Essential Minecraft Mods Video of the Day

• On November 1 since when did Terraria have minecarts, paging Big Hero 6, Intel's DG1 card was coming to the desktop, no, seriously, stop laughing, and there were zero new cases of Bat Flu in Australia.
  
  
  
• On November 2 the Raspberry Pi 400 was 2020's answer to the ZX 80, Samsung entered production on 5nm, San Francisco and New York were screwed, iCloud dropped dead, and NASA's SLS ain't gonna work.
  
  
  
• On November 3 Apple invited everyone into their roach motel, 1984 was a cookbook, the Ryzen 5600X was slightly slower than the 3700X, and undocumented colours on the Tandy Colour Computer. Also, everyone rode the Death Coaster.
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 4 California's Proposition 22 was set to pass, proving that the only solution for a bad law was a worse law that couldn't ever be repealed, Australia's STEM workforce was set to reach parity by 2091, Ant's IPO got spiked, and Twitch suspended musicians for playing their own music. Also, Asa Coco University was on Google Maps.
  
  
  
• On November 5 Xioami unveiled the - I am not making this up - Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini, Ryzen 5000 went on sale and was out of stock in 3.75 Planck times, Florida released three quarters of a billion mutant mosquitoes, and the New York Times was sitting quietly in its corner, drooling and nibbling its hair.
  
  
  
• On November 6 I got annoyed because reasons, Vultr fixed my server in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds - where with IBM Cloud at my day job I have been waiting A WHOLE FUCKING WEEK FOR THEM EVEN TO RESPOND and that's after our account manager escalated the ticket twice, Zen 3 went brrrr, the timing of the release of the new Xbox could have been better, and San Francisco killed itself some more because why not?
  
  
  
• On November 7 Facebook went all-in on reasons, scientists discovered the Nether, "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD was forced to change its name, TokuDB was depreciated, and the gluten-free chilli wasn't.
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 8 Parler hit two million users, my GitLab server imploded, but I was able to scrape it back together from a corrupted virtual machine image and it worked again, Twitter went all in on reasons and locked me out of my account, and it was probably all Casper's fault.
  
  
  
• On November 9 Facebook was only reasons because they loved you, older versions of Android were going to stop working with Let's Encrypt - unless you installed Firefox, so just do that, and running BGP on a Lego brick. No, really.
  
  
  
• On November 10 we got MariaDB temporal tables working and they were great, the Ryzen 5700U was a 4800U, Zoom lied, and the tame Apple press had a brief moment of clarity before it went back to being the tame Apple press. And I encountered Haachama's opening theme for the first time.
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 11 this claim was disputed and also considered harmful, I fucking hated Elasticsearch, Apple announced a new family of desktop iPhones, AMD updated Ryzen Embedded to Zen 2, there was a rather nasty security bug in Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop, Hyundai was looking to buy Boston Dynamics.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 12 ugh, I got some UI that loaded fast, at least, TSMC approved $3.5 billion to construct a 5nm plant in Arizona, and Twitch set itself on fire, not because reasons, just because they are idiots.
  
  
  
• On November 13 Aria tables weren't any better than InnoDB, Facebook tripled down on reasons, passively cooled Ryzen mini-servers from ASRock, MacOS Bug Sir arrived, Apple immediately fucked everything up, preventing Catalina and Bug Sir users from launching apps unless they first disconnected their internet access - and then it got worse, and Target removed a book.
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 14 I was testing Mana at scale - small scale, but scale, X-NAND was NAND only X, Target apologised and put the book back, and just use GZip with ZFS.
  
  
  
• On November 15 if it's too good to be true you probably disabled the full-text index, more bad news for Bug Sir - news that Apple knew about all along and decided to ignore, Amazon was on fire, and spiders.
  
  
  
• On November 16 the first regular launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon, um, launched, Wordpress booted sites because reasons, Free Republic also got reasonsed by their hosting company, iPhone development was a disaster area, and the OnePlus 8T camera was great about half the time.
  
  
  
• On November 17 GitHub reinstated Youtube-dl, the Azure Python library was so large you couldn't deploy it on Amazon Lambda, new graphics cards you can't afford (and also can't get), and a dual-core Intel CPU from 1977.
  
  
  
• On November 18 Resellee wanted to be the Pinduoduo of Southeast Asia, Epic Games sued Apple some more, Ethereum continue to be crap, Twitter announced a new feature that no-one asked for and that would almost certainly not work, and the new blacklist.
  
  
  
• On November 19 I found two hosting providers who don't reasons, we looked at Big Navi, the tame Apple press immediately changed its mind about what you need from hardware when Apple stopped providing what they previously said you needed, and Outbrain joined reasons club.
  
  
  
• On November 20 Twitter's new feature that no-one asked for lasted less than a day before collapsing in a heap, Bug Sir was worse than we could imagine, Zen 2 NUCs arrived from Gigabyte, Devfonts had fonts for devs, the threat of the leapn't second, Buzzfeed bought the Huffington Post because no-one else would, and Journalists For Reasons struck again.
  
  
  
• On November 21 YouTube chat was terrible, Radeon 6000 third-party cards were on their way and expected to solve the supply problems, and end-to-end ECC vs, a 0.1¢ surface-mount resistor.
  
