First two weeks of this year were quite busy. We had CPUs meltdowns, then we had
busy CES. Finally, this week was a normal one, at least for most of us. So, if you are not running for your life, check this list of interesting things I stumbled upon this week.

Making of Apple's emojis
10 years ago Angela Guzman was an intern at Apple. Today, she give us insight into how the Apple's emojis were created. It is really interesting to read how things we use every day became the reality.

CALayer tutorials
If you ever wonder how all those fancy iOS animations are made, this is the site for you. Shannon Potter wrote multiple in-depth tutorials explaining how to do them.

Nintendo Labo
Nintendo goes back to making toys. This time, it is going to make cardboard accessories to Nintendo Switch. It looks weird at the beginning, but actually it is clever combination of portable console and piece of cardboard.

Nintendo Switch Emulator
Speaking of Nintendo Switch. CEMU Emulator now supports Nintendo Switch. It supports one game, to be precise. Nevertheless, here you can see The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in stunning 4k 60fps!

GeForece Now - cloud gaming by Nvidia
Nvidia presented their own gaming service. It allow to play AAA games on your ordinary PC and Mac. At the moment, the service offers almost 150 games, including Star Wars Battlefront II, The Witcher 3 and PUBG. Pricing is still unknown, but you can try to get access to the free beta.

BeatSaber
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game. I'm not a big fan of music games, but this one is impressive. Something tells me, this might be a hit 😉.

Star Wars Rebels Mid-Season 4 Trailer
After 4 seasons, Star Wars Rebels is coming to an end. Here is the official trailer of remaining episodes.

Image credits: Disney.

Second week of January is traditionally the CES week. As always, they were multiple hardware announcements and presentations. You can check what's new watching coverages from Marques Brownlee here and here, or Linus Tech Tips.

The CES is not the only thing that happened this week. Here is the list of cool things I stumbled upon.

MPC Blade Runner 2049 VFX breakdown
This is how young Rachael was brought to life in Blade Runner 2049. It is astonishing to see how technology advanced during just couple of months. Tarkin, in Rogue One, was remarkable technological achievement, but he was not perfect. Here I cannot tell the difference between Sean Young and hers computer counterpart.

Xcode hardware performance
Ash Furrow compiled the list with Xcode's performance on various macs. It already has the statistics for newest iMac Pro. What's disappointing, the new powerful hardware doesn't make fresh build times noticeably faster. The improvements are only for incremental builds.

I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site.
David Gilbertson explains how hackers can create bogus NPM package and use it to steal information without us knowing. This is reminder that we should always verify our 3rd party dependencies!

SpaceX launched Falcon 9 with Zuma satellite
Once again Space X launched its Falcon 9 rocket and landed it at Landing Zone 1. This was 21st successful landing of the first-stage of the rocket. Unfortunately they are rumors that the entire mission wasn't that successful. The Zuma satellite failed to reach the orbit and was lost. The mission was a secret, so we will not know, at least not in the near future, what really happened.

Zuma mission start
John Kraus captured this photo of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with Zuma satellite. If you like this photo, you should check out his website.

Image credits: John Kraus.

This week passed mostly with discovery of two new CPU vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre.

Here is TLDR version:

• Researches from Google's project zero and couple of universities around the
  world found two exploits in current CPUs and called them Meltdown and
  Spectre.
• Meltdown affects only Intel CPUs.
• Spectre affects all chips (Intel, AMD, ARM).
• There are security patches for Meltdown. They can affect computer performance
  from 0% to 30%. The slow down depends on the task and the processor model.
  Fortunately the impact for "normal" users should be minimal, but if you run
  server you might not be that lucky.
• There is no one magical fix that can protect users from Spectre.
• Definitely, in the future, there will be multiple patches that will try to
  fix different aspects of this exploit.
• Don't panic! All you need to do is to update your operating system. All major
  systems already prepared patches.

Here is the list of links for those who want to know more.

Site dedicated to those exploits
Meltdown academic paper
Spectre academic paper
Google Project Zero Technical explanation

Simple explanation of the Meltdown bug

Intel's statement and whitepaper
List of affected CPUs

Benchmarks showing how meltdown fix is slowing down CPUs
More benchmarks
How meltdown fix affected Epic's Fortnite servers

AMD's statement
ARM's statement and whitepaper
Apple's statement
Google's statement

Why Raspberry PI isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown
Funny parody of Intel's stickers

Image credits: Meltdown Attack.