Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 04 2022 01:39 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, April 19 2022 07:25 AM (LZ7Bg)

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Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Sunday, April 03 2022 11:11 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 04 2022 04:20 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 04 2022 09:41 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 05 2022 10:11 AM (obo9H)

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• It's the weekend again - somehow - and that means it's Question and Answer time.  Take one of the bottles from the basket, put your question inside, and cast it into the waters.  It will probably just wash straight back up on the beach, but if it does make it here to PixyLab I will attempt to answer.
  
  
  
• No news on house #3 yet.  The one that was previously #4 on my shortlist has actually sold, but I wasn't actively pursuing that one because while the renovated interiors were first rate, the location (between an iron foundry and an artillery range) was less than ideal.
  
  
  
• 123qweQWE!@#0.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  GitLab had a default test password configured for accounts registered via external authentication providers.  They say no accounts have been compromised, but the bug affects not only the cloud service, but the paid on-premises version and the free open source edition, so if you run your own it's time to update.
  
  Also, put it behind a firewall.  At my day job your VPN account has to be configured to grant access the the GitLab server before you can do anything at all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Sabrent's 8TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSD is now available at a mere $1499.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is about what I paid for three 4TB drives, but if you absolutely have to fit a ton of storage inside a laptop - maybe if your job involves video editing on the go with a film crew - then it's either that or $2200 for the 8TB option on a MacBook.
  
  
  
• Proposed EU regulations would require all blockchain transactions - all of them - to be registered with a verified account - on both ends - and the details made available to member governments at any time for any reason.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And transactions valued at more than 1000 Euros would be automatically reported to the government.
  
  Note the both ends requirement.  If you want to transfer your crypto to someone - anyone - they also must register with the EU.
  
  Oh, and these registers, if implemented, are going to get hacked.  Count on it.
  
  
  
• Posting the full name and medical history of a patient in a reply to a Yelp review is a HIPAA violation.  (The Verge)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
  
• A Scottish Twitter user has been sentenced to 150 hours of community service for being a Twitter user.  (The Verge)

  Sheriff Adrian Cottam told Kelly he passed the "custody threshold” but there is a presumption against prison if there is an alternative.

  Which means that this haggis-humping bumblefuck was actually considering jail time for the crime of being a pretty normal Twitter user, which is to say, a loathsome mindless hate-filled tankie who would likely be shot by his own zampolit if their unit ever faced action.
  
  Hang on...
  
  Right, this is not Twitter, nor am I Scottish.  Just needed to check.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned purchases of foreign software for critical infrastructure.  (The Register)
  
  But at the same time has legalised theft of foreign software, so that's okay.

• Some of you expressed interest in the cover home of The Concise Dictionary of Regrettable Architecture (4th ed, Stodder & Houghton, 3716pp) as mentioned in yesterday's Pixy Goes House Hunting item.
  
  Well, here's one of the bathrooms:
  
  
  
  After looking at several late 19th to early 20th century homes that have been lovingly restored (and one that is a complete dump but is heritage listed and so frozen in time as a complete dump) this place comes across like a big bowl of curried corn flakes.
  
  Every single pixel asks the question why?  
  
  And that's the bathroom they they selected to show off the property.  If this was a modest three-bedroom place passed down in the family for 65 years and now on the market for the first time, sure.  Buy it, replace the kitchen, bathroom, and carpet, strip off the wallpaper and paint everything left white, and you'd have yourself a little gem.
  
  For this one, the owner would have to be someone prepared to drop an additional half a mil to gut it and rebuild from the inside out.
  
  In other words, not me.

Posted by: ahd at Saturday, April 02 2022 09:56 PM (6vszb)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 02 2022 10:12 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 02 2022 10:14 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 03 2022 12:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, April 03 2022 07:54 AM (ZlYZd)

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• 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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Other than that there are four brand new houses in the same development just coming on to the market and right in my price range.

After that it might be Plan B, which is to move there and rent and continue the search at a more leisurely pace.

• Repeat after me: We have a hot prospect expecting to close today but if you act right away...
  
  Actually, this time I believe them, because (a) they provided details that were not to their advantage and cooled me down on this property, and (b) they didn't claim a hot prospect so much as a room temperature one.
  
  Either way, bleah.  I'll have my agent check out my top two alternates but I'm getting ready to activate Plan B.
  
  
  
• I'm not sure there is a top story today.  Well, the Washington Post says that some of the cryptographic signatures on the Laptop from Hell check out proving that the emails are from who they say they are and did in fact say what they say when they were sent, but we knew that 18 months ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• YouTube has added 100 free TV shows and over 1000 free movies.  (Mashable)
  
  Where are they?  What are they?  No-one knows.  You can't browse the list; you can't search for them; and if I click the link to see even a sample of the TV shows I get a purple monkey error.
  
  "It's personalised" says YouTube, which apparently translates to "fuck you".
  
  Also, the small number of free movies I could find that are actually viewable in Australia are crap.  But then so is Netflix.
  
  
  
• Canada will ban sales of combustion engine cars by 2035.  (Engadget)
  
  Has Canada ever seen Canada?  There is no country in the world that would benefit more from global warming or that is less suited to electric vehicles.
  
