Tuesday, December 15
Ow Fuck Ow Fourth Edition
Tech News
- RAM arrived. 1/8" audio jack to dual RCA cable arrived (to replace Multiplicity's crappy audio streaming). Two 32GB USB thumb drives arrive tomorrow so I can create recovery images for Tohru and Rally.
Plan is to swap the the 16GB RAM for 32GB, the 256GB NVMe drive for the new 1TB WD Black, and the 1TB 2.5" hard drive for a 1TB SATA SSD. I already have those - they were a late upgrade for my previous system, and are currently running as external drives. Might as well move them inside.
First Rally, which mostly runs Linux VMs. Just back up the VMs, clean install on the new SSD, copy the VM back again DO NOT TRY THIS WITH COMPRESSED VOLUMES OR YOU WILLDIEHAVE A REALLY MISERABLE DAY and then install everything I need to work before moving on to Tohru.
Since they're cross-linked via HDMI - each has HDMI in and out - either one can in theory take over all duties while the other is just a second screen.
- Woolworths delivered my groceries today. Nothing was missing. I now have a freezer packed full of gluten-free satay chicken and lasagna, because I kept adding more to my order each time they lost them.
- To speed up you must first slow down. (AnandTech)
Interesting analysis of an external NVMe drive, tested first on Thunderbolt, which provides a direct PCIe connection, then on USB 3.1 at 10Gbps.
Thunderbolt provided better burst performance but worse consistency and slower sustained writes. I'm guessing that this last isn't by design, but rather than the USB interface throttled writes just enough that the drive controller itself never throttled.
- The FTC has finally woken up from its fifteen year nap and asked social networks to explain themselves. (Tech Crunch)
They've sent notices asking details of what the companies are doing with users' personal data. Targets include Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube, which is pretty much all of them.
Given that Google and Facebook are both facing anti-trust action already, this is likely to ruffle some feathers that damn well need a good ruffling.
- Google went down across the entire world yesterday because they ran out of disk space. (Google)
Oops.
- The MacOS Bug Sir 11.1 update is out. (Mr Macintosh)
If you have a 2014 MacBook Pro and didn't already kill it with the initial release, this one is supposed to actually work.
Freedom of the Hydraulic Press Video of the Day
Not two streams I had expected to cross.
Sorry Freddy Video of the Day
Though I suspect he might have actually enjoyed this.
Check out the credits on YouTube. Not a minimal-effort version.
Essential Minecraft Mods Videos of the Day
Who Needs Netflix Videos of the Day
This is just Hololive EN, just Minecraft, just one day.And that's after Kiara had to bail on a Minecraft collab due to predicted technical difficulties (her upload speed drops from 300Mbps to around 5Mbps at the scheduled time of day, making Minecraft unplayable).
So she did six hours of Atelier Ryza instead.
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Monday, December 14
Double The Fun Twice Edition
Tech News
- Ordered the RAM upgrade for my two PCs today. There are finally some good deals on Amazon... Except it's Amazon UK and delivery might be by Friday or it might be three weeks from Friday.
So I ended up ordering two 16GB Crucial modules - since Amazon AU helpfully have a 3 per customer limit - and two slightly more expensive Kingston modules. Should have them tomorrow.
(I decided not to try messing about with 32GB modules, at least for now.)
Update: It's here already, already.
- Third-generation Epyc can hit 4GHz unless it can't. (WCCFTech)
We're running a cluster of Threadripper servers at work because they had significantly better single-threaded performance than Epyc did when we got them. Downside is they don't support registered memory, so the limit is 256GB per system.
The higher-clocked members of the new Epyc lineup should perform better even on single-threaded workloads and support up to 2TB of RAM.
Of course, a new generation of Threadripper parts will also be arriving soon and will be even faster again.
- Working in pyjamas doesn't hurt productivity. (ZDNet)
Guess I'll need to fins a new excuse then.
- Google is forging ahead with Chrome changes that will cripple ad blockers. (CNet)
Google is an advertising company, not a tech company.
- It's not me, it's You(Tube).
Just went down. Worldwide, apparently. Embedded videos still play but the site itself is dead as a doornail.
- Gmail too. Oh, good. Well, since pyjamas are out, there's my excuse.
- Wait. Gonna try something.
Make that some embedded videos still play.
- Some sites using Google services also got side-swiped by the outage.
We use Google Cloud for one of our apps at work, but just cloud servers, nothing fancy. That has continued to run without a blip, as has their DNS.
