• You can't partition a MySQL table with a full-text index, which is one of the top use cases for partitioning a MySQL table.  Poo.
  
  
• What's in a Lake, Atomic Edition: Gigabyte's Brix line now features some Gemini Lake (yes, another one) Atom models.  Most notably the GB-BLCE-4105 with a Celeron J4105 and the GB-BLPD-5005 with a Pentium Silver J5005.
  
  These chips are vastly improved over older Atoms, with up to three times the single-threaded and multi-threaded performance of chips currently found in budget laptops.
  
  
  
  In fact, the J4105 and J5005 deliver almost exactly the performance of the classic Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 1/10th the power.
  
  
  
  In theory, they only support up to 8GB of RAM, but there's theory and there's screenshots of the Windows 10 system summary with 16GB of DDR4 2400 RAM.
  
  This is good, because if I upgrade the SSDs and RAM in Tohru and Rally I need to pop out the existing SSDs and RAM, and these Brixen provide a dirt cheap option to put those into a working system for offloading some Linux VMs or whatevers.  They only support PCIe x2 for the SSD, so the transfer rate would be limited to 2GB per second, but I think I can probably live with that.
  
  Intel offers an even cheaper model using the Celeron J4005 which is dual core rather than quad core.  That's not fatal given the low price, but it lacks the M.2 slot the Brixen have, which rules it out for me.
  
  
• Huawei's Kirin 980 brings the Arm A76 core (at 1.92 or 2.6GHz) and Mali G76 GPU together on TSMC's 7nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  This should be an impressive chip; my daily tablet is a Huawei Mediapad M3, which has the Kirin 950, a quad-core A72 at 2.3GHz.  It's pretty quick; the only thing I really miss on that tablet is LTE.
  
  Huawei say the new chip should be 30-40% faster than the Snapdragon 845, which is in turn 30-40% faster than the Kirin 950.
  
  The cluster of four A76 cores is split into two pairs, one at max speed, the other at medium speed, to give better control over battery life.  This is a new feature from Arm.  I'm not sure if the cores are synthesized differently or if the difference is purely in the voltage levels.
  
  Another interesting thing is how fast this happened.  Arm announced the A76 core in May.  The Mate 20 will launch with the Kirin 980 in October.
  
  
• Fuck the Windows 10 Photos app.
  
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook Pro UX480 is a 14" laptop with a Whiskey Lake U CPU and that nice touchscreen touchpad, let down by a flawed keyboard layout and a meh 1080p display.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• MSI's new P65 Creator is supposedly a laptop for content creators, but has a 144Hz 1080p display where a 60Hz 4K display would be vastly preferable.  (Via PCPer)
  
  Otherwise it's very good, with a sane keyboard layout, a quad-core Intel CPU, a choice of GTX 1050Ti, 1060, or 1070 graphics, and up to 32GB RAM, a single Thunderbolt port, and three full-speed USB 3.1 ports, wrapped up in a nicely understated design while keeping the weight under 2kg.  With a 4K wide-gamut display it would make a great creative laptop with real gaming abilities at need.  Get on that, MSI.
  
  
• Asus shrank their ZenBook 13 in the wash.  (The Verge)
  
  Follow the link, scroll down a little, and you'll see the 2018 model next to the 2017 model.  The two laptops have the same screen size but look completely different.
  
  
• I mentioned before that a flaw in Apple's event scripting allowed misbehaving applications to automatically click on security notifications to give themselves permission to trash your Mac.
  
  In the latest beta of MacOS Apple have fixed this by replicating the single most despised feature of Windows Vista.  (Six Colors)
  
  This completely breaks application scripting.  Completely breaks it.  (Shirt Pocket Watch)
  
  Good work, world's first trillion dollar company.
  
  
• Google's new Advanced Protection Program uses hardware keys made in China by a company linked to the Chinese military.  (ZDNet)
  
  Yubico - which makes its keys in the US and Sweden - is available as a backup solution, but the required primary key is a dubious Chinese item that you have to buy from Amazon - Google don't even supply it.
  
  The keys may be secure, for all I know, but this project is garbage implemented by idiots.  Google aren't even trying to appear secure here.

Video of the Day

For some reason the thumbnail image won't display on my PC or Mac in Chrome, but it works in Firefox, in Safari on my Mac, and in Chrome on my tablet, so it's just YouTube being weird.  If you see the grey YouTube image, click play anyway.  It will work.  Probably.

I still prefer the straightforward hyperkineticity of the RWBY version, but that is some pretty amazing editing there.