The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Thursday, January 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 January 2020

Weevils Be To He Whose Weevil Sinks Edition

Tech News


Disclaimer: I shall call it...  Steve.

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Wednesday, January 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 January 2020

Don't Mind The Bees Edition

Tech News

Anime Stuff

Watching The Ancient Magus' Bride.  I was reading the manga and then remembered that it had got an anime series.  Its slow-paced - one chapter to one episode - but that suits the feel of the story at least early on.  I'll see how it goes where there's more action.  The anime goes past where I've read up to, so I'll be able to compare the two from both directions.

Only real problem is the anime translates "Slay Vega", which is an already odd enough term, as "Sleigh Beggy".  And it gets used a lot in the first few episodes.

The manga has - deliberately - very few cues as to exactly when it is set.  When they visit London only the old landmarks are actually drawn.  There's a double-decker bus seen crossing a bridge, but those have been around since the 1950s.  A fairy indicates that skyscrapers exist, and boxy ones rather than nice Art Deco ones, so again the 1950s or later.

But the Magus himself mentions computers with multi-user operating systems as a metaphor he'd expect a teenager to understand, so despite all the peaceful English countryside and steam trains it's definitely the 21st century.


Disclaimer: Do bugs even have pockets?

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Tuesday, January 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 January 2020

Why Is It Already Tuesday Edition

Tech News

Disclaimer: This one goes up to 11.

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Monday, January 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 January 2020

Too Darn Humid Edition

Tech News

  • Second generation Optane might be delayed until as late as 2021.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Wait, that's next year.  Never mind.


  • Intel will be manufacturing some CPUs at Global Foundries unless it won't.  (WCCFTech)

    The only plausible candidate for such a move is their budget Atom range.  I'm sure Intel would be happy to free up their high-end fabs from having to make such low-margin parts, and GloFo 12nm is good enough.


  • Does email contribute to global warming?  (Japan Times)

    No.  Are you an idiot?  Can you not do basic arithmetic?  Watching a single short YouTube video burns more electricity than the average user would need for a month's worth of email.  And email replaces mail, which was vastly more resource intensive.


  • The Doomsday Clock now stands at two minutes to lunchtime.  (The Bulletin of the Irrelevant Doomsday Prophets Who Everyone Thought Had Retired Years Ago)

    Of course, they say it's two minutes to midnight, but if you're a Prophet of Doom and you stop prophesying doom you'll quickly find you're out of a job.  It's not so much a self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-prophesying prophecy.  Once it's out there, the only thing you can do is repeat it louder every year.


  • Why not "Rover"?  (NASA)

    Seriously?


  • That's a TRS-80 Model III on a diet.  (9to5Mac)

    The ergonomics are horrifying.  Were horrifying, would be horrifying.


  • What happens if the external drive holding your Dropbox folder hiccups and you have to unplug it and plug it back in again?

    Well, apparently the answer is if you're unlucky Dropbox will immediately notice that the folder is empty and start syncing the changes to your cloud storage - by deleting everything.

    And the deleted files don't show up in the Deleted Files page because that would be too easy.

    On the plus side, it deleted 140GB of data really quickly.

    I'm not sure what it will do when I allow it to sync again because I was very careful to prevent that.  I'll find out as soon as I have a second copy of everything.



Anime Opening of the Day



This is pretty good.  I've read some of the manga and they did a solid job bringing the story to life, and all the voices fit nicely.

I just went to see where the manga goes after this first season of the anime wraps up....  And the answer is, it doesn't.  The anime steamed right past the manga adaptation.

The original web novel, on the other hand, is up to chapter 357, so presumably the plot threads that are laid out in the last two episodes of the anime are picked up therein.


Disclaimer: Unless they aren't.

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Sunday, January 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 January 2020

Too Darn Hot Edition

Tech News

  • A look at a Supermicro Cascade Lake workstation motherboard.  (AnandTech)

    Threadripper has pretty much erased any reason to buy these systems, but if you want to stick with Intel for some reason, at $620 for a proper workstation motherboard this is not bad value.

    Seven PCIe 3.0 x16 slots - though not all x16 at once - four M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, one 10Gb Ethernet, two 1Gb Ethernet (one used for IPMI), twelve memory slots - where it does surpass Threadripper, and the usual scattering of USB and audio ports.


  • Four hours to bury a cat exit an infinite loop?  (MGBA)

    The bane of any emulator developer's life is programs that depend on the actual hardware behaviour for undefined operations.


  • Thirty-two cores at 5.4GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Liquid nitrogen was involved.  And probably alcohol.


  • The Air Force Space Command was formed in 1982; their familiar shield appeared sometime after that.

    The very similar Star Fleet logo didn't show up until mid-way through Deep Space 9 around 1996.

    But then there's this from 1978:



    Yes, it's not exactly the same, and yes, I'm just using it as an excuse to foist Blake's 7 upon my audience.  But still.


Disclaimer: Alcohol was definitely involved.

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Saturday, January 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 January 2020

Wombats Ahoy Edition

Tech News


Disclaimer: Cyrus Vance, Attorney at Law.  Cyrus Vance and the Case of the Exploding Moose.  Cyrus Vance and the Mysterious Taxicab.  Cyrus Vance and the Crooked Mayor.  Cyrus Vance Gets Fitted for Cement Overshoes.