No Video of the Day
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Sunday, December 13
Casper The Rat Edition
Tech News
- Blue on Blue: Intel's Core i9 11900K will feature eight cores and sixteen threads unless it won't. (WCCFTech)
The i7 11700K will also feature eight cores and sixteen threads.
In 10th generation the i9 had 10 cores, giving it some reason to exist. In the 11th generation, while the core itself has been updated, the count has gone backwards, so the i9 is at best 4% faster than the cheaper i7.
Both use 125W at base clock and up to 250W at boost clock, compared to 105W and 150W respectively for a 16 core 5950X. On the other hand, you can't get a 5950X right now. On the third hand, you also can't get any 11th generation desktop chips because they haven't even launched yet.
- Green on Green: Nvidia told hardware reviewers to kiss the ring.
Hardware reviewers were unimpressed, to say the least.
This is one of the more moderate responses. Other Linus was pissed.
Under the glare of having every tech journalist in the world angry with them, Nvidia has since backed down. (TechSpot)
I'm not sure that will be enough.
- Guess my next system will be all AMD after all. Whenever that might be.
- Virtual events suck. (AParker)
So do real-world events, but this post at least discusses some ways to fix virtual events.
- Windows 10 on ARM now has 64-bit x86 emulation. (Thurrott.com)
Or at least the preview release does. And it seems to work, at least if the application you want to run is Photoshop Elements.
- A long awaited new RPG is finally available to play: Nox Archaist is out for the Apple II. (Vintage is the New Old)
You do need a hard drive on your Apple II to run it, as it doesn't fit on a floppy. And at least 128k of RAM. Or you can use the included emulator to run it on Windows or Mac, that works too.
- Kiara did an in-person collab with Matsuri from Hololive JP - despite being part of Hololive EN, she and Calliope Mori are currently living in Japan.
In the stream she mentioned that they originally planned to meet at her house, but decided at the last minute to go to Matsuri's house rather than introduce Matsuri to Casper.
It turns out that Casper is a rat. Not a pet rat, a rat rat. It has a name, but it lives in her ceiling.
- The version of Multiplicity included in Object desktop turns out to be limited to two computers, so scratch what I said. Also, the audio streaming sucks for some reason.
Not At All Tech News
Triumphant Returns
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Turtle Shambles Edition
Tech News
- I've been running Stardock's Start8 and Start10 since two days after I first installed Windows 8, and Fences nearly as long. Lately I've also been running Multiplicity to share my keyboard and mouse (and clipboard) across machines and Groupy to group windows together.
All work well and are recommended. If you do have multiple PCs and need a solution like Multiplicity, I suggest picking up Object Desktop which is a license for all of Stardock's utility software for five systems.
In theory it's an annual license; in practice the way it works is pretty generous. Anything you install in the first year not only keeps right on working but keeps getting updated, as far as I can tell, indefinitely.
- The Corsair MP400: A zoom, followed by a splat. (AnandTech)
If you're looking for a cheap NVMe SSD, your choices are DRAMless TLC models or QLC models. I don't think anyone makes DRAMless QLC drives for reasons that will become apparent in a moment.
Both of these options work fine for reading data. They typically have slower, cheaper controllers than high-end drives, but this is 2020 and a slow, cheap controller means speeds over a gigabyte per second.
On writes, each design has its own problems. DRAMless designs have inconsistent write latency, running just fine most of the time but occasionally spiking up into territory held by the fastest spinning disks. QLC on the other hand depends on a large pseudo-SLC cache for write performance, and when that runs out, write speeds drop by as much as 95%.
The upside is that if the drive is cheap you can buy a huge model with a ton of cache. If you have a 4TB drive with 1TB of cache you're not likely to run out quickly. Problem with the MP400 is the larger models cost as much per gigabyte as a high-end TLC drive.
- An 8TB MP400 gives you about 2TB of high-performance space - about 1.75GB per second - at a cost of $1500.
The 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus gives you 2TB of high-performance space at $400. (Serve the Home)
High-performance in this case meaning 7GB per second reads, 4.6GB per second writes. So if you need serious performance and don't want to fuss around with NVMe RAID, that price is not bad at all.
- The Hackboard 2 is a tiny Atom based single-board computer. (Tom's Hardware)
At $99 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage it's more expensive than the Raspberry Pi ($55 with 4GB RAM and no storage) but on the other hand it can run standard Linux distributions or even Windows.
The Celeron N4020 is a low-end 6W dual-core part, but single-threaded performance is decent, about 60% of a Ryzen 1700, or 35% of a 5600X.
- Oracle is following Tesla and HPE and abandoning California for Texas. (Tech Crunch)
Like ships leaving a sinking rat.
