You keep mentioning and linking this Hololive and related stuff. I'm out of the loop. What is that, and what's the background on it?

Some background from my personal perspective might help. I spend long hours alone at home at my desk, sometimes late at night, and I find that having something playing on the second monitor can help prevent me from getting even more distracted and wasting time on Twitter or wherever.

For a few years I was a dedicated listener to a long list of podcasts, including networks like This Week in Tech and The Incomparable. But as we moved into 2020 a lot of the stuff I was listening to on ostensibly tech or geek culture topics was becoming unpleasantly political, and by "unpleasantly political" I mean batshit crazy communism. The same stuff that had wrecked Twitter by 2018.

But around that time, this surfaced in my recommendations on YouTube, the only time Google has gotten anything right since about 2013.



It's only a 20 second clip but it was enough to make me sayWhat the heck?and take a closer look. And then I found there's no escaping the rabbit hole.

This is Hololive:



Yes, there's a lot of them. (That's seven videos edited together by a fan, which explains why some of the transitions aren't perfect.)

Basically Hololive is a 24/7 international all-girl improv comedy channel. Unwoke, unpolitically correct, irreverent and chaotic. They even have their own Bugs Bunny character - you see her for a couple of seconds in that video, her name is Usada Pekora and she has 1.8 million YouTube subscribers.

They sing, they dance - they have live concerts using full motion tracking and 3D models, they draw - at least two are successful commercial artists, they play an awful lot of Minecraft, and they don't take any shit from anyone.



Hololive's own background is also interesting. Parent company Cover Corp was working on a new AR device, that replaced expensive motion tracking with a regular iPhone and clever software, but they weren't having a lot of success breaking into the market.

Then in 2017 two Japanese girls fresh out of high school approached them and said what they needed was their own virtual spokeswoman. One of them is now Tokino Sora with 900,000 subscribers, and the other is referred to as A-chan, and is a senior manager overseeing activity across the entire company.



The pivot was spectacularly successful, and Hololive is basically a money factory. Their smallest channel - and they have dozens - has close to 300,000 subscribers, and the largest is approaching 4 million.

I think a lot of people are sick of hypocritical woke crap and are looking for entertainers who will simply tell it like it is. The 2D characters they use and the stage names (and a very strict corporate policy protecting their privacy) give them enough distance that they don't need to maintain a pretense in their opinions.

They don't get explicitly political but in this benighted age that itself is a profound political statement.

And beyond the official content - and there's so much of that that it's impossible to watch it all - there's an absolute avalanche of fan content, from cute video clips:



To entire virtual worlds:



So forget Hollywood, forget Netflix, forget podcasts, I really don't care anymore. I'll be over here in the corner juggling hedgehogs.

Also, Hololive is the main reason I bothered to get back on Twitter. They post their stream announcements there.

This is Gawr Gura of Hololive EN, the most successful virtual YouTube of all time:



Okay, yeah, she's a bit of a ditz on some things. But she can maintain both sides of a conversation for four hours at a time, every day, without ever repeating herself, and for the most part while doing three other things at the same time, and that's a rare talent.

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Top Story

• Visa and Mastercard have cancelled Russia's credit cards. (CNBC)
  
  All of them.
  
  On the one hand, yes, Russia is run by a nuclear-armed despotic thug.
  
  On the other hand, this is a totally reasonable move that won't hit innocent bystanders or have massive long-term blowback.
  
  On the third hand, this is a way to crush nuclear-armed states without kicking off World War III.
  
  On the fourth hand, we know - we know - that now that this has been weaponised, it will not stop here. We know because we've been here before.
  
  And on the fifth hand, none of this happened when Trump was president.

Questions and Answers

• Not phrased as a question, but deserving of an explanation.
  
  From Fisht:

  There is nothing worse than the Gluten people. The anti Gluten Cult signaled the end of America. No basis in fact and no ability to stop talking about it. JP did a great episode on this millennial virtue scam.

  It's absolutely true that 95% of the people eating gluten-free, and all of the most vocal ones, are doing it as a fashion accessory.
  
  But that leaves the other 5% who will spend two days trapped in the bathroom if they accidentally nibble on the wrong brand of breadstick.
  
  I'd much rather not have to limit myself to eating out maybe once a year. I'd love not to have to view the words Ingredients: Wheat flour the same way I would Front towards enemy. I don't particularly enjoy paying twice as much for food and having one tenth the range to choose from.
  
  But I don't have a lot of say in the matter.
  
  
  
• From Mel Pinto:

  If we use gab in our URL when commenting, the comment will not go thru and you get:
  Your website (gab.com) has been banned. If you feel this is in error, please contact the blog owner by email, or tech support at help@mu.nu

  Not intentional. It's probably tripped the automated spam filter. I'll remove it, but I might need to explicitly whitelist it.
  
  
  
• From 40 Miles North:

  Pixy, I asked a couple days ag if you thought graphics card prices would drop. In the last two days, the price on the XFX Speedster Radeon RX 6600 XT dropped 20%! I hope to buy one shortly. It should be a decent jump from my XFX Radeon RX 460. Let me know if you think I should wait.

