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Wednesday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 March 2021

Sit And Click Edition

Tech News

  • Intel's 670p is their new high-end QLC SSD.  (AnandTech)

    High end for QLC that is, which means low end.

    It's much improved over the earlier 660p and 665p.  Only problem is it costs more than a good TLC drive like my WD Black SN750 - $155 for Intel's 1TB model vs $130 for the WD.

    Intel will need to bring prices down by 30% before it makes any sense at all.


  • Speaking of 30% cheaper, if you try to order the Asus Zenbook 14 from Amazon Australia, the US model - delivered to Australia, in Aussie dollars, including Australian sales tax - is 30% cheaper than the Australian model.

    The only difference is the plug on the charger.

    The Zenbook 14 has USB-C.

    The Zenbook 14 does not support USB-C charging because fuck you that's why.


  • This could be something.



    Its a host board for the Pi Pico with microSD, USB, audio out, and from the looks of it, HDMI.

    Tom's Hardware says DVI but you can see there's no DVI connector.

    What they likely mean is a port that is physically HDMI and electrically DVI, which actually works perfectly well up to 1080p.  You don't get audio that way, but on the other hand, implementing it that way is royalty free, which matters a lot for small runs of hobby boards like this.

    Update: Oh my God.  (GitHub)

    So, DVI and HDMI use encoding called TMDS.  You can't just dump a digital RGB signal onto the cable; you have to encode each of the three colour channels as a 10-bit serial stream - at ten times the native pixel clock.

    That's precisely what they're doing.

    In software.

    They do overclock the Pico from its nominal 133MHz to 252MHz to get the necessary serial clock, but it works.  They can in fact drive two 640x480 60Hz DVI monitors from a single Pico, entirely in software.


  • I can get fried rice again.

    There are two big supermarket chains here in Australia.  One of them offered a quite nice store-brand microwave chicken fried rice in those long-life pouches that last about a year in the pantry.  A couple of months ago I went to order more and they were nowhere to be found.

    Now the other supermarket mysteriously has what looks exactly the same chicken fried rice except with their own store brand on it.

    I haven't been eating it as much lately because they recently started offering even better frozen versions that aren't much more expensive, but it's good to have a supply tucked away in the pantry.  In an emergency you can just eat it as a rice salad; it's already cooked.  Tastes better hot, but it's not bad cold.


  • It's likely that Apple will soon switch from their proprietary Lightning port to USB-C for all their mobile devices.  That will cause a lot of e-waste as people throw out existing devices, adapters, and cables because while they don't say it they expect Apple to fuck everything up.  (ZDNet)

    Why do they expect Apple to fuck everything up with the switch to USB-C?

    Because they already is.




  • Rocket Lake launches on March 30 unless it explodes on the pad.  (Hot Hardware)

    Which it probably won't because a certain retailer has already been selling them and benchmarks are out in the wild right now.

    The 11900K comes close to the Ryzen 5800X on Cinebench in both single and multi-core tests,  But the 11900K is the top of the line Rocket Lake part, and the 5800X is AMD's mid-range desktop part.  On the eleventh hand, the Ryzen 5900X and 5950X are pretty hard to find, though the 5800X seems to be in good supply.


  • I really should buy a new router to replace the one that caught fire.


Disclaimer: Because the one that caught fire ain't feeling too good.

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Monday, March 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 March 2021

Onwards And Sideways Edition

Tech News

  • AMD's 4th gen Epyc Genoa will have stuff unless it doesn't. (WCCFTech)

    Specifically, up to 96 Zen 4 cores, 12-channel DDR5, 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0, and a 6096-pin socket.  In a two-socket system 48 PCIe lanes of each CPU will be used as interconnect, making 160 lanes available for I/O.

    Supposedly with a 320W TDP configurable up to 400W.  Current Threadrippers peak at 280W, and most Epycs are lower; 400W is rather a lot.

    But a 96-core 4th gen will easily match two 64-core 2nd gen Epycs.  It will also have twice the I/O bandwidth and more than twice the memory bandwidth.

    I had seen speculation of 96 cores and wondered how they'd fit the 12 chiplets required - even with 5nm it would be a tight fit.  The answer is, make the socket bigger.