- The FDA has given emergency authorisation for the first Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague vaccine. (Tech Crunch)
An independent review board unanimously recommended approval earlier this week, so the FDA only required several days and repeated kicking by the president to actually do their jobs.
- What's four orders of magnitude here and there? (The Register)
Well, when it's a cloud hosting bill, that means your free plan costs you $72,000 per day.
- A new species of whale has been discovered. (The Vast)
Whales notably being small and easy to miss.
They took DNA samples to determine the new whales' place in the whale family tree, though they didn't discuss exactly how.
- Hey Rocky, watch me pull a Linux distro out of my hat! (ZDNet)
Rocky Linux is a new fork of CentOS, created by one of the founders of the CentOS project, and named in memory of another project founder. In the first 48 hours, 650 contributors have signed up to work on it.
- Ryzen 5600X servers are starting to show up at hosting providers. (Webhosting Talk) Not many of the higher-end Ryzen 5000 models yet.
The six core 5600X matches Intel's ten core W-1290 in both single and multi-threaded benchmarks. (Passmark)
- Risu (of HololiveID) - who I've been watching because my regulars Coco, Haachama, and Pikamee are all on holiday at the moment - streams Minecraft with subtitles enabled, so that she can keep the audio turned down but still know when a creeper is creeping up on her. The subtitles are mostly descriptions of sound effects, and produce some curious combinations.
Rabbit Hole Parade Video of the Day
They've added fifteen rabbits to the rabbit hole since this was posted in April. (Not counting Hololive China, which came and went in that interval.)
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Saturday, December 12
Sow Their Fields With The Tears Of Game Journalists Edition
Tech News
- A look at the Supermicro X12SAE and Intel's W-1200 workstation platform. (AnandTech)
The W-1200 range of CPUs are the workstation versions of Comet Lake - the 10th generation desktop range, with the top of the line W-1290P being a Core i9 10900K.
In other words, high clock speeds and high power consumption, but good single-threaded performance. Unfortunately for Intel, the W-1290P barely beats a Ryzen 3700X on mult-threaded server workloads, and that's AMD's, what, seventh or eighth fastest mainstream desktop processor? And available for half the price of the W-1290P.
- A look at the Western Digital Black SN850. (Tom's Hardware)
The one I just got is the SN750. The new model brings better latency and bandwidth numbers, support for PCIe 4.0, and about twice the price.
- The Orange Pi R1 Plus is a simple, cheap single-board computer suitable for firewall / router tasks. (Tom's Hardware)
I'd prefer three Ethernet ports rather than just two, but at $20 and just 2" square, you can simply use two of them. Well, and a DMZ switch.
Compared to the original R1 it upgrades the RAM from 256M to 1G, and the CPU from a 32-bit A7 to a 64-bit A53. That's plenty to route even gigabit internet.
- We can have democracy or we can have Facebook. (The Ink)
Facebook doesn't cross my radar screen as much as Twitter and YouTube, but they too are a metastatic cancer and need to be burned out rather than broken up.
- Need a single-chip 32-port 800Gb Ethernet switch? (Serve the Home)
Yes, 25.6Tbps of switching fabric can be yours for the low price of... Hmm. Wonder why they left that detail out?
- Microsoft is planning to start forcing upgrades of Windows 10 1903 and 1909 versions. (The Redmond Cloud)
This has happened before, of course. One of my older computers cannot succesfully upgrade and has bricked itself twice. Soft-brick - being a PC, you can always reinstall from a current ISO.
Unlike, say, a 2014 MacBook Pro meeting Bug Sir.
- Wait, passwords? (Tech Crunch)
the music streaming giant said the data exposed "may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners of Spotify.â€
That it was even possible to accidentally share passwords is an enormous red flag.
- Then they came for Dilbert.
Robot Chicken Video of the Day
While being watched by a terrified sheep.
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Thursday, December 10
It's Et Tus All The Way Down
Tech News
- My 11 PM finish last night turned into a 1:30 AM finish, so that was fun.
- YouTube is banning any video questioning the processes or outcome of the 2020 US election. (Victory Girls)
Google's corporate motto: If you're going to be evil, be all the way evil. No half measures.
- Turns out every detail of the last story Big Tech buried was true. (CNBC)
CNBC now notes that Hunter Biden is being investigated over his taxes. Because he didn't pay state income tax in Delaware on kickbacks from a Chinese company implicated in the Uyghur genocide.
And even then spends most of the article whining about Trump's tax returns, when we already know everything that was in those as well.
Burn them all to the ground.
