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The End Of The CrunchPad | TC - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
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Outsanity, Alex Scrivener, Shey, Jamaican of FF and 8 other people liked this
"It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it."
- Itachi
from Bookmarklet
There's more this story than is being told, I'm sensing.
- Itachi
Ungood! A hundred times double-plus ungood! But yes, there is the air of missing information.
- i80and
from IM
Yeah, definitely more to the story. This could also be a negotiating tactic on the part of Arrington, he does have considerable power with his readership. No way to know for sure.
- mikepk
+1 mikepk
- Todd Hoff
In my experience, when someone says repeatedly "it's not about the money" . . . it's about the money.
- John Craft
TechCrunch VS. Fusion Garage is now online at the AllRise court. Join the debate and cast your vote - http://bit.ly/AllRise277
- AllRise
Wow. This is disappointing. Hope they work it out and we see this come to market.
- Mitchell McKenna
That really truly sucks. Time for Arrington to go back into lawyer mode and have a field day. "No Prisoners!"
- Andrew Leyden
Damn. I was so looking forward to this...... hope it gets sorted out.
- Roberto Bonini
sad sad day
- Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)
Can it be that FG refused to make it at a $300/unit price point and that Arrington refused to budge on the price?
- Daniel J. Pritchett
For a "Fortune 100 Business Intelligence developer" you do ask quite a stupid question, Daniel. Were you privy to Arrington's budget figures and cost estimates to assume his $300 retail unit target was anywhere near realistic? You think his 13-people strong manufacturing partner FG was sunk by greed [before product even hit the market] because that's what Arrington alleged to? Wake up. #CrunchPad
- ianf ⌘
Odd that no one has even mentioned the rumors of an Apple tablet, and how that might affect the success of the Crunchpad.
- John Craft
Listen to yesterdays MacBreak Weekly. Leo and co had a along discussion about this that included the iTablet.
- Roberto Bonini
"MacBreak Weekly 169: This Is What Happens Larry" - LOL. Thanks, Roberto.
- John Craft
For those of us who cannot afford to invest umpteen minutes of their lives in listening to Laporte's et al. drivel, could you please summarize his arguments here, Roberto?
- ianf ⌘
Either there never was a crunchpad (ie this is arrington's way of getting out of it- but there are working prototypes). Or there was no way to get it to Market before the iTablet (hence the crunchpad would just be another also ran). Or, and this is alex lindsays theory that there was no way to do it at $300 or $400 dollars.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Basically then what I was saying all along http://friendfeed.com/search... - darn Laporte to steal all the credit (and credit$$$) for Regurgitating My Stating The Obvious™
- ianf ⌘
There was a lot more discussion over the matter. But those are the main main main points.
- Roberto Bonini
I want one even worse now.
- SAM
Interesting SAM. What if this is a Apple-esque stunt to drive demand??
- Roberto Bonini
Which particular "Apple[-esque]" stunt are you thinking of?
- ianf ⌘
I thought of that Roberto... and if it is... brilliant and I want mine in black.
- SAM
Ian - none in particular... but Apple does all sorts of non-orthodox PR. i want mine in black too - to go with my iPhone ;)
- Roberto Bonini
I was just saying the $300 price point was unlikely and maybe FG didn't want to stay involved with an impossible project. Thanks for the kind words, Ian.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Oh, I though something has passed me by [everybody needs to conduct occassional self-test for Alzheimer on themselves, and this was mine ;-))]. Apple would not have done anything like that, and –TRUST ME ON THAT– Arrington even less so. He has lost so much face over it already, that he'd be downright stupid to attempt to whip up the interest for the CrunchPad by killing it first. He's naive, but stupid? no.
- ianf ⌘
Daniel, emit things grounded in reflection or experience, and I'll be the first to applaud you. From a "business Intelligence developer" I'd expect something better than that your naive take of the TC/FG business relationship: "[maybe] FG refused to make it at a $300/unit price point and Arrington refused to budge on the price?" Spare us.
