Sunday, May 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 May 2021

And Your Little God Too Edition

Top Stories

  • Several more sources are reporting on the new dual-actuator drive from Seagate.  None of them mention the price.

    I think it's a pretty safe bet that it costs more than just buying two drives and putting them in RAID-1.


  • You own nothing.  (Motherboard)

    An airbag vest for motorcyclists sounds like a potentially neat idea.  This one, though, silently after some warnings - probably - stops working if your monthly payment doesn't go through, which sounds to me like a great way for the manufacturer to get sued out of existence.

    Someone arrange the lawyers, I'll bring popcorn.




Anime of the day is Oh My Goddess - or Ah! My Goddess, originally, before someone pointed out the natural pun - a five-episode OVA series from 1993, animated by AIC.  It's short and sweet and colourful and lovingly animated and generally a whole lot of fun.

Highly recommended.

That's not the only version, though.  There's also a series of 48 short comedy episodes from 1998 called Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses which is also fun; it's a kids' cartoon version of the main story but a well-crafted kids' cartoon version.

And there's a movie from 2000 which I recall liking quite a bit, though it's quite a jump from the OVA to the story told in that movie.

There's also a 26 episode TV series from 2005 that I wasn't crazy about - I'll get to why in a moment - and a 24-episode sequel series from 2006, which I don't recall watching, and a two-episode OVA from from 2007 and a three-episode OVA from 2011, all adapted from a 48-volume original manga series that ran from 1988 to 2014 and, apparently, just when it had finally reached a conclusion - I gave up on that about fifteen years ago - started up again in 2019 with another three volumes out so far.

The manga has sold over 25 million copies, half to fans, and the other half, so far as I can tell, to masochists.

I like the original OVA series because it picks five self-contained stories from the manga (including the origin stories of the four main characters), tells those, and is done.

I don't like the TV version because it is faithful to the manga, retelling the complete story, chapter by chapter, and the manga is just painfully slow moving.



Tech News

  • AMD's socket AM5 is on its way with 1718 pins.  (WCCFTech)

    That's about 400 more pins than AM4 but it doesn't sound like it will bring major functional changes.  It will support DDR5 RAM, which requires more pins per module than DDR5 - each module provides two 32-bit channels each with independent addressing and ECC, instead of a single 64-bit channel.  This adds about 40 signals per module but provides much better support for multi-threaded workloads.

    Zen 4 won't be out until next year, so the first parts to use socket AM5 will the upcoming Rembrandt APU with Zen 3 cores and RDNA2 graphics.

    (Similarly, the first parts on socket AM4 weren't Zen 1, but an APU built on an older Bulldozer family core.  This allowed manufacturers to qualify their boards ready for the arrival of Ryzen.)


  • How to disable Windows 10's crappy new newsfeed.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Alternately, install Start10 from Stardock.


  • The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is a 13" thin-and-light laptop with the Four Essential Keys.  (Thurrott.com)

    The location of the keys is slightly awkward, but they are present, and in a laptop less than twelve inches wide and weighing under two pounds there's just not a whole lot of room for perfect keyboard layouts.

    It comes with an 11th gen Intel CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage, a 2160x1350 screen (a 16:10 ratio), two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.

    So I/O is rather on the light side.  It does however have a fingerprint scanner and a physical shutter for the webcam, so when you turn it off, it is off.


  • The Indian government has asked that social media companies remove references to "Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague", which is the term that took hold after they previously requested the same firms to remove references to the "Indian variant" of COVID-19.  (Reuters)

    Slow learners.


The Only Good Thing to Come Out of Evangelion Anime Music Video of the Day



This one was originally created with two VHS decks and a stopwatch.  When you notice that the lip-sync isn't perfect, it's actually a miracle that it lines up at all given the technology available.

This version is a frame-exact remake from the DVD release, but I think the original is still floating around somewhere.


Disclaimer: Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:05 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 794 words, total size 6 kb.

1 I've been MUMRed, Pixy. Comments appear once but disappear upon refreshing the page. This has happened once before. andycanuck  (fake email, above, but I think you've got my real one already)

Posted by: andycanuck at Sunday, May 23 2021 11:20 PM (UHVv4)

2 It's been remedied, Pixy, the curse of MUMR has been lifted. 
Cheers, china.

Posted by: andycanuck at Sunday, May 23 2021 11:24 PM (UHVv4)

3 Didn't windows X already have a bunch of annoying, fluttery news "tiles" that everyone gradually learned to disable because they poppped up when you didn't want them, jumped around like spider monkeys, and slowed everything to a crawl?  I guess they thought that everyone who already disabled this misfeature must have wanted a new version of it (with a different name and in a different location) that comes turned on by default.

Also, it takes Lawrence Abrams 5* paragraphs to say "open the taskbar context menu, and disable news and interests".


*since he does a full line break after every sentence (except the first) I'm giving him half credit.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 23 2021 11:25 PM (obo9H)

4 Sorry for the OT, Pixy (and Normal). This is the last comment about this I'll make here.
I can comment alright on your HQ tech thread, and here oddly enough, but I get the MUMR troll treatment still on all of the other HQ threads.
Thanks for your time, Andy
And excuse the thread hijacking, Normal. 

Posted by: andycanuck at Sunday, May 23 2021 11:50 PM (UHVv4)

5 "it takes Lawrence Abrams 5* paragraphs"
Yeah, that's a garbage article whose actual purpose is to display ads.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 24 2021 04:14 AM (eqaFC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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