  
  
• On November 22 Asus did not announce their new Tinkerboard 2, Twitter's new fleets feature did not work in any way whatsoever, angry Haskell noises, and ChromeOS without so much Chrome in it.
  
  
  
• On November 23 the Ryzen 5600X was the best mainstream gaming CPU, the ASRock 4x4 didn't suck, and S3 was a semantic minefield.
  
  
  
• On November 24 PayPal screwed up all my paypalments, MyNOR was a homebrew CPU with a one-transistor ALU, Maddy was a mail server, and burning down your own home for fun and profit.
  
  
  
• On November 25 Arm-based Macs were only slightly more open than a brick, Vivaldi was putting the good stuff back into their browser, I was tempted by 32GB DIMMs, memory leaks were working as planned, the Poco M3 was announced starting at $149, and the new Razer Blade Stealth was utterly pointless.
  
  
  
• On November 26 we were back in Twitmo, minks attacked, Cowputers returned, a macro-mini-ITX Epyc server motherboard, and third-party Radeon 6000 cards arrived and lasted about as long as a snowflake on the surface of the Sun.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 27 the midpoint between zero and infinity was 1.5, PHP 8.0 was released, Russia announced its intention to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and AWS collapsed in a heap and took the New York Subway with it.
  
  
  
• On November 28 cheap NVMe SSDs were going, going, gone, we looked at the Western Digital Black SN750, and scientists found water of the coast of Hawaii.
  
  
  
  
  
• On November 29 Journalists For Reasons were outraged that Facebook was still allowing people to post, OpenVPN was ugh, and Ruffle was a Flash player written in Rust.
  
  
  
• And on November 30 the Western Digital Black SN750 was on sale about 40% below its usual Australian price and we grabbed two of 'em, don't make your users mad, 35 years with the Amiga, and did Nvidia sell $175 million worth of RTX 3000 cards directly to crypto miners?

1 Towa's laugh in that roller coaster vid is... wonderful.

2 Apple's bug is my feature! I've been meaning to wipe-and-reinstall my old 12-inch MacBook on Catalina as a sterile travel machine for my next Japan trip (whenever that ends up being...), and now I can do it without manually building an install image.

-j

• On October 1 Humble's Corel Draw Bundle didn't actually contain Corel Draw, the Surface Go was adequate - if you avoided the terribly underpowered entry model, the Surface Pro X was meh, the XMG DJ 15 had all the ports, 3270font was what it said on the tin, the Great Peanut Brittle Shortage of 2020, The Elf and the Hunter's Item Atelier, and the Intel 8051 had 128 bytes of RAM.
  
  
  
• On October 2 Dwarf Fortress turned out to be a great source of low-resolution bitmapped fonts, Transport Tycoon and the Memotech MTX 512, and a leaked benchmark of the 5900X turned out to be pretty damn accurate.
  
  
  
• On October 3 the 11th generation ZenBook 13 wasn't terrible, we took a guided tour of the pixel-packing plant, and Apple patched the fix to their update.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 4 Green Sardine joined Navy Flounder, Sienna Cichlid, and Dimgrey Cavefish, NestedText was 98% less insane than YAML, which is still a bit insane, Ubuntu 20.10 beta was here, and so was PHP 8 RC1 because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• On October 5 running Doom 3 on an RTX 3090 - as a RAM disk, a preview of a preview of the Xbox Series X, Windows kernel timers were horrible, and I was tricked by Western Digital's naming. Also, DOOG.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 6 Nvidia replaced video meeting codecs with video puppets, USB 4 was worse than USB 3, Python 3.9 was out, and I was watching YouTube streams from a parallel universe.
  
  
  
• On October 7 the House Judiciary Committee report on Big Tech came back and recommended taking off and nuking the entire site from orbit, Netflix got indicted, Apples T2 security chip was broken and unfixable - though exploits require physical access, and we got a Baldur's Gate 3 release trailer.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 8 Intel announced its new Rocket Lake desktop lineup which is still months away even now, AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 family, and the former head of Apple's App Store testified that yes, the store's policies are set up explicitly to illegally abuse a monopoly position.
  
  
  
• On October 9 Hololive livestreams were unwatchable - a problem that turned out not the be the streams themselves but Chrome's terrible handling of YouTube chat, the latest Acer Nitro 9 paired Renoir with Turing, and AMD was rumoured to be looking to buy Xilinx, which as it happened, they were, and did.
  
  
  
• On October 10 you could no longer run Star Citizen on a Pentium, not that the game will ever actually see release, the Xeon W-1270 was kind of meh, scientists found a better solution to the Travelling Salesman problem - 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% better, yes, but it was thought to be impossible, and Twitter escalated its war against its own users.
  
  
  
• On October 11 lunasvg was a standalone SVG rendering library, CSV at 2GB per second, automating reversible functions in Julia, and all DRAM has the same access speed. DDR1-333 has the same random access latency as DDR5-6400.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 12 the Seeed Grove Beginners Kit was good value at $19.90, Telepath was a new social network for idiots, JuliaMono had all the glyphs, an office suite in four lines of code, and the Pentagon contracted SpaceX to deliver mail by rocket.
  
