I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!
Thursday, January 13
Much Of A Muchness Edition
Top Story
- My Lenovo Tab M8 FHD arrived, and despite some listing weirdness (Amazon has it as a "business laptop" running ChromeOS) it is actually the right thing.
Since it's currently the only small Android tablet with a high resolution screen, and at A$234 including international shipping and taxes it's reasonably priced - less than a third of the cheapest iPad Mini - if it works well I'll buy a second one.
Lenovo has an 8.8" gaming tablet in the works, but nothing showed up at CES so it could be some way off. Samsung's latest small tablet only has a resolution of 1340x800 which is barely better than the 2012 Nexus 7.
- Why you can't hire engineers. (GitHub)
Probability 1: Your company sucks.
Probability 2: Everything else sucks, so even though they are actively looking for a new job because their current company sucks, you need to work twice as hard just to convince them that your company might suck less.
Probability 3: Someone at your company installed Node.js without your knowledge, and now it looms over your headquarters like a great looming thing.
Tech News
- Plausible Analytics is an alternative to Google. (GitHub)
Uses 1k of JavaScript on your website, and the server-side code is written in Elixir, which while not quite a mainstream language is miles ahead of garbage like PHP or Node.js.
Free to download and run yourself, or available as cloud service from $9 per month.
Not a paid ad, just that any solid alternative to Big Tech is worth a mention.
- Intel's new Celeron runs single-threaded tasks as fast as the Core i9-10900K. (Tom's Hardware)
Meaning if you only need computer for light use - email, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, YouTube - a $42 CPU might be all you need.
- A little upmarket, Intel's i5 12400 makes a good Linux CPU. (Phoronix)
No low-power cores so no performance weirdness, and it's pretty solid on both single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks while keeping power consumption under control.
- Apple fixed a bug that would kill your iPhone if it detected an IoT device with a bad name. (Bleeping Computer)
Add Cthulhu to your network Y/N?
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
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Wednesday, January 12
Psy-Ops R Us Edition
Top Story
- Is Web3 a scam? (Stack Diary)
<shake shake>
Signs point to yes.
- NFT projects are MLMs for tech elites. (Every)
Yes. Mostly. I'm trying to do work using NFTs to solve practical problems, as ownership or identity tokens for digital property, where an NFT has an intrinsic value of a few cents to a few dollars.
The people who burn tens of thousands of dollars on intrinsically worthless garbage annoy the hell out of me because they price the blockchain out of reach of the practical stuff I want to do. At best it's money laundering. That's at least an understandable motive.
- Blockchain apps are not what they appear to be. (Molly White)
All too often they fail to deliver on their promises - and fail in the worst possible way.
You could at least eat tulip bulbs.
Tech News
- The PCIe 6 spec has been finalised. (AnandTech)
This doubles bandwidth yet again - to as much as 128GBps in each direction on a x16 slot - by using four electrical levels rather than just 1 and 0, an encoding method known as PAM4.
I don't expect it to arrive soon, but then I didn't expect PCIe 5 in consumer systems until maybe 2023, and it actually showed up in the new Intel Alder Lake systems last year
- Intel NUC 12 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)
Some models have been cancelled but the regular models are still expected to ship.
These will probably be using the 1200P range of CPUs, which have 8 low power cores and 2, 4, or 6 fast cores. Only the fastest model has 6 fast cores and that might not make it into a NUC, but the four i5 and i7 models with a 4+8 core configuration should be about twice as fast as current model NUCs, which is a pretty substantial generational advance.
- Meanwhile Intel is desperately trying to pretend that they've never heard of Xinjiang province. (WCCFTech)
It's a no-win situation for them. True, it's a no-win situation because the company is run by spineless worms, but it's still a no-win situation.
- Windows has an HTTP vulnerability tht is not currently being actively exploited. (Bleeping Computer)
Only really affects Windows servers. Friends don't let friends run IIS.
- T-Mobile said it isn't "broadly blocking" Apple's Private Relay function. (9to5Mac)
They blamed it mostly on an iOS bug that turns the function off.
I mean, which is more likely, a cellular carrier behaving badly, or a stupid bug in an Apple operating system?
- Podcasting hasn't produced a hit in years. (Bloomberg)
No surprise. Podcasting caught cancer in 2020 and died. Everyone with talent moved to YouTube.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Let's stop calling them conspiracy theories, and start calling them what they really are - spoilers.
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Tuesday, January 11
Slightly Less Ugh Edition
Top Story
- Web3 can't fix the internet. What we need is socialism. (Jacobin)
Socialists: Celebrating 180 years of finding problems and making them worse.
Tech News
- How to secure your QNAP NAS. (Serve the Home)
1. Follow the menus in QTS or QUTS depending on your device to perform a clean shutdown.
2. Turn off the power and unplug the power and network cables.
- Linux Mint has sold out to the commies at Mozilla. (ZDNet)
Who get their money in turn from the commies at Google.
This is in place of previously selling out to Yahoo, so I'm honestly not sure very much has changed here. It's free money; they'd be fools not to take it.
- Multiple carriers including T-Mobile/Sprint are blocking Apple's Private Relay. (9to5Mac)
Private Relay is a sort of low-grade corporatist TOR, and T-Mobile is blocking it specifically because it prevents them from spying on their customers.
- How NPM can prevent a new colors attack. (RSC)
Pinned versions.
My first suggestion would be burn it and piss on the ashes, but pinned versions might work too.
- If you want to build the next Cobalt Qube the Interceptor board from Axzes might be what you need. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 - a smaller version of the Raspberry Pi with just the CPU and RAM, no I/O ports - that provides five SATA ports, four gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB ports (plus two USB headers), and two HDMI ports. $99 plus the cost of the compute module itself, which is, um, out of stock.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
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Monday, January 10
F-Word All The Things Edition
Top Story
- Oh nyo.
This is the game that wrecked my vacation and now that I'm back from vaction has wrecked my first day back at work.
Thanks anonymous hacker, but couldn't you have done this a week earlier?
Tech News
- Canon can't get the chips it uses to lock users into approved toner cartridges and has had to issue instructions on how to unlock your printer to use toner cartridges without those chips. (WCCFTech)
Which means you no longer have to buy Canon cartridges at all. Every silver lining has a cloud, or however that saying goes.
- Pixy's First Law of Personal Responsibility: Once you choose to use Node.js, everything that happens subsequently is your own damn fault.
One developer broke about 20,000 Node.js projects after getting fed up with Big Tech taking advantage of open source developers. (Bleeping Computer)
He uploaded broken versions of two of his libraries in protest against being treated basically as slave labour. The guy appears to be something of a nut and reportedly set his own apartment on fire with amateur pyrotechnics experiments, but he's not wrong.
And for uploading unapproved changes to his own code - which broke the functionality but didn't do anything malicious - he's now locked out of GitHub.
Which is owned by Microsoft.
That's exactly how people should be trained. It's entirely correct.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
This Is Why I Throw Money at Vtubers Video of the Day
A lousy day at work after a lousy week when I was supposed to be on vacation but was at work - often at 2AM - but this little clip cheered me up.
Thank you chaos gremlins.
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Sunday, January 09
It Was The Both Of Times Edition
Top Story
- The best of CES. (Hot Hardware)
A couple of these I agree with. AMD's Ryzen 6000 looks great, the OnePlus 10 Pro with a camera-module co-developed with Hasselblad is going to be expensive but could be good, and the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition is shut up and take my money. (PC Magazine)
It uses a 12th-generation Core i9 laptop chip - so six fast cores and eight low-power cores, up to 32GB of RAM (soldered in) and 1TB of SSD (possibly replaceable) and a 2880x1800 14" OLED display with 90Hz refresh and 100% of DCI-P3 colour.
And the Four Essential Keys. And dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, a regular USB port, and a headphone jack. No microSD slot but you can plug a little adaptor into the USB port for that.
Price not yet announced but likely to be a lot.
- The Worst of CES. (The Register)
A couple of these I've already featured here: The Samsung TVs with a built-in NFT marketplace, and the new Mercedes EQS which forbids its owners from opening the hood.
But one I'll add is from the Best Of article above: Dell's new XPS 13 Plus not only lacks the Four Essential Keys, it lacks the entire row of function keys as well. Dell is not just copying Apple, they are copying features Apple had to walk back because their customers rioted.
Questions and Answers
- From Hal9000:
Do you know anything about MIDI? I have a MIDI hardware controller that I want to send CC (Continuous Controller) messages to a Win 10 app that controls a digital mixer. From what I've been able to gather, this can't be done directly. There must be something "in between" that listens for USB messages, and then forwards them.
I don't know much about MIDI or VS Community Edition, but I do know that Python has MIDI libraries available and I use and recommend PyCharm, which also has a free community edition.
In any case, I want to develop a Windows desktop or web app (for personal use) to do this. What do you think of VS Community Edition? I have most (recent) experience using Python and php/ mysql (low level Raspberry Pi stuff) but could dust off my C++ if necessary.
I'd certainly give Python a try before diving into C++.
- From badgerwx:
Several times in 2021 you had items about chrome & recommended that people avoid it. I'm a Linux user & wondered if that recommendation also included chromium? I use several browsers (depending on the site I'm accessing) & I hope that I can keep using chromium w/o worrying about the latest evil Google is up to.
As far as I know, yes. Chromium has a few questionable API features (that Brave, Vivaldi, and others remove in their Chromium-based browsers) but the worst of the Chrome features are only in Chrome.
- From Gmac:
You mentioned a Dell laptop that you were getting and I was wondering if their product line uses any of the newer [AMD] chipsets for the processor and graphics.
Dell does have some AMD-based laptops - if you look at their Vostro range, for business laptops, or their G-series gaming laptops. I don't think they have any laptop models with dedicated Radeon graphics, only integrated graphics or Nvidia.
The Inspiron models I have are Intel / Nvidia though.
- From Fred Z:
Android Firefox seems to be refusing to update dynamically created input fields on a reload. The inputs are created by PHP with a default, eg current date.
This could be related to weirdness in Firefox's page caching. Other people seem to have run into the same problem, and the solution is to disable caching on your form page.
A page left open overnight then reloaded will not show the new date even though inspection shows the val attribute has been properly set by php.
- From John Henry:
I hate that I can't get a decent size TV that doesn't have alexa/Siri/echo built in. I hate the idea that my TV track s me.
The answer to that is a resounding maybe.
I like your idea of using a monitor instead of a tv but expensive and small
How about a 70"tv connected to a pc stick plugged into the hdmi port? No direct connection to the internet
Can the TV send info out over the hdmi, through my computer and back home?
I know that the computer will tell prime/Netflix what I'm watching on their channels. But that's it, right. The TV is just a dumb display.
Recent versions of HDMI actually support Ethernet, so if both your TV and your your PC stick support Ethernet-over-HDMI and you don't disable it, there is a channel for all the "smart" garbage to activate itself.
- From Nemo:
Just what are the "Four Essential Keys", anyway? The only keys I find essential are the ones labeled "A" through "Z" and "0" through "1". OK, the space bar and the shift key and "Return" are pretty important, too. But then, I grew up with a manual typewriter, so what do I know?
PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End. If you don't have dedicated keys for those, some common editor functions require you to hold down four keys at once.
- From Jewells45:
Pixy can you unban my etsy shop, pretty please?
Oops, sorry, will get back to that today.
- From Nathan:
Why do people write Y2K22? Is it somehow more optimized than 2022?
It's a reference to the Y2K bug for idiots who have generated similar bugs in 2022.
- From m0lr4k:
Sick of Windows, how practical are things like Crossover and Proton for running Windows apps on Linux? I managed to install Debian 21 years ago now, but have never kept it as a daily driver. The biggest gap I still see when I try is the garbage ecosystem around audio systems/drivers, and high end design software. (That said, saw even things like Rhino3d have been successfully kinda run with crossover.)
I haven't done this myself recently, but reports from sites like Phoronix suggest that the situation has improved enormously over the past 12 months. Might be worth as shot.
Tech News
- Intel's Core i9 12900HK beats AMD's Threadripper 1950X on Cinebench R20. (Tom's Hardware)
On the one hand, the 1950X is from 2017. On the other hand, the 12900HK is a laptop chip.
On the third hand the 12900HK is 20% faster than AMD's current fastest laptop chip but uses twice the power. (WCCFTech)
- QNAP's new TS-464T4 NAS has Thunderbolt 4 and 10GbE. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a compact 4-bay NAS with dual M.2 slots for caching drives, 2.5Gb and 10Gb Ethernet, dual Thunderbolt ports for directly attaching laptops, and HDMI to directly attach a monitor,
Price not yet announced but likely to be a lot.
- In a surprising turn of events, the Webb Space Telescope still has not exploded. (NASA)
Not sure what is going on here.
- Half a billion users of the free Avira antivirus software - from the same shitheads who own Norton these days - now get to experience the joys of mining crypto. (Krebs on Secuity)
The same company - formerly Symantec, now called NortonLifeLock which is a totally reassuring name after their enterprise division was sold off to Broadcom - also bought Avast last year, for another half a billion victims customers.
- What's wrong with this picture?
Mumei from Hololive Council did a meme review stream just now. She had around 8000 viewers, which isn't too bad.
But she also ran a poll - which got over 44,000 votes.
The only way to vote on the poll is to watch the stream, and getting even a 50% response rate to a poll is pretty good on YouTube.
Meaning they are massively undercounting live viewers.
I noticed that Kaneko Lumi of Cyberlive - the one who plays Kerbal Space Program and sings duets with herself in Swahili - has abandoned YouTube for Twitch. Twitch is run by idiots, yes, but they don't seem to actively despise content creators the way YouTube does.
Not At All Tech News
- Currently reading Tim Powers' Stolen Skies, the third book in the Vickery & Castine series. Powers doesn't really do sequels; other than this series there's Earthquake Weather which was mostly solid and Hide Me Among the Graves which was not - his only novel in 30 years that came up short.
The first of these was great, classic Powers; the second was pretty good but not quite as good; the third is shaping up to be better than the second. Recommended.
Also recently read (or re-read) Lawrence Watt-Evans' Obsidian Chronicles - Dragon Weather, Dragon Society, and Dragon Venom. Turns out I had never read the third volume before - I would have remembered that ending. Quite a change from the more light-hearted Ethshar stories; people die in all sorts of gruesome ways throughout the series.
- Let's call the whole thing off.
- Totally Not Feds R Us
This Is Getting Out of Hand, Now There's Five of Them Video of the Day
Sana and Baelz of Hololive Council, Luto and Sara of Prism Project, and now Neena of Production Kawaii. There might well be more; my watch queue is perpetually full these days. And Haachama as an honorary Aussie of course.
I only spotted Neena because this popped up in my feed:
Her accent isn't so obvious in that clip but that's the brand of peanut butter I buy. Used to be Kraft, but it was sold to a local company and rebranded a few years ago.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
Sydney band Flowers might be slightly more familiar under the title of their debut album they adopted as their band name the following year: Icehouse.
Disclaimer: Are we not forest fairies? We are Pomu!
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Saturday, January 08
Terrible People Edition
Top Story
- Everyone in this story deserves everything that is about to happen to them: A new "tech startup" wants to allow people to bet on lawsuits using purpose-made cryptocurrencies. (Motherboard)
That's an awful idea in at least three different ways but the people behind it aren't likely to have much time to enjoy the chaos because they are dumb enough to market the idea with "50%+ annual returns".
Yes, anything that offers that is a Ponzi scheme - or a robbery - and yes, the feds do still take a dim view of such things.
Unless they're the ones running it.
- Weekends are Question and Answer time. Drop your tech questions in the comments and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.
Tech News
- If you offer a Patreon subscription in an international subscriber's local currency, you are now subject to the laws of that country. (The Register)
Says a ruling by Lord Justice Fuckbiscuit of Britain.
Since this is in regards to a libel suit, and libel laws in Britain are shit, this is important.
The solution is to block all GDPR countries at the router. Let them eat cold kippers and warm beer.
- SonicWall has its own Y2K22 bug. (Bleeping Computer)
There is at least a patch for this one, unlike Honda cars which are trapped in 2002 until August.
- How a routine gem update created $73k in subscriptions. (SerpApi)
They weren't hacked and subscribed to garbage services as I first thought. Rather, after updating the libraries for a code deployment (Ruby libraries are called "gems") their software charged existing customers an extra $73k.
Why?
Because (after much debugging on their side) there was a change in what "or" meant in a MongoDB database library.
The maintainers of that library should be strapped to the outside of a rocket and launched directly at Cygnus X-1 because you do not ever, ever, ever do that.
- First impressions of Web3. (Moxie)
Web3 is the web, only fucked up with catastrophically bad blockchain implementations which promise to decentralise everything but in fact centralise it on new platforms that don't answer to you any more than the current ones do but also cost you money.
The article gives a specific example of the rapid corruption of a supposedly decentralised protocol.
- What is Web3? (Substack)
Is it all a scam, or is it only almost all a scam?
- AMD's cheap(ish) new RX 6500 XT video cards kinda suck. (Tom's Hardware)
Only 4 PCIe lanes and missing hardware for video decoding, meaning that task lands back on your CPU, makes it a big pile of meh.
- A fire at ASML's factory in Berlin affected less than 1% of the floor space. (Tom's Hardware)
But the area is involved in making key components for EUV lithography, and ASML is the only company in the world that makes machines for EUV lithography.
And EUV lithography is what is used to make all the latest computer chips. All of them.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: When the server goes offline, you must whip it. Losing site uptime? You must whip it.
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Friday, January 07
Nerd Fight Edition
Top Story
- Nerds have swarmed Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, after it announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrencies. (Tech Crunch)
Chief nerd and Mozilla cofounder Jamie Zawinski was quoted as saying:
Which made me laugh out loud because there's nothing better than watching communists fight over money.
- Talking to the blockchain camp and the anti-blockchain camp makes me understand why jocks shoved nerds into lockers back in the day. Insufferable asshats the lot of them.
Tech News
- Speaking of communist and money global Bitcoin mining suffered a blow when Kazakhstan shut down its internet. (The Guardian)
The people of Kazakhstan barely rate a mention. The effects of massive civil unrest on Bitcoin's price, though, that's important.
- The Signal messaging app meanwhile now supports untraceable-ish crypto payments. (Wired)
The blockchain is public, but that doesn't mean you need to make it easy to track payments. You just need to be able to prove that a given amount has or has not been paid, and you can do that while keeping other details secret.
- Meanwhile comedy struck Manhattan when an art gallery owner lost two million dollars worth of imaginary monkeys. (Motherboard)
Oh no. Anyway-
- Yes, it's a Ponzi Scheme. So what? (CoinDesk)
That's illegal is what, you chucklefucks. Doing it in purely digital fashion just makes you automatically eligible for wire fraud charges.
- In non-crypto news (I hope) Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has an 8 inch tablet. (CNet)
Not is an 8 inch tablet, has an 8 inch tablet. To the right of the keyboard.
And it's one of those shitty 1280x800 models too because we can't have nice things even when they are otherwise absurd.
- France has fined Facebook and Google €210 million over asymmetric cookie popups. (The Register)
Being jerks, Facebook and Google made it much harder to turn down cookies than to accept them.
Being jerks, France decided to steal their lunch money.
Nearly as good as watching communists fight over money.
- The ESA is sending a probe to visit the moons of Jupiter. (Popular Science)
All 67 of them, in fact. Which makes sense. Why travel all that way and not see the sights when you arrive?
- QNAP's TS-h1290FX is a 12-bay 2.5" NAS. (Serve the Home)
And an Epyc server CPU and dual 25GbE and a $7500 price tag. So probably won't be finding its way into Starlab any time soon.
- Speaking of which, got another box today - including the first of the 4TB SSDs.
Still waiting on the laptop RAM to arrive though.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
I've heard this song a hundred times but never saw the video before today. It's everything I could have asked for.
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Thursday, January 06
Blockchain Inferno Edition
Top Story
- Read the room.
Thanks, @DappRadar. I was blissfully unaware of this new game until it took over the entire fucking blockchain, pushing gas prices from 30 as high as 5000. (Reddit)
Polygon's response to their blockchain crossing the Shoe Sunflower Event Horizon is apparently it's a blockchain, what did you idiots expect? (Reddit)
Because of course they still get their money. It's only a problem if they don't get paid.
Tech News
- The Phanteks Evolv Shift XT is a mini-ITX case that can easily expand into a large mini-ITX case. (Tom's Hardware)
All the fun stuff was announced yesterday.
- Handling 80TB and 5 million page views per month for $400. (Poly Haven)
1. Abuse Cloudflare's $20 per month plan to offload the 80TB of file downloads.
2. The mee.nu server - which costs $50 per month - is closing in on 2 billion total page views. And that server is kind of broken.
- Party like it's 2002. (Bleeping Computer)
Honda has been hit by its own Y2.022K bug that resets their cars' navigation computers to 2002. The bug will fix itself in August. Until then, where were you going to go anyway?
- Crypto platform Arbix Finance has disappeared with $10 million of user funds. (Bleeping Computer)
Only $10 million? Scarcely seems worth it.
- Norton 360 - in case you weren't aware - is utter garbage. (The Register)
Norton Utilities back, back in the day, was great. In 2022, it comes bundled with a cryptocurrency mining app that installs itself without notification, skims off 15% for Symantec, and is protected from removal by the other utilities.
Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Buck the flockchain.
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Server alarm went off but I was dealing with a crisis at work where a platform we depend on for much of our business was getting DDOSed. Is getting DDOSed.
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