- ianf ⌘
@mikepk http://friendfeed.com/techcru... "This could also be a negotiating tactic on the part of Arrington" - NOT. Other things being equal, Arrington will never fully recover from that monumental fiasco he himself engineered. Recover as in being taken seriously by readers in the future. As there was nothing to be...
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- ianf ⌘
#sidenote: that's probably the first time I've seen a permalink of a comment by someone in an actual FF thread
- Itachi
For the record, I've been doing #hashanchors since April, not that FF Powers That Be expressed any interest in alleviating extracting of them: http://friendfeed.com/search...
- ianf ⌘
Re: [AJ Batac] "I just realized that I am madly in love (♥) with FriendFeed that the thought of dumping me for Facebook hurts a lot." (via http://friendfeed.com/ajbatac...)
Itachi, Eric Logan, John μller and AJ Batac liked this
For reasons that will soon become apparent, I am responding to AJ Batac's short note in a post of my own, and in four parts, rather than one long comment. When I arrived here 4 months ago –now 3600+ comments, 700+ posts to date– I was sort of optimistic. This was a service I grokked outright, and which felt very little intrusive and thus trustworthy. I visited FF a year earlier as a guest, but could not cope with the old "pre-beta" design that took all of a laptop's screen to view, and scaled very badly where text size was concerned (I am of weak sight). Now, in 2009, it felt like they were on the right track to make it worthy my hitherto unattainable goal, synchronous participatory multimedial hypertext.
- ianf ⌘
There were a number of features OBVIOUSLY mising from the function mix, but they looked like they would be added later—especially as they were such no-brainers as usable granular #hashanchors [present ones require so much motivation to extract and synthetise by hand, that I seem to be the only one here regularly using them]. Also, I kept worrying that apparently there was no clear-cut...
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- ianf ⌘
Another jarring point was my halftime discovery, actually a reply from Bret Taylor to a query of mine, that the missing Mission Statement of the FF was an email from him to Paul or vice-versa [I would have supplied you the granular url, if I could find it, but, alas, apparently fell into the void("http://friendfeed.com/search..."), beyond the...
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- ianf ⌘
This in my view makes the FF a Petri dish for opinion fascism, which I've already stated up front [http://friendfeed.com/ianf...], something quite contradictory to assumed primary intention of all social media: alleviating creation and maintenance of personal networks. And now FF founders have sold their...
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- ianf ⌘
"For reasons that will soon become apparent" Because you want to back-up your threads and are unsure about copyright of other people's threads in which you participated?
- Philipp Lenssen
No, Philipp, not for those reasons alone. Let's say I lost the thread pointing to that conclusion somewhere in the middle of that lengthy diatribe, which I then had to break up in pieces. But I was trying to convey some of the hurt felt by AJ Batac, too. FF –even without the FB angle– felt full of unfulfilled promise, and now it is known it will never be fulfilled. However, I suspect...
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- ianf ⌘
Also, Philipp, where am I "unsure about copyright of other people's threads in which you participated?" I am not, my words are mine, whether submitted in others' threads or not. This represents one of design failures of the social-something Friendfeed: by reassigning rights to delete any commenter's contributions to any thread's owner, without AT LEAST making sure that the contributor...
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- ianf ⌘
Your words are yours, but I was more thinking of the context of your words, i.e. the comments of others appearing in those threads...
- Philipp Lenssen
That's the problem with FF, Philipp, "your words are yours" - except, in current scheme of things, they are not. Or at least not entirely. We post comments to express ourselves, reasons vary, but perhaps even as a proof of our existence. Therefore we should be the sole masters of whether our words here do or die. But the FF founders have made a conscious decision to assign FINAL RIGHTS...
