• On August 1, I ventured out into occupied Sydney and bought chicken nuggets, Russia hacked 27 US Attorney's offices, Chinese hackers hacked insecure home routers, physicists built the world's first time crystal - this being the 21st century or something, the GAO told Jeff Bezos to hit the road, Intel's Itanium was finally dead, praise the cube, and the Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China - wait, Amazon China?
  
  
  
• On August 2, we planned to get three of the slimline Intel NUCs and they were immediately discontinued, Thunderbolt 5 was trinary, Google scrapped Google Reader, YAPSP, and Paul Hansmeier continued running the scam that landed him in jail from his jail cell.
  
  
  
• On August 3, Huawei set up an Arm-based datacenter in Moscow for when you want your data backed up by all the world's major intelligence agencies, a dual-socket Epyc motherboard for just over a grand, Windows 10 started blocking PUPs which could have been useful if it worked properly but it doesn't so it isn't, China was hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia, and the Pentagon's new AI could predict what day it would be several days in advance.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 4, the server crashed and I promised to get us migrated to a new server soon and we all know how that turned out - which is to say, I just got a database snapshot over to my new development server, the US government tried to fund $1 trillion of expenditures with $28 billion in revenue, Apple had new video cards, and a keyboard that somehow only worked on a couple of specific Mac models, build your own CDN in 5 hours, Journalists for Censorship were at it again, DRAMless SSDs - just say no, I was getting a Dell - which I did, and it was very nice, and was immediately discontinued, Microsoft ran out of servers, supply chain attacks were getting worse, ten-year-old unpatched Android devices finally lost support, and South Korea declared war on Apple and Google's payment monopolies.
  
  
  
• On August 5, our friend Brickmuppet suffered a stroke - and blogged about it while waiting for the ambulance, my twin HP Spectre X2s turned out to be toast thanks to battery bloat, supercomputing could fix the blockchain said idiots, and the IRS seized $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency.
  
  
  
• On August 6, Apple wasn't spying on you - they were spying on your children, Apple cared so much about your privacy that they wouldn't permit anyone else to violate it, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake chips with their super-efficient low-power cores would eat electricity like popcorn, I was getting a second Dell laptop - and in fact I now have two of that model since it didn't get immediately discontinued, getting put on a secret list as a service (GPOASLAAS), the US government planned to track you everywhere you went, and Google's new cameras worked.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 7, an internal Apple memo called people who opposed their plans to spy on children "the screeching voices of the minority", perpceptual* hashes had the same problem as all AI - they're 90% A and only 10% I, the Tame Apple Press got shredded, WhatsApp joined the pile-on, CalyxOS was Android without the Google, Intel was investing $120 billion in a new chip fab location, the TSVs were coming from inside the die, venue shopping above and beyond, and just how doomed was the blockchain exactly.
  
  * I mean "perceptual" but that typo is too good to fix.
  
  
  
• On August 8, Sydney pissed on the lockdown rules, the Tame Apple Press bit the hand that beat it, you could finally expand the storage on your Playstation 5 which you don't have because you can't get it anywhere, why CAPTCHA photos are so depressig, yeet that router, octal considered harmful to everyone, everyone was collateral damage in the Elastic War, and a long way to a small angry your mom joke.
  
  
  
• On August 9, we looked at SCEditor and pronounced it pretty darn good, th first of those Dells arrived, Edge dived head-first into a giant swirling cauldron of suck, a DMCA takedown notice was sent to Google demanding the removal of links to 127.0.0.1, a long list of broken stuff in Windows 11, testing high-end SSDs across different CPUs, and a 256MB boot partition, why?
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 10, Brickmuppet came back to us at the turn of the tide, anti-government hackers hacked the entire Belarus government, Intel's Arrow Lake targeted AMD's Zen 5 - probably sometime in 2024, Synology took its turn in the massive security vulnerability chair, and the second hardest naturally-occurring substance.
  
  
  
• On August 11, the Radeon 6600XT was a video card, you could finally run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac and it sucked, hackers stole $600 million from Poly Network, a cyrptocurrency exchange, what's wrong with Ethereum: a wrong answer, both QNAP and Synology NASes got targeted by ransomware - though not mine because they're unplugged and turned off right now, and Amazon was awarded a double-top-secret contract to provide cloud services to the NSA because sure why not.
  
  
  
• On August 12, Samsung flipped and folder, the hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network sent them $256 million and a thank you note, NSW police arrested a man posting mean tweets... involving threats to harm horses, so yeah, throw the book at him, and Stardock announced Start11.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 13, Apple needed to be thrown in a volcano - and many Apple employees agreed, DDR5-4800 was the new DDR4-3200, physicists created a Wigner Crystal this time, Reddit was valued at $10 billion somehow, and Twitter push an update that everyone hated. I couldn't remember which one this was - it was their own stupid font. They're still using that thing but they've banned me again so it doesn't really bother me since I rarely see it.
  
  
  
• On August 14, Apple "regretted" "confusion" over its plans to spy on your children, and rolled out checklists to "explain" to customers why it was spying on their children, the WD Black SN750 4TB model was real, the Wuhan Bat Virus Lab was not actually across the road from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market, MacOS 11.5.2 was a 2.5GB patch that fixed - Apple wasn't saying so we don't know, a look at a new QNAP NAS, and Facebook Messenger got end-to-end encryption.
  
  
  
• On August 15, 64GB of RAM is enough for anybody, if you have two of them, it wasn't 1Password's fault that MacOS sucked, and the Perl development community disintegrated.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 16, the Biden Administration admonished the Taliban for being insufficiently woke, everyone wished they had waited a week before airing their dirty laundry, Microsoft wanted to emulate the Belarussian secret police, Russia was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, Huawei was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, T-Mobile said they may or may not have been hacked (spoiler - they were hacked), do not buy the Crucial P2, Nestflix and chill, and this incident report:

  An SUV collided with a bus. The bus collided with a power pole, which fell on the bus and took power out.
  
  The fire station is right next door, but the doors are electrically operated. When they crank them open manually, there are live electrical cables blocking access. The rear exit is blocked by an electrically operated gate.
  
  Meanwhile the SUV is on fire but the passengers on the bus are trapped by the downed power cables.
  
  Then things get complicated.

  
  
  
• On August 17, the Biden Administration leaked the entire secret terrorist watchlist onto the internet - it even got indexed by search engines, the Memorial Health System got hacked, T-Mobile confirmed that it got hacked which everyone already knew, and Chase Bank wasn't hacked - they were just idiots.
  
  
  
• On August 18, Poly Network got all its money back and offerered the hacker half a million bucks and the position of chief security advisor, which seems appropriate, Reichskaren Ardern locked down New Zealand over a single case of Bat Flu, memory prices were coming down, new Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts were expected soon - which didn't happen, an Earth-shattering kaboom, and the critical flaw was coming from inside the house.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 19, researchers showed that Apple's magical neural hashes were broken, this is how you get consent decrees, Raptor Lake would have up to 24 cores sort of, the US Census Bureau got hacked - last year, 46.8 million past and present T-Mobile users had a bad day, and with the ongoing Chinese implosion TSMC was the most valuable company in Asia.
  
  
  
• On August 20, Intel announced the announcement of Alder Lake, their GPU team went full chuuni, Apple's neural hashes collided with reality, LinkedIn had a tiny flaw that let anyone post a job opening on any company's LinkedIn page, OnlyFans committed autotumblrisation, and TikTok was collecting biometric data on its users because of course they were.
  
  
  
• On August 21, Apple announced - we swear we are not making this up - that they were "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" - a direct quote and phrase you might wish to avoid accidentally pasting into your search bar like I just did, Google handed your location data to the police, collaborative filtering didn't work for Chatroulette, and Tesla's D1 hit 362 TFLOPs or 80mpg, whichever came first.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 22, Intel's 12th gen parts outperformed 11th gen parts - on a GPU benchmark, how to beat Windows 11 into submission, Google bribed game developers not to abandon the Play Store, AT&T said they definitely weren't hacked and the database of 70 million customers was fake - which is actually plausible,because these lists are sold to other hackers and its easier to fake it than to actually hack in and get the real data, GM recalled 73,000 faulty Bolts, a judge ruled that California voters had infringed upon the rights of California politicians by, uh, voting, and I found the perfect monitor and it was out of stock - but it eventually came back into stock and right now is on sale at about 25% off so I'm going to get two more of them.
  
  
  
• On August 23, Bus Factor Zero, puppy murder was not the vote grabber it used to be, ShotSpotter was decidedl sus, the latest Firecuda was very fast indeed, Samsung showed of 512GB DDR5 memory modules, a new Mac Mini was allegedly on its way, AMD discussed 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and 4D chiplet technology using hydrophilic Dielectric-Dielectric Bonding with Direct CU-CU bonded interconnects, the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty was based on fake data, and how to get admin access to any Windows machine with a mouse and, um, no, pretty much just the mouse. Oh,and there was a sudden outbreak of very, very Australian vtubers.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 24, over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool leaked private data because nobody ticked the "don't leak private data" box, Western Digital silently swapped out the flash chips in their SN550, AMD CPU pricing returned to Earth, though GPUs remained in orbit somewhere beyond Mars, and IBM's new mainframe CPUs were big chips full of stuff.
  