  If the price is right, buy it. It's a decent card and as you say, much much faster than the RX 460.
  
  Chip supply remains uncertain so I wouldn't hold off on something you need.
  
  
  
• From Mrs Whatsit:

  I am running video processing (enhancing) software on two PCs. Same version of the software. PC's identical except one is Win 10 and the other Win 11.
  
  Processing the exact same video file, the Win 11 machine is significantly slower (by several hours).
  
  Is it possible to take a PC that came with Win 11 preloaded and roll back to Win 10?

  You can't roll back, but you should be able to download Windows 10 from Microsoft and install it on your Windows 11 system. (How-To Geek)
  
  Windows 11 uses the same activation keys as Windows 10 so any system authorised to run 11 is able to run 10. Some systems running 10 aren't officially supported on 11, but you won't have that problem.
  
  
  
• From Caiwyn:

  Pixy, can you explain how you got into VTubers and what the appeal is? I watched the KFP video you posted a couple of weeks ago, and I found it very amusing, but I felt like I was missing some context. Do you have a place to start for someone interested in going down that rabbit hole? Is there any kind of connection to the politics that drives this site, or is it completely disconnected?

  Oy, there's a question.
  
  To tackle the last part first, vtubers originated in Japan and are still heavily influenced by Japan. The two largest agencies - Hololive and Nijisanji - are Japanese, as are many of the smaller ones like Prism and Phase Connect and VOMS. Japanese culture leans conservative, mostly, and vtubers are for the most part the polar opposite of the screaming campus garbage babies that infest so much of online media.
  
  Pipkin Pippa - Phase Connect's resident Bugs Bunny character, because apparently every agency needs a resident Bugs Bunny character - has a standing invitation to go on Nick Rekieta's livestream and no-one thinks this is odd. Precisely zero pushback.
  
  As to where you should start.... Um. In mid-2020 when I got into it, that was easy. There was Haachama and Coco with Hololive Japan, Pikamee with VOMS, and the three girls from the newly launched Hololive Indonesia, though I didn't know at the time that they all spoke fluent English.
  
  And that was about it. Almost everything else was in Japanese.
  
  Now, there's 11 members of Hololive English and 6 in Hololive Indonesia, both with more on the way, 11 members in Prism Project who all speak fluent English, 14 (last I counted) 20 in Nijisanji's English-speaking branch, plus Phase Connect, Tsunderia, Cyberlive, MyHoloTV, VOMS, major indies like Kson, mid-rank indies like Shizukou, Vyolfers, and Reiny, and small indies like Nymroot and Mooyü.
  
  So... Kind of depends what you like.
  
  Someone fighting the meme wars on the side of righteousness and/or chaos? Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect.
  
  The nicest person you could possibly imagine but with a weakness for terrible, terrible puns? Ninomae Ina'nis (Ina) of Hololive or Pina Pengin of Prism Project.
  
  Salty gamer girl with a heart of gold? Amelia Watson and Gawr Gura of Hololive.
  
  
  
  Manic chaos fairy? Pomu Rainpuff of Nijisanji.
  
  Dark Overlord of All and honorary Aussie? Haachama of Hololive Japan.
  
  As Australian as Vegemite on toast? Luto and Sara of Prism Project, and Baelz and Sana of Hololive.
  
  Classic RPGs and weird dating sims? Mooyü.
  
  Be prepared to be totally lost as far as the "lore" goes. It doesn't matter what "bottom left" means, or why Pekora's name comes up alongside the Geneva Community Guidelines, why all the penpals want to jump in the bioreactor, or who Pomura and Ayunda are, and you'll pick up Japanese terms like yabe and ponkotsu quickly enough from context. There will be plenty of context.
  
  And be prepared to drop in and out of streams. Hololive alone puts out a hundred hours of content a day, though only a quarter of that is in English.
  
  
  
• From DaveX64:

  Do you have a favorite Keyboard - Video - Mouse (KVM) solution when you need to control more than one computer from the same place or do you favor more of a Remote Desktop type solution?
  I would like to control a Windows and a Linux box from the same dual monitors, keyboard and mouse without a lot of hassle. They're desktop computers in tower cases, not laptops.

  I haven't used one for a while, but the one I did have was an Aten unit that supported dual PCs with dual monitors, and it worked pretty well. They still make those.
  
  
  
• From Catherine:

  Pixy, I'm no longer up on tech or computers. But my kid in college is looking into buying a laptop for school. She will study at least some computer programming as a math major and computers minor, and I would not be surprised if she ends up with two degrees. She could spend what I consider to be a mint on a laptop ($3k would not break her financially). What is in stock and capable if computer science is her plan? We have ordered Dells in the past and they've held up well. I'm so sick of buying from woke companies, but it doesn't seem like there is hope not to pay foreigners or woke idiots. We try to buy American, but we're also realistic . . . and we are in the Midwest US but would order too. Feel free just to drop a link and not spend much time. I'm sure you get this often.