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- ianf ⌘
Group OVERload _ If something bothers me, if just a little, about friendfeed is the excess addresses in a post, especially if they are repetitive. ianf ⌘ suggests a good solution here: http://friendfeed.com/friendf...
esther ♥ ♫, Ross Miller, Kol Tregaskes and 2 other people liked this
"It needs to be slimmed down to just a single "X to Y and 5 other feeds" so it stays a one-liner" - ianf ⌘ - - I think that way will add visibility to the 'title' of the post. .. thoughts?
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Given that I commented in that thread 8 times, and uttered a number of critical suggestions, it's just as well you quoted me outright. But you should have substituted the leading "It" for "The leading author/ destination line needs to…". [Of course, had we had an easy way to refer to individual comments, this could have been merely pointed to with a granular-anchor link:...
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- ianf ⌘
Sure. referring to another user's comments could be easier.
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Micah Wittman to Micah's feed, FriendFeed Hacks, FriendFeed Feedback, chrisofspades, Mitch, metalerik, Eric Logan, K.D., Willem (@wim66) ☠, Rich, Svartling
friendfeedCommentAnchor - New User script & Bookmarklet to add a permalink to each comment - http://wittman.org/project...
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Claudia Koltzenburg, Daniel Mietchen, Mike Chelen and 40 other people liked this
friendfeedCommentAnchor [v0.1.0] - http://wittman.org/project... - A user script, a bookmarklet and an alternative configuration userscript (has autoCommentAnchor turned ON). To add a permalink to each comment. The hyperlinked text default is "#" (you can change it in the Configuration section to "permalink", "linky", etc in the user script). Works in single post and stream modes. Tested on Firefox and Safari.
- Micah Wittman
Special Note ~ Post image: NOT A HASH TAG :)
- Micah Wittman
I started the group ffhacks to house a concise listing of user scripts: http://friendfeed.com/ffhacks . If you have a script that works on the current version of FriendFeed, and you're its author, write a comment on http://friendfeed.com/ffhacks... with the link and I'll share the original friendfeed post to the group.
- Micah Wittman
Does it only work to other users with the script enabled?
- Andrew Trinh
The anchor is the comment <div> container id which has been there all along; there simply has not been a user interface to conveniently access it. So yes, a URL with the anchor will work for anyone regardless of script usage (tested in Firefox & Safari).
- Micah Wittman
Thank you, Svartling :)
- Micah Wittman
This is awesome Micah, well done! :D It's really non-intrusive too.
- Mitch
splendid work Micah!
- vijay
Thanks, guys.
- Micah Wittman
fantastic. precisely what I had in mind. only tested the bookmarklet so far...I'll have to check out the userscript later.
- chrisofspades
chrisofspades - right on :)
- Micah Wittman
i like bookmarklets.
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
everybody subscribe to Micah's ffscripts group! http://friendfeed.com/ffhacks
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Hi, Franc :)
- Micah Wittman
Hey Micah. how's it going? ;)
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
ianf, yep. I try anyway. I remember one or two conversations you had anchors - I've wanted access them for a while too. Cheers!
- Micah Wittman
#hashanchors should have been there by default, so that you could spend your time on more creative things rather than fixing FF. In fact, absence of this key element of hypertext, granular addressability, tells me that FFeeders really do not care for comments - they're ffodder to the OPs, which are the only ones that rank anything in the hierarchy of submissions around here. I don't...
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- ianf ⌘
Great feature Micah Wittman thanks. another bookmarklets suggestion plz browse this: http://friendfeed.com/friendf...
- Nimaa
Installed the script and like it.
- Miss Elle
Thanks, Miss Elle. Take a look or even subscribe to http://friendfeed.com/ffhacks to check out more scripts.
- Micah Wittman
Is my maths right? If the URL shortner FriendFeed uses has 5 unique characters, does that mean they can have a total of 1,453,933,568 unqiue shortened URLs?