  
  
• On October 13 the Ryzen 5600 was probably on its way and probably still is, the Xeon W-1290P was the fastest small-server Xeon and still meh, a new Amiga for 2021, and serverless was always bullshit.
  
  
  
• On October 14 the iPhone 12 came out, Krita 4.4 came out and we couldn't remember what Krita was, sneaky tricks with cartridge ports, Amazon Prime Video wasn't good, but Netflix was worse, and Torchlight 3 got a launch trailer. Apparently the latest update makes it into a fairly decent game.
  
  
  
• On October 15 everything about the Hunter Biden laptop story was true, and everything the mainstream media and Big Tech said about it was a calculated lie. Oh, and something about a room-temperature superconductor.
  
  
  
• On October 16 Twitter crashed, Slack quickly followed suit, we were somewhat irate with the utter bullshit flowing from social media companies' spokespuppets, Nim 1.4 was out and pretty good, and we reported in on the LA jetpack guy.
  
  
  
• On October 17 Ryzen 5000 and liquid nitrogen - two great tastes, Atlassian took a leaf out of Apple's book and told it's customers to get fucked, and GitLab 13.4 is out. While GitLab has had a few bumps along the way, and it's getting kind of memory-hungry, they consistently pump out solid new releases with solid new features for free. They make their money from enterprise customers, and I hope they continue to succeed because it's great stuff. Oh, and PHP sucked.
  
  
  
• On October 18 we got 1.2TB of microSD cards,the New York Post's Twitter account was still locked over an entirely accurate and correct news story, 50Gb Ethernet cards, twenty-five European governments announced plans to set €10 billion on fire, and more Node malware. Note Node itself, other Node malware.
  
  
  
• On October 19 Google and Facebook went to war with Australia's ABC, who are also filthy commies but the old school variety that you don't see so much anymore, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module was, an Intel laptop with Intel graphics from Asus, AMD made its model numbering problems even worse, and there would be four models of the Radeon 6900, maybe. Oh, and God Mode in Windows 10. Literally.
  
  
  
• On October 20 the battery on my nice Dell Laptop was 110% dead, Intel sold its flash memory division to Hynix, and Epyc Milan looked promising. Still does, because it's still not available. If you're a regular user, anyway; apparently Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't having trouble getting them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 21 Osiris Rex landed safely on Bennu, and there was no Dana FreeNas, only Zuul TrueNAS.
  
  
  
• On October 22 the 5950X hit 5GHz with a regular cooler, no liquid anythings, the 3070 could outrun a 2080 Ti but you couldn't get one, OAuth 3 was heading our way to make everything worse, and how the perfectly nice ironclad beetle survives getting run over.
  
  
  
• On October 23 Intel shipped its DG1 graphics chip to an eager audience of nobody, the Ryzen 5600X was fast, Amazon was openly engaging in fraud, Ubuntu 20.10 was out, and a small shark hit one million subscribers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 24 we got a new Penric and Desdemona story, the RTX 3070 Ti died on the vine, leaked benchmarks of the Radeon 6000 family looked great - shame we didn't get leaked availability data, GitLab went down - we did mention a few bumps, Xerox PARC got a DARPA contract and we expressed surprise that either entity still existed, Patreon banned QAnon, Hololive streamed 32 hours of Minecraft content in one day, and The Outer Worlds came out. Oh, and the RIAA Streisanded youtube-dl.
  
  
  
• On October 25 it was fourteen degrees in Sydney in late October, somehow, someone tweeted out the source code for youtube-dl, someone else managed to get it into GitHub's official DMCA repo - sort of, then they came for the Jacobins, some cookies were more equal than others, and programming in Algol on the Atari XL.
  
  
  
  
  
• On October 26 Azerbaijan posted notices of Armenian violations of their ceasefire agreement - but accidentally pushed Send before the violations supposedly happened, escaped cloned female mutant crayfish took over a Belgian cemetery - a headline that could not be beaten in a normal year, Twitter censored warnings about Twitter censoring warnings, passive cooling was hard, the RIAA was full of crap, and the Ryzen 5950X showed up. In Passmark. It went whoosh.
  
  
  
• On October 27 AMD bought Xilinx as we mentioned, Zoom censored warnings about Zoom censoring warnings, 3% of Starlink satellites failed shortly after launch which is about the industry average, and The PlayStation 5 looked terrible. Not its capabilities, the physical design. Seriously, what the hell? And there was water on the Moon.
  
  
  
• On October 28 AMD recorded record records, the RTX 3070 got tested and pronounced "good but nonexistent", GitHub played the good guys - for real, and MacOS would damage your computer.
  
  
  
• On October 29 we ran out of frogs, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 arrived for approximately seven femtoseconds, 5nm was 50% denser than 7nm, the ten quintillion dollar asteroid, and the Scottish National Party is run by Nazis. Oh, and Hololive really likes Queen.
  
  This is probably my favourite clip because of the trouble she goes to to play the song in-game.
  
  
  
  Also the pure Elite Miko energy. Though Haachama's recent video was actually in tune.
  