  I have a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus and I quite like it. Fast, mostly quiet, great screen, half the price of an equivalent MacBook. It's not a gaming system but more than capable for stuff like Minecraft. Plus you can pop it open with a screwdriver and upgrade the memory and storage yourself - it's not soldered in place on that model, and Dell provides a detailed service manual.
  
  
  
• From Dudeman:

  My kid is looking for a laptop when he begins college next year. He wants a Framework laptop. Is this a good option? What is a better option?

  If you want something you can do basic upgrades and repairs on yourself, there is no better option than the Framework right now. A single screwdriver (provided) is all you need and everything is labeled and replaceable. The four I/O ports are swappable to whatever you need - USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort, and little storage modules up to 1TB. And it runs well under Linux.
  
  It will soon be slightly out of date - it's 11th generation and 12th generation laptops are starting to appear - but if you're not buying for a while there might be a newer model out by then.
  
  
  
• From RayG:

  Pixy, I get the "secure" lock icon when I enter https://ace.mu.nu on my desktop Chrome. I don't get it on my iPad no matter what I do. Also, on my desktop, when I follow the link for Comments at the end of the "above the fold" part of your post on the main page, I do not get the lock icon. I can enter "https://" in front of the URL myself and get it.
  
  Why is the site not always secure by default? Why can't I get the lock icon on my iPad?

  I can certainly force it the HTTPS by default. I'm not sure why there's an issue on your iPad, but I can try Safari on my iMac and see if it does the same thing.
  
  
  
• Also from RayG:

  Another question: when I use the "Continue reading" link instead of the "Comments" link on the main page, I get a page with a link that says "Access Comments" but it goes to e.g. http://minx.cc/?post=398108 when never opens, browser says "minx.cc took too long to respond." Is this a bug or what?

  Yeah, we need to update the templates and rebuild all the pages to get rid of that link.
  
  
  
• From Daniel Ream:

  My existing cobbled-together whitebox RAIDZ server needs updating. I've got 4x3TB drives plus a 500GB HDD for the OS. i7-875K CPU, 8GB RAM. It's moderately loud and produces a fair amount of heat. it just holds media and some personal files, no need for much performance.
  I'd like something cooler and quieter in some kind of non-rackmount form factor; haven't decided yet whether I'm going to add more drives to the pool or just buy a set of newer, bigger drives but I'd like both options, which means more than 4 3.5" HDD bays. Any recommendations for CPU/mobo/case?

  Even the new Core i3-12100 ($124) should do fine for that; modern CPUs are amazingly fast. Motherboard I'm not sure of, best to browse around for something reasonably priced with lots of SATA ports.
  
  As for the case, there is something that came out just recently: The AeroCool Cipher. It's a fairly standard ATX tower case, matte black with a mesh front and zero RGB nonsense, but it has room for 15 drives - 11 3.5" and 4 2.5".
  
  Supposed to be $75 plus tax but I couldn't find it on Amazon or Newegg to confirm.
  
  
  
• And from rd:

  MS Edge says AOSHQ is unsecure. No httpS, just http.
  
  Is there a missing certificate? How do I fix this?

  Click here. The server is not forcing HTTPS on new connections, so if your browser has remembered the old HTTP URL it will keep defaulting to that.
  
  All browsers now try HTTPS first, so this doesn't happen for new users.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Asus Flow Z13 gaming tablet is heavy, ugly, expensive, and... Slow? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has the latest Core i9-12900H CPU, on-board RYX 3050 Ti graphics, and an optional 16GB RTX 3080 dock, so how can it be slow?
  
  Well, the 3050 Ti is noticeably slower than the 3060 (which is what I have, so I'm glad I paid the extra for that), and the 3080 is external running over Thunderbolt, so despite being a high-end card is slowed down by only having 4 lanes of PCIe.
  
  I guess if you want a gaming tablet the answer is, don't want a gaming tablet.
  
  
  
• A year late and a dollar short, Threadripper Pro 5000 is close to launch. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But with up to 64 cores at 4.5GHz there is still no competition.
  
  
  
• Everything you need to know about Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Wait, didn't 12 generation just come out? Isn't 12th generation mobile still just coming out?
  
  Yes, and yes.
  
  
  
• My oven is full of eels.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The same hackers who hit Nvidia recently appear to have done the same to Samsung. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The leaked data includes source code for the firmware of a lot of Samsung devices, which is not entirely a bad thing.
  
  
  
• The same hacking group is using certificates stolen from Nvidia to sign malware as trusted driver updates. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is entirely a bad thing.
  
  
  
• At least they're not solar freaking roadways. (Fast Company)
  
  Covering canals in California with pergolas of solar panels is not entirely a stupid idea. The land is not otherwise in use, there are access roads, and the shade will save enough water from reduced evaporation to irrigate an extra 50,000 acres.
  
  Which is not a lot but I wouldn't want to mow it.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Disclaimer: The peeps don't like it! Drop the gas price! Drop the gas price!