Jorge Escobar, Aldiantoro Nugroho, Chris Rivait and 2 other people liked this
10 Numbers + 26 Uppercase + 26 Lowercase = 58. So calculating that out, 58 x 58 x 58 x 58 x 58 = 1,453,933,568.
- Johnny Worthington
from IM
I guess if - or when - we ever need more than 1.454 billion URLs they could just add additional letters
- Bryce Roney
I think when they run out of letters and numbers they start using lolcats
- (jeff)isageek
Your math is a little off 10 +26 +26 = 62 and and 62^5= 916,132,832. For the life of me cant figure out how you got 1.45 billion, 58^5= 656,356.768 and 58^6=38 billion
- Jimminy Fuller
Maybe FatFingeritus on my calculator
- Johnny Worthington
Of course the math that we both did is simplified because for each character in the string could at some point be the actual length of the URL, because /0 doesn't equal /00000. Thus, (62) +(62^2)+(62^3)+(62^4)+(62^5) = 931,151,402 would be the actual maximum for 5 characters.
- Jimminy Fuller
Johnny: They just keep growing :). For instance here is the first (public) ff.im URL: http://ff.im/3. Eventually we will be up to 6 characters
- Benjamin Golub
Johnny, with that information you could write a script to constantly submit items to FriendFeed until it hits http://ff.im/johnny so that you get yourself a shortened FF vanity URL. Someone already got mine: http://ff.im/tony. It's actually a fun way to find random entries: http://ff.im/web, http://ff.im/feed, http://ff.im/1234
- Tony Ruscoe
How dares Sven Bergiers claim http://ff.im/ianf for some forgettable, no-comment item? Unwittingly and from Twitter, of all places, no less. A scandal, that's what it is. [Amend: also, Tony, there's no need to continuously post random entries to FF in order to "catch" any one pseudo-vanity url: all it'd take is a script to poll FF for newest entries, compare their ff.im share urls to target pattern, and then figure out the rate at which it will come within reach. Then start posting like crazy! ;-))]
- ianf ⌘
@Ben - since you're reading this thread, perhaps you can answer it ex-FF cathedra so to speak: how come current comment #hashanchors aren't ff.im'd by default? It's not as if it'd put a hell of an extra load on the server. And here's my proposal from May 1st, 2009: http://ff.im/2uBFP
- ianf ⌘
Does the FriendFeed API allow you to shorten FriendFeed pages into ff.im for applications like TweetDeck, etc?
Kol Tregaskes, Micah Wittman and Hans-Juergen Koch liked this
You mean shorten the urls to posts? Sure, press "Share," copy short ff.im-url in the middle line at bottom.
- ianf ⌘
I don't mean for me to manually do it, I'd like to see a feature where you post a FriendFeed link in TweetDeck or DestroyTwitter and it will automatically convert the link to ff.im
- Aaron Myers
TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter apps not under FF's control, are they?
- ianf ⌘
No, but like with Flickr and Digg, links can be shortened using the API and/or public tools. Didn't know of FriendFeed made that available.
- Aaron Myers
FF makes ff.im (="FF I am" ;-)) shorturls available through Share dialog, but not as far as I can see, through its API. Nor is there a way to submit granular-anchor-FF url to it and receive a shortened one in return (i.e. I could not refer to your comment above the ff.im way, while I CAN refer to it with this laboriously-extracted tinyurl <http://tinyurl.com/qlcwch>). So, are you just assuming FF API can be used for that, or do you KNOW IT for sure?
- ianf ⌘
ianf, how did you manufacture THAT tinyurl? über-cool!
