A cricket bat!
Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.

Saturday, February 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 February 2022

Go Fuck Yourself Russian Warship Edition

Top Story

  • 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

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




Disclaimer: Boop.

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Post contains 827 words, total size 8 kb.

Friday, February 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 February 2022

Property Blues Edition

Top Story

  • Found a house I like.  Well, I say like, but that's not quite the right word.  Listed at around the market value of my current place, but (a) the lounge/dining area alone is roughly the size of my entire home, (b) the land area is larger than the land footprint of this entire townhouse complex, and (c) it has gigabit internet available (rare in Australia).

    Catch is it's a bit of a commute.  Like about ten hours.

    On the third hand we don't have an office in Sydney anymore, so I don't have a commute.


  • Samsung shipped a hundred million phones with broken encryption.  (ThreatPost)

    They were quietly notified last year and slipped a couple of patches into the regular updates, so if you've updated your phone since last September you should be good.

    Samsung chose a robust encryption method but got the implementation details wrong, leaving it leaky and prone to attack by unprivileged apps on the phone.


Tech News



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



Disclaimer: Shan't.

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Post contains 325 words, total size 3 kb.

Geek

Adventures In Elevenland

I mentioned that I ordered an HP Aero 13, specifically with Windows 10 because it was 30% off, where the newer model with Windows 11 was only 20% off, and also because I don't want Windows 11, for several reasons not least of which is Windows 11 Home forces you to sign in with a Microsoft account and not just a local password.

So naturally while they charged me for the cheaper Windows 10 model, what they actually shipped me runs Windows 11.

But you can set it up to sign in with just a local password.


The second way - if you goofed and already set up WiFi - is to hit Shift-F10 as that page suggests and just disconnect your WiFi

I also had to toggle the power to get it to restart the setup cycle but it worked fine.

As for the hardware?  Seems nice.  Very light, great screen (2560x1600 at 13" is pretty darn sharp), not slow, though internet speeds here leave something to be desired right now.

The provided charger is a bit of a brick, but it charges from any USB-C charger as well as the barrel jack, so that's not a problem.

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Thursday, February 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 February 2022

A Farewell To PixyLab Edition

Top Story

  • Today has been a shitty day for the world in general.  Also I have to move out of my home for the past decade since I'm renting and the owner is putting it on the market.

    Might be looking to buy this time.  Move to a less expensive area with worse transport, as long as it has good internet access.

    Didn't think I could necessarily swing the deposit but I had completely forgotten about certain financial reserves that have just been sitting there while I've been working 48 hours a day.  So...  I can swing the deposit on a reasonable place.

    (You forgot you had how much money?  Yeah, I've been busy.  Also it's not exactly liquid.)

    Update: Or move out of Sydney entirely and save about a million bucks plus interest. That seems... Inviting.


  • Russia may attempt using cryptocurrency to evade the worst of the incoming sanctions.  (New York Times)

    I can see the headline now: Ruble falls to new low of 40 trillion to the dollar as Russia's crypto reserves drained by bot network Weed_Slut_420.

Tech News



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





Disclaimer: About the other shitty news today - yeah, I know.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:50 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 522 words, total size 5 kb.

Wednesday, February 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 February 2022

5G Or Not 5G Edition

Top Story

  • Internet is still out.  Playing telephone tag with the idiots at my ISP - how the hell can you run an internet business when your only support is by phone?

    Meanwhile I have a 5G phone, a 5G SIM card, and a 5G plan.  What I do not have is a 5G signal, because that would make life too easy.  If I go upstairs and stand by the window I can just about get a second bar on the 4G signal sometimes.

    At least I have a much better mobile plan.  The bandwidth fees I was paying would have quickly added up to the cost of the new phone.


  • I was wrong, we need crypto.  (Hey.com)

    A heartfelt and un-woke post from the guy behind Ruby on Rails, a long-time crypto-skeptic (justifiably) now shocked into being a true believer:
    This is crazy. Absolutely bonkers. Terrifying.

    I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies.

    And that it was the Canadians who brought this on? You might as well have told me that it was really the Care Bears who ran Abu Ghraib.
    I work mostly with Python, though I do like Ruby.  Might be worth taking a look at Rails even though - yep - it does have a Code of Cancer.


  • In a cashless society, freezing someone's bank account is a prison sentence.  (The Hub)
    The fact that weaponizing the financial system against nonviolent protestors and their distant supporters was the government’s tool of first resort should worry anyone who understands the role of civil disobedience in democracy. I would like to think Minister Steven Guilbeault, who was once arrested for scaling the CN Tower to hang a Greenpeace banner, lost a little sleep when he considered that disrupting critical infrastructure is still a common tactic of his environmentalist comrades. But somehow I doubt it. If there is one thing we haven’t seen much of in Ottawa recently, it’s principled consistency.
    Very true.


