It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.

Tuesday, June 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 June 2026

Horrible Cosmos Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I had twenty-four blackbirds sitting right here.  Where have they gone?  I was going to teach them piano.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 246 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, June 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 June 2026

Apocryphal Anomalies Edition

Top Story

  • The Sound Blaster Katana V2X is a walking disaster.  (Ars Technica)

    It's a USB speaker.  How bad can it be?

    Well, it is a USB speaker, yes.  It also supports Bluetooth connectivity for your mobile devices.  At the same time.

    And it makes it easy to upgrade the firmware should you need to do so.

    Over Bluetooth.  Without authentication.  While it is plugged into your PC.

    Meaning that anyone within Bluetooth range can reprogram it with arbitrary functionality.  Make it open Powershell and wipe your hard drive?  Sure.  The only problem there is the lack of imagination.

    Oh, and Bluetooth is always on, even when the device is powered down to "sleep" mode, so just turning it off won't save you.

    Creative - the company that sells Sound Blaster devices - states that it does not regard this as a vulnerability, which leaves me to wonder what kind of creeping cosmic horrors they would regard as vulnerabilities.


Tech News




Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Two days, one night, complimentary late checkout.  It's a package deal.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:29 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 286 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, June 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 June 2026

Mixed Herb Edition

Top Story

  • I mentioned before how PCIe switches - at least ones operating faster than PCIe 3.0 - are prohibitively expensive and reserved for enterprise customers except for the ones built into every mainstream PC motherboard.  All but the cheapest models have a chipset, and that chipset's primary function is to act as a PCIe switch.

    And hobbyists have started tinkering with using AMD's B650 chip, which is a serviceable and reasonably priced example - plus one that already works because every operating system has drivers to support it.

    Now it's moving beyond a hobby.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Raspberry Pi shop WisdPi announced its PROM21 All In Expansion Card - the codename for the chip in the B650 chipset is Promontory 21.  For $199 - not cheap, but it's a small production run - you get four extra M.2 slots, five 10Gb USB 3 ports, a selection of USB 2 headers, and an OCuLink header that can provide four PCIe 4.0 lanes or through an adaptor cable four SATA ports (the magic happens in the chipset, so the cable is easy).  And it's a single slot half-height half-length card so it will fit easily into any PC.

    Minisforum is preparing a similar card.

    This would have been much more interesting before storage prices went into orbit, but at least it exists.


Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Orange-lemon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 549 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, June 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 June 2026

Sleb Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: What did you say to me?  No, honestly, I couldn't find a translation.  (Apparently it's in Teda, a language spoken in Chad.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:17 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 862 words, total size 8 kb.

Friday, June 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 June 2026

Lilo Pelekai Multipass Edition

Top Story

  • AI token costs are becoming a meme.  Here's why that's a good thing.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's not.  I mean, not for the AI companies, and not for anyone else unless it pops the bubble, and not even then as trillions of dollars of virtual money suddenly disappearing would cause a certain amount of drama.
    Despite that, Altman projects that AI token usage will continue to increase.  He said that six-and-a-half years ago, the top token spender at the startup used 100,000 tokens a month - today, that is the global per capita average token usage, and that OpenAI’s token leader uses about 100 billion a month.  The OpenAI chief also admitted, to his own embarrassment, that someone else uses even more. So, if token usage were to grow linearly, then he would expect the global per capita token usage to hit 100 billion monthly.
    Somehow I don't think that will happen.  At OpenAI's current rates, that would cost the average user over a million dollars a month and provide the company with a quadrillion dollars in monthly revenue.


Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Big bada boom means no one gets left behind.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 347 words, total size 3 kb.

Thursday, June 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 June 2026

Nonexistent Edition

Top Story

  • Apple's MacBook Neo is selling so well the company has doubled production.  (MacRumors)

    At that rate they'll run out of bad chips and have to start using good ones, but economies of scale may make up for it.

    Also the company is reportedly working on a 12GB model for next year.  If they can hit the same price that will offer a worthwhile bump in capabilities; 8GB is a bit restrictive even on a Mac.


Tech News



Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: You are living in a twilight world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:12 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 242 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, June 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 June 2026

Switch Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Poit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:16 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 312 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, June 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 June 2026

Rainy Rene Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: You must gather your party before venturing forth.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 268 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, June 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 June 2026

Leftover Chinese Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • AMD also announced global availability of its 9070 GRE, previously a China-only edition.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is essentially 75% of the company's flagship graphics card, the 9070 XT, trimmed from 64 cores and 16GB of RAM to 48 cores and 12GB of RAM.