  
  
• On October 30 Zen 3 was a lot better than Zen 2 which was a lot better than Zen 1 which was vastly superior to Bulldozer which was not very good, Intel released more details of chips that still don't exist, yes we have no video cards, restaurants had had enough of Grubhub's shit, and I played laptop charger badminton.
  
  
  
• On October 31 Big Navi got benchmarked, it was time to launch Twitter Safety into the Sun, Sony reportedly wanted to buy Crunchyroll, and Mars declared independence.

1 Well, based on how long it took me to get a 4800H laptop, I'm sure the 5k stuff will be shipping in volume sometime in 2022.  Still better than Skylake MCCCXIV refresh on 14nm++++++++++++++ that will ship concurrently.

2 Also, one day a couple of years ago I was staring at Roman numerals and it occured to me that the glyphs I and X were pretty obviously just tally marks, and that C and M were later additions based on the Latin Cent- and Mil-.  Now, where do V, L, and D come from?  Well, V is literally just half (the upper) of X, L is the lower half of C, and D is the Latin version of the Greek Lambda, which is either the right or left half of M.

3 Delta, not Lambda.  Sheesh.  I must be drinking or drunk or something.

• On September 1 we looked at some classic Japanese home computers, and... Oh, right, the specs of the initial RTX 3000 cards were leaked.
  
  
  
• On September 2 Ethereum gas prices peaked at 660, Intel launched their Tiger Lake family, whichever one that is, Acer announced some Tiger Lake laptops which were actually quite nice but would be better if they used AMD, Nvidia launched their RTX 3000 range making the earlier leak a bit of a non-event, and bubble memory was surprisingly slow.
  
  
  
• On September 3 we looked more closely at wavetable synthesis both on a 3MHz 10-bit CPU and in modern software, Qualcomm announced the 8cx gen 2 which was the exact same chip as the 8cx gen 1, and Arm announced the Cortex R82 which is an embedded processor capable of directly addressing 1TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• On September 4 Ethereum gas prices peaked at 28,925 - I had forgotten that, restaging Gallipoli with rubber duckies, Melbourne went full Stalin, kicking down doors of people accused of posting on Facebook, Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold 2, and we discovered that NEC had a 9MB floppy drive all the way back in 1988. Oh, and full specs for the Imagine 1000.
  
  
  
• On September 5 we died of dysentery after downloading 100,000 pages of documentation for 1980s computers, text editing for podcast, how modern digital pregnancy tests really work (hint: very small rabbits), and I couldn't do math.
  
  
  
• On September 6 the HP Omen 15 had the four essential keys, we found a PDP-11/70 emulator that runs in your browser, Snap sucked, and HP Basic didn't.
  
  
  
• On September 7 QB64 was a 64-bit Basic compiler, we discovered some really nice game resource packs on Itch.io, the Poco X3 NFC seemed like a decent phone, magenta did not exist, and Google fixed one of the worst Chrome misfeatures.
  
  
  
• On September 8 Microsoft announced the Sbox, the SiPearl Rhea had 72 Zeus cores, Jasper Lake was, well, something, Ryzen 4000 would include 10-core parts (this has very much not happened), Progress bought Chef, and Italy and Australia opened noticed Apple-kouhai. Oh, and Itch.io is just full of resource kits suitable for classic computer games.
  
  
  
• On September 9 BEEEEP, the Sbox cost less than its components, some Western Digital 5400rpm drives turned out to run at 7200 rpm, and squeezing 256 colours into 5 bits.
  
  
  
• On September 10 AMD took over the top ten slots in Passmark entirely (today the best Intel result is a $7500 Xeon coming in at #15 while costing more than every AMD part above it), get your own Threadripper Pro 3995WX system for just $18,000, AMD announced its upcoming Zen 3 and RDNA 2 announcements.
  
  
  
• On September 11 the Surface Duo was a brilliant $299 device priced at $1399, Synology introduced their first desktop 10Gbit device, promising rumours the RTX 3060 Ti surfaced (and it did in fact turn out to be a nice card), and the iPhone camera app normalised the California fires out of existence. Oh, and the SNES hardware was insane. It did a matrix multiplication for address calculation, on every single clock cycle.
  
  
  
• On September 12 the Nightmare 13 was horrible, the Phantom 9 was a Z90, and the Mirage 11 was one louder, I started writing an emulator generator, time to download an Amiga, the first benchmarks of the Radeon 6000 range leaked (and were on the low side of what was actually released), YAML was bad, Apple continued to Apple its customers, and long cat could get its own damn coffee.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 13 multiple register banks were the way to go - and also multiple stack pointers, because why not, the Iconikal SBC was $7.99 on Amazon except they didn't have any, per explodia ad astra, and a look at the classic HP 150 touchscreen PC.
  
  
  
• On September 14 writing a Basic compiler in Python, Nvidia bought Arm, Microsoft did not buy TikTok, Nikola imploded, and the CBP impounded 2000 sets of OnePlus-branded OnePlus ear buds for not being Apple. Oh, and cheating in text mode for fun and legibility, and actual 1980s hardware did it first.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 15 3D-printing BMO, don't write a recursive-descent parser, another nice game resource pack, an 1121 qubit quantum computer, and no-one was going to get a PS5 for Christmas.
  