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
It's very laborious, involves looking under the hood for a specific comment, extracting its id-string, tacking it manually onto the permalink, and submitting to tinyurl. Could have been achieved much easier if FFeeders thought of it, and subscribers cared about it/ kept requesting it. Here's my once-suggestion: <http://ff.im/2uBFP> and also read this <http://friendfeed.com/search...>
- ianf ⌘
I see I though that was a good idea. ;-) I still think it is. The self-referencing search in fun. I almost commented on this while I was commenting on it. But yes, the hashanchors on comments would be AWESOME.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I also have managed to self-reference the very comment the link appeared in, but it involves two-step saving and editing of it. Better FF would preindex "last+1 comment," so it could be extracted from page's source before comment was posted (this would create some confusion if two or more people commented the same thread at once, but I'd still be willing to live with the...
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- ianf ⌘
Would like to have the comment-like-share line below expanded comments as well.
Ivan Zuzak, Chris Loft, Kol Tregaskes and zeroinfluencer liked this
You'd like to share just a comment? It's possible already, although not straightforward, and requires a degree of motivation. Wait a sec, I'll show you how. [Addendum: like this: <http://friendfeed.com/friendf...>. Now, if only we could get FF to hurry up and implement these #hashanchors <http://ff.im/2uBFP>]
- ianf ⌘
Anchors on comments would be most welcome.
- Kol Tregaskes
Well, actually I meant to also display the comment - like - share button below an item which has a lot of comments. Otherwise you have to scroll up to leave a comment.
- TobiasVerhoog.com
I understood that much, and, since there exist a third-party script to add just that, a trailing disposition links line last in a thread, it is enough of a proof-of-concept to assume that it will be added to FF in near future.
- ianf ⌘
And the Hashanchors would be AWESOME.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
timestamps aren't as useful in real-time. especially on comments. not everything can be "1 second ago". may I suggest updating the timestamp as the rest of the page updates?
Mehmet Alp, Mitch, Isha (Marysia) and 9 other people liked this
Timestamps need to be real-time, hehe. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Is it time to move to absolute times rather than relative?
- Ken Sheppardson
With absolutes you get into the nightmare of timezones. Relatives are much easier.
- Yan
I wouldn't call having a time zone setting in your user profile a "nightmare". Seems to work fine for pretty much every other service I can think.
- Ken Sheppardson
Thanks for the feedback, Chris. It's something we're definitely aware of and looking to improve.
- Dan Hsiao
Imaginary time stamp
- Robert Hafer
Dan, for a start would it be possible to put in an attribute (maybe a specially formatted id attribute) to the a tag that contains the Unix epoch timestamp in GMT? That way for starters Greasmonkey coders can work on a way to do absolute time stamps in JavaScript and handle time zones in the browser. Once a good Greasemonkey solution surfaces, you may be able to incorporate that into the site itself.
- Andy Kruger
@Ken timestamps turn absolute after one? week - go look for any marked 30 april or earlier, you can't get any more absolute than that [still no indication of year, but maybe that's there too]; @Andy Greasemonkey scripts are not browser independent, so why should FF cater to just one such? I agree that more exact timestamps could be placed beneath the hood, alongside ff.im-pre-encoded pointers to all comments by default (aka #hashanchors see http://ff.im/2uBFP)
- ianf ⌘
Ianf: I suggested Greasemonkey because it's just JavaScript. It opens up opportunity for someone to write some JavaScript code that can then be put in the actual site code to make it available in other browsers. I might take a close look at the permalink URL and see what can be derived from the "random looking" code in there, maybe it's a timestamp?
- Andy Kruger
Can't be pure timestamp, because FF must be able to post several thousand posts per second, so it has to distinguish between them. And whatever they do, they consider server latency. My gut feeling it's a pure random number that is timestamped to nth decimal microsecond in a parallel associative array.
- ianf ⌘
Yeah... Bit of wishful thinking on my part there. I turned the one for this post into a number and in Unix epoch it comes to a date in the 1970s (I forget now what year).
- Andy Kruger
I don't mind the "Monday" or the "22 April" timestamps but I would like the time to be added to them all. Perhaps add as an option (ability to set the date format of timestamps).
- Kol Tregaskes
ianf, even though they display a date after one week, that doesn't really help with the real-time issue. and as Kol said, it'd be nice if it displayed the time also.