    It's also rumoured to support AVX-512 which is currently the only server benchmark Intel can still win.

    It won't appear until the first half of next year, though.


  • Wonder if they'll support three channel DDR5 on socket AM5.  The desktop I/O die is currently one quarter of the Epyc I/O die, so if they keep that ratio, it would mean three memory channels.

    Doubt it - though it would make for amazing APUs


  • WASM everywhere everywhere. (GitHub)

    It's a Web Assembly interpreter compiled using that run-anywhere C library.

    Card


  • Don't plug your new Arm-based Macbook into that USB-C dock.  (ZDNet)

    Because it might die.

    Two points worth noting.  First, Apple blames the dock.  Second, they've released a software patch for it.


  • The invoice for the viewscreen was in your spam folder.  (ZDNet)

    Alexa supports over 90,000 Skills.  What do they all do?  Amazon doesn't know, or much care.


  • Microsoft has a patch for that horrible NTFS bug, where you can scramble your filesystem by opening a file with a particular name.  (Hot Hardware)

    You can't have it.

    The patch, that is, not the bug.  The bug you can have.

    To be fair, this is because they are allowing beta testers to beta test.  Pushing a buggy filesystem patch out to a billion users would not end well.



Disclaimer: But it would certainly end.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 February 2021

We Don't Want Your Business

Tech News

  • You can mine Ethereum on Apple's M1 Arm chip.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Despite Apple's vaunted efficiency and TSMC's 5nm process, it is half as efficient as a previous-generation Nvidia card fabricated on 12nm.  And for throughput, it delivers between 3 and 4% of a 3060 Ti.


  • I recently mentioned Redbean, the tiny run-anywhere web server.  Take the binary, add your content directly to the file (since the binary is also a valid Zip archive), and run it directly on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Free/Open BSD - or boot directly into it from BIOS.

    And now Lua.

    Redbean+Lua+SQLite would make a <1MB application server that could be distributed as a single binary for every major platform.


  • Lastpass doesn't want you to use Lastpass.  (PC Perspective)

    Why exactly does a password manager need seven third-party tracking cookies?


  • In defense of dumb TVs.  (Framework)

    Kogan - Australia's own little Amazon Marketplace - still has a couple of store brand 4K dumb TVs.  And they're stupidly cheap.  I might pick up the 50" model before they disappear entirely, otherwise it's....

    Well, Philips does sell a 55" 4K monitor.  95% DCI-P3 gamut, DisplayHDR 1000, DisplayPort input, and a built-in 40W soundbar.  But it is a fair bit more expensive.  Also a reasonably-priced 43" monitor, though without DCI-P3 or HDR.


  • After killing CentOS, Red Hat now offers free RHEL subscriptions for open source nonprofits.  (ZDNet)

    Of course, before they killed CentOS they already did that.  It was called CentOS.  And you didn't have to beg for it.


  • Planned to clean my fridge, so I typed fridge cleaner into the search box when ordering my groceries.  Soapy water and paper towels would do the job, but I wanted to see what came up.

    What came up was a specifically food-safe disinfectant.  Kills the usual 99.9% of germs, but no harsh chemicals, it promised.  Took a look at the ingredients - water, ethyl alcohol, and vanillin.  Oh.  It's basically vanilla vodka at one tenth the price.

    I'm not sure exactly what proof it is; it doesn't say on the label.  After taking a whiff, I did what any enterprising scientist would do and sprayed a small puddle on the granite countertop and dropped in a lit match.  The puddle didn't catch fire, but the match burned with a blue flame for the next thirty seconds before finally going out.

    It also works really well at cleaning glass, and smells great.

    Update: They publish a safety sheet for it.  It's 25% alcohol by volume - 50 proof - and they list the flash point as 36°C.  Which doesn't mean that it catches fire at 36°C, it just means that it can catch fire at 36°C if you apply a match to it.  As does, for example, paper.


  • Speaking of Hololive and YouTube's algorithmic idiocy, apparently best doggo got demonetised for a while and had Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague warnings attached to her videos.


Disclaimer: And the horse you rode in on.

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