  
  
• On September 16 the RTX 3080 was great and you can't have one, Apple's new iPads were okay, I guess, China fucked itself, I accidentally reproduced the Microbee Gamma on paper, and yes, Virginia, Nim can compile to a Raspberry Pi.
  
  
  
• On September 17 Sony revealed the PS5 and also the Xperia 5 II, Tiger Lake was the CPU of choice for Dwarf Fortress, an LL(1) expression parser in 100 lines of Python that didn't work, and what happened to the Z800.
  
  
  
• On September 18 SiFive was preparing a desktop RISC-V processor, a rather nice imaginary computer, Apple complained that Epic Games was interfering with its ongoing abuse of its monopoly position, the PS5 could run PS4 games but not PS1 or PS2 games even though the PS4 could run PS1 and PS2 games, and we watched far too many Dragon Spirit videos.
  
  
  
• On September 19 the RTX 3080 was released and immediately sold out, and the PlayStation 5 went up for pre-order and immediately sold out, VueJS hit 3.0, MSX1 was bad, and the Sharp X68000 was good.
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 20 the Amiga was a hell of a lot better than the Atari ST, a motherboard with 20 USB ports, the new Spider Man game was a 105GB download, Intel submitted their secure enclave patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel again - after being rejected thirty-seven times, Russia headed back to Venus maybe, and tricks you could play with one bit.
  
  
  
• On September 21 it wasn't Chrome fucking up the comments but an expired SSL certificate, China was at war with everyone, the US Air Force skunk-worked like they had never skunk-worked before, I knew why the Hololive JP girls referred to to Gura as Same-chan, and the Ars Technica comments were very briefly worth reading.
  
  
  
  Plus twelve hours of high-spec chiptunes.
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 22 Arm announced the N2 and V1 cores, Microsoft bought Bethesda, and the 74LS861 was magic. Also, Elasticsearch took seven seconds to search 28,000 records on a 4.5GHz 24-core Threadripper server.
  
  
  
• On September 23 we had a day, the Samsung Pro 980 abandoned MLC, Intel found some atoms somewhere, and AMD was preparing a next-plus-one generation APU.
  
  
  
• On September 24 HP had a 4K laptop with 8GB of non-upgradable RAM, the RTX 3090 arrived and immediately sold out, Amazon showed off their fall lineup of telescreens, and a 1TB storage module for the Sbox cost nearly as much as the Sbox itself. Also, free anime.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 25 we decoded Intel's 10nm mess, Google decided that an Apple a day was a good way to fuck its customers, and an entry-level Epyc server from ASRock. Entry-level as in it's limited to 1TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• On September 26 Seagate released a buzzword-laden announcement of a new object storage platform that managed to hide the key fact that the whole thing was open source and available for download immediately on GitHub, the RTX 3000 capacitor fiasco, Dimgrey Cavefish joined the school, and Google Maps removed photos of Ayer's Rock.
  
  
  
• On September 27 Navy Flounder joined Sienna Cichlid and Dimgrey Cavefish, PyPy updated to Python 3.7, Toshiba announced 25Gb Ethernet SSDs, and San Francisco asked everyone to please leave.
  
  
  
• On September 28 we fell completely down the rabbit hole, the RTX 3060 would have more cores and worse performance than the 2080 Ti, researchers found the man page for a secret Nazi supercomputer, and tried turning it off and on again, which would explain the remainder of 2020, SectorForth was a complete Forth system that fit in a boot sector, and the source code for the original BBC Micro version of Elite was rediscovered, annotated, and published.
  
  
  
  
  
• On September 29 the Cortex 78AE was an embedded Cortext A78, the Thinpad X1 Nano was a smaller Thinpad X1, reasonably enough, the X1 Fold was a notebook that - novel idea - folded, and DuckDuckGo had about a zillion magic search codes.
  
  Still down the rabbit hole, if you were wondering.
  
  
  
  There are a lot more rabbits now, but Roboco still doesn't have any pants. Actually looking back at this, they've grown up a lot in just six months.
  
  
  
• And on September 30 we never update our operating system, we found someone even worse at SQL extensions than the PostgreSQL team, Neo4j fixed the limitations that made me sideline it previously, and this house.
  
  

1 But yootoob's subtitles actually worked pretty well on the first version!!!
Though, I'll admit, seeing the line "rabbit pants" really cleared up things for me.

2 Roboco still doesn't have any pants.
I first encountered Roboco in this video, and I'll admit to being fascinated by her pants or lack thereof.  I actually spent a couple of hours trying to figure out just exactly how that legwear would work in real life. Once I realized that she's actually an android in canon, it became a lot easier.
Eventually I settled on "bodysuit with the so-called pants attached to that."  Otherwise you're looking at implanting snaps into her pelvis, and that seems like a big deal for a fashion statement. 

• On August 1 Twitter got hacked by a 17-year-old from Florida, because your security is only as strong as the weakest link and Twitter's weakest link was very weak indeed, and meanwhile RedHat made their weakest link 100% secure, so much so that your servers would no longer boot.
  
  
  
• On August 2 the Dragon returned to Earth, Bootstrap Icons was a set of icons for Bootstrap, and Tesla and Google re-invented cookies.
  
