1. Dividing some amount of text into pages on a computer screen is unnecessary and annoying.
2. Adobe has a stranglehold on the format and is constantly dicking around with it. Lately I encountered a fillable PDF that Acrobat Reader refused to fill. I could fill it with Firefox but after saving it was no longer a fillable form for any Acrobat user. What's the point of a fillable form that disallows filling it out?!
3. Adobe increasingly supports JavaScript for form validation, etc. I can only imagine what a nightmare mess that is. If we're going to shoehorn in a browser, might as well just use a browser.
PDF is really a family of formats. There is the "good" (=sane) PDF, PDF/A-2, and then bunch of less good stuff (all the rest). PDF/A-2 doesn't have any interactive stuff, like forms or JS, and is a ISO standard that is not going to change under your feet. Because it is such mature and limited format, most readers should have no problem with PDF/A-2 files.
Also check out https://pudding.cool if you’re unfamiliar and enjoy extremely high effort visualizations alongside editorial and educational text content.
There's good discussion on this here, and on Reddit.
In addition to all of that, the real moral of the story is to not use anything with dynamic billing for personal projects, even if there is a free tier. Always ensure that the free tier does not automatically turn into a paid tier.
That said, I've never used Netlify, so I don't know how they present this service at the time of signing up.
GitHub Pages is great for static sites, and included Jekyll build support is a bonus.
Would be perfect with a brief explanation of what this is and how to use the generated profile.
People who need profiles probably have better dedicated tools for the job. This website could be a nice educational resource for people who are unfamiliar but curious; it's just missing an explainer.
There are two primary purposes. Fundamentally .mobileconfig profiles are a standardized XML format that are an officially blessed way to bundle up a lot of various macOS, iOS, or tvOS configuration options into an easy standard format that can then be installed on various devices to apply a whole bunch of stuff all at once with no additional work. There are various GUIs to work with them, including Apple's free Apple Configurator, or iMazing does a nice one as well, they're the backbone of a lot of MDM usage for iDevices now, and they can also be created programmaticly. As well as closed there are lots of open source solutions for this and it's not particularly hard to roll your own or customize (though you probably want to save yourself the pain of dealing directly with the ancient format as much as you can).
So first, even for completely bog standard config it can be an easy timesaver, as well as way to make a change in a single place in a deterministic fashion and then apply it uniformly. I use it a great deal just purely for my own personal and family devices for example. I've got lots of email accounts, WiFi networks, and so on, that aren't special but sizable in number. I've made a few profiles for those, which I can then take and install on each Mac, iPhone, or iPad to have all the accounts loaded saving some manual config work. If I need to change a password, add or remove, I can do it in one single place, and then push it out to do the config. No need to jump back and forth to a password manager doing lots of copypaste of passwords on the phone. It's not a huge deal but it's a pretty simple time saver.
Secondly, .mobileconfig will let you do stuff that you can't (officially) do at all otherwise, particularly on iDevices, so in that case it's simply the only easy way to get at certain functionality. Some functionality is only available to "supervised" devices you setup fresh under supervision now, and can give you a much deeper level control. For HN types, it can be useful to load your own private root CA and cert chains, cert using WPA Enterprise networks, etc. It's another way to make it harder to do certain activities with a stolen device.
I think a lot of people with Apple devices who don't "need" profiles could still find them handy honestly. It's not exposed very well but it's also no some horribly complex thing to get some value out of. There are a lot more people with iDevices then Macs (so that rules out Apple Configurator), and typical serious MDM offerings are all subscription based sadly. So in turn free tools for other platforms are nice to see.
What is this for?
Apple offers tools, such as Apple Configurator that allow you to create your own iOS Configuration Profiles.
Apple Configurator is only availble for MacOS devices. This is useful if you do not have access to one but still need this.
This site will help generate a configuration profile based on the network information you provide.
Using this, you can import the profile into your mobile devices (via a method such as an MDM).
You can see all of the modified output in the bottom as aqua text.
All of this is run client-side, within the browser.
Based on it mentioning MDM, I assume profiles are the only way to join a network on some phones with MDM enabled? So maybe it's for companies that procure many iPhones and zero Macs?
They'd either have been hired as a remote employee, or with an expectation to come to the office at some point. If that wasn't communicated, something went wrong at the time of hiring.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
That's right. When I worked there, I had a colleague planning to move away from Seattle. Our director wouldn't allow remote work, so this person switched teams into an official Virtual location under a director that would.