  
  
• Phenylephrine is useless.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a precursor to meth.  On the other hand, it does nothing.  And there are many cheaper substances that fit both those roles.
  
  
  
• QNAP again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Seriously?

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 31 2022 11:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 31 2022 11:28 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: furnall321 at Friday, April 01 2022 04:28 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 01 2022 06:47 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 01 2022 07:27 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 01 2022 08:51 AM (MuaLM)

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• Agent for the other house on my shortlist is not playing games.  Sent the contract right over, only one thing in there that raises an eyebrow, and certainly no deal breakers.  Getting my agent to do a walkthrough and then will take it from there.
  
  What I also found while clicking around is a rather nice five bedroom house on 16 acres on the edge of town - with a spare two bedroom house just in case, I don't know, the main house has a puncture.  At the extreme upper end of my price range but actually still cheaper than my current place, which is about the size of the spare house there.
  
  The problem is, it's on wireless internet, and wireless internet in Australia sucks.  A major reason I selected this particular town is the fibre internet, and this house don't got it.  I can do my job remotely, but I still need to be able to do my job.
  
  What price 1km of Cat 5?
  
  
  
• Axie Infinity's Ronin network bridge got hacked.  Just a little bit.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For $620 million.
  
  And they didn't notice for a week.
  
  (Yes, this is crypto stuff.)
  
  (breathe in)
  
  WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
  
  (breathe out)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is officially officially here for officially $1999.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But actually a whole lot more than that.
  
  And there are no reviews, because Nvidia didn't send out review samples.
  
  It runs at 450W and should be about 35% faster than the RTX 3080 at three times the price.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Ryzen 5800X looks kind of dead.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want speed you'll go for the 5800X3D or the 12-core 5900X; if you're price-sensitive you'll want the new 5700X which substantially cheaper, uses much less power, and is only 5% slower in single and multi-threaded benchmarks.
  
  
  
• HP's new FX900 Pro SSD is, um, pretty good actually.  (Tweaktown)
  
  It's not the fastest SSD in existence, but it's cheaper than anything faster and faster than anything cheaper.  7.4GB/s read and 6.7GB/s write, with 43 µs read latency and 14 Âµs writes.
  
  
  
• Paging Barbra Streisand.  Will Ms. Streisand please come to the Law of Unintended Consequences phone.
  
  
  
  
  Farewell, Ubiquiti, you assholes.
  
  
  
• Sydney is acquiring...  Sandworms.  They're sandworms.  (ZDNet)
  
  The sandworms will be used to extend the new Metro system in western Sydney, burrowing through 200 metres of sandstone and shale per week.  (Not a lot of granite around here.)
  
  
  
• What happened to that 40 mile long Russian invasion convoy.  (The Guradian*)
  
  Or one version of events, anyway.  But something sure happened to that convoy and it wasn't good.
  
  * Stet.
  
  
  
• This professor stopped grading her students' papers.  How did it go?  (The Conversation)
  
  She has no idea because she stopped grading her students' papers.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 30 2022 11:25 PM (oPg+d)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 31 2022 01:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Eros at Thursday, September 28 2023 08:26 PM (vmsJS)

Posted by: martin at Wednesday, September 17 2025 02:33 PM (TiFMY)

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• I'm pretty sure the real estate agent for the house I talked about yesterday is playing games with me - I can see the Internet Archive, I know how long this place has been on the market, sure you have a hot prospect right this minute and are expecting to exchange contracts shortly, I believe you, millions wouldn't - but I don't have time so you're off the list.
  
  Which leaves me with something that's cheaper and doesn't appear to need any work.  Still with the old-school high ceilings, and 50% larger than my current place while being 60% cheaper.  Maybe not my dream home but a huge improvement and the mortgage payments on a 10-year loan will be less than not much more than my current rent.
  
  
  
• The ECASH bill in the US House of Representatives aims to introduce a government-controlled non-blockchain anonymous digital currency.  (CoinDesk)
  
  What?
  
  It would be legal tender, support peer-to-peer transactions, and would not have either a centralised or distributed ledger.  Like cash, the ledger would be after the fact, not part of the currency.
  
  I'm going to have to read up on this because this sounds (a) like a good idea and (b) impossible.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Asus ProART B660 Creator D4 is a pretty good and not overly expensive Alder Lake motherboard.  (Guru3d)
  
  It's the cheaper B660 chipset so not overflowing with slots and I/O, but all the essentials are there including four DIMM slots (DDR4, still much cheaper than DDR5), a PCIe 5 x16 slot ready for next-generation graphics cards, three M.2 slots for storage, and two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  
  
• Shorter MIT: We suspended SAT requirements and half our freshman class are morons.  (MIT Admissions)
  
  So you admit it, do you?
  
  Hacker News thread says no shit, Sherlock.  Also that college mostly sucks.
  
  
  
• The car dealership did it.  (EFF)
  
  Sorry to spoil the punch line.
  
  
  

Party Like We're Underwater Video of the Day

Had to get up during the night because rain was coming down sideways and my front hall was flooded.