  
  
• On August 3 we visited Derepedia, Pleroma was a fediverse node written in Elixir and not a reportable medical condition, except that it also used Node.js which is.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 4 we were reincarnated as a wombat in a world where P=NP, Ryzen hit 6W except it was still Zen 1, Intel's next-gen chips would beat AMD's current-gen chips, and weird shit the PostgreSQL query optimiser taught me. Oh, and Windows Defender defended you from defending yourself. Peachy.
  
  
  
• On August 5 Apple released new iMacs, ranging in price up to A$13,748 and already obsolete, Luau was Lua with types, Parkinson's law applied to web page load times just as every other field of human endeavour, and a SpaceX Starship prototype didn't explode.
  
  
  
• On August 6 Samsung launched the Note 20 and Tab S7, Twitter locked the Trump presidential campaign out of its account over a factually accurate tweet, and the matte finish option on the new iMac turned out to cost as much as two Acer 27" 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• On August 7 MySQL decided to drop 20% of incoming connections, Intel got hacked - sort of - and sort-of confidential documents were sort-of leaked, and Apple forbade game streaming on iOS because they are idiots.
  
  
  
• On August 8 I was playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, apparently, Google bought the creator of Focal smart glasses and immediately bricked all existing devices, the Note 20 was not very good, and Julia could compile static binaries.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 9 Twitter was in talks with TikTok to create the worst website ever envisioned, scientists actually demonstrated working cold fusion - useless for energy production, but working, and several hundred critical bugs were found in Qualcomm's DSP firmware.
  
  
  
• On August 10 Department of Corporate Slave Rabbits came to an end, but to make up for it we got alcohol from air.
  
  
  
• On August 11 the Oppo Reno3 came with an A75, A76, or A77 core depending on where you bought it, the Oppo A52 looked good, Reddit committed slow suicide, the customer was mostly wrong, ASRock showed off a standard ATX EPYC motherboard which might be very interesting now with Epyc 3 close to retail release, China blocked all TLS 1.3 connections, Ceres had an ocean, and 2020 was summed up in one tweet.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 12 a 128-core six-screen laptop for very large laps, LPDDR5 <> DDR5, Genius used Trap Street, there's a hole in the radio telescope, dear Liza, AMD clobbered Intel in value competition even after Intel slashed its prices, and Microsoft announced the Surface Duo, a very nice pocket productivity device for the busy young businessperson on the go in a year when all the busy young businesspersons are sitting at home in their pyjamas.
  
  
  
• On August 13 Humble Bundle packaged Vegas, Sound Forge, and Acid Music Studio at a very reasonable price and if you missed it they're doing it again right now, Intel spilled a deet, Twitter announced their new API and hurriedly reassured developers that the old API wasn't going away because the new one was a train wreck, TechDirt got the DTs and I dumped them from my list of news sources, and I still don't trust Dropbox.
  
  
  
• On August 14 Micron announced GDDR6X RAM - now ued in Nvidia's high-end cards, Ethereum gas prices briefly hit 300, Intel confirmed DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 for 2021, which probably means 2023, SpaceX's Starlink didn't suck, web browsers did, and YouTube went full Kafka. Oh, and the Yam cryptocurrency self-destructed - due to a bug rather than the more usual someone running off with the funds.
  
  
  
• On August 15 notes on writing your own virtual machine, Ubuntu updated the kernel version on an LTS release, apparently forgetting what the S stands for, Clippy got a job with Twitter, and I migrated all my music over from Google Play to YouTube (since Google Play Music is now deceased) and only lost one track out of the thousands I'd uploaded - Deborah Conway's Holes in the Road. ((I chose Google Play Music precisely because it let me upload all the tracks I'd ripped from my own and my father's CD collections.)
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 16 Google Cloud had more death flags than an otome game villain, and a California court found that Amazon does in fact sell the products it sells.
  
  
  
• On August 17 a rather nice and not insanely expensive HP laptop, Notepad++ got banned in China, IBM announced their Power 10, and I realised that Hot Chips was on.
  
  
  
  
  
• On August 18 the Chuwi AeroBook Pro also had a 4K display, but had a five year old CPU to go with it, IBM's Power 10 and z15 CPUs were too complicated to even describe coherently, Big Tech was playing Notice Me Senpai with the DOJ, a strategy that appears to be paying off, just not for them, and a new biography of Dave Brubeck got around to mentioning his birth on page 302.
  
  
  
• On August 19 the A520 chipset was in fact a chipset, Microsoft presented the Xbox Series X, and Baldur's Gate 3 was announced for early access starting September 30. I should check on how that's going.
  
  
  
• On August 20 Intel actually said what Tiger Lake would be, though they've probably forgotten which one it is by now, Melbourne got a brand new 212-storey residential skyscraper - in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the Eiuyuden Kickstarter unlocked its 30th stretch goal.
  
  
  
• On August 21 I started tinkering with my 10-bit home computer emulator, a Lightroom update helpfully freed up large amounts of storage by deleting all your photos, and the Synology DS1520+ was still only gigabit.
  
