CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Wednesday, May 08
Performance Update
I banned about 700 blogs trying to sell counterfeit sports jerseys and FIFA tchotchkes, and everything is running a lot better all of a sudden.
I banned about 700 blogs trying to sell counterfeit sports jerseys and FIFA tchotchkes, and everything is running a lot better all of a sudden.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:20 AM
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Daily News Stuff 7 May 2019
Doo Doo Doo Edition
Doo Doo Doo Edition
Tech News
- So, I sat down this evening to do my usual little roundup, and before I got the chance to even touch the keyboard, my PC starts playing the "device disconnected" sound on a loop. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo.
This is generally not a good sign.
Turns out my 5TB 2.5" WD drive has gone to meet its maker. Well, not literally, since I haven't sent it back for repair, but near enough. It doesn't power on any more.
Taking with it a whole bunch of stuff I can download again from Steam, Humble Bundle, my 1TB Dropbox folder, or the backup drive on my iMac. But it will take three or four months to get it all back because I'm still stuck on ADSL.
Naturally I had a spare 8TB drive just sitting in a box.
Update: Ah, my Dropbox files were mostly synced to my iMac as well. That will save me downloading half a terabyte or so.
- The Dept. of Energy is building a 1.5 exaflop AMD gaming rig. (AnandTech)
Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs. It will comprise 100 racks of equipment - which is not all that much - and use 30MW of power - which is.
- RedHat 8 is out.
After about 97 years. Sorry, I've already moved to Ubuntu.
The RedHat announcement is vacuous corporate garbage. The product details page linked from there is vacuous corporate garbage. The sysadmin technology brief linked from there is also vacuous corporate garbage. Ugh.
The operating system is probably just fine, but how many layers do I have to drill through to find any information?
- Microsoft will ship a real Linux kernel with WSL2. (Bleeping Computer)
The current version of Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a translation layer to map Linux kernel calls to Windows calls. That's why (for example) LMDB crashes on WSL.
WSL2 should perform file operations much faster as well, since the translation layer slows things down even when it doesn't break them.
Anime Opening of the Day
There is a minor tradition in anime of creating opening credit sequences that are entirely representative of the show but give you no idea what you are about to see. Hinamatsuri is a fine example.
No indication at all of time-travelling apocalyptic combat cyborgs, and yet there are at least three of them in the first season alone.
Picture of the Day
Picture of the Day
Things not to buy from vending machines:
- Sushi
- Hard drives
- Kiwi pellets
- Time travelling apocalyptic battle cyborgs
Disclaimer: Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:18 AM
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Tuesday, May 07
Daily News Stuff 6 May 2019
Pokemon of the Opera Edition
Inside your Pokeball. This show is far better than it had any right to be.
Pokemon of the Opera Edition
Tech News
- How to boost your Bluetooth signal so that everyone within two hundred feet can hack you. (ZDNet)
This seems ill advised.
- Shuttle's XPC Slim DH370 might be less stylish than the Compulab Airtop3 but it's also roughly one third the price. (AnandTech)
Two Ethernet ports, WiFi 5, two serial ports, 8 USB ports, two DisplayPort ports, and HDMI. Room for one each M.2 and 2.5" drives, and two SO-DIMMs. Starting at $330 without CPU, RAM, or storage.
- Seagate is shipping 16TB disk drives. (AnandTech)
Density hasn't improved at all, though - the drives have nine platters.
- The advantage of buying cheap SD cards on Amazon is that when they fail they just lose all your data and don't burn down your house. (The Atlantic)
- Facebook is looking to launch its own cryptocurrency. (Ars Technica)
Double plus do not want.
- We have reached Peak Buzzword. (arxiv.org)
Wait, is that quantum artificial general intelligence on the blockchain, or just the classical variety?
- The future of the future of books. (Wired)
Everything about books has changed, except the books.
The Pokemon of the Opera is There
Inside your Pokeball. This show is far better than it had any right to be.
(What the heck are you doing with embedded start times, YouTube? Stop that. Oh. Never mind. Fixed now.)
Speaking of Merc Storia, the anime covered five quests out of, I think, 43 in the source material. They could do another two seasons without even revisiting the same countries. Unfortunately the game itself is Japanese-language only, so while it will happily run on my tablet I have no idea what I'm doing.
Disclaimer: Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:39 AM
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Sunday, May 05
Daily News Stuff 5 May 2019
Even The Spiders Are Moeblobs Edition
Merc Storia is Bottle Fairy meets Pokemon meets Kino's Journey meets Princess Tutu.
Just when you think you have a handle on it, an opera breaks out.
Even The Spiders Are Moeblobs Edition
Tech News
- You've redecorated. I don't like it. (PC Perspective)
Actually it's not bad at all; they just need to add a recent story list at top right.
- Dell says oh, yeah, Epyc. (Tom's Hardware)
Possibly Intel's chip shortages are biting them, or it's customer demand, or some combination.