Had to pause writing this post because rain was coming down sideways and my front hall was flooded again.

Gotta get out of the flood zone.

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 29 2022 06:16 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 29 2022 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 30 2022 05:39 AM (oPg+d)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 30 2022 07:40 AM (r9O5h)

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• I mentioned in a separate item that I've narrowed my house search down to two - though of course this morning a brand new four bedroom house popped up right in the centre of my price range - and I have someone checking on one of the properties for me because I have...  Questions.

  There's at least seven doors and one flight of stairs that aren't indicated on the floorplan, the main bathroom apparently occupies four separate rooms, there's a window that opens out onto the patio which is in turn entirely inside the house, and I think I might need to replace the carpet...

  Well, turns out you can find anything if you poke around long enough, including the last time this house was on the market back in 2015, and the photos and the floor plan from then.
  
  Yes, there are exactly seven doors missing from the current floorplan - and one missing from the old floorplan, which shows not only a solid wall in that place but the kitchen sink on the other side.
  
  The stairs are in the front hall, which is not what I expected.  I thought they were at the back of the adjacent living room.  That makes the front hall narrower of course but it adds light from above, and this plan shows that the loft area is larger than I had thought.
  
  The main bathroom really is split into four separate rooms which, well, okay; overall it's 15'x12' so even with separate rooms for the bath and the shower it's not exactly camped.  Honestly, the bath room by itself is bigger than my entire bathroom.
  
  And I probably will need to replace the carpet.
  
  On the upside, someone with some interior design sense has been in there in the past seven years and replaced the old custard yellow paint in the dining room and kitchen with eggshell and white respectively, and probably added $50,000 to the valuation in one shot.
  
  The 2015 photos don't make it look nearly as nice as the newer ones, and specifically the newer photos leave out the hallway and the stairs.  But if they've just gotten rid of the custard yellow plague there as well, that should look much better than it did.  And if not, painting is the one home maintenance task I have real experience at.
  
  
  
• The Australian Stock Exchange expects more delays to its blockchain based trade records system.  (ZDNet)
  
  Originally expected to go live in April - last year - it's now set for April next year, but they've already advised that they're likely to miss that date as well.
  
  I'll give them credit for that: If you know that your project is going to miss its deadline a year in advance, that means that someone is paying attention.  I've seen - and rescued in some cases - projects that sailed straight into their deadline with no warning and no working code.

• Existing geothermal plants around the Salton Sea could be updated to extract $5 billion worth of lithium per year in addition to the 432 megawatts of power they produce.  (Fast Company)
  
  This seems like a good idea.  Geothermal - unlike wind and solar - is a viable baseload power source, where it is available.  (It's available everywhere if you're prepared to dig deep enough, but that's expensive.)  And 20,000 tons a year of free lithium might be enough to start curing California.
  
  
  
• The plain text internet is coming.  (The Protocol)
  
  I'm so old I remember when the internet was plain text.
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, that's actually old.
  
  
  
• When slower is faster: The rise of Python in scientific computing.  (The Coop Blog)
  
  This presents an interesting case where converting a program from Fortran to Python made it 100x faster.  Python itself is 100x slower than Fortran - or more - but it has a ton of easy-to-use, highly optimised libraries for scientific computing.  And straightforward Fortran code you write yourself can't compete with libraries refined over decades by thousands of programmers around the world.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Monday, March 28 2022 10:15 PM (nRMeC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 29 2022 03:09 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 29 2022 03:12 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, March 29 2022 03:27 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, March 29 2022 10:20 AM (MuaLM)

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I've narrowed the house hunt down to two - with a dozen alternates in case those fall through.  One comfortably within my price range and very nice, one stupid cheap by big city standards and still quite nice.  There's a big price gap but the more expensive one is about 50% bigger and on twice as much land, so that's understandable.

I was a bit concerned about possible street noise with that larger one, but then I took a closer look at the layout (built in 1908, it's been through multiple renovations and extensions and the interior arrangements are now not merely complicated but non-Euclidean) and realised that the bedrooms are at the back.  The house now faces sideways; I suspect it originally took up a large corner lot but the street frontage on one side was subdivided and sold off decades ago. 

Okay, fine.  Sideways is fine.  Does explain why there's no facade.

There's at least seven doors and one flight of stairs that aren't indicated on the floorplan, the main bathroom apparently occupies four separate rooms, there's a window that opens out onto the patio which is in turn entirely inside the house, and I think I might need to replace the carpet, but it's twice the size of my current place (three times by volume thanks to the 13' ceilings) at 60% of the price.

I was taking a look at weather for this town, and on the positive side they haven't been affected at all by the recent and ongoing Noachianism.

On the not-necessarily-negative side, there were overnight lows below freezing every month from April through September last year, something that simply doesn't happen in Sydney.  By the time I move up there in May I'll be facing the coldest weather I've experienced in years - and it won't even be winter.

Layers.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, March 28 2022 02:47 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: JT at Monday, March 28 2022 04:10 AM (0EkmO)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, March 28 2022 04:57 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: JT at Monday, March 28 2022 06:30 AM (0EkmO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 28 2022 10:00 AM (PiXy!)

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