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 06 2022 09:45 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, March 07 2022 07:11 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 07 2022 09:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 07 2022 09:47 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, March 07 2022 03:08 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, March 07 2022 09:55 PM (5iiQK)

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• Weekends are Question and Answer time, unless I have to work, or I just worked two 18 hour days back-to-back, or I need to pack up and move house to a house I don't have, or my internet is down again, or my entire state is under flood and storm warnings, or every gluten-free foodstuff I normally eat is out of stock at the same time (possibly related to eastern Australia being underwater right now), or it's freaking World War III, but if it's all of those they cancel out somehow so Q&A is on.
  
  
  
• In the first sensible move of any of the participants in this whole debacle Russia has banned Twitter and Facebook.  (CBS / MSN)
  
  And over 140 other domains including the BBC.  Sadly we are not on the list, but this is just new additions and we may have been blocked previously.
  
  The BBC has responded by restarting its shortwave news broadcasts.  (The Verge)
  
  Everything old is new again.
  
  
  
• Russia doesn't have anything like China's Great Firewall but US companies are stepping up to help with leading provider of bad internet backbone connections Cogent cutting off access to Russia.  (ZDNet)
  
  They're justifying this by a broad reading of new EU regulations, but the regulations never actually say Russia has to go back to acoustic couplers and hope.
  
  
  

Tech News

• One moment, need to reboot my keyboard...
  
  
  
• With many of Ukraine's existing communication systems offline the new shipment of Starlink satellite dishes could become a target.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They're small and low-power and not easily spotted in the normal soup of radio waves, but if everything else has been knocked out one way or another they're much easier to detect.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the normal soup of radio waves the FCC is looking to crack down on crappy wireless avionics.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There's long been a fight between mobile carriers who say their operations don't infringe upon frequencies used in aircraft and aircraft makers and operators who say your phone will make their plane crash.
  
  It seems they're both correct - and the fault is with the aircraft, or rather wireless receivers used in some instruments.  They're so poorly designed that they pick up signals hundreds of megahertz outside their designated band.
  
  
  
• Yandex, Russia's version of Google only even more obnoxious about its web crawling efforts may be technically bankrupt.  (CNN)
  
  While the parent company is based in the Netherlands, most of its operations are in Russia, and recent sanctions act as a network partition event in an improperly balanced cluster.
  
  
  
• Microsoft meanwhile has blocked all new sales to Russia.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft has also been providing assistance to Ukraine to defend against hacking attempts, so whether you agree with their decision or not, they are actually doing more than just virtue signalling.
  
  
  
• Major cryptocurency exchanges are very pointedly not blocking Russia.  (CNN)
  
  Whatever you thing of cryptocurrencies generally, the underlying point is that there's no central control, and no-one can block your access to the blockchain.  So again, they're operating based on principles rather than profit, or rather, a little of one and a lot of the other.
  
  
  
• Similarly, ICANN is not intending to revoke Russian domain names.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That one was never on the cards.  The old .su TLD is still active.
  
  
  
• The US Space Force is planning to start patrolling the far side of the Moon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because that is civilisation's chief area of concern right now.
  
  
  
• Firefly's ITX-3588J is a high-end alternative to the Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can you get it?
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one more thing?  Half the world's supply of ultra-pure neon used in chipmaking comes from Ukraine.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was highlighted in 2014 when spot prices for neon shot up 600% during the invasion of Crimea, but then everyone went right back to sleep.
  
  
  
• Belarus is now on the tech industry shitlist too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  
  
  
• The great thing about paying twice as much to get a Mac is that it just works.  (Derek Seaman)
  
  After trying three different docks and three different Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adaptors, it just works.
  
  
  
• More on the suckage of Western Digital's new high-capacity NAS drives.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Base on their ratings, having a ZFS pool of 20TB drives with a weekly data scrub would exceed the annual workload rating after four months, even if nobody was accessing the data.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, have a drive failure already on my new ZFS server.  Good thing I configured RAID-Z3.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing to release the new Mac Studio.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is either a smaller version of the Mac Mini, or a larger one, or something else entirely.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 06 2022 06:54 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:14 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 06 2022 08:27 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 11:40 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 06 2022 12:15 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 06 2022 04:40 PM (PiXy!)

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• Russia has asked Google to stop the spread of misinformation about its invasion of Ukraine.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that is.  Not Google's.  Google is so far as I know still deeply entrenched in the Sudetenland and not looking for further adventures.
  
  To be specific, Russia is objecting to calling the invasion an invasion, showing pictures of the invasion, streaming videos of the invasion, or generally claiming that Ukraine is a place that exists.

  Russia wants to introduce a new law that would punish spreading fake news about the Russian armed forces' military operations in Ukraine with up to 15 years in prison.

  Wonder where they learned that habit.
  
  
  
• And in particular, don't mention the fact that Russia is currently bombing an active nuclear power station.  (AP)
  
  Because that would be bad.
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you need a 12-core (sort of) NUC with dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports ASRock has one.  (Anandech)
  
  Two, in fact.  Should be pretty zippy; these use the new Alder Lake laptop chips.  4 fast cores plus 8 efficiency cores, which combined should be about twice the speed of the previous generation 4-core parts.
  