Tech News


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





Disclaimer: Dirty creature come my way, from the bottom of a crypto lake.  Selling off all my apes, think I've made a big mistake.

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Post contains 723 words, total size 7 kb.

Tuesday, February 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 February 2022

Party Like It's 1999.99 Edition

Top Story

Tech News

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



Disclaimer: All of these things I do, because I don't want to reboot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 339 words, total size 4 kb.

Monday, February 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 February 2021

I Wish You A Stasi Christmas Edition

Top Story

  • Hackers took advantage of the confusion around an update to OpenSea's smart contracts to launch a phishing attack and steal NFTs worth between $0 and $200 million.  (The Verge)

    Apparently they managed to make $1.7 million in real crypto before being caught at it and locked out.  The NFTs can easily be rendered untradeable and worthless, but once sold the cryptocurrency is harder to block.

    So the ALV (Average Laundering Value) of the NFTs - the imaginary hyper-inflated prices they were listed for - was around $200 million, the thieves actually made off with $1.7 million in ETH, and the remaining stolen NFTs are now worth absolutely nothing.


  • Here's how it went down, translated into non-crypto terms:

    1. The Open Seas Zoo was planning on transferring $200 million worth of extremely rare monkeys to a new secure location in a U-Haul with security features and GPS tracking.
    2. The thieves stole an identical truck and added removable U-Haul decals to make it look exactly like the real thing.
    3. On the night of the transfer, they parked their U-Haul right behind the Zoo one and overpowered the driver.
    4. They then directed the monkey wranglers to fill their truck with monkeys.
    5. The original U-Haul was ostentatiously driven off, breaking the speed limit and getting caught on camera before being abandoned in an open field where it would be quickly tracked and found.
    6. Meanwhile the decals were stripped off the fake U-Haul and it was driven sedately from the crime scene and parked under a disused railway bridge where it wouldn't be found.
    7. The thieves now laid low for a few weeks while the police traced the real U-Haul but found no sign of the monkeys.
    8. A month later after the fuss had settled down the thieves could return to the stashed truck at their leisure.
    9. This is all your fault, Brian.
    10. You can have your monkeys back, guys.


  • These crypto enthusiasts are idiots.  (CNBC)


Tech News

  • I have two lights now on my fiber internet box.  Yesterday it had one; it's supposed to have three.  Progress, I guess.


  • I also have the new phone, a new SIM card on a 120GB plan instead of a 2GB plan, and probably a 400GB microSD card.  I say probably because I accidentally bought it from a third-party vendor when ordering from Amazon, something you should never ever do for SD cards and USB drives.  It's probably real though.  If it's fake, it's a very good fake.  I've bought a dozen or so SanDisk cards and it looks 100% legit.

    The Samsung A52s is very close in specs to the Oppo A91 I already have - same 2400x1080 AMOLED screen, just 0.1" bigger, same camera layout, same 128GB storage - but has an A78 core instead of A73.  It's about 140% faster according to benchmarks, and by far the fastest Android device I own.  Will be interesting to play with it.


  • San Francisco mayor London Breed also wants to flush workers who have fled their offices back into the city.  (SF Chronicle)

    In her case it is rather more literally a shithole.


  • AMD's new Radeon 660M RDNA2 integrated graphics outperforms Intel's fastest Iris Xe offering in most benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)

    On the one hand, it's not a lot faster than Intel's best integrated graphics.

    On the other hand, this is the cut-down version with 6 graphics cores.  The full version has 12 cores and isn't too far behind dedicated GTX 1060 and 1650 desktop cards.  (WCCFTech)


  • Yet another thunderstorm rolling in this evening, but at least this one isn't directly on top of me.


  • Was going to share the worst take in the history of takes, but he got ratioed out of existence.


  • At least in software I can just sigh and deploy to older, crappier, but still working hardware.




  • Speaking of older crappier but still working hardware, 2.82TB of backups transferred so far.  I could reduce that way down with some cleanup effort, but never have the time.

    Compression and dedup on the new backup server reduce the actual storage used to 1.67TB.

    Also, hard drives are really slow when you have 100 million files.


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



Disclaimer: Or is it?

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Post contains 725 words, total size 6 kb.

Sunday, February 20

World

A Question, If I May

What the fucking fuck is this fucking shit?