- Lego is putting the STEM in Star Wars. (Tech Crunch)
Or possibly vice versa. Anyway, you can build and program your own mouse droid. And R2-D2.
- Why can't I access archive.is when using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS? (Hacker News)
Short answer: Because archive.is is run by crazy people.
- Wondering how a 112-core server with 6TB of Optane DIMMs might perform? Wonder no more! (Serve the Home)
Overall, the answer is meh. Unless you absolutely need the biggest single-image system you can get, two systems with quad Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs will be significantly faster and cheaper.
- I/O is faster than CPU. (PDF)
When your disk drive had an 11ms access time, it didn't matter much how many layers of code were between your application and the write head. Ten years on, a good enterprise SSD can have a write access time of 11µs, but CPUs aren't anything remotely close to 1000x faster.
The solution? Get rid of most of the operating system. Maybe.
Anime Stuff
Merc Storia is Bottle Fairy meets Pokemon meets Kino's Journey meets Princess Tutu.
Just when you think you have a handle on it, an opera breaks out.
Disclaimer: The paella isn't actually anything special.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:13 PM
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Saturday, May 04
Daily News Stuff 4 May 2019
No They're Not Edition
No They're Not Edition
Tech News
- PC hard drive shipments expected to drop 50% in 2019. (AnandTech)
Sort of. This only counts internal hard drives, and the primary drive in most new PCs is a small SSD. External hard drive unit shipments are expected to drop by a couple of percentage points, but capacities are continuing to grow.
- Firefox says you didn't really want those extensions, did you? (Tech Crunch, hat tip Mauser)
Not DNS this time, but an expired certificate.
- Oracle killed Java.
Or at least, it's bleeding out on the battlefield.
- Git is distributed. What the hell are you idiots doing? (ZDNet)
I can't imagine how broken your environment must be if someone hacking your GitHub project causes a complete loss of your code.
- Avoid Jenkins. (ZDNet)
I ran into an article on the theoretical issues with Jenkins just recently (ITNext) and now we're looking at hundreds of plugins with security vulnerabilities. How do you even begin to audit that mess?
This is a problem with any application with a plugin architecture but no plugin security model. Coughwordpresscough.
Anime Opening of the Day
Merc Storia is (a) Bottle Fairy meets Pokemon, and (b) a third-tier anime you probably haven't even heard of, and yet it looks wonderful. Sure they take the shortcut of doing some backgrounds watercolour style with reduced detail, but they are wonderful watercolour style reduced detail backgrounds.
Don't know yet if the story is any good, but I'll give it a couple of episodes just because it's pretty to look at.
Update: Bottle Fairy meets Pokemon meets Kino's Journey.
Don't know yet if the story is any good, but I'll give it a couple of episodes just because it's pretty to look at.
Update: Bottle Fairy meets Pokemon meets Kino's Journey.
Disclaimer: Don't care, got paella.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:32 PM
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Friday, May 03
Daily News Stuff 3 May 2019
Let's Try That Again Edition
Let's Try That Again Edition
Tech News
- Do you miss all those old Flash/Shockwave/Java/Silverlight/weirdproprietarycrap browser games?
Wish you could go back and play penguin golf one more time?
Flashpoint is a universal player that handles all those games.
455MB download, or 102GB bundled with 14,000 games.
- Azure went indigo for a couple of hours due to a DNS screwup. (ZDNet)
Pixy's Law of Inexplicable Application Outages: It's probably DNS.
- Turns out porn was the only valuable thing on Tumblr. (One Angry Gamer)
Who knew?
- Facebook has banned a range of far-right figures including Louis Farrakhan leaving newspapers and wire feeds scrambling to fix their headlines. (Bloomberg)
- Only 112 years to save the planet. (Ars Technica)
Disclaimer: There was more, but my browser crashed. Actually, there wasn't more, but my browser crashed anyway.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:34 PM
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Thursday, May 02
Daily News Stuff 2 May 2019
Node.js And Ethereum Edition
Yeah, it's the Enoden again. 90% of Japan lives within walking distance of Enoshima, as far as I can tell from watching anime.
Node.js And Ethereum Edition
Tech News
- Node.js still sucks.
$ npm install
added 768 packages from 928 contributors and audited 14853 packages in 69.649s
found 1 high severity vulnerability
run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details
$ npm audit fix
fixed 0 of 1 vulnerability in 14853 scanned packages1 package update for 1 vuln involved breaking changes(use `npm audit fix --force` to install breaking changes; or refer to `npm audit` for steps to fix these manually)
$ npm audit fix --forcenpm WARN using --force I sure hope you know what you are doing.
-
Facebook flunks the use/mention distinction much like other simplistic robots. (TechDirt)
Except... The post that Facebook took down for racism actually was racist. TechDirt are playing Social Justice Warrior here rather than Free Speech Warrior. I don't think it should have been removed, but TechDirt is making all the wrong arguments.