  
  
• On August 25, the Cerebras CS-2 was a single chip with 850,000 cores using 15kW of power, Google's new motto appeared to be "If you control language, you control thought", Google told its slaves to shut up and get back to work, a hacker stole 600,000 private photos from iCloud by pretending to be from Apple tech support, if you unlocked the bootloader on a Galaxy Z Fold 3 the wheels fell off, and Hololive Indonesia announced auditions for Gen 3.
  
  
  
• On August 26, slavery with benefits, Intel's upcoming 12900K showed early signs of not completely sucking, CanIStillUse was a site tracking feature deprecation the way CanIUse tracked implementation, OnlyFans adopted antidesentumblrarianism, there was a big bug in Geth, and how to escape a hungry bear using math.
  
  
  
• On August 27, with all the component swapping in SSDs we we suggested you just buy a970 Evo Plus - which turned out to also have been the victim of component swapping, Synology had another big bug, though in its networking gear rather than its NASes, and Reddit said no to the Nazis. The real Nazis - the ones who call everybody else Nazis.
  
  
• 
  
• On August 28, Microsoft consigned hundreds of millions of PCs to the landfill, Fractal Design's new case was recalled before it burned anyone's house down which was a nice change, Uncaught RangeError: Value undefined out of range for undefined options property undefined, which Android tablet was right for you, and a teeny tiny HUGE FUCKING BUG in Microsoft's Cosmos cloud database.
  
  
  
• On August 29, Microsoft announced that if you manually install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware you wouldn't get any updates and there was much rejoicing, Asus NUCs had no audio because there were no audio chips, Alder Lake chips could draw up to 350W, that Cosmos DB bug was called "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine at least until December when expectations will get reset like you couldn't believe", and Facebook was banning certain Bat Flu links in private messages.
  
  
  
• On August 30, I added the third verse:

  January 20, 2021 -
  The press goes back to sleep
  After four years
  Of moral outrage
  At being forced
  To pretend
  To do their jobs.
  
  Now again they can bask
  In the warm praise
  Of government apparatchiks
  For asking pre-screened questions
  Regarding the color
  Of the paint
  On the presidential plane.
  
  Some months later
  When everything has gone
  Quite predictably to Hell
  The question on every journalist's lips
  Is how could the public
  Have got all of this
  So wrong?

  That was posted originally to Twitter in three parts. They've since banned me and deleted it, but that's a story for another day.
  
  
  
• Still on August 30, 40% of code suggestions by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contained security vulnerabilities, the new Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 40% faster than the 3995W - if it ever showed up, Google Play turned a profit of $8.5 billion on presumably net revenue of $11.2 billion, and a very large computer case.
  
  
• And on August 31, Arm China hoisted the black flag and began slitting throats, China generally was busy scrubbing that internet thing clean of facts, a roundup of the best consumer hard drives, there was one good small Android tablet - but it was completely unavailable in Australia, a situation I just discovered has been corrected, and a bug in Google's search app prevented some phones from, um, making phone calls.

1 A trend that's really driving me crazy is websites that built their own version of your browser's interface themselves, instead of letting the browser handle it, and then getting it wrong. Mostly commonly is when they invent their own scrollbars.

2 The skinny scrollbar thing--or worse, websites that have infiniscroll but no scroll bars at all--is horrible and everyone who does it should be beaten on the soles of the feet with a broom handle.

3 "This isn't a fully-enabled part"
Yes, and the first test launch of the Ariane 5 didn't meet all the objectives.

4 Youtube tech channels make me thanksful for a) the mute button b) closed captioning c) double-speed playback.  Also, if you scroll down so they/them face is off-screen it's suddenly not painful to watch.

5 And: yes!  50% of the performance at 20% of the power-draw sounds like a win to me.  It's sad that the only way that intel can even come close to AMD's performance figures is at wattages that would make Seymour Cray wince.

6 It will be interesting to see how the 12900 non-K part does.  Fully utilised silicon with 8 fast and 8 efficiency cores but with the power consumption turned down a couple of notches.

• On July 1, the world's fastest SSD was fast - ish, how to install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi, yes, we had no Xboxen, launching virgins into orbit, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon went out with a bang, with 490,000 people tuning in for her farewell stream.
  
  
  
• On July 2, Humble Bundle was not so humble, the Optane P1600X was perfect for doing nothing very quickly, the FTC voted itself new powers, I - apparently by pure psychic energy - voted myself a raise, and Amazon was unhappy with stuff.
  
  
  
• On July 3, Facebook went full Stasi and the usual subjects loved them for it, the Zenfone 8 headed to the US, Oppo merged with OnePlus saving everyone the bother of pretending they were different companies, Intel signed a deal to produce chips at TSMC, dodging that TPM report, Russia launched another attack on US businesses, the tame Apple press were busy conducting that Russian domesticated fox experiment on themselves, kill your IoT devices with an axe, Instagram claimed that it wasn't Instagram, and Twitter moved to protect its target market of drooling idiots from the consequences of their own actions.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 4, Windows 11 was all about security - not yours, theirs, Samsung had a new small tablet that kinda sucked, the Ryzen 5700G kinda didn't suck, Qualcomm headed back to making custom cores, Intel might have been bringing Sapphire Rapids to the desktop - but probably not until 2023, and STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE and also DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 5, managed services companies were disease vectors in a plague-ridden world, how to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine, Qualcomm was headed forwards to 4nm, an SSL certificate chain got taken out by a cosmic ray, Windows on Arm still sucked, and rent seekers sought rent.
  
  
  
• On July 6, we wondered how much it would cost to bribe a bear, how to uninstall Windows 11, we thought - stupidly - that GPU prices would continue to come down, QNAP had another critical vulnerability, and yes, Audacity was suddenly spyware.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 7, Australia was getting a shiny new computer for the National Minecraft and Also Some Astronomy Centre, YouTube went too far and had to walk backwards, Oppo was cheating on benchmarks - poorly, JEDI was cancelled - which turned out to maybe have been the right decision though for the wrong reasons, there was a BIG bug in Windows printing, WSL2 was great unless you did I/O, and the Biden Administration considered sending a sternly worded note to Russia.
  
  
  
• On July 8, npm audit was broken by design - as well as being broken accidentally, the 10Gb switch situation still sucked, neurons used pulse-coded signalling like everyone except apparently neuroscientists thought all along, what browser should you use to replace Chrome (Brave), China was for some bizarre reason gathering DNA samples of millions of women, and YouTube banned Hololive's Houshou Marine - just a small account with 1.4 million subscribers, no reason to check first.
  
  
  
• On July 9, the massive Russian ransomware attack affecting 1500 companies around the world didn't touch backups so everyone just restored from backup and went on with their day, the new Atari console had solid hardware and crap software, API pagination was surprisingly complicated, and by "surprisingly complicated" we mean "a complete nightmare", don't buy the Lexar NM620 SSD, Google dropped their Play Services - for 2013 releases of Android which was kind of understandable, California insisted people were not fleeing the state and that sorry no-one was available to discuss it because they had all moved to Tennessee, and we discovered Pina Pengin.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 10, nothing went horribly wrong in the tech world for an entire day, the NSW state government finally lost the plot (the premier at the time has since resigned and been replaced with someone substantially better), Samsung's 3nm GAA process was on track for 2022 risk production, Backblaze pointed out that you couldn't make money farming Chia, Tencent was spying on children, which I suppose is better than just enslaving them, and Samsung's mobile app to control their washing machines needed access to everything.
  
  
  
• On July 11, just buy Stardock's Object Desktop and be done with it, Journalists for Fascism was at it again, how to merge two Apple IDs into one and other ways to ruin your life, Science Based Medicine imploded their hard-won reputation for not being batshit insane leftist ideologues, and Hope descended a little too hard. (Hope is currently playing Terraria.)
  
  
  
• On July 12, Kaseya - the managed services company that helped 1500 other companies get hacked - patched the vulnerabilities involved, giant pandas were no longer endangered, and a free and open internet was under attack said, uh, Google.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 13, AMD's Threadripper 5000 was expected to launch in August - something I'm pretty damn sure didn't happen, the rainbow dildo butt monkey incident, OpenSearch reached 1.0, SolarWinds again, nuclear powered Bitcoin mining, and the Salton Sea could supply 40% of the world's lithium.
  
  
  
• On July 14, 83% of the world's software developers were burned out, give me /events not webhooks, RabbitMQ had streams, Alder Lake might not suck, AMD-based NUCs didn't suck, Russia took the day off and let have a turn China hacking US companies for a bit, Amazon rolled out end-to-end encryption for doorbells, Adobe updated Fucking Acrobat (TM), how Intel fucked up, Firefox broke Facebook and there was great rejoicing, and the Great EN Vtuber Explosion hit full steam with Nijisanji's second wave.
  
  
  
• On July 15, it hurt to live.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Still on July 15, if you can't code, that routine would let anyone straight in if they simply didn't enter a password, and thus 1500 companies had their data wiped, China hacked governments in Asia instead of companies in America for a while, Microsoft patched 117 vulnerabilities, Twitter scuttled Fleets, firewall your firewalls, and I wasn't biased against Apple, I just hated everyone.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 16, it's not censorship if it's a private company said the censors, Ukraine shut down a football mining operation, Windows printing had another BIG bug, it might be possible to know how many numbers there are, unsafe at any speed including parked in the driveway, and the Steam Deck looked pretty cool.
  