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Friday, January 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 January 2020

Friday Before The Long Weekend Edition

Tech News

  • So, I have NBN.  FINALLY.  Only been waiting a decade and change.   Now I can do a whole bunch of stuff.

    Real download speeds seem to peak at around 50 Mb, uploads at 32 Mb.  That might be because I'm on WiFi right now and surrounded by other people's access points; I'll grab my box of cables tomorrow and get back to wired.

    On the plus side, having a decent amount of bandwidth means that I can run downloads and uploads at full speed and not any notice a difference with my web browsing.  I had three days worth of uploads to Dropbox queued up; that turned into two hours once I got things switched over.

    Also, I snagged the cables and knocked the brand new router onto the floor twice today.  The old router lived on the floor; it occasionally got stepped on but it never fell off.  I'll find a longer Ethernet cable in the box so the new router can live somewhere a bit safer.  Having all my SSH sessions disconnected any time I wander into the kitchen for a midnight snack will get tired pretty fast.


  • Not every RX 5600 XT can hulk out.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The new BIOS update significantly increases clock speeds and memory speeds, but you can only increase memory speed to 14 Gbps in BIOS if the card has 14 Gbps RAM in the first place.


  • Please explain yourselves, YouTube.  (TechDirt)

    Why is it that someone can "accidentally" block hundreds of YouTube videos based on claims for copyrights they don't own?


  • At last count, Twitter was 135% bots.  (Medium)
    Retweets and likes can be a method of radicalization.
    Insert TripleFacepalm.gif here.


  • The Internet of Bricks.  (ZDNet)

    Sonos has partly walked back its original plan, which appeared to be "make customers as angry as possible without literally setting them on fire".  But the fundamental problem with companies just deciding to remotely trash your appliances remains.


  • Space cookies!  Hand me the rap rod, plate captain!  (ABC News)


Disclaimer: Faster internet access somehow doesn't make more news stories appear.  Darn.

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Geek

Better Than Bad Part Deux

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Speedtest.PNG?size=720x&q=95

Ping time to my local dev servers (at Binary Lane and Vultr here in Sydney) is down from an already reasonable 15ms to around 7ms.

Ping time to the US is still pretty much what it was, unfortunately.

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Anime

It's Better Than Bad, It's Good

Log Horizon season 3 announced for October.

No trailer yet so here's the old one again.



Speaking of season 3 announcements, where did Non Non Biyori disappear to?  Been eight months.

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Thursday, January 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 January 2020

Last Days Of ADSL Edition

Tech News

  • I'll be joining the 20th century tomorrow with (mostly) fiber internet access.  Of course, since this is a government project, it's taken 12 years and the access speeds have not increased at all in that time.

    Still, I'll have about six times the download speed and twenty times the upload speed I do right now, which will make things like Dropbox actually useful.


  • If you're looking for an Australian cloud server Binary Lane offers 1 GB of RAM, 20 of GB SSD, and 1TB of monthly bandwidth for A$4.

    That's up from 768 MB RAM and 500 GB bandwidth on their previous plan.  Locations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.

    A$4 is around US$2.70, so that's not every much at all.


  • At the middle end of the scale, WebNX offer a Ryzen 2600, 64GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of SATA SSD or 2 x 256GB NVMe SSDs, and 30TB of bandwidth for US$75.

    That wasn't a listed config but I asked.  They have cheaper servers but that's about the cheapest with ECC RAM.


  • TerraMaster has a dual-drive 3.5" Thunderbolt 3 DAS.  (AnandTech)

    The question why immediately springs to mind, but there is an answer: It's small, cheap ($249 without drives), and has a little carry handle.  It's great for anyone who needs to be able to carry tens of terabytes of data to the work site - film shoots being probably the primary audience, but that price is low enough to be attractive to a lot of people.


  • The Asus Republic of Gamers Zenith II Extreme Alpha is the motherboard of choice for the Threadripper 3990X unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)

    It supports 16 phase power, DDR4-4733 RAM, USB 3.2 2x2, 10Gb Ethernet, WiFi 6, 8 SATA ports, and, um, 15 M.2 slots, all PCIe 4.0 x 4 NVMe.  3 on the board itself, two on a little adaptor, and 10 more in additional adaptors in the PCIe slots.

    That leaves it - if you do go all-in on NVMe - with just one PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for graphics.

    It also has that little OLED display.

    Price around US$1000.


  • Save .org.  (savedotorg.org)

    I don't care about .org, I just like that domain name.


  • On the road to Swift 6.  (Swift.org)

    There was a Swift 5?


  • MongoDB announced a preview of GraphQL support...  (MongoDB)

    This could be useful.

    ... for their Atlas cloud platform.

    Oh look, I have some cookie crumbs left over from yesterday.

    This is the same as with their Lucene search support.  That would be amazingly useful if it were part of their open source product.  As part of their cloud platform the only thing it offers is vendor lock-in.


  • The experience of getting caught as the cat's-paw in a credit card fraud scheme.  (Free Code Camp)

    1. We've had $60,000 in donations in the past 24 hours!
    2. That's about 60x normal.
    3. So...
    4. Fuck.

    The solution:

    1. Hang on the phone until you find the right person to speak to.
    2. Refund every single transaction manually.  All 3537 of them.


Disclaimer: Always be polite to tech support, even when it's their fault.  Because sooner or later you will be the tech support.

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