• I have my agent checking the contract on my first alternate now.  Assuming there's no major issues and no-one has already grabbed it (and there's no indication of that so far), I'm prepared to go over asking price if needed, because this one has the right combination of being ready to move right in and have the potential for improvement - because you could park a freight train in the garage.
  
  Speaking of which, the craziest damn house popped up in my tracker just now.  Seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, four living rooms, two kitchens, two laundries, nine car spaces, five minute easy walk through the park to the shops, and in my price range.
  
  Except (a) it's for auction at at the end of the month so who knows what the final price will be, and (b) it was built in 1957 and could grace the cover of a James Lileks book with the word "regrettable" in the title.
  
  
  
• CNN+, the new pre-failed streaming service from the former news network, is planning to sell NFTs of its first half hour of content.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  If this doesn't kill NFTs I think they might be immortal.
  
  What are NFTs, you ask?
  
  Well, think of a baseball card.  It doesn't have any special intrinsic value - it's just a piece of cardboard.  It doesn't give you any influence over the player, of course, or let you attend a game.  It's just a piece of cardboard.
  
  Now, imagine a digital baseball card - it's just a file on a computer somewhere.
  
  An NFT is like a digital version of a photocopy of a 3x5" index card that lists the address of the locker at the bus station containing the baseball card, so that if you remember the locker combination you can take it out and, um, put it into another locker, with the added bonus that eight billion people with hacksaws and power drills have easy 24x7 access to the bus station, and even so, there are people willing to spend six figures on these damn things.
  
  I can only sleep at night by telling myself that it's probably mostly money laundering and what these people really do for a living is something relatively wholesome like smuggling heroin or land mines or endangered monkeys or maybe all three each nested inside the other like so many addictive explosive hyperactive Russian dolls.
  
  Because, yes, my job is mostly NFTs these days.
  
  Which is why I can afford a seven bedroom house - albeit in a country town; this thing would be eight figures easy if it was in an upmarket suburb in Sydney - but I'd almost sooner live in a cardboard van by a cardboard river.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Quis scamodiet ipsos custodes?  (Lupinia)
  
  In which a scam prevention expert gets scammed - partly because she expects customer service from her bank to be incompetent, and it takes a while for the scammer to raise sufficient red flags.
  
  She is an expert and she manages to keep the scammer on the line while she calls the real customer service line of her bank so that they can watch in as the scammer tries to steal her money, but it's a valid if rare example of how you can be too cynical for your own good.
  
  
  
• Not with NFTs though.
  
  
  
• In case you've missed this one it's fortunate that it's harder to block Chesapeake Bay than the Suez Canal.  (gCaptain)
  
  Same shipping line, different ship.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 22.04 is in beta.  (Phoronix)
  
  I'm looking forward to this; 20.04 had a surprisingly smooth launch; I think I first deployed it at the beginning of May that year and have had very little trouble with it.  (That's on servers.  I run lots of servers on Ubuntu, but I've had less experience with it on the desktop.)
  
  
  
• Google is bringing a new advertising API to Chrome.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you don't like it, you can simply opt out.
  
  Of Chrome.
  
  Because you sure can't turn the new Topics API off.
  
  
  
• Samsung will sell parts and tools needed to repair the Galaxy S20 and S21 and Tab S7+.  (Fast Company)
  
  And provide detailed repair guides in partnership with iFixit.
  
  But Pixy, you say, aren't those all prior year models?
  
  Why yes.  Yes they are.
  
  
  
• Russia's Great Firewall isn't working and could be headed for collapse.  (Torrent Freak)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...
  
  
  
• The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted Earendel.  (CNN)
  
  I wondered where he'd gotten to.
  
  The star (because that's what Hubble spots, after all) is 28 billion light years away, which means since the Universe is only 14 billion years old that light effectively travelled at twice the speed of light in order to reach us.
  
  Because space is not only really big, but very weird.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Horn wearing Anon at Friday, April 01 2022 07:53 PM (9GEPh)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 01 2022 10:25 PM (r9O5h)

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