  
  
• On July 17, Google banned distributing anything they don't like for any reason by anyone, Oberon+, Threadripper Pro, NASA got the Hubble working again, an RCE in CDNJS, 25,000 years after walls were invented, scientists figured out what they were for, and Pocket Casts was bought by WordPress.
  
  
  
• On July 18, why, though, HP Australia kinda sucked, Lenovo Australia kinda sucked, more on the UK Post Office embezzlement debacle that turned out to just be buggy accounting software, installing Z/OS on your laptop, Facebook hit back at claims that it wasn't a fascist-run shithole, and the Freedom Phone looked distinctly sus.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 19, there was ANOTHER BIG BUG in Windows printing, BubbaBot as prior art, SQL was annoying, a Pi Pico with a ton of connectors, and a billion rows per minute into SQLite.
  
  
  
• On July 20, President Biden made it perfectly clear that Facebook was not mowing down people in the streets as far as he was aware, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were set to launch, Black 3.0 was even blacker than Black 2.0, Audacity apparently was mowing down people in the streets, China in the computer room with a jumper cable, why I buy Dell, Android TV became recursively worse, and Apple removed an app for spotting fake reviews because Amazon apparently found it inconvenient.
  
  
  
• On July 21, IP addresses randomly disappeared, another BIG BUG in Windows (not printing this time), Amazon's New World vs the RTX 3090, China hacked 13 US oil and gas pipelines - in 2013, the EU banned arithmetic, and fuck systemd.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 22, everyone agreed that the keyboard on the new Razer Blade 14 sucked, what was the definition of NUC anyway, and yet another BIG bug in Windows printing, just not Microsoft's fault this time.
  
  
  
• On July 23, we were going to move to a new server - and will this week, even Global Foundries was expanding, the new Dell XPS 17 also had a crappy keyboard, the Washington Post streamed porn, and free ransomware unlocking keys.
  
  
• On July 24, we threw the blockchain people into a volcano, oh, yeah, those idiots, something was sus in the state of Alder Lake, a time of redemption for crappy GPUs, that nifty Framework laptop shipped, our fascist overlords were the only defense against their fascist overlords, and Journalists for Censorship were at it again again.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 25, Haachama came back to us at the turn of the tide, an update to ChromeOS had a teeny tiny bug, China partied like it was 2010, Apple fixed some teeny tiny WiFi bugs, Microsoft fixed a teeny tiny Windows Domain Controller Bug, Apple's mantra was fuck developers, and we were mad as hell and weren't going to eat bugs anymore.
  
  
  
• On July 26, never look a duck bearing lemons in the mouth, it was too good to be true, nuclear power was expected to decline in efficiency - by 0.5% over thirty years, an feeding the world with demethylated potatoes.
  
  
  
• On July 27, Intel launched its new 7nm process by the simple expedient of renaming 10nm to 7nm, 2023's Meteor Lake could have 192 graphics cores, 2022's 7900XT could have 240 graphics cores (rather more powerful ones), just throw all the blockchain people into the volcano, and the EU threatened to sue every single member state except Germany.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 28, then they came for our gaming PCs, Microsoft said you couldn't dodge the Windows 11 hardware requirements - which turned out to be a lie, Kioxia demonstrated six-level flash memory cells which lasted as much as (checks notes) two hours before losing your data, Cassandra 4.0 and MongoDB 5.0 were out, and the EFF sued the US Post Office over its illegal domestic espionage activities.
  
  
  
• On July 29, the Democrats named people aren't complete idiots as the greatest threat to their grip on power, cutting all of the cords, Google and Facebook required workers who never set foot in an office to be vaccinated, and Apple shut down internal Slack channels because they hate their employees almost as much as they hate their developers and their customers. Apple workers - unionise. No, wait. ... Okay, I have popcorn. Now unionise.
  
  
  
• On July 30, that telepathic raise I mentioned kicked in and was even backdated, which didn't make up for the sleepless nights but was at least something, a standard arrived for LPDDR5X, Dell was just a big doodoo head said other gaming PC makers, Safari was filled with bugs and just generally crappy, China entered into a new era of economic suicide, and HP laptops apparently existed, even in Australia.
  
  
  
  
  
• And on July 31, I was looking at buying a couple of new computers - and five months later I still am, although I have bought a couple of new computers in that timespan, conservatives in Australia attempted political suicide and were only saved by one of their leaders getting caught up in a corruption investigation, resigning, and being replaced by someone at least partly sane, Static.Wiki was Wikipedia only static, idiots and maniacs, obvious security risk was obvious, the EU fined Amazon $888 million, more nastiness on PyPi, and what's a dead hobo here or there?

1 The idiots at arse technica just haven't received the memo on how it's racist to say that chinese companies use slave labour.  Once that's sorted you won't have to worry about those sorts of comments again.

2 a) There's apparently a case that fusion would produce more radioactive contamination than fission.
b) Sustainable energy advocates are still a festering crock of rancid shit.
c)  I would have trouble saying any more on those folks without getting a bit impolite.

• On June 1, Ryzen desktop CPUs received integrated graphics, the 3080 Ti arrived because why not, Wikpedia's own Wikipedia page got hit with a DMCA takedown notice, and Microsoft announced a package manager for managing packages.
  
  
  
• On June 2, Russian hackers - which is to say, Russia - targeted meat processor JBS, everyone banned Belarus, Amazon scored 75,000 own goals, and magical metamaterial microscopes.
  
  
  
• On June 3, Amazon's warehouse injury rates were somehow, like, totally off the charts, man, video cards were HOLY CRAP THAT'S EXPENSIVE, the next version of windows loomed, there would never be a Python 4, Huawei launched its own operating system - Harmony OS - which was a very hastily papered-over version of Android, and don't use Chinese web browsers.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 4, the Supremes reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which had been seen by prosecutors as a convenient way to double criminal charges on almost anything, we gave up and ordered pizzas, firewall your firewalls, and Cloudflare was a big fat bag of money waiting to be sued.
  
  
  
• On June 5, Microsoft blamed "human error" for the suspicious disappearance of inconvenient search results, the Radeon Pro W6800 was a very expensive way to buy a Radeon 6800, Medium was the latest company to post a "no communism on company time" notice, there was nothing more expensive than a free tier, Apple really hated its own developers, and DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
  
  
  
• On June 6, Apple fixed the problem frying M1 Macs' SSDs - which cannot be repair or replaced, all Zen 4 desktop CPUs would have integrated graphics (latest news is that it will just be four RDNA2 clusters, which isn't enough for gaming but is better than nothing), Big Tech discovered that getting socialists elected is a terrible idea, Windows 11, and Amelia from Hololive raised $18,000 for an animal shelter... In three minutes.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 7, Microsoft Edge continued its descent into crapware, Chia ruined everything, and the USAF contracted SpaceX to deliver rocketmail.
  
  
  
• On June 8, Rule One of Never Trust Anyone Club, Quis stealodiet ipsos stealodes, it was the one week of the year when Apple pretended not to hate all its own developers, CPUs were back in stock, and antivirus software became indistinguishable from a virus.
  
  
  
• On June 9, paging James Burke, laptop makers ran out not of CPUs or GPUs or RAM or anything like that but the power interface chip needed to provide Thunderbolt powers, patch all your Adobes, patch all your Windows, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon announced her retirement.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 10, Bitcoin vs. the volcano, ransoming cows, the 3070 Ti arrived in reviewers' hands to a resounding meh, Western Digital and Seagate ramped up production of disk drives - just a bit, knowning full well that Chia would crash, patch your Chrome, Ring said, and a certain foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza indie vtuber gained 200,000 followers overnight.
  
  
  
• On June 11, networks didn't, Intel offered $2 billion for RISC-V designer SiFive, dirt as a service, hackers broke into Electronic Arts' network and discovered there are worse things than chipped Cthulhu on toast, Samsung's security kinda sucked, and Melbourne really sucked.
  
  
  
• On June 12, Microsoft promised they would finally stop updating Windows 10 in 2025, the 11900KB was as fast as the 11900K at half the power and you couldn't have one, TSMC expanded the expansion of its expansion plans, BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize - for documenting China's genocide, where the New York Times won the same prize for covering up Stalin's genocide, Slack considere harmful, and the New York state senate passed a right to repair bill - sort of but not really.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 13, Codecov got hacked because they are retards, Audi / VW got hacked because they are retards, McDonalds got hacked, blockchain ruined everything, China ruined blockchain which was maybe a good thing, no-one was silly enough to announce PLC flash, click on this link, and when in doubt bribe the reviewer.
  
  
  
• On June 14, any sufficiently profound incompetence was indistinguishable from malice, 80% of the audience of the Microsoft / Bethesda E3 stream was watching Hololive, dude, where's my flying car, room 222 got banned, and a prebuilt system that didn't suck.
  
  
  
• On June 15, Apple ruined everything, GaN chargers were small but expensive, there was a new Razer laptop which didn't have the Four Essential Keys because they never do, everyone got hit by ransomware, and the new US National Security Advisor was a complete wanker.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 16, Windows 11 leaked, Amazon blocked FloC too, RAID expansion arrived for ZFS, Google's phishing protection sucked, and exercise bikes got hacked, somehow.
  