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Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 February 2022

Pack Your Bags Kids We're Going To Disneyland Edition

Top Story

  • I noticed this too.  Apart from the usual propaganda outlets like the CBC and the mainstream Canadian press, there's a huge amount of bot activity supporting police brutality against peaceful protestors.



    They're not even very good bots.  This really needs an investigation because if what I'm seeing is real, it's a massive scandal.


Tech News


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




Disclaimer: "Well, that's good.  Fantastic, that is.  Twenty minutes to save the world and I've got a post office.  And it's shut."  The Doctor was basically a sysadmin having a bad day.

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Saturday, February 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 February 2022

Curse You GOG Galaxy Edition

Top Story

  • New phone has arrived and joined the dozens of other boxes waiting to be opened.  Yay.  I'll do that on Monday when the SIM arrives as well.


  • New backup server has been deployed and data is trucking over from the old one with the failed drive.  The old server is RAID-Z1 so it can't survive losing another drive; the new one is RAID-Z3 so it takes four drive failures to put it out of action.

    Also enabled compression and dedup on the new server, which slows things down a bit but is probably going to be fine.  


  • Now that people - both workers and business owners - have discovered they mostly don't need to come in to the office anymore, don't need to fight traffic on the one hand and pay obscene rents on the other hand - cities such as New York are basically fucked.  (New York Post)

    New York's new mayor, who, against all probability, seems to be even dumber than the previous one, is telling people that it's time to leave their comfortable, functional home offices and venture once more into his foetid crime-ridden shithole of a city before his budget completely implodes.

    If you don't go into the office, your company will reduce or cancel its lease entirely, and the small businesses around it that depend on passing trade will go broke.

    Elections have consequences, and elections that put idiots into office doubly so.


  • Update: This is the way.




Tech News

  • Thanks GOG Galaxy.  Your unscheduled update just ate my entire mobile data cap.

    Fortunately I'll be moving to a much higher data cap on Monday.  I would have just upgraded the existing plan except I can't because my once-competent service provider was acquired by idiots.


  • Leaks suggest Motorola (Lenovo these days) is planning to launch a camera this year.  (Liliputing)

    The camera will have a 194MP primary sensor, 50MP wide angle, 12MP telephoto, and 60MP selfie.  Oh, and there's a phone attached to that as well.

    You might be saying that a small phone camera cannot possibly have a useful 194MP sensor, because the pixels would be smaller than the wavelength of light, and you'd be correct.  Motorola's engineers have worked around this by the clever trick of making the sensor freaking enormous - by phone standards anyway.

    You'd probably use it downsampled to 50MP, but that is still super-detailed.  If you want a decent take-anywhere camera this might be one to watch.  It won't rival a proper DSLR because of the limitations of its physical size, but you're not going to have a DSLR in your pocket everywhere you go.


  • A detailed look at AMD's new Ryzen 6000 mobile CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is not a huge design change; it's based on existing Zen 3 cores and RDNA 2 graphics.  But this is the first time those have been put together on the same chip, and the chip itself is using TSMC's update 6nm node so it runs faster and cooler than the previous generation.

    If you want to play games on integrated graphics, it is a huge upgrade though, easily twice as fast as 5000-series chips.  It requires DDR5 (or LPDDR5) RAM because DDR4 doesn't have the bandwidth for that level of graphics performance, so that might push prices up a bit.

    It also has built-in support for USB4 at 40Gbps, essentially a store-brand Thunderbolt port.


  • Intel is preparing to launch its new line of Alder Lake NUCs, starting at - oh.  Starting at $1500.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Nice try, Intel.


  • Google Drive is flagging MacOS .DS_Store metadata files for copyright violation.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Google is the world leader in practical applications of artificial intelligence, so this could not possibly be a mistake, they will patiently explain after they delete all your files and terminate your account.


  • Samsung's Galaxy S22 lineup is here.  (ZDNet)

    I could get the S22 Ultra for only, let's see, four times the price of my newly acquired Galaxy A52s.  Given the panic that apparently arose after my abrupt disappearance from the Zoom meeting when I got hit by lightning, I could probably tell work I needed it and they'd pay for it - except that it won't be released for two weeks yet.

    And also I don't need it.  There's that too.


  • (Some) Apple Store workers are planning to unionise.  (9to5Mac)

    Good.



Party Like It's 1959-ish Video of the Day



Thomas Bender commented on this two days ago when my internet was dead.  My internet is still dead, but now I've had a chance to look it up, and it's, well, there it is, listen for yourselves.



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





Disclaimer: It's definitely the voices in my head.

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Post contains 797 words, total size 7 kb.

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