- Speaking of burning them all to the ground: The FTC - along with the attorneys generalses of 48 states and territories - is suing to break up Facebook. (Tech Crunch)
Sow their fields with salt. Just swing by video game journalists tweeting about Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll find all you could possibly need.
- SpaceX ran a 95% successful test of their Starship prototype. (Space.com)
That last 5% got a little bumpy though.
- The CentOS project just committed suicide. (FOSSPost)
An opinion piece on yesterday's news of CentOS 8 being thrown in the woodchipper, but a correct opinion piece.
- Ducks can swim. (Quanta)
Imagine a circular fence that encloses one acre of grass. If you tie a goat to the inside of the fence, how long a rope do you need to allow the animal access to exactly half an acre?
The answer of course is that the goat will eat the rope, then eat all the grass, and then start in on the fence.
(My brother got tired of mowing the lawn - he has an acre on the outskirts of Melbourne - and got a couple of goats. Later he got tired of stepping in goat poop, but that's a story for another day.)
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that his company had made the correct call in the Timnit Gebru case and vowed to investigate and make sure it never happens again. (Axios)
Forget anything I said about "one healthy sign". Google is fucked.
- Speaking of which, YouTube will suspend your account, lie about notifiying you, and never once give you a reason.
Reddit thread. No love lost here.
YouTube is working overtime to create an entire generation of antitrust litigators.
You Don't Seem To Understand - Being Broken Up Is The Easy Way
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Wednesday, December 09
Et Tu Woolworths Edition
Tech News
- Somehow work managed to schedule my day starting with an 8:30 AM meeting and running right through to a 9 PM site deployment with an 11 PM finish. So a quick News Stuff tonight, and I'll check on any comments tomorrow.
Fortunately the deployment actually seems to have worked, because I ain't gonna try to fix it. (I do have a switch to roll the whole thing back in three seconds flat.)
Update: Mostly worked. "Thank you for your feedback. Please try pressing Shift-F5, or on a Mac, Command-Shift-R, and let us know if that helps."
- On the other hand, Woolworths lost half my frozen stuff for the third time in four weeks. The one time there wasn't a bunch of stuff missing, there was a bunch of stuff out of stock, but at least that time they gave me substitutes for most of it.
On the third hand, these new gluten-free chocolate/chocolate-chip mini muffins are going to be my doom.
- ASRock has two new graphics cards: One that fits in an M.2 slot (with a cable to the backplate) and one that definitely does not (Tom's Hardware)
Whether you want the tiny VGA-only card with 16MB of RAM or the 6900XT with 16GB, pricing is not available at this time.
- Shuttle has a new barebone system that looks like - and is exactly the size of - a half-height optical drive. (Tom's Hardware)
Up to a 10 core Intel CPU, 64GB RAM, one M.2 and one 2.5" drive, HDMI, dual DisplayPort, dual GbE, eight USB ports, and two serial ports.
- Do not use a message queue as your transactional database. (Materialize)
You can get away with the converse, at least on a small scale. I've done that with Mana - everything - database, cache, message queue, search engine - gets shoved into MySQL, or rather MariaDB, because I don't have time to manage multiple databases for a side project. Maybe I could put the cache into a memory table. I should check on that.
- CentOS 8 is EOL effective December 2021. (Phoronix)
CentOS 7 will continue to be supported through 2024.
I already jumped ship to Ubuntu because CentOS 8 took so damn long to ship, and they're not giving me any reason to regret that decision.
- Apple's new AirPods Max are... Headphones. (Thurrott.com)
$549 headphones.
Available in grey, also grey, blue, green, and pink.
Includes a volume knob with approximately 97 functions jammed into it.
- Phoenix Down: YouTube just banned Kiara, one of the HololiveEN girls. (Reddit)
750,000570,000 subscribers? Don't care.
Pulling in close to $100k a month in superchats? Don't care.
Never had a single strike? Don't care.
Nicest person you could imagine short of Ina, who is so sweet she might be made entirely of sugar? Don't care.
The Algorithm has spoken.
She'll most likely be back in a day or two, but honestly, what the fuck are those idiots at Google doing? FLAG MAJOR CHANNELS FOR HUMAN REVIEW. YOUR ALGORITHMS ARE SHIT.
Update: When life gives you chickens, make a fast food franchise.
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Tuesday, December 08
Wide Mouthed Frog Edition
Tech News
- Hynix is launching 176-layer NAND. (AnandTech)
No indication yet as to whether this is one layer of 176 layers or two layers of 88 layers like Micron. Either way, they will be producing 512Gb TLC flash chips.