  
  
• On June 17, GPU prices were dropping - just not very much, upcoming motherboards for the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs where coming up, Tim Cook said that fundamental human rights were all well and good but not at the expense of, well, expense, President Biden gave Russia a list of things not to attack - yes, really, Amazon blamed everyone else, and Datadog left something unwelcome on the carpet.
  
  
  
• On June 18, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, update your Chrome - yes, again, Carnival joined the ransomware fleet, Ukrainian hackers actually got arrested, and AMD's latest high-end video card was not actually available to purchase, at all, anywhere.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 19, Windows had eight inconsistent UI designs, the US Senate proposed tax credits for new silicon chip fabs - which is far from the worst waste of money they've come up with recently, handy HTML tricks, Russia banned VPNs that were too secure for their liking - and hacked Poland's email servers, Oregon legalised human composting, and I forgot that I was the one who came up with that name
  
  
  
• On June 20, DDR5 RAM was here - only to disappear once there was actually a use for it, QNAP had a dual 100GbE adaptor so you could get hacked 100x faster, North Korea hacked South Korea, yet another news story that was previously an episode of Doctor Who, and journalists turned mental illness into performance art.
  
  
  
• On June 21, the New Yorker tried to blame anime on Donald Trump, carbonised chikuwas, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX was honestly not worth it, Intel promised that its GPUs would eventually not entirely suck, we all sang the Doom song, and I wisely excluded Rust from the list of the three most important programming languages.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 22, we got a leak of the upcoming Ryzen V3000 embedded chip and it looked exactly the same as the latest leak of the upcoming Ryzen 6000 laptop chip - because it is, China continued ruining crypto mining and therewas great rejoicing, being 100% compatible meant reproducing all the bugs too, and ADATA was in the news.
  
  
  
• On June 23, AMD's upscaking solution worked pretty okayish sort of, SiFive caught up with Arm chips from 2017, Brave had its own search engine sort of, a bug found in 800,000 firewalls got patched sort of and the beatings would continue until the smiles improved.
  
  
  
• On June 24, a couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin - I wonder if their remains were ever found, John McAfee was found dead in a Spanish prison, NewsBlur got hacked and held to ransom and restored from backups and was back online in a couple of hours, the Microsoft Store was crashing on Windows but fortuntely not on any of the other operating systems that it doesn't run on anyway, "What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene.", and West Taiwain was working its way forward into 2014.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 25, Microsoft actually got around to announcing Windows 11, you need to fill out the TPM report first, Sydney had its first brush with Bat Flu lockdowns, we remembered when $600 billion was a lot of money, Hong Kong's Apple Daily got written to the blockchain, and someone needed to go into orbit, unplug the Hubble, blow on the connector, and plug it back in.
  
  
  
• On June 26, Macs couldn't run Windows or corporate VPNs, update your Dell SupportAssist - or uninstall it, either works, we had no computers that could run Windows 11 either, kids these days, Mozilla announced Rally, a 100% secure data sharing system that didn't exist, making it really easy for the thiees, and right to unglue.
  
  
  
• On June 27, Microsoft's own flagship Surface Studio 2 wasn't on the Windows 11 compatibility list, Google delayed Floc by two years after the entire world told them to shove it, genocide, schmenocide said YouTube, Huawei was sus, Microsoft signed the package of a Chinese rootkit, and NASA did a software update of a helicopter on Mars.
  
  
  
  
  
• On June 28, the Eternal October begins, Windows 11 didn't need TPM, it just required it, Unicode 14.0 supported Toto, Cypro-Minoan - which no-one can read, Vithkuqi, Tangsa, and Old Uyghur, Binance was refused licenses to operate anywhere, and open offices sucked.
  
  
  
• On June 29, Microsoft didn't know what hardware you needed to run Windows 11 so please stop asking, the Fuck You software pattern, the SafeDollar stable coin plunged in value by, uh, exactly 100%, and with everyone fleeing Google's AMP they rebaited the hook and started fishing again.
  
  
  
• And on June 30, Microsoft apologised for the confusion over Windows 11 and explained that the cheese was supposed to go in the silver cup and the addled mice in the bronze soup bowl, the HP Pavilion Aero looked pretty good actually expect for the limit of 16GB of RAM, yes, those WD My Books got hacked, because the master password was, um, commented out, Russia hacked Denmkar's central bank, and the 700 million publicly accessible emails of LinkedIn users were publicly accessible because they were publicly accessible.
  
  

1 I think the mad race for higher version numbers is silly.  If you rememebr Volkerding's apology circa 2000 . . .

2 Ubuntu does it right.  Year.Month.Update and EvenYear.04 is always LTS.

3 Agreed.  Sensible and clear.  Still, it bows to a hurried sense of number inflation.  At least going back to the 1970s, the idea of versioning was to give end-users (and third party developers) a sense of compatibility:  your word-processor compiled for version 2.02 would probably still run on version 2.4, maybe not on 3.0 though; and then a certain company got into the game of gratuitous version checking.

4 I have fond memories of my pizza-delivery days... in the Eighties. I don't think it would be as much fun now, but if they supplied the car and let me pick the neighborhood (suburbs only, no Dem-run cities), it wouldn't completely suck.

-j

5 "These resources read the User-Agent string of the browser to check the installed version of Chrome. Unfortunately, sites using Duda only read the first two digits of this number."
Wow, that's exceedingly stupid, even for web developers (of whom many, I acknowledge, are not stupid, but as a class, they do seem to go to great lengths to do dumb things).  Goodness, doing a string index to find the - or / or whatever the character that's built into the user agent string so you know how many digits are in the number must take a few hundred machine cycles!

6 If you're assuming that a two-digit value will never overflow, at least pick one that won't overflow until after you're retired.

• On May 1, one third of the staff at Basecamp quit after management put up a sign saying "no communism during business hours", Taiwan banned China, Zen 3+ was/was not cancelled, and PornHub sent out five million DMCA takedown notices.
  
  
  
• On May 2, the Opera browser did something pointless, Ethereum was useless, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency, Huawei was planning a 3:2 desktop monitor - which has now shipped but isn't easy to find, fuck Apple part 793,682, Rocky Linux arrived to avenge the fallen CentOS, octal still considered harmful, and there was no way any of this would immediately go horribly wrong.
  
  
  
• On May 3, being able to skip an update as a service (BATSAUAAS - pronounced "bat sauce"), the future was chiplets, three different words got sued, how to stop Windows 10 from snitching on you, I used some bad words about Twitter but it was entirely justified, nuclear reactors don't freeze, and nice reputation you have there, shame if anything happened to it.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 4, I used bad words about the NBN but it was entirely justified, there was nothing in Australia between the 3060 and the 3090, the end of Flash, and we wondered how Apple and Epic could both lose.
  
  
  
• On May 5, I had a phone and a pen - well, a phone and a tablet, Chia crossed the two exabyte mark, Cinder was a performance-oriented fork of Python - I wonder if that project is still active okay last update was 41 minutes ago I'll take that as a yes, if you updated your Dell's BIOS any time in the last twelve years you had a local RCE, the Exim mail server did that five years better, Instagram stopped the Signal, and the US government broke its own laws.
  
  
  
• On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out, New York proposed banning crypto mining, nobody knew what AMD CEO Lisa Su would announce at Computex (it turned out to be desktop APUs, mobile GPUs, and V-Cache), Belgium crashed, and Twitter rolled out a mean tweet early warning system.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 7, China banned security researchers, Amazon awarded double points for pedestrians, IBM showed off the world's first working GAAFET chip - and has since showed off something better/faster/cheaper, delayed ACKs vs. Nagle's algorithm, Google was the single biggest threat to your online security, and the HP Zbook Fury mobile workstation went up to 128GB of RAM and yet is somehow only available with a basic 1080p display.
  
  
  
• On May 8, even among iOS users only 4% were dumb enough to explicitly allow apps to track them, Intel's desktop integrated graphics kinda sucked, 128 million iOS users got free malware, make sure to update your Foxits, the ACIC declared that only criminals use encryption, and Chernobyl caught fire. Again.
  
  
  
• On May 9, AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APUs were upcoming, the web went backwards, how to do things to stuff, rebooting your computer with another computer, and Colonial Pipeline got hacked.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against COVID information, Apple's AirTags blew a huge hole in privacy for everyone, AMD achieved its highest server market share in basically ever, and worm sushi.
  
  
  
• On May 11, congratulations on your purchase of new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime, Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit - or "counterfeit" products, MIT declared that you're sciencing it wrong, one socket good, two sockets better, gas supplies were set to resume in the Eastern US - eventually, and America was run by retards.
  
  
  
• On May 12, Intel's 11th generation laptop chips arrived and were actually pretty good (I now have a couple and can confirm this), Samsung threatened us with Arm laptops, Boeing 787s apparently were running on Windows 95, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, a the time worth a combined $5.5 trillion, called for government bailouts, and Apple's developer website fell over so maybe they had a point there.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 13, Xiaomi? More like Xiaomeh, the 5.9" Asus Zenfone 8 was one of the smallest Android phones on the market, Gigabyte had a fancy-schmancy 43" 4K monitor but it was pretty expens - hey, that's $500 off right now and I actually have money to spend for a change, and it's not "Cancel Culture", it's consequences, howled the mob as it waved its flaming torches and brandished its pitchforks.
  