- chrisofspades
from email
FF have the times as you can see them on FFholic for example. So just needs to be switched on or added as an option.
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol, please supply a sample url of that FFholic absolute-timestamped instance.
- ianf ⌘
They could also suppress the timestamp completely until it is at least 5 minutes old. You're more likely to accept a timestamp of "5 minutes" on something that is actually 7 minutes old, than a timestamp of "1 second" on something which is 2 minutes old. The margin of inaccuracy is less.
- DGentry
Couldn't times be sent as absolute and translated by the browser to local times?
- Brian Sullivan
That spells trouble. Because, in order to enable localized absolute times (they already are localized by default, if relative), you'd need to parse the entire incoming data stream. You don't think this would affect average latency? Think again (and, besides, in order to abet parsing and decoding, the timestamps would then have to be pretty cryptic to the naked eye).
- ianf ⌘
from email
ian - the naked eye would never see them --they would always be parsed and displayed. I am not sure how difficult it would be. The comment times could be parsed and displayed as a popup when needed. The main posting times could be accessed easily if the were all tagged with the same type - there are not usually that many on the page. The point being the way they are now is incorrect and deceiving.
- Brian Sullivan
I don't think you guys understand what "the naked eye" means. Read the introductory paragraph on this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
- Mitch
OK, time for the heavy guns incl. dotting the i's, crossing out the t's, full regal stops. FF is a dynamic medium, with pages updated both by "top-ups" from the server, and locally, and with the timestamps parsed and resolved uniformly by the former. There's a reason for the latter: doing them any other way, i.e. parsing by browsers, would adversely affect page rendering times, its...
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- ianf ⌘
from email
@rehafer "Imaginary time stamp" your comment made me lol XD
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
Short of providing us with copyable granular html#anchors, I'd like each comment icon to be amended with ff.im-shorturl to that very entry, so it can be manually extracted from the source and reused.
Mike Chelen, guruvan (Rob Nelson), zeroinfluencer and 5 other people liked this
Like this (substitute ff.im for tinyurl.com - link is live): <div class="comment friend" cid="0817f49886cf4800a4608a6c81b08e57" id="c-0817f49886cf4800a4608a6c81b08e57"> <div class="quote" id="http://tinyurl.com/dje4c9" title="Wednesday at 1:41 pm"></div>
- ianf ⌘
yep, would be cool
- obz
Would be nice to have, yes.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
For the record, let's call them self-referential #anchors or #hashanchors (=a self-referential #hashtag if there ever was one).
- ianf ⌘
Very good idea
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Mind you, this could (and probabli will) be done even better, so that we won't have to search for granular ff.im links in the source, but will be able to copy them directly. Mine was just a temporary, interim solution to a problem nobody thinks exist. But it does, and if we take the url (=a single-string/ one-line pointer to an item in the docuverse) as one of the greatest inventions of...
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- ianf ⌘
from email
FF, please hyperlink URLs like www.bladam.com (hey, I know that was semi-shameless, but I had to give SOME example, right? :P). This would match the behavior of Twitter and I think Facebook, too, where people now just expect to be able to click on anything that starts with www :)
Kol Tregaskes, TobiasVerhoog.com, Kevin Fox and Darren Heydon liked this
Adam, FF needs a better policy on how to treat/ hyperlink embedded urls. Above all, it needs to enhance its own, internal ones, even the ff.im shortcuts, by substituting them in the text with uniform "[ff]" links or similar [see my two Humble Proposals <http://ff.im/2it9x> and <http://ff.im/2itFd>]. Since we'd know that these terse anchors are all of FF's doing, they'd be as "safe" to...
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- ianf ⌘
Wow, okay, you've clearly thought about this more in-depth than I have! :)
- Adam Lasnik
Have I ever, since 1989 or thereabouts.
- ianf ⌘
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