- It's not just you. Nvidia also can't produce enough datacenter GPUs - even at $15,000 each. (Tom's Hardware)
These are produced at TSMC, so they have problems with both their foundry partners.
- Microsoft Teams also had a wormable remote execution bug. (GitHub)
Fixed now, but a single message could invisibly run arbitrary code on the computers of everyone following a given channel - and also send out additional messages to cause further havoc. Escaping from two, possibly three sandboxes in the process.
- More desktop. (Serve the Home)
Gigabyte's MZ72-HB0 is a dual Epyc EATX motherboard. Up to 128 cores and 4TB of RAM, five PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, two USB 3 ports, one M.2 slot, and 24 SATA ports - all directly from the CPUs; there's no chipset.
- My ISP seems to have finally fixed routing to Singapore, bringing ping times down from around 240ms to under 100ms. I'm going to see what that's like with a VPS, because SSDNodes have a datecenter in Singapore but not yet in Sydney, and a larger dev server would be nice.
Walfie GIF of the Day

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Monday, December 07
Timnit Gebru Has Been Surprise Removed Edition
Tech News
- I mentioned yesterday that one of Google's AI ethicists - a far-left ratbag by the name of Timnit Gebru - had threatened to resign if her demands weren't met, upon which Google said Your proposal is acceptable.
Ars Technica has an article up on this and while the article itself tries to paint her in a flattering light the comments come down pretty firmly on the side of If you threaten to quit, expect to be taken at your word.
Which is a little surprising given the echo chamber nature of Ars Technica's comments. They're still downvoting en masse anyone who points out that these attitudes are rampant in academia, though.
Meanwhile Reddit's opinion is that she sounds exhausting to work with. And that Twitter sucks.
- The Ryzen 5800X is a great CPU that costs about $50 too much. (Tom's Hardware)
Also, you probably won't find one anywhere, though it has been easier to find than the 5900X or 5950X.
- Elon Musk's grocery delivery service now has more room for refrigerated goods. (WCCFTech)
Specifically, Cargo Dragon 2 - which just launched for the first time - is 20% larger overall and has twice the capacity for supplies and equipment that need to maintain a consistent temperature during flight.
- Broadcast TV via ESP. (GitHub)
More specifically, broadcast NTSC colour TV using the serial port on an ESP8266 and a simple length of wire as an antenna.
This is not just generating the video signal but the carrier in software. On an embedded controller the size of a grain of rice.
- The monoliths are multiplying. (Insider)
I've read this one. It doesn't turn out well.
Barlowe's Guide to Hololive
I've been watching Hololive most days for the past two months - I often have it on when I'm working late - and so far I've managed to watch at least part of one stream of about, oh, a third of them.
Right now the two HoloJP girls I watch most - Coco and Haachama, since they speak English in a lot of their streams - are on holiday, so I've been catching up on Risu, who also speaks English most of the time.
And they just added three new HoloID girls that aren't on the list yet, all multilingual.
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Sunday, December 06
Do Not Eat If Contents Are Pulsating Edition
Tech News
- So, I got a new combination washer/dryer. And noting that two brands of laundry capsules were half price this week - and I have three weeks of laundry to catch up on - I bought plenty.
Fine print says on both: Do not use in combination washer dryers.
Fuck you, fine print.
Apparently this is because they contain more detergent than you need in the average combination washer/dryer, and not because they catch fire. Don't care. I'm not going back to powder.
- Razer has a NUC. (AnandTech)
It weighs sixteen pounds.
At some point - perhaps when you could store a week's worth of groceries in them - we have to stop calling these things NUCs.
- Leftists shocked when Big Tech outsources all technical work to Bangalore. (Tech Crunch)
Wait, that's next month.
Work hard enough to make yourself useless, and even the idiots running Google will notice.
- Ben Bova has passed away following COVID-related pneuomina and a stroke. He was 88.
- The ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB840M2P-B is an M.2 drive caddy that slides into a drive caddy caddy that slides into an adaptor mounted onto a HHHL PCIe card. (Serve the Home)
Useful, but seems just slightly over-complicated.
- Dust from asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese probe Hayabusa-2 has been safely returned to Earth. (International Business Times)
Though I'm not sure exactly what mishaps can befall dust, short of nuclear fusion. I suppose it could be annoying if it travelled half a billion kilometres only to get lost in customs.
- Near-Earth Object 2020 SO is actually Surveyor 2 Booster 1966. (NASA)
Which means if it does intersect with the Earth's orbit - which it won't this year - it will safely burn up in the atmosphere.
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