    The only problem is the MSRP was reduced from $599 to $549, which makes it rather the opposite of a good deal.


  • Nvidia is announcing - oh, wait, it just went official - its RTX Spark laptop chip.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This offers up to 20 Arm CPU cores, coupled with up to 128GB of RAM and an up to RTX 5070-class integrated GPU.

    This is the same chip used in Nvidia's DGX Spark AI desktop, which retails for $4699, so don't expect the laptop version to be cheap.


  • Speaking of cheap laptops, Dell's new XPS 13 starts at $699 ($599 for students).  (Liliputing)

    It uses Intel's low-end Wildcat Lake CPU, but one of the better ones with actually quite acceptable performance.  And unlike many competing models it has a screen on par with Apple's MacBook Neo, a 2560x1600 IPS panel covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz, at a healthy 500 nits brightness.

    Basic model has 8GB of RAM (soldered) and 512GB of SSD.  I/O consists of two USB-C ports and...  That's it, really.  Doesn't have the Four Essential Keys either.


  • What does have the Four Essential Keys is Lenovo's new Thinkpad T14 Gen 7.  (Notebook Check)

    It comes with a 6 or 8 core Ryzen processor with Radeon 840M or 860M graphics respectively - good if not great - the aforementioned keys which while not in my preferred layout are all present and unshared, and expandable memory and storage.

    And a 2880x1800 OLED display...  With 500 nits brightness and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz.

    (A word of caution with these OLED panels: They look amazing but burn-in is real.)


  • Download all the computers.  (Virtual OS Museum)

    Ever wanted to see what the old days of computing were like - as early as 1948?

    Want to play with that Apple II or BBC Micro your parents couldn't afford?

    Or just want to play with a Lisp or Smalltalk workstation?

    It's all here. 179GB of it.


  • Wikipedia editors are threatening a global strike where they'll stop airbrushing history.  (The Register)

    Oh no.


Tech News






Disclaimer: Not to worry, I have central heating.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:40 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 578 words, total size 6 kb.

Sunday, May 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 May 2026

Nesting Countries Edition

Top Story

  • GitHub Copilot users are aghast at the exponentially higher costs they are facing starting tomorrow with the introduction of usage-based billing.  (Tech Crunch)
    "What a joke," one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month.
    He posted this with a screenshot of his estimated bill...  From a visibly unactivated version of Windows.
    Another user posted "WOW, didn’t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous," sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000.
    Both of them posted to Reddit, and both got dunked on for being obviously incompetent vibe-coders.

    I use Claude Code.  My company pays for the 5X plan, and I rarely hit the 1X mark.  The people who do hit the limit are either experimenting - fair enough - or trying to tell the AI to generate an entire application with a single prompt, which just doesn't work.


Tech News

  • What to expect from Nvidia at Computex.  (WCCFTech)

    A new Arm-based laptop chip.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.


  • What to expect from AMD at Computex.  (WCCFTech)

    A new x86-based laptop chip, specifically Medusa Halo, the successor to the Ryzen AI Max 395+.  Up to 24 CPU cores and a bigger GPU upgraded from RDNA 3.5 to RDNA 5.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.


  • What to expect from Intel at Computex.  (WCCFTech)

    Updated handheld gaming things, using the new Panther Lake chips with the B390 graphics core, which is actually faster than AMD's mainstream integrated graphics.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new handheld gaming thing.


  • MSI's Claw 8 EX AI, for example.  (Liliputing)

    It has a 1920x1200 8" 120Hz display, up to 32GB of RAM, and an M.2 2280 slot for storage, along with Intel's new Arc G3 which is a low-power edition of the Panther Lake laptop chip with Arc B390 graphics.

    Don't expect it to be cheap though.


  • You can now print 3D objects in colour on your colour 3D printer.  (Prusa)

    Well, that's novel.

    What they're doing here is taking an existing multi-colour 3D printer (ideally you want a 5-colour model) and then feeding it CMYKW filament spools and printing your model in halftone using a 0.1mm screen.

    That's not very high resolution but it helps that it's 3D so you get some colour from the obscured layers as well as from adjacent dots.

    Really have to wonder what it does to performance though.  3D printers are slow enough as it is.

    You can use it with existing filament, not just the new CMYKW spools designed specifically for the purpose, but you'll need to recalibrate the colour model.



Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: Eight nations though and all bets are off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:10 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 485 words, total size 4 kb.

<< Page 1 of 726 >>
114kb generated in CPU 0.1618, elapsed 0.3697 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.3434 seconds, 419 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using http / http://ai.mee.nu / 417