-
GNU Guix 1.0 is out.
What is Guix? I don't know. It might be a package manager. I think it's a package manager. It might be a hot dog bun steamer for all that web page tells you.
-
Apple is fighting against California's right-to-repair legislation on the grounds that you could poke your eye out. (ZDNet)
Or something very close to that.
Anime Opening and I Wonder if the Vimeo Tag Still Works of the Day
Yeah, it's the Enoden again. 90% of Japan lives within walking distance of Enoshima, as far as I can tell from watching anime.
Music Video I Didn't Know Existed of the Day
Disclaimer: Don't ask me how my day was. That NPM output was my day.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:52 PM
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Wednesday, May 01
Daily News Stuff 1 May 2019
Everyone Gets A Woodchipper Edition
Everyone Gets A Woodchipper Edition
Tech News
- That backdoor in Huawei's equipment was apparently Telnet. (TechDirt)
Which admittedly should not be active on anything built since 2000 or so, but is not in itself malicious.
- Search 300 million Creative Commons licensed images, most of them terrible.
- Apple cares about your privacy because they don't want anyone else taking away that potential ad revenue. (ZDNet)
- Speaking of Apple, iPhone revenues for Q1 2019 are down 17% from the same quarter last year. (Thurrott.com)
Despite or because of the price increases?
- Facebook is redesigning the worlds busiest web site to not look like hot garbage. (The Verge)
Whether they'll succeed is another question.
Anime Update
Charlotte: Nope.
Asobi Asobase: Nuh-uh.
No Game No Life: No way.
No Game No Life: No way.
Hanayamata: Ya, maybe. And it's on AnimeLab so it's click-and-watch.
Disclaimer: Woodchippers and 6:30 AM do not mix. Seriously, what the fuck?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:37 PM
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Tuesday, April 30
Daily News Stuff 30 April 2019
Okonomiyaki Edition
Well, one of the girls who sang the theme song is Suzuka Nakamoto, better known these days as Su-metal.
The other two members of Babymetal, Yui Mizuno and Moa Kikuchi, got their start with the idol group Sakura Gakuin by performing this song as a duo at an audition.
Update: Everything is on the internet if you dig hard enough.
That's them. That's the audition that eventually led to Babymetal.
Also, there's apparently 51 volumes of ZKC manga now, most of it fan-translated. That's one volume for each episode of the anime. We need a new season, and not that The Unlimited thing either.
Okonomiyaki Edition
Tech News
- Mozilla might be shutting down development of Firefox for Android in favour of the new Firefox for Android. (PC Perspective)
The old one will receive bug fixes regardless, so worst case there will be a short period where it doesn't get feature updates, followed by a brand new version.
- AMD just turned 50 and are celebrating with 50th anniversary editions of CPUs and GPUs. (PC Perspective)
The specs are identical, though; the only difference is the packaging, and (for the GPU) the colour. If you want a cherry red Radeon VII, this is your chance.
- Vodafone found hidden backdoors in Huawei equipment. (Bloomberg)
On the one hand, this is entirely believable of Huawei.
On the other hand, it's Bloomberg, so the story is probably wrong in at least seventeen different ways.
Huawei says those backdoors were already there when they arrived. (ZDNet)
- Amazon is reportedly preparing an ultra-hi-fi music service to compete with TIDAL. (Tech Crunch)
The target audience is idiots with money, or possibly, bats. 96kHz / 24 bit is great for editing because it prevents degradation as mix all the tracks together, but nobody can tell the difference. Except bats, and they only ever sign up for the free trial and then cancel.
Video of the Day
Okay, remember this, which I've posted before because the Zettai Karen Children opening has been scrubbed from the internet?
Well, one of the girls who sang the theme song is Suzuka Nakamoto, better known these days as Su-metal.
The other two members of Babymetal, Yui Mizuno and Moa Kikuchi, got their start with the idol group Sakura Gakuin by performing this song as a duo at an audition.
Update: Everything is on the internet if you dig hard enough.
That's them. That's the audition that eventually led to Babymetal.
Also, there's apparently 51 volumes of ZKC manga now, most of it fan-translated. That's one volume for each episode of the anime. We need a new season, and not that The Unlimited thing either.
Disclaimer: I didn't do it. Nobody saw me. You can't prove anything!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:10 PM
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Monday, April 29
Daily News Stuff 29 April 2019
Gyoza Party Edition
Gyoza Party Edition
Tech News
- Sony just had its most profitable year ever. (WCCFTech)
Mostly due to their entertainment division and strong PlayStation 4 sales, which are rapidly approaching 100 million total units. The electronics side of things is a bit meh, with a few bright spots like camera sensors.
- If you have a Mac with Thunderbolt 3, you can add a Radeon 56 for $1199. (Ars Technica)
If you have a PC, $299.
- The Amiga still isn't dead. (Slashdot)
Stubborn little bugger.
Disclaimer: All the news that fits, we print.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:54 PM
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