  
  
• On May 14, the Biden Administration boosted its cyber posture, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists, Colonial Pipeline allegedly did, so did the DC Police Department, Samsung committed $150 billion to expanding its semiconductor fabs, Microsoft killed its private blockchain service because who uses blockchains anyway, the answer was six, and the price of the Surface Duo crashed from four times what it should be to merely twice.
  
  
  
• On May 15, Europe was useless, AmigaOS 3.2 was out, making Python half as fast as PyPy already is, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were on their way, the Tame Apple press looked at Apple's new products and said meh, and propaganda efforts went fractal.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 16, Framework's modular laptop opened up pre-orders - and turned out to be genuinely good though it still lacks the Four Essential Keys, we waste 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs - well I know I certainly do, and you can't do that in Rust.
  
  
  
• On May 17, the secret was to bang the rocks together, aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com was an URL lengthener, Apple introduced a completely pointless audio technology and at the same time removed the headphone jack, we called bullshit on magic batteries, Huawei was monitoring phone calls in the Netherlands for ten years, and we were Pomu.
  
  
  
• On May 18, Amazon launched Operation Universal Paperclips, Intel's Tiger Lake-H high-end laptop chips arrived and turned out to be pretty good, Amazon S3 access policies were fucked, researchers linked Linear A to Linear B - the name was probably a clue, genocide, schmenocide yet again, and Apple very generously didn't take a cut on products it didn't sell.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 19, which weird hybrid SSD should you buy (hint, the answer rhymes with "none of them"), movcc was a C compiler that only used MOV instructions, Chrome would automatically change your passwords for you because that couldn't possibly cause any problems, Ethereum 2 was coming, no, really you guys, and Twitter climbed into bed with Russia which to be fair is not actively engaging in genocide right this minute. So far as I know.
  
  
  
• On May 20, I was back on double secret probation for suggesting that maybe Jews would no longer willingly climb into boxcars, Libera.Chat sprang from the ashes of Freenode after the owners of Freenode went insane, the founder of Telegram called Apple users "digital slaves", hosting company Hetzner banned crypto mining, Apple's Senior VP for Software Development called MacOS an open sewer, and China got settled into a steady rhythm of banning absolutely everything.
  
  
  
• On May 21, HP's Omen 16 and 17 hade the four essential keys - though this seems to have been corrected with the latest models, the hedgehog knew one very important thing, the Irish High Court declared crime illegal, Google opened a cheese shop, the iPad Pro matched solid hardware with an operating system designed to prevent you from using it, and a breakthrough in the race to 1nm.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 22, underwater flying cars by Friday, dual actuator drives were dumb, Apple said that Apple's App Story monopoly wasn't a monopoly because the company was run by idiots, and the company's digital slaves didn't deserve any better anyway, China continued its communist implosion, the Pareto Principle applied recursively, Microsoft reclaimed the Outer Worlds, the replication crisis accelerated and applied recursively, and Linux kernel maintainers finished cleaning up after the malicious fucks at the University of Minnesota.
  
  
  
• On May 23, you owned nothing, AM5 was on its way, the ThinkPad X1 Nano had the Four Essential Keys, and Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague arrived.
  
  
  
• On May 24, Apple was protecting its customers the same way a farmer protects chickens from foxes, Chia passed the 10 exabyte mark, there were half a million unfilled computer security jobs in the US alone, and a cheap no-name 2.5GbE USB adapter turned out to be pretty good actually.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 25, Mozilla fixed a 21 year old bug, the 5600H beat the 11400H, next year's graphics cards that you won't be able to get ware expected to be twice as fast as the cards that you can't currently get, and Apple was working hard on removing existing features that people actively use.
  
  
  
• On May 26, I was irked by Microsoft, Arm announced three new Arm cores, a million PCs were being sold worldwide each day, the FPGAvoradio, a partial solution to Hilbert's 12 problem, Russia fined Google twelve cents, 15 microsecond access times.
  
  
  
• On May 27, that thing with the mouse that is fixed by disabling HDCP happened to me again, blockchain ruins everything, the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti were on their way, AMD's sales grew 93% year-on-year, Freenode completely imploded, Amazon was buying MGM - did that go through? Still under review as of last month it seems - and it was a fine line between working from home and living at work.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 28, Intel's Alder Lake was expected to arrive before the end of the year - and did, we expected October to be insane which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, how to do all your work on an iPad (the trick is to not have a real job), and AI's core competence was breaking things.
  
  
  
• On May 29, China hacked all the things, Russia hacked whatever China didn't,  security hardware was insecure, Twitch replicated YouTube's screwups from around 2010, USB power delivery got amped up - or rather, volted up, Twitter charged people for the privilege of getting banned for no reason and then lied to, and Apple hated developers nearly as much as users.
  
  
  
• On May 30, Intel quietly released Tiger Lake B and basically no-one noticed, Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August - spoiler: they did not, Microsoft ruined Edge, and Iraq very sensibly banned Bitcoin mining.
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 31, the storage market was - the technical term is fucked - with prices for some drives doubling in the space of a month, Microsoft threatened us with a Windows 10 update, something we would all too soon be nostalgic about, and Apple's next Mac Mini would fix the problems they created with the current Mac Mini, yep, definitely.

1 I mean, l love Kate, but that song always makes me think the turntable is running a bit fast.

2 It's striking, and it launched her career - I think she was only 18 or 19 when she recorded it - but yeah.

3 Well, yes, there wasn't really anything like that in 1979.  Lisa Dal Bello would probably be the closest in terms of "Not sounding like anything else", but she didn't get there until 1981 (her earlier albums are okay, but nothing startling or unusual).  Danielle Dax didn't until 1983.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTLzENNPpFU

• On April 1, the ASRock Z590 Taichi had a thing that spins, TSMC was investing $100 billion in fab expansion and R&D, the EmDrive still didn't work, and taking the world's fastest server out for a drive.
  
  Plus Hololive EN got new costumes.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 2, my main dekstop PC started crashing if I played two YouTube videos at once, Intel's i5-11400 was in stock and not terrible, AMD increased production of Ryzen CPUs and it was eventually enough, and isEven as a service (iEAAS).
  
  
  
• On April 3, we updated our video drivers and our mouse stopped working - the solution is to disable HDCP, I enjoyed my first weekend off in a couple of months and went fishing - in Minecraft, Hynix invested $106 billion in new fabs and R&D, Rocket Lake Xeons were on the way, and Rust leaked your username.
  
  
  
• On April 4, the best CPU was the one you could find on store shelves, the best GPU likewise, GitHub was being used to mine crypto, personal details of half a billion Facebook users were floating around the internet, and power went out at our dataenter, I had to switch over to the backup server and hide some old content but it should all be fixed in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 5, LG stopped making phones, disabling PSF cost 1% in performance, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 6, Oracle lost its long running copyright suit against Google, Edge grew three sizes that day, the ErdÅ‘s-Faber-Lovász conjecture was settled, the new Razer Book 13 lacked the Four Essential Keys, Azure went down dure to a DNS problem, fuck Coloroado, it was a bubble - and still is, speaking of which $2 trillion in cryptocurrency, Yahoo Answers shut down, the anwer was not to hire communists in the first place, everything was in short supply, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 7, fire, flood, and explosions, Ice Lake Xeons scaled up to 40 cores - when AMD already offered 64, 7% of Americans were smart enough to stay off the internet, Autralia was considering its own Section 230, the RIAA was run by idiots, sometimes a silly idea that works is still a silly idea, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 8, EEVBlog returned from its little fire/flood/explosion hiatus, Amazon's SC1 storage was $15 per TB per month, Alienware announced its first AMD laptop since 2007, GnuCOBOL, Twitch Bans Everyone, Facebook didn't give a shit, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 9, Asus announced Ryzen 5000 NUCs which all used Ryzen 4000 CPUs, Intel's DG2 was rumoured to compete with the RTX 3070, 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked, LinkedIn joined the 500 million user leak club, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 10, we submitted a price list to the EU Parliament, Linux was coming to Arm-based Macs - and still is and forever will be, the Ryzen 5900 non-X leaked, dogs is dogs and cats is dogs and squirrels in cages is parrots, an app for installing apps installed malware, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 11, China slapped Alibaba with a $2.7 billion antitrust file and CEO Jack Ma was literally unavailable to comment, everyone got integrated graphics, web sites didn't need to be accessible to people who didn't have internet access, why HJKL, genocide schmenocide, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 12, AMD CPUs were in stock and being snapped up by turkeys peafowl, the 5700G was real, Duck blocked FloC, Apple found a useful feature and fixed it, the legacy media lost its shit, inside Intel's fat NUC, potato chips, Coca Cola, ketchup, Fruche, and quail eggs, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 13, AMD announced the 5800 and 5900 non-X, a different server exploded this time, Amazon release OpenSearch, verbing weirded HTTP, hackers held Dutch cheese to ransom, the Unit Conjecture was false, Intel looked at its record profits and demanded a government bailout, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 14, the HoloEN Minecraft server expired, scammers used fake product recalls to get their hands on graphics cards, Apple ruined everything, Apple and also Google ruined everything, the Dell Inpiron 14 7000 looked nice and I just managed to get one before they stopped making it, millions of IoPoC devices were insecure - gain, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 15, Journalists for Cenorship was at it again, a motherboard only a mother could love, Washington State passed a pro-municipal broadband law, I installed Cinescore - and it worked, bath pizza, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 16, there was a power outage at TSMC's FAB14A, there was a power outage during a storm in Ogden, Utah, Nvidia called RTX 3000 its best product launch ever and you couldn't get one anywhere, don't use Chrome, Twitter worked to reduce bias in its algorithms but not - critical point - in its employees, testing the Raisin 5900X, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 17, everybidy blocked Google's FloC, an encrypted penguin was still a penguin, Python mostly worked, a passively cooled i9-10900, knots in the family tree, Dell spun VMWare back out, the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 lacked the Four Essential Keys but for good reason, Elon Musk channeled his inner D. D. Harriman, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
  
  
  
• On April 18, the trouble with LXD, Beethoven's hamster, and the server was still down but wait - the server was back!
  
