• In an effort to preserve at least some RTX 3060 cards for gamers, Nvidia has deliberately skorked their drivers to cut Ethereum hash rates in half  (AnandTech)
  
  And launched a new range of mining-oriented cards.
  
  Which rely on the exact same supply-constrained chips as the gaming cards.  But are worse at mining.  A lot worse.
  
  No, I don't know what they think they're playing at either.
  
  
  
• Need more screen real estate on your laptop?  Got $20,692 of somebody else's money to spend?  Expanscape got you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Aurora A5 and A7 have up to seven screens - four 4K 17" displays, two 9" 2K displays, and a 7" touchscreen.
  
  They run on a Ryzen 7 4800U.  The A5 comes with 64GB RAM, 2TB of NVMe SSD, and 2TB of SATA SSD.  The A7 boosts that to 128GB RAM and 8TB total SSD.
  
  These are currently prototypes, but if you want one badly enough they will custom build it to your specs and deliver it to you.  The traditional markets for these would be film editing in the field and energy and mineral exploration, but both those industries are kind of in the dumps at the moment.
  
  
  
• Intel just Osborne Effected Rocket Lake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, not deliberately perhaps, this is a leak.  But according to the leak, Alder Lake will be 20% faster than Rocket Lake and ship in December, giving Rocket Lake a mere nine month lifespan, since it won't even launch until next month.
  
  Alder Lake will use a new socket - LGA 1700 - and support DDR5.  If it launches on schedule and delivers as expected, it will give Intel a lead over AMD for the first time in four years, since Zen 4 isn't expected until early 2022.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Office 2021 will be available for purchase later this year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which seems like a good time for it.
  
  Also, yes, purchase, as in you plunk down your money and then you get to use it.  Office 365 will still be there if you prefer that.
  
  
  
• WhatsApp has explained what data it shares with Facebook and why.  (ZDNet)
  
  The answers are, respectively, everything, and fuck you.
  
  
  
• Photoshop can no longer draw lines.  (Photoshop)
  
  It's been broken for months.
  
  Which just tells me it's time to cancel my subscription entirely because it's that long since I've used it.
  
  

I noticed this account first because she does some nice fanart of Hololive members.

Then I found that she does drawing streams on YouTube.

Then I found that she does gaming streams on YouTube.

Then I found that she does English-language Minecraft streams, which are in short supply right now - at least on the channels I follow.  HoloEN hasn't done any since Kiara's house building a week ago, Moona and Reine's big shopping mall collab seems to be mostly in Indonesian, and Reine's planned English-language solo stream today got turned into Journey to the Savage Planet at the last minute because the Holoserver wouldn't talk to her.  (I should check and see what Pikamee has been up to, she might have something for me.)

Vyolfers only has 1770 subscribers so far, which is less than 1% of the smallest Hololive member, but it means that chat is a small group of friends and not a huge chaotic mess.

Oh yes, ground beef.  If you watch it, you'll see why.  She has a unique method of herding cattle.

Update: Dammit, I checked on what Pikamee has been up to, and her latest video - just a few hours ago - is an announcement about Monoe getting fired for an unspecified breach of contract.  Since VOMS only had three members that's a pretty serious blow.

Laptop Repair Video of the Day

Not Louis Rossman repairing a MacBook with a dead capacitor, but something better: Dave Jones repairing a Tandy 102 from 1986 with a dead PCB track.

Watching him take it apart, for a moment it seemed surprisingly sophisticated for the time, with an array of ten surface-mount QFP packages visible on a daughter board.  Then I realised that it needed ten surface-mount QFP packages just to drive the 240x64 monochrome LCD display, which these days you'd just connect over I2C or something.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 20 2021 02:21 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment