• One final* purchase, a 2TB NVMe drive from Amazon for the new spare laptop.  Specifically the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, which is what I recommend to people who need a good M.2 drive and are wondering what to get.
  
  It's "only" PCIe 3 and "only" does about 3.5GB per second and 620,000 IOPS, with a read latency around 50 microseconds, an only costs about 20% than garbage like the Kingston NV1.  The reason I didn't get it for my larger laptops is it "only" goes up to 2TB.
  
  And the reason for the purchase is that HP Australia doesn't do build-to-order; there's exactly two models available of the Aero 13, and since the 512GB model is on sale and the 1TB model is not, buying my own SSD and installing it saves me about A$550 - and gives me twice the storage capacity.
  
  My old spare laptop has a 5500U processor; this new one has a 5600U. It's six times faster.
  
  * Update: Oops I bought it again...
  
  
  
• So the IRS cancelled their plans to force people to audition for a movie role before they could file their taxes online only after seven million people had handed over all their details to a private contractor.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  So, what happens to all your private data now?  According the IRS, the answer is that individual users can log in and delete their data...  Maybe.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Binance has invested $200 million in trash-tier blogging platform Forbes.  (CNBC)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  
  
• Sony has a new model of High Resolution Walkman out.  (Liliputing)
  
  $3600.  Not a bubble.
  
  
  
• Did I fall asleep and miss something, or was there somehow not a massive blockchain debacle in the past week?
  
  
  
• The big list of bad bots.  (Badbot)
  
  These either ignore the robots.txt files that control how web crawlers crawl the web, or, well, still ignore them but in a different way.
  
  Seekport and SEMRush are two I have had to block, along with Baidu, because they will point multiple indexing servers at a single host at once and just trash the place.