  
  
• The Intel Core i3-12300 is good value for money.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 4-core part priced at $143.  While four cores is not a lot these days, the new design makes it about as fast as my 2017 Ryzen 1700 system that I am typing this on right now - with half the cores.
  
  On single-threaded tasks it's about 80% faster.  
  
  And cheap.  Did I mention cheap?
  
  
  
• Russia declares war on Apple in 3... 2...  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple Maps has been updated to show that Crimea is part of Ukraine and no longer Russian territory.  Unless you're actually in Russia.

• Found a six-acre plot of land neatly in my price range, on the edge of town, with power, water, and internet available.  Bit of a walk to the shops but since I have my weekly groceries delivered that's not a huge issue.
  
  
  
• Aaaand my internet just went down again.
  
  
  
• UCIe is PCIe for chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD has used its own Infinity Fabric for its chiplet-based designs since 2017, while Intel has used, um, whatever it has used.
  
  UCIe is a shared specification developed by Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC (among others) so that chips designed to the spec can easily be plugged together and might even work.
  
  Speeds go up to 256GBps, which is a lot.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 04 2022 12:05 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Saturday, March 05 2022 01:43 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 05 2022 05:33 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 05 2022 05:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Sunday, March 06 2022 02:44 AM (IC7R4)

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• I was promised eight inches of rain today.  So far only two.  I feel robbed.
  
  
  
• The Conti malware gang - who have thrown in their lot with Russia - have been hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If your team is going to side with one side it helps not to have the other side on your team - the deed seems to have been done dirt cheap by a Ukrainian gang member.
  
  Oops.
  
  Internal communications and source code have been published, as usual.

Tech News

• Benhmarking AMD's Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  Short story: It's the same chip (on the CPU side) as the old one, but a series of clever tweaks has made it 9% to 14% faster.
  
  On graphics it's in a class of its own.
  
  Meanwhile the Ryzen 5000 desktop range, no longer the fastest gaming processors around, 
  have received price cuts of 20 to 25%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ryzen 7000 is due out later this year, though, and will use a different motherboard.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB Red NAS drives are rated for 300TB of writes or reads per year.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's not a lot.  Particularly for reads.  You can do that in two weeks, leaving the remaining fifty somewhat empty.
  
  
  
• Small, cheap, fast: With Intel's new NUC, pick one.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's basically a mini-ITX Alder Lake system, just with Intel branding.  If that's what you want, it is that.

• Shot:  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
  
  Chaser:
  
  
  
  
  In a warzone, has faster download speeds than 90% of Australia.
  
  
  
• Particularly Tasmania.  (ZDNet)
  
  The entire state lost internet access around 1:30 PM today.
  
  Major internet problems in Queensland and New South Wales today as well, due to large parts of those states being underwater.  We're currently in the latter half of "Of droughts and flooding rains".
  
  Come to think of it, I should check what towns are in trouble right now and scratch them off my list.  Armidale is a reported emergency area but so is the part of Sydney where I live right now, and while everything outside is thoroughly soggy, it's not coming inside.  Lismore and Ballina are less fortunate.  A couple of my co-workers in Queensland are cut off but otherwise safe.
  
  Update:

  The State Emergency Service put out a flood watch for the whole Sydney region, with the worst predicted for areas around the Upper Nepean River.

  That's unusual.  The Nepean, yes, but the entire Sydney region?  I'll be fine; I'm up on a hill in Sydney's north, but much of the western parts of Sydney are low-lying and flat.
  
  Update Two: Five to eight inches of rain predicted where I live tomorrow, with similar falls across Sydney.  Time to batten down.
  
  Update Three: I've been so busy with work that I missed the fact that Sydney flooded last week.  (ABC - the Aussie one)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• 40Gb DisplayPort 2.0 connections connectors will be labelled DP40.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And the new higher speed 80Gb connectors will be labelled DP80.
  
  This will work over existing Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 cables which are rated for 40Gbps, because DisplayPort only needs to send data in one direction.  It actually switches all the receive wires into transmit mode.  (Except for the single USB 2.0 pair in the middle.)
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new 20TB NAS drive has 64GB of flash on board.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not, I understand, used for data caching, but to record metadata that is normally written to the disk itself.  This will still improve performance, and NAS units have their own dedicated SSD caching slots now so it's not so important it be built into the drives themselves.
  
  
  
• Internet domain registry and other services company Namecheap has stopped supporting Russia.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Russian customers and .ru, .by, and .su (which still exists) need to find a new home.
  
  The CEO is responding to questions at Hacker News.  The company apparently has staff in Ukraine.
  
  
  
• Toyota has suspended operations on 28 production lines after a key supplier got hit by a cyberattack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There's a reason armies work on "hurry up and wait" rather than "just in time".  A perfectly efficient "just in time" strategy is 100% fragile; any problem at all propagates downstream.
  
