).
• Anker PowerWave Pad wireless charger – 10W for Galaxy phones, 7.5W for iPhone for $9.99 at Amazon (use code: LABOR2503 - normally $17.99).
• Anker PowerLine II 3-in-1 charging cable – USB-C, microUSB, Lightning for $11.24 at Amazon (use code: ANKER8436 - normally $17.99).

via Ars Technica
Dealmaster: A bunch of Amazon devices are on sale for Prime members today

Transcript

Dilbert: We need to fix our user interface because half of our users can’t figure it out.
Boss: Tell them to read the manual.
Dilbert: That’s not how you fix a bad user interface.
Boss: Then why do manuals exist?
Dilbert: If you need me, I’ll be banging my head against a wall.

via Dilbert Daily Strip
Comic for September 18, 2019

Demo live-building of Laravel 6 project to track expenses, also showing how to customize the code after download from QuickAdminPanel, and how to push code to Github.
via Laravel News Links
Create Laravel Expense Tracker in 15 Minutes – with QuickAdminPanel