  
  
• Still on April 18 but with a working server, always use --instance-only, or --optimized-storage, that works too, thanks for the bonus, I quit, Twitter went down and nothing of value was lost, Intel's midrange 11th gen desktop parts were not terrible, one card only, Intagram for kids was a bad idea, and Facebook allowed governments to lie, something that had never happened before in all human history.
  
  
  
• On April 19, AMD's Epyc Milan was the world's fastest CPU, Van Gogh didn't exist, an Nginx cheat sheet, no-one was driving the car, and even a dead squirrel could get hit on the head by an acorn.
  
  
  
  
  
• On April 20, we got a new new server, what good was AI anyway, barking dogs, screaming babies, and IoT, and multiplying a SPOF by four just creates four SPOFs.
  
  
  
• On April 21, nothing was on fire right at that moment, an 850,000 core CPU, Alder Lake-S Xeon W-1400, Mongita was SQLite for MongoDB, the M1 iMac arrived, Discord turned down $12 billion, and the Geico gecko sprung a leak.
  
  
  
• On April 22, teenagers having knife fights was perfectly normal, the Linux Foundation banned the University of Minnesota, the Zenbook 13 had the Four Essential Keys, a 6k Docker container, we ran Linux GUI apps on Windows, the Russians showed that they could be just as stupid as anyone else, and Intel defeated a zombie patent troll.
  
  
  
• On April 23, we cursed Cogent backhaul links, I got a day off - well, a night off anyway, the best tablets of 2021 were not particularly good, the Post Office was spying on everyone, the EFF sued Proctorio - no, not the game, IBM corrected a mistake, phishing emails looking to steal Twitter account details turned out to be genuine emails sent by Twitter because Twitter was run by idiots, the iMac was overpriced, and honey entered the modern era.
  
  
  
• On April 24, I ate lunch, you couldn't buy a Land Rover, dozens of fraud convictions were overturned in Britain when it was proven that the Post Office couldn't count, unplug your QNAP NAS right now and leave it like that, and we encountered cascading containment failure.
  
  
  
• On April 25, SSDNodes launched in Sydney and I have two servers there that I basically haven't used because this entire year was chaos but at least they're cheap, this is how you get a regulatory crackdown, don't click on this link, the University of Minnesota apologised for getting caught, and Sabrina the Teenage Embezzler.
  
  
  
• On April 26, the naming of names was a nomenclature matter, Apple said that no reasonable person would assume they owned the things they bought, hackers stole Apple's schematics and for some strange reason no-one cared, Twitter was blocking tweets crital of the government, we lost a little on every sale but made it up on volume, we reminded ourselves to look into Envoy, and the Linux Foundation told the University of Minnesota to take a long walk off a short pier.
  
  
  
• On April 27, Basecamp went woke, started going broke, and unlike most companies put two and two together, it was not a defective Xbox CPU, TSMC was preparing to release 4nm and 3nm chips, the MacOS malware filters had a hole in them big enough to drive the Ever Given through sideways.
  
  
  
• On April 28, Arm announced the upcoming V1 and N2 server cores, AMD also announced a record quarter, never run Google ads, Microsoft also blocked FloC, Mangadex was still offline, streaming web browsers to your web browser, and MacOS went one step sideways and two steps down.
  
  
  
• On April 29, Chia voided your warranty, AI dungeon leaked your creepy fetishes you weirdo, and Experian leaked absolutely everything about absolutely everyone.
  
  
  
• On April 30, Chia ate an exabyte, dammit Walter, another reason not to buy an Arm based Mac, Vivaldi blocked those damn cookie popups, and always trust a squirrel with fireworks.
  
  

Disclaimer: Chitter chitter weresquirrels of Jakarta.

1 In fairness, America is wrong to be pushing 'no child labor, ever'. America's public school system seems like it might have objectively worse outcomes than child labor.

As for nuclear power, yeah, pushing solar/wind, which is right now inherently mixed fossil fuel, and pushing against nuclear, is a clear act of evil by American and German regimes. "Oh no, terrorists might get access to fissile material" is obvious bullshit the way both regimes have screwed over counter proliferation efforts against Iran.

2 I agree on the child labour issue, but it's more about embarrassing Pooh Bear and his regime.

3 Child /slavery/ is not a good deed, that I will concede.

The rampant fecklessness of industry sourcing stuff in China from slave labor was wrong.

And we should not have made our employment law so unduly burdensome that expanding into totalitarian slave labor markets seemed like a reasonable idea.  If we had anything going for us, it was that free labor is smarter and more productive.  It very much looks like our self proclaimed rulers were trying to destroy us from very early on.

Xi's preferred pronoun in English is Pooh.  Calling him anything else is deadnaming, and makes trannies kill themselves*.  Xi leads a profoundly incompetent, evil and destructive regime.  If he were the best option for the Han, the Han might as well exterminate themselves, and save pain**.

*I'm joking here, and do not wish to encourage anyone to kill themself.  Please don't, where there is life, there is hope.

**Yeah, the Han have better options.  I don't truck with killing oneself to 'save pain'.  If anyone is considering this, I think it very likely that the state of mind will prove temporary if you wait, and there are a bunch of evil jerks who lie to people who are in serious pain and other difficulties.  

March

• On March 1, AMD's Genoa server chips would have stuff unless they wouldn't - now pretty much all confirmed by updates to the Linux kernel to support said stuff, WASM everywhere - except it went pretty much nowhere, Alexa had 90,000 friends skills, don't plug your Macbook into a USB-C dock, and Microsoft had a patch for that horrifying NTFS bug.
  
  
  
• On March 2, Intel launched their 670p before the 665p even really reached store shelves, no USB-C PD for you, a Pi Pico carrier board with HDMI in software, fried rice was off, and fuck Apple yet again.
  
  
  
• On March 3, lots more details on how the Pi Pico generates HDMI signals in software, the Threadripper Pro hit retail, an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4, the Radeon 6700XT arrived, and the US Navy was convicted of piracy.
  
  
  
• On March 4, CircuitPython was coming to town, SpaceX's Starship SN10 test flight was a complete succ... oh dear, Mozilla had concerns about India probably because they're racist, 117 patches to Grub on the wall, 117 patches to Grub, a lightweight UI toolkit with a 1.3GB SDK, and ladies and gentlemen please stand for the national anthem.
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 5, bring your own damn client, eBay banned sales of the six Dr Seuss books removed from publication because fuck you that's why, HTTPWTF, ceci n'est pas une pomme, Google gave your browser cancer, and Kiara from Hololive got her shadowban lifted whereupon YouTube deleted her last two months of content because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  
• On March 6, Rocket Lake accidentally arrived and was okay I guess (the Rocket Lake laptop chips came later and are actually pretty good), iMac Pro delenda est, and 30,000 Exchange servers got hacked.
  
  
  
• On March 7, Seagate was planning a 100TB hard drive, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was an upcoming D&D game shortly before D&D got woke and went broke - but I'll take a look at it now as it has now released and has a ton of positive reviews, everything you never wanted to know about FFMPEG, and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.
  
  
  
• On March 8, Humble had a Bundle, Hynix shipped 18GB 6400Mbps LPDDR5, there was no serverless, there was just nobody else's servers, how quickly we forget, Dell's XPS 15 still lacked the Four Essential Keys, Google killed Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay, yes, really and freak bread accidents.
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 9, Epyc Milan was about to launch - and did, Lunar Lake popped up in Linux kernel patches, Ice Lake Xeons leaked, Google's UI sucks - probably deliberately, and the most efficient way to solve linear equations turned out to be guesswork.
  
  
  
• On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing edition, this was not the bear you were looking for, and there was an RCE in Git.
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 11, the Xiaomi Mi 11 was a flagship phone priced like a flagship phone, Epic Games sued Apple and Google again, the MGM lion was a paper tiger, and you really shouldn't have been browsing North Korean websites in the first place.
  
  
  
• On March 12, our main MongoDB cluster started to go to pieces at my day job - a clear sign of how the year would proceed, the Razer Blade 15 generally sucked, Alder Lake was going to have a lot of PCIe lanes, and looking inside Cooper Lake.
  
  
  
• On March 13, Rocket Lake was huge, Stronghold Warlords was more Stronghold than Warlords, SQLite 3.35 could drop columns, there were no adults at Google, and we received a warning and failed to recognise it when OVH's SGB2 datacenter burned to the ground.
  