  
  
• And the entire internet, like it or not, is a warzone.  (The Register)
  
  24/7.  It's a wonder anything works at all.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 02 2022 08:09 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, March 02 2022 10:45 AM (MuaLM)

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• The Quest for Pixy Manor continues apace.  I've found a 5 bedroom place on two acres - in the same country town I was looking at before - for around $300k less than they're asking for my current shoebox on a postage stamp.
  
  And it has gigabit internet, which is not something I can get here in suburban Sydney.
  
  It's not as nice inside as some of the other places I've looked at, but it has all the storage space I could ask for - an attached 3-car garage, plus a second detached 3-car garage.  And the land is already divided into two lots and for that $300k I could probably build something on the second lot and sell the original.
  
  

• Or I could just start my own crypto trading platform, defraud customers of $2.4 billion, and buy the whole damn town.  (MSN)
  
  And get indicted by a grand jury but that seems like a detail we can iron out later.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Lenovo's new ThinkPad X13s is a laptop power by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which is - according to this article - not just another respin of a mobile phone chip, but one designed for laptop use.  
  
  It has four fast X1 cores plus four low power A78 cores.  The fast cores in my new phone are A78, and this chip uses them as its low-power cores.  It will still lag behind Apple's M1, but this might finally make Windows on Arm viable.
  
  Wouldn't recommend it over an Intel or AMD model unless you need some serious battery life - it manages 28 hours on a single charge.
  
  13" 1920x1200 screen, and up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of SSD.
  
  
  
• Apple has filed a patent for a computer build into a keyboard, like the TRS-80 Model 1 and the VIC-20.  (The Register)
  
  Because of course they did.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:43 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:45 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:01 PM (n+R81)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 01 2022 12:13 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 01 2022 07:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 02 2022 03:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 02 2022 09:48 AM (Z0GF0)

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• This is the way.
  
  
  
  
  Amazon takes longer than that just to change a status page from green to yellow.
  
  
  

Questions and Answers

• From sock_rat_eez:

  Pixy, can you recommend a cheap tablet that would be (relatively) easily rooted & switched to Linux ?
  10-inch-ish size preferred, performance expectations low, SD card slot

  I'm not really up on models can easily be rooted and what versions of Linux run well, but the people at the XDA Developers forum are.  Here's the guide for the Lenovo M10 FHD Plus I have for example.
  
  It can be a fiddly process even for a tablet that is known to be rootable though.
  
  
  
• From Faffnir:

  Using Brave,videos will not display for some COB's, mostly Weasel's Gun thread.
  
  Using Chrome works.
  
  Any suggestions?

  By default Brave doesn't install the Widevine DRM extension, so if the video is DRM-protected, it won't play.  Only thing I can think of immediately.
  
  
  
• From DaveX64:

  What is your favourite data recovery utility? I stupidly left the cover off my computer and had a wireless phone sitting within 8 inches of the bottom of a Western Digital 4TB Black mechanical hard drive. It still shows in Windows but access is sporadic. I have about 2TB of data on it but a lot of it is crap anyway, would still like to get a few things off it.
  
  Thoughts?

  One I used successfully about ten years ago was Stellar Phoenix.  They have a free download that tells you if there's something that can be recovered before you actually pay for it.
  
  The other one that has a solid reputation but that I haven't needed to use is SpinRite.  It's one of the oldest data recovery apps for Windows so it looks kind of clunky, but it's well-regarded.
  
  
  
• From badgerwx:

  I've heard that an SSD drive has a certain number of writes & that determines its lifespan. My laptop has an SSD main drive & a secondary HDD. Would it be worth it to move my /home & swap directories from the SSD to the HDD? I'd like to keep using this laptop as long as possible, and I'm not handy enough to open the case to replace anything.

  SSDs do have a limited lifespan, and it's more limited if you have a cheap QLC drive instead of a TLC one.  
  
  But modern SSDs are very clever about managing this and you have to rewrite the contents of the entire drive hundreds or even thousands of times before you run into that limit.  This does happen on busy database servers - there are more expensive SSDs rated for heavy database loads - but is unlikely on the average laptop.
  
  
  
• From Rodent:

  How are things in Australia Covid/Economy wise? Hopefully they're dropping quarantines and those concentration type camp things they had.

  Here in Sydney (and the state of New South Wales generally) it's been relatively sane throughout.  Could have been better, but not crazy.
  
  Very limited vaccine mandates.  Mask mandates have been on again / off again.  Currently you need to wear masks on public transport and in hospitals, and you need proof of vaccination for large indoor music events.  And there's a couple of types of venues - night clubs, strip clubs, and, um, houses of ill-repute - where you have to check in.
  
  I have never once checked in.  I don't have the check-in app installed.  I have worn masks half a dozen times.
  
  Economy is going mostly okay.  Our government did spend a lot of money keeping people in jobs during the various restrictions, but it seems to have been better managed than US efforts.  Smaller scale makes that easier, I guess.
  
