Author: Rob Attrell

You should be able to use TMs during Pokemon Go Community Days

I have never posted about Pokemon Go on here before, and it’s possible once I start, I’ll just never stop.

However, what happened this morning hits in just the right way to scratch all my itches, and that’s what this website is about. I posted the following on Reddit last night, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, it was removed this morning by the mods.

This is part of a bigger thing I always think about, where I don’t understand how the cultural nuances of Reddit got to where they are. So rather than complain about cancel culture or how I’m being attacked in an echo chamber, I’m just going to re-express my point here. Free speech!

If you don’t care about Pokemon Go, by all means you don’t have to keep reading.

I realize Niantic wants to sell elite TMs, which is why they haven’t put anything like this in motion, but with PvP now being a big priority, you can officially buy access to moves like icy wind on dewgong, or psystrike on Mewtwo.

With CD move TM windows, none of those uses change. Especially with something like a magikarp community day, where up until March nobody could have thought we would ever see this, people have great maxed out, powered up, best friend pokemon. These now either get replaced by new pokemon with a CD move, or people have to spend valuable elite TMs on something easily ‘replaceable’ to get extremely meta relevant moves.

For example, I have a 100% Gyarados that’s currently maxed out as of S1 of GBL, but it’s now much less valuable than my 93% Aqua Tail Gyarados from today for PvP, unless I use my one and only elite TM (and because I only get one of these per season of GBL, I’m realistically effectively never using it).

Even if using a TM during this window required candy and/or stardust (somehow) it would still let the pokemon we already have be usable down the road (like what happens every December so far).

All of this to say, in an effort to increase fairness, especially in GBL, I don’t think it really takes anything away from the game (at this point) to let people use CD evolution windows to also TM those moves.

r/TheSilphRoad Post

Here’s What Canada’s ‘COVID Alert’ app (beta) Looks Like

[UPDATE – July 31]: The app is now publicly available. Go get it!

On Wednesday, Health Canada finally released a beta (test) version of the Canadian ‘COVID Alert’ exposure notification app.

I have been waiting for a couple of months to finally be able to get this set up once Apple and Google announced they would be building exposure notifications in to their operating systems, and it’s finally here (if you are willing to jump through some hoops and help test it out).

Let’s take a look!

When you first launch the app, you’re given a bunch of info right off the top. You’ll also have to accept exchanging exposure tokens with other phones, as well as receipt of exposure notifications, and then standard iOS app notifications as well. Here’s what the setup screens look like:

Once you’ve got everything activated, there’s not a whole lot to do besides look at the menus and edit your information.

I was informed via email they will be testing what an ‘exposure’ looks like in the app over the next 2-4 days, so if that happens, I will definitely share that information!

There’s not much to the app to be honest (which is a good thing), but there is a little more information to go over.

In the meantime, here’s some information provided under ‘How it works’:

These exposure notification apps (one per country, by rule) are meant to be for public health reasons only, so they’re very minimal, and outside of use in conjunction with your doctor, you won’t really notice it on your phone.

The only information the app collects and is able to use is a set of randomly generated ‘codes’ from the phones of others you interact with, and your phone sends out a similar set of ‘codes’ to people around you. No private information is stored or sent anywhere, like location or your personal details.

If you test positive, your doctor will give you a one-time use code which you enter in to the app, and this (if you choose to do it) will notify anybody else who has the app that you were nearby them and may have exposed them to the virus, because their phone has stored your ‘code’ from while you were near each other.

It’s a pretty incredible, secure system, and I’m really eager to have it see wide use in Canada and around the world, on Android and on iOS, over the coming months and possibly years.

When I hear more about the public release, I will post updates here!