  And Hololive EN Gen 1 celebrated their halfiversary.
  
  
  
  Prism Gen 3, Mooyu, and Nymroot all just celebrated their respective halfiversaries. March was a long long time ago.
  
  
• On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse - a game in which you made a house for crabs - to change its name because it might mislead people, threads are better, anyhting mandatory was forbidden, and Apple wisely killed the HomePod.
  
  
  
• On March 15, Epyc Milan was here, Nvidia hacked its own drivers, WeLeakInfo did, GitLab fell over, and the LG Gram 17 was a definite if expensive maybe.
  
  On March 16, India was confused but had the right spirit, the new USPS truck looked dumb, Azure Active Directory fell over and not for the last time, and a hidden Epyc Milan gem.
  
  
  
• On March 17, Asus showed off a new Thunderbolt 4 expansion card that only worked on motherboards designed specifically with that card in mind making it entirely useless, Rocket Lake actually launched officially after accidenteally leaking out to retail over a week earlier, Apple took up the Google challenge of terrible UI design, and we discovered zombie rap electroswing fusion.
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 18, the 6700XT reached reviewers and was somewhere between pretty good and amazing depending on stuff, HP spileld the a lake of beans, which one was Van Gogh again, building SMB into the Linux kernel was a bad idea, YouTube only had your back inasmuch as they used it for target practice, and Shapecatcher was Shazam for Unicode.
  
  
• On March 19, AMD did not artificially limit crypto mining performance, AWS added Lambda to S3 for and actually useful, 19 antiviri classed uTorrent as malware, and Russia threatened to ban Twitter but still hasn't followed through.
  
  
  
• On March 20, learn science, go to jail, the PCIe 6.0 spec reached a final draft, interrupts updated, Victoria University deleted every file on every PC on their network, and alkalized water was dangerous bullshit.
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 21, we got our Pi Picos onto the internet, Asus launched their version of Intel's useless DG1, Alder Lake was going to bring DDR5, PCIe 5, and more fast, Nividia's unhackable rate limited got hacked again, the Surface Duo could double as a 2D 3DS, and Mini-Zork II was released for the Commodore 64.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 22, the 32 core 3970X was 75% of a 64 core 3990X because TDP is a thing, the 6700 non-XT leaked but never showed up, fuck systemd, the worst possible case, Backblaze accidentally leaked all yourfilenames to Facebook, and it was millions of spiders.
  
  
  
• On March 23, one of the MongoDB nodes at my day job simply dropped dead, a sign of things to come, I set myself up with a Minecraft server, a sign of things not to come, Crystal hit 1.0, MangaDex went very thoroughly offline, and just Windows things.
  
  
  
• On March 24, sorr folks, canal's closed - camel out frount should've told ya, Intel is back, baby, said Intel, Google remove ClearURL because fuck you that's why, Reddit hired a known associate of rapists and paedophiles, tried to scrub all mention of her from the site, and then fired her in the space of 24 hours, and then they came for RMS and the FSF, and Cream of Bat Soup or Anthrax Leprosy Pi?
  
  
  
  
  
• On March 25, Samsung sampled 512GB DDR5 modules, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark, were you pondering what I was pondering*, and the 11700K was a waste of sand.
  
  * I think so, Brain, but where would we find five hundred gallons of lime jello and a polo pony at this time of night?
  
  
  
• On March 26, Qualcomm announced the 780G, with unspeicifed Qualcomm CPU cores because you don't need to know, that ship was still stick, two gigauwus per second, the $69 million 404, and SpaceX dusted itself off and tried again.
  
  
  
• On March 27, it was the stupid questioning the stupid in DC, which Epyc CPU is right for Factorio, and in Minecraft I found diamonds before sheep.
  
  
  
• On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with the backups from the deceased Theodore, I found sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens, testing the NUC 11 as a tiny server, and Haachama's content returned, though not Haachama herself.
  
  
  
• On March 29, Haachama herself returned, there were no Nvidia cards in Australia, that ship got unstuck, I repaired that 12TB MongoDB cluster - or so I thought, octal considered harmful, PHP got hacked, and I had every colour except brown.
  
  
  
• On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy, the database I just repaired was still work - spoke too soon, we unleashed the Pigz, and there were 30 malicious Docker images on Docker Hbu - downloaded a combined 20 million times.
  
  
  
• On March 31, Intel's 11900K was an embarrassment, we found out what mongod --repair did (not much), Arm announced Armv9, Dimgrey Cavefish leaked, TSMC outlined its plans for 4nm, and we didn't yet know the full story of the Ubiquiti hack.
  
  

 

 

1 Stablecoin growth might just be a tiny reflection of your good friend and mine and his fiscal policies and the future of the US dollar.  If the feckless cunts indexed inflation the way it was indexed in 1979, I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at 18-22% right now, with more fun to come.  Let's Go Brandon!

2 "Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI"
It's possible you dodged a bullet.  I had a Ryzen Asus Pro WS Ace whatever x570 and had nothing but trouble with it--I'd bought some G.Skill Samsung b-die 3000MT RAM, even labelled as for Ryzen, and it wouldn't run at XMP speeds at all in that motherboard, plus there were other weird little problems.  Got rid of it, replaced it with a different one, I think a Gigabyte Aorus, and the same ram works at rated speed now, and all the niggling little stability problems are gone.

• On February 1, the Amazon Telescreen was available in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado, for any X build your own X, we lint-picked the MIT license, and Android emulators delivered malware.
  
  
  
• On February 2, Perth caught fire during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been inconvenient, the specs for AMD's Milan server CPUs leaked - accurately as it turned out, Alder Lake-P was on its way - and still is, and the Odroid H2+ had six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports except you couldn't get one and still can't.
  
  
  
• On February 3, Huawei's completely new and original mobile operating system still said Android on the info screen, PCIe 5.0 switch chips were sampling, there was a local exploit on all popular versions of Unix, and Big Tech was whining that some politicians wouldn't stay bribed.
  
  
  
  
  
• On February 4, Google got into a slap fight with Australia, Microsoft made popcorn, AMD shipped a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs which wasn't nearly enough, Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s which wasn't nearly enough, and Mass Effect got high resolution textures.
  
  
  
• On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt, Disqus sucked, Huawei remained on the shitlist, and Haachama taught us how to speak English.
  
  
  
• On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks, Intel fire back against Apple's selective benchmarks with their own selective benchmarks, Fujitsu was working on a 1PB tape cartridge, and Apple was the apatosaurus in the room of software immortality. Plus truth in computer advertising.
  
  
  
• On February 7, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were due next year and still are, we reverse engineered a 1 bit processor, Iran stopped the Signal, apps in the App Store openly lied, an article about privacy issues set 87 distinct tracking cookies, and the internet was full of crazy people.
  
  
  
• On February 8, Google locked the YouTube and Gmail accounts for Terraria and ignored the company's attempts to contact them, Google locked the accounts of one of its own employees and ignored his attempts to contact them, I attempted to make gluten-free donuts and failed, and an Android barcode scanner app with ten million users suddenly turned into malware.
  
  
  
  
  The actresses in these ads are from the pop group Nogizaka46 and can actually play the instruments they are pretending to play.  I had a great video of a drum solo but it's disappeared because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• On February 9, if you needed a 28GBps SSD and couldn't wait for PCIe 5.0 Highpoint had you covered, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worht of Bitcoin, CD Project Red got hacked, Zen 4 could deliver a 40% total performance boost - next year, and we discovered Monkeys R Us.
  
  
  
  
  
• On Fabruary 10, Haachama from Hololive hit a million subscribers, I had no groceries again, Rocket Lake wouldn't work on existing motherboards - despite fitting into the existing socket, Amazon removed a fashion range from its store after a competitor filed a report saying they contained drugs, and fuck Apple.
  
  
  
• On February 11, Amelia from Hololive hit a million subscribers, we compared the Threadripper Pro 399WX to mortal systems, Samsung planned a $17 billion fab for Texas, I air fried baby potateos, Let's Encrypt joined the preppers, what was it with Democrats and fake screenshots, and the Matic blockchain was two million times cheaper than Ethereum. (This has since been corrected.)
  
  
  
• On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council and a bigger bunch of lovable dorks you can't find anywhere, the Biden administration had plans for stuff, Australia introduced legislation to really annoy Google, everyone had package vulnerabilities, and Audible censored a book on censorship. Also, Apple couldn't figure out how to format a disk:

  The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.

• On February 13, I predicted you wouldn't be able to get an RTX 3060 - and though it's been a while, I now have two of those, Rocket Lake was on its way, Amazon claimed that state laws didn't apply to them, YouTube shadowbanned everybody, and a Yandex employee was caught selling access to other people's email.
  
  
  
• On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was an alternative for when the Pi Pico was just too damn large, we remembered that the other person on the tech support call was a human being too - probably, Arm shipped 6.7 billion chips, and 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner, with original toolkit.

• On February 15, the RTX 3060 hit shelves at two to three times MSRP, SELECT * considered harmful, the Pi Pico could output VGA despite having no video hardware at all, and bubble dwellers rose up against reality.
  
  
  
  
  
• On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko, my router caught fire - literally; I burned myself yanking the power cord, the WD Green SN350 was serviceable but overpriced, Clubhouse was sending your data to China, and the idiots at Bloomberg ran another story claiming that Supermicro motherboards were compromised based on absolutely zero evidence.
  