  Definitely seeing inflation starting to bite here.  Each week some other item on my grocery list has gone up by 10%.  My Amazon Prime subscription is paying off there - fresh food prices don't seem to be affected nearly as much, and other groceries I can often order cheap in bulk from Amazon if I don't care what day they arrive.
  
  
  
• From questioning pookysgirl:

  What's the internet bandwidth for most of Australia? Do they use satellite for the Outback?

  Anyone in a metropolitan area and almost all country towns have 100Mbps available, 250Mbps or so if you're on cable, and 1Gbps on fibre.  Outside of town it's either fixed 5G (you get a big antenna for better reception) or a satellite solution.  There's a home-grown satellite solution called Sky Muster for the Outback, and Starlink just started deploying here too.
  
  

  How many undersea cables go into Australia? Do you ever have it that you're on an international call and it sounds like the whales are attacking the undersea cables with AK-47s? (Pooky and I used to get that sound circa 2012-2014. We'd laugh and make up stories about whale cartels.)

  There's at least a dozen major undersea cable links, the two biggest being Southern Cross which connects Sydney and LA via two different routes, and SEAMEWE3 from Perth to Singapore.
  
  It used to be that connecting from Sydney to Singapore would travel all the way to the US and back again, but they seem to have fixed that in the past couple of years.
  
  Sadly, no, I have not heard the whales.
  
  
  
• From mildly citrusy:

  What is your take on blockchain data storage such as filecoin?

  Unfortunately that's rather like asking what flavour of unicorn I prefer.  Crypto developers are really bad at keeping their tenses straight, and often speak of future events in the present tense.  Unless you have very small amounts of data or very large amounts of money, you can't store data on the blockchain.
  
  
  
• From markreardon:

  After 20+ years living on my corporate e-mail address, I'm coming up on retirement at the end of fiscal 2022.
  Can you discuss free vs pay e-mail and give suggestions for preferred options.

  Of all the big tech companies that will give you free email, I distrust Microsoft the least.  They'll just spam you with advertising, probably, and not report you to the Stasi so long as you are profitable.
  
  For paid solutions, ProtonMail is the benchmark, but they give you very little online storage.
  
  
  
• From Lexistexas:

  So, proof of work, to get on the blockchain requires solution of an algorithm, right? Who comes up with the algorithm? And how do the other nodes on the network know the answer in order to verify it?

  The algorithm is baked into the blockchain when it is designed (which means that a poorly-chosen algorithm can wreck a blockchain further down the road).
  
  The algorithms are designed so that it is hard to compute the right answer, but easy to verify that a supplied answer is correct.  This generally involves very large prime numbers and probably elves.
  
  
  
• From Bildo:

  I have an Asus ROG laptop that won't connect over wifi to any printer. I've checked my router, my firewall, and all the laptop settings I can I think of. No matter what I try I get the same "Wireless Printer Not Found" message. Any ideas as to what's going on?

  Elves again?  Possibly dark elves.  The combination of Windows networking and printers has always involved black magic.
  
  
  
• From The Mantastic Tor:

  You often make references to the Four Essential Keys. I've worked in IT for 25 years and had never heard this phrase before you, and I haven't been able to find any other mention of this phrase in my web searches. So, if you please, which keys are these?

  PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End.  If you are using a modern IDE without those keyboards you often to hold down three, sometimes four keys at once to perform common functions.
  
  I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that on small laptops there is no good solution to this.  Either the keys are missing, or they are present but the keyboard is too crowded or too small, or shifted one key to the left so the keys are never where you expect if you touch type.
  
  

Tech News

• Swapped the 512GB SSD in my Dell Inspiron 14 for the spare 4TB QLC one I had.  (I was originally going to use two 4TB QLC drives in my two Inspiron 16s but then (a) the QLC model went out of stock and (b) Amazon had the TLC model at the same price.  So I got two of those and the QLC drive I already had ended up surplus.)
  
  Opened it up (kind of fiddly), found the SSD slot (hidden but not very), installed the new drive, closed it up, and...
  
  Wouldn't power on.
  
  Opened it back up, swapped the original drive back in, powered it on with the case open - works.
  
  Installed the 4TB drive again, crossed fingers - powered on this time.
  
  Okay, done.  I promise to never open this one up again.  That just leaves, uh, four more laptops to do.  Including the Aero 13 which doesn't even have visible screws.
  
  Speaking of the Aero 13, it came with a big clunky barrel jack charger.  I have a little USB charger on the bedside table with one USB-C port (and four regular ones), and wanted to see if it would charge from that.
  
  Yep.  No problem.  It's only getting 35W so it won't charge very quickly, but since it only gets used in the evening for watching YouTube and checking websites, the chance of me running through its battery life is basically zero anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel, AMD, and TSMC have cut off supply of chips to Russia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China has also been banned from shipping products using those chips to Russia, which doesn't mean they won't do it on the black market anyway, but restrictions on volume and higher prices will fairly quickly strangle Russian IT.
  
  China's own chip production is mostly at 20nm, several years behind Taiwan and South Korea which are both at 5nm, or Intel at 7nm.
  
  
  
• Nvidia was reportedly breached by South American extortion group LAPSU$.
  
  South American extortion group LAPSU$ was also reportedly breached by Nvidia.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The story is Nvidia followed the backchannel to the hackers' own servers, encrypted their data, and is now holding them to ransom.
  
  Many grains of salt with this one, though the initial hacking attempt appears to be confirmed.
  
  
  
• Russia is gradually being cut off from the SWIFT payment network.  (The Guardian)
  
  Russia has $500 billion in foreign reserves...  Digitally.  They can't spend it if no foreign bank will talk to them.
  
  Of course with the idiots currently in charge in Washington DC and Berlin this won't be a clean isolation, but they can turn the thumbscrews tighter day by day.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 28 2022 03:23 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, February 28 2022 07:23 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 28 2022 09:31 AM (PiXy!)

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• Weekends are Question and Answer time, when I'm not working because the blockchain has blown up again, or stuck on a mobile link with a two second ping time, or tied up moving house, or whatever is scheduled for next week that I don't want to think about.
  
  Drop your questions in the comments today and if I don't get crushed by a meteorite I will endeavour to answer them tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Internet is back on.
  
  It was the cable between the modem and the wall socket.
  
  How exactly that got fried by the lightning strike when nothing else was affected I do not know.  Maybe they have optoisolators at both ends to protect against this sort of thing.
  
  First thing I watched was a Minecraft stream with Pina Pengin of Prism Project, possibly the single nicest vtuber in the world, which got gatecrashed by Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect who has a standing invitation to join Nick Rekieta's livestream if that gives you any indication.
  
  
  
• Wait, HoloEN is having an unarchived off-collab?!  Amelia, Ina, Mumei, Fauna, and Kronii are all in the same room.  You can tell by the acoustics - they're terrible.  Right now they're singing the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody, as you are required to by law in any karaoke session involving more than three people.
  
  
  
• The US and allies including Taiwan have announced broad export restrictions of technology to Russia.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• China's supreme court has ruled that fundraising via crypto tokens is a crime punishable by ten years in prison.  (The Star)
  
  Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
  
  
  
• Nvidia is investigating an attack that took down parts of its internal network for two days.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Nvidia says that its "business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted" - which means that the attack was aimed at its R&D.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Russian hacking group Conti basically announced that it's an arm of the FSB.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There might be some independent criminal hacking groups operating in Russia, but for the most part it's government controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
  
  Also in that article: The FSB got hacked.
  
  
  
• The poor you will have with you always because poverty is relative.  (Jeff Kaufman)
  
  Shoots down a Twitter meme about how modern minimum wage earners make less than Bob Cratchit, because minimum wage earners throughout history by definition earn minimum wage.  The meme ignores purchasing power, which has gone through the roof.
  
  
  
• The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible.  (Statistical Modeling and Stuff)
  
  Good article about how you can immediately disregard certain scientific papers as garbage if they claim unreasonably large effect sizes.
  
  So if an article says that babies whose mothers regularly sang to them average 2 weeks earlier on learning goals than the control group, that's just normally dubious stuff.  But it they claim six months earlier, it's trash, throw it out right away.
  
  
  
• How to use an iPad Pro to power your home office.  (ZDNet)
  
  Step One: Don't have a real job.
  Step Two (optional): Get offended when people point this out.
  
  
  
• The USPS has told the EPA to go fuck itself and is proceeding with the purchase of 150,000 new trucks with internal combustion engines.  (Washington Post)
  
  "If you give us more money, we'll think about also buying some electric ones," they added.
  
  
  
• The world's largest bacterium has a sort of proto-nucleus.  (Science)
  
  Bacteria normally have their DNA just scattered about like toys in a kid's bedroom after a playdate, but this one has it all neatly stored away like that one kid who you just know is going to have a Wikipedia page before they turn 21.
  
  Also of note is the size: It's 9mm long, on average, with specimens up to twice that.  Bacteria are not supposed to do that either.
  
  
  
• How to achieve a completely secure link between two devices that are not themselves secure.  (Quanta)
  
  Quantum.
  
  The difference in this article is that they actually did it - it's not just theory anymore.
  
  
  
• Status pages at large internet companies are garbage.  (The Register)
  
  There was an outage at AWS last week, but you wouldn't know it from their status page or their official announcements - because those are the same thing.  Changing a single indicator from green to yellow on the AWS status page is a management decision, not an automated process.  Without approval, that light stays green even if the entire datacenter just got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
  
  That's where Status Page Status Page comes in.  (Status Page Status Page)
  
  It checks what the status pages for AWS, GitHub, and Slack are saying, compared with what is actually happening in the real world, and goes red if they don't match up.
  
  
  

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Sunday, February 27 2022 09:14 AM (YVq1I)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, February 27 2022 10:57 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 27 2022 12:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: John D at Monday, February 28 2022 01:08 PM (VAiJm)

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