  
  
• On February 17, Coco from Hololive hit a million subscribers despite having her million subscriber stream banned by YouTube, testing the Lenovo Thinkstation P620, Pine64 announced a new Quartz64 SBC, Samsung's new memory chips ran at 1.2TFLOPs, Texas froze over, Adata changed the hardware on their SX8200 Pro SSDs without notification for the third time, and Parler came back online for a few minutes.
  
  
  
  
  
• On February 18, we were briefly blessed when Facebook blocked Australia, we were sad to note that Google was not planning to block Australia, the Spectre x360 14 had a 3000x2000 display and the Four Essential Keys, Citibank blew half a billion bucks and it was not a blockchain bug, and the CEO of Minds was not a lunatic.
  
  
  
• On February 19, Nvidia skorked the 3060, the Aurora A7 had up to seven screens - unusual in a laptop, a leak said that Intel's 12th generation parts would be faster than 11th generation, WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, Photoshop couldn't draw lines, and we discovered indie Indo vtuber Vyolfers, who just just yesterday celebrated the anniversary of her first stream.
  
  This was before the great English-language vtuber explosion, so if HoloEN weren't streaming you had to go hunting for something. Now we have eleven HoloEN girls instead of just five, plus ten in NijisanjiEN, plus thirteen in Prism, which while based in Japan streams almost entirely in English, plus ten in Cyberlive (though I have only found time to watch Lumi). I not only can't keep up with all the content, I can't keep up even with just the content I particularly want to watch.
  
  
  
• On February 20, ethicists behaving unethically, 10Gbit/mm², build your own Voodoo 5 6000, and Brave found a bug and had a fix released in under 24 hours.
  
  
  
• On February 21, bits fell off Boeings, an expansion board for the Pi Pico turned it into the perfect 1980s home computer, leaks of what turned out to be the M1 Max were mostly accurate, and we bound to localhost:0.
  
  
  
• On February 22, Ethereum sucked, we headed off into a Brave New World, liberals got the bullet too, Totalitarianism for Dummies, and we lamented video card pricing that now looks cheap.
  
  
  
• On February 23, unexpected technical difficulties with Chinese online platforms, Facebook sadly unblocked Australia, JPEG XL was JPEG 2000 but fixed, JWCC was in retrospect a terrible idea, Concise Encoding was a universal data file format still only available in Go, and a news article got everything wrong.
  
  
  
• On February 24, a Chrome extension that blocked Google, a review of console architecture in a lot of depth, Betteridge's Law of Quantum, and the trouble with MinIO was Cassandra, and the other problem with MinIO was their entire business model.
  
  
  
• On February 25, AMD was to announce the Radeon 600XT on March 3 which they did, it was expected to sell at double MSRP which it did, and Ubuntu took a chill pill on LTS updates.
  
  
  
  
• On February 26, Redbean was a web server that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD using the same binary, semiconductor demand was 130% of supply, the RTX 3060 was pretty good, all we wanted was an edit button, Australia's stupid link tax law passed through Parliament, and the language of technical difficulties was universal. Humanity will one day be saved by everyone on the planet coming together to try to figure out how to operate the Doomsday Machine.
  
  
  
• On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots, Dell's water-cooled systems were still noise (reportedly the latest models are better), the Sabrent Rocket Q4 was the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive available, YouTube sucked, and we discovered why gluten free chicken nuggets are better than the regular kind.
  
  
  
• And on February 28, mining Ethereum on the M1, Redbean got Lua support, meaning it needed only SQLite to become a universal lightweight app server - and I wasn't the only person to note that because it now has exactly that, Lastpass vs. Lastpass, the last of the dumb TVs, and we discovered we discovered a cheap source of vanilla vodka.

• DDR5 vs. DDR4: Is it time to upgrade your RAM?  No.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Short and sweet.
  
  
  
• A new AI algorithm can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, the structure of proteins.  (Medium)
  
  Conventional protein folding algorithms are painfully slow.  The new algorithm guesses - and gets it right 90% of the time.
  
  
  
• exa is a modern replacement for ls.  (The Exa Website)
  
  Burn the witch.
  
  It's written in Rust.  Which I guess is better than Node.js.
  
  
  
• Rails 7 is here.  (Ruby on Rails)
  
  Okay.
  
  Better than Node.js.  Or PHP.
  
  
  
• Fakku - which started out as a pirate site - filed a DMCA takedown notice against TorrentFreak - which reports on pirate sites.  (TorrentFreak)

1 "For example, exa prints human-readable file sizes by default, so the -h option no longer applies."

Dumber Is Better!â„¢

2 After installing exa in my gentoo chroot: ls -l /var/cache/distfiles/*.crate | wc -l 67

It's maybe not node.js bad, but it's bad.

The meme police they live inside of my chat

The meme police ain't gonna let them do that

The meme police I bonked them all with a bat

Oh nyo...

1 WTH is going on with the German Army?

This probably would have had to be in the works before Merkel's resignation.

I know Germany has being going totalitarian under Merkel.  I know that I've alleged that the East German Communist party was an offshoot of the NSDAP.  I know that I've been suspecting that NATO is de facto defunct.

I'm still a bit surprised.

2 I guess this is the logical endpoint of the Bundeswehr (There were definitely members of the Bundesmarine in the ceremony, if you want to call it that.), given how a plurality of Germans polled regarded the armed forces as an uniformed social welfare delivery service.  When your services' raison r'etre is not being on the cutting edge of national policy, but serving as errand boys and girls for the political cause of the day...You get something right out of the old films and photos of the Parteitag at Nuremburg and Munich.

On the other hand...For a while and not that long ago, the Poles had more Leopard 2 tanks than the Bundeswehr did, and currently have more tanks in total.  There is a better chance of the Poles marching into Berlin at this point, then the Germans marching into anyone else's capital.

And yes, every once in a while, I muse about how maybe the US should have insisted on the Morgenthau Plan after all.

1 There's a special level of Hell for employers that contact people who are on holiday/vacation for some work related problem.
I hope they're adding 2 days onto your holiday for the one day they had to call you in.

2 The end result of that would just be me working seven days a week while piling up infinite annual leave.

3 Now hold on a minute, and let's think this out.  All you have to do is make sure you can cash your leave in, and then quit when you have enough money to retire.

4 For some reason, Princeton appears to see what the University of Minnesota did with Linux and decided that rather than being an example of what not to do, Minnesota's study was something that should be replicated in other fields.

For some reason, the copy of Firefox I was using that I have been careful not to update...Decided to update for me.   I hope Brave (Or if anyone else has another browser in mind.) does not do that, because this is the final nudge I need to jettison Firefox completely.

5

All you have to do is make sure you can cash your leave in, and then quit when you have enough money to retire.

The impossibility of me ever actually taking leave combined with my employer being good about things like cashing out accrued leave is why I can suddenly build my dream computer lab.

6 Dear cxt217,

The only way that I know to completely prevent brave/firefox/chromium from updating is to run a gentoo chroot with version locks in your package.mask (and very likely your package.unmask as well).  As far as I know, there's no way to prevent automatic updates in windows, and it's very difficult to prevent inadvertant updates in most linux distros.
FreeBSD can also manage the trick, but it's not as easy to run as a service under windows.  And the graphics and wireless support aren't "up-to-date" enough, really to run FreeBSD on your laptop, unless your laptop is pretty old.

7 Normal - I bought an old desktop(WIN7) to run some old games I enjoy, that was apparently used in some business.  No games, and locked down very tight.  I get pop-up messages asking me to enable MS updates. I ignore them and only pull down the updates that I want.
Don't know if it because it's an older Windows system or not, but apparently it USED to be possible to shut down auto-updates. Makes me wonder what business used to use this one.

8 "it USED to be possible to shut down auto-updates"
It did.  And Microsoft got tired of being constantly yelled at because of all the people who never updated their systems and got malware, and they looked at Android and Apple phones auto-updating and just said "that's for us."
They were gonna get endless hate either way, but this causes fewer security problems.

9 Pale Moon and Vivaldi seem to be possible to prevent from updating.

MS operating system, with windows 10 it is possible to pause updates for 35 days.

Hate to say it, but I've shifted a lot of my "doesn't work in pale moon, and need it for business" websites to Edge.

10 Linux Mint allows you to turn off automatic updates, including for third party repos registered in Apt and for flatpak.  So not updating browsers wouldn't be that hard.  To prevent accidental updates, you could blacklist a browser version until you are ready to update, though you would have to do this for every version.  They did add in nag notices, but after significant pushback gave a decent amount of granularity in setting their frequency and ability to limit to which ones go out.

11 I was trying to refer to just the browser updates.  Most of them automatically check and update unless you change a setting or two hidden deep within the bowels of the menus.  Brave in particular, runs a background service on windows that updates even if you don't open brave.  I'm not aware of any setting that will stop it either.

You can always compile vimb yourself, if you like to have fun!  Or use lynx.

12 "Brave in particular, runs a background service on windows that updates even if you don't open brave. I'm not aware of any setting that will stop it either."
Delete the task from Scheduled Tasks?  I usually do that periodically.  Chrome doesn't need to check for updates every frickin' hour.