  
  
• On August 22 the 6502 was fucking weird - and so was the BBC Micro that used it, 95 nearby brown dwarfs were discovered though none closer to us than Alpha Centauri, and Microsoft Flight Simulator required all the hardware.
  
  
  
• On August 23 I tried out Nim for my emulator after running some initial experiments in Python, and it actually worked great, a retail release of Ryzen 4000 APUs sold out in minutes, we found a guide to de-Googling your life, and no-one recycled dead solar panels.
  
  
  
• On August 24 server-side rendering was the new hotness, and Zoom went down. Also, 128k of RAM really is not a lot.
  
  
  
• On August 25 Nim worked nicely, TSMC's 5nm node entered production with a total of one customer, and why not write your configuration files in JavaScript.
  
  
  
• On August 26 birds were kind of dumb, the new version of Firefox for Android was bad, we underestimated the price of the RTX 3090 but not by much, the Zenfone 7 went bziiip and we looked at classic graphics chips from the 1980s.
  
  
  
• On August 27 TSMC pushed GAA back to 2nm, Salesforce recorded reocrd profits and record layoffs, Fucking Elastic recorded a record share price, Arwes made your app look like 2020 as seen from 1980, and ArangoDB had some good stuff.
  
  
  
• On August 28 8-bit Atari systems had an early version of the Amiga Copper chip, you will soon be able to exit your ship in Elite, Google declared war on the Fediverse, First Rule of 30% Fee Club is Do Not Mention 30% Fee Club, and we remembered the HP Series 200 Model 16.
  
  
  
• On August 29 the Eiyuden Kickstarter ran out of ideas for new stretch goals after clearing 45 of them, Marvel cancelled their Arm server processors, Apple told everyone to go fuck themselves, a malloc Geiger counter was actually kind of a good idea, and Objective-Rust.
  
  
  
• On August 30 I completed the programming model for my 10-bit home computer emulator - currently unfortunately on hiatus, Rochester Electronics had 27 billion components in stock in a warehouse the size of Belgium, and Google decided to attempt necromancy on Macromedia Flash only this time with "open" standards that just happened to be entirely controlled by Google.
  
  
  
• And on August 31 we explored how to cheat wavetable synthesis into existence in a 1983 home computer, on a clear dodecahedron you could walk forever, Cloudflare sort of went down only it was someone else's fault and they blamed BGP, Pinterest decided they didn't need a shiny new building in the Bay Area, and Apple was working on an in-house GPU. Oh, and the media started tweeting their "fiery but peaceful" pieces because they have no understanding of how Twitter selects an image to associate with a link.
  
  

1 Picked up the ROG Zephyrus G14 today--the one with the 4900HS, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and RTX 2060 MaxQ (but also switchable iGPU).  Very nice, mostly.  Trackpad is the best I've ever used, although I haven't used a ton of them.  It's like glass, though.  Maybe it even is, I dunno.  Keyboard's good for a laptop keyboard, except the backlighting sucks.  It's fast.  The fans are definitely audible when gaming but they have an unobtrusive pitch unlike some other devices.

2 Rick C: Oof!  I bought one of the MSI Bravo 15s with a 4800H (zen2, 8 core, 16 thread) and it's a frightening monster.  I'm assuming the 4900HS just has a bit more thermal headroom.  Compiling llvm11 with clang takes nearly 20 minutes here.  Not a fan of the "gamer" aesthetic, but it's a nice fast laptop with a good screen, so why am i arguing?

3 The HS chips are a bit weird--the 4900 is clocked a bit higher than the 4800, but the HS suffix instead of a plain H means it's a 35W chip, not a 45W.  In this case the difference between the 4800H and the 4900HS is nominally 100MHz faster.  In practice, while gaming, it doesn't tend to stay near the max boost.  So far it's pretty nice, and it's not nearly as gamery as a lot of other laptops.  I'll know more once I've got a compiler on it but it feels faster than my 8250u.

1 Think it was it related to the southeast AT&T disruption caused by the Nashville bombing?

2 Whenever a major network route gets interrupted - or gets fixed - it takes a while for internet traffic to settle down again.  I think that's what happened; they fixed something for a little while I couldn't reach the server.

• On July 1 Apple killed the PC as we knew it, if "as we knew it" was "a Mac retaining any semblance of openness", Amazon delivered snowcones, and ruining open source projects for fun and profit. Speaking of fun and profit, EOFY reporting requirements suck.
  
  
  
• On July 2 we dove deep into Intel's crappy Lakefield thing, LG produced a 17" laptop weighing less than three pounds, the Rust compiler will never be fast, Microsoft made the start menu somewhat less worse, and the Color Maximite 2 arrived, runnin Basic code about as fast as a 6502 could run assembler. Also a whole bunch of anime was pushed back to 2021.... Which is now almost here.
  
  
  
  Non Non Biyori season 3 airs starting January 10.
  
  
  
• On July 3 don't use archive.org as a CDN, beating the Blub Paradox, 23,000 MongoDB databases got hacked this time, and Facebook shut down Lasso and Hobbi.
  
  Who?
  
  
  
• On July 4 the Ryzen 4700G (which you can't get) matched the 3800X (which you can), Cronk returned, Walmart converted 160 unused parking lots into drive-in theatres, John was kind of a jerk, and Twitter removed sanity checks. Also we wished America a happy Independence Day.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 5 we predicted that the next big thing from Apple was higher prices and shit no-one asked for - and we were right, relativity explained Mercury - both the planet and the element, and we did not end up getting a W-1290P.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 6 Brython was a bad idea, don't buy $2 USB-to-Lightning cables, and using DEX as a dump stat.
  
  
  
• On July 7 Slack imploded, then exploded, Ryzen XT was meh - compared to Ryzen X, which was and is great, pricing for Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs leaked and you still can't get one, and amorphous boron nitride either was or was not the next big thing.
  
  
  
• On July 8 Thunderbolt 4 was on its way, and so was Hot Chips 2020, the Phanteks P500A had room for two motherboards, and the World Health Organisation noted that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague was, and I quote, "a thing".
  
  
  
• On July 9 we were slacking from work due to a back injury and accidentally skipped an entire season of Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya and got very confused, some lunatic turned Redis into a search engine, Reddit was spying on you, and 117 out of 117 home routers failed security scans.
  
  
  
• On July 10 Threadripper Pro appeared - a fully unlocked Epyc for the workstation market, Google banned its competition, I asked a question that I still don't know the answer to, and Facebook broke everything.
  
  
  
• On July 11 1TBVPS.com sold 1TB VPSes, engineering samples for Epyc 3 showed up in benchmark results, and the Commander X16 should have used a W65C265S.
  
  
  
• On July 12 Threadripper Pro started at just 12 cores, presumably for tasks that didn't need much CPU but used a ton of RAM, I first discovered MariaDB support for temporal tables, and the WD Blue SN550 performed good.
  
  
  
• On July 13 Github went down again, WeWork was wildly woverwoptimistic, and no, you idiots, Microsoft is not about to abandon x86.
  
  
  
• On July 14 New York celebrated a mountain of corpses, you couldn't get a Ryzen 3300X - and you still can't, and a crowdfunded AMD NUC appeared just in time to be obsolete.
  
  
  
• On July 15 Google ruined everything, Patch Tuesday fixed 123 vulnerabilities, and the Ethereum disaster was just beginning.
  
  
  
• On July 16 we banned Tencent, Twitter got hacked, and Zen 3 did not support DDR 5, as it turned out. It could, but it doesn't.
  
  
  
• On July 17 it wasn't Twitter accounts that got hacked, but Twitter itself, and with inside help, my perpetual license for FontAwesome 5 got planned obsolencensed, and Patreon shot itself in both feet.
  
  
  
• On July 18 Twitter attackers "were not able to view previous account passwords" - just your email address and phone number, Cloudflare went down and took GitLab, Patreon, Authy, and Downdetector with it - and also Digital Ocean, the Asus PN50 broke cover, and no, you're not shadowbanned, we've just, um, banned your shadow.
  
  
  
• On July 19 Citrine was an incredibly bad idea, remote work could destroy Silicon Valley, and if not there's still a chance of a wandering comet, and the Children's python was not named for its diet after all.
  
  
  
• On July 20 we installed Windows and Steam on a Raspberry Pi - or at least, some unfortunate soul did, Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs, and H.R. 6666 had 66 sponsors.
  
  
  
• On July 21 AMD officially launched their desktop APU range which, yes, you still can't get, AnandTech benchmarked all the things, and Samsung remotely bricked every single one of their Blu-Ray players. With an XML file.
  
  
  
• On July 22 Metacritic saw a bright new future in fraud, 10.16 == 11, and Comet Neowise put on a show over the SpaceX launch pad.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 23 the Xioami Mi 10 offered near-flagship specs at flagship prices, TechDirt was still drunk, PyPy had a huge problem with Mustache partials, and oh, how quaint, the Ethereum gas price spent most of the day below 100.
  
  
  
• On July 24 Intel's 7nm process was a year late, and won't show up for at least another two years, and I was hyped for 5nm Ryzen APUs which also won't show up for at least two years. The next release looks set to be at 6nm, which is a minor (but worthwhile) update to 7nm rather than a brand new node.
  
  
  
• On July 25 TechDirt was tilting at wombats imagining they were windmills, Yahoo nuked its comment system, and Ethereum continued to be Ethereum, a condition that would persist through the remaining months of the year.
  
  
  
• On July 26 Intel's Xe graphics were on their way, no, there aren't going to be hydrogen-powered Airbi any time soon, and it turned out there a world outside of Europe.
  
  
  
• On July 27 PHP 8 caught up with ALGOL 60 - in one specific feature, don't give third-party sites access to your private GitHub repos, do not watch this video.
  
  
  
• On July 28 a Suikoden sequel crashed Kickstarter by giving it too much money, Intel's crunchy ice pickle, S3 considered harmful - for anything that isn't... for anything at all really, Arm-based Macs entered a quantum superposition, and we discovered Campbell's Law. Or rather, we knew of the fact, we just discovered that it was named Campbell's Law.
  
  Oh, and we also fell into the derpy otome villainess isekai manga subsubsubsubsub-genre with Bakarina and Bertia.
  
  
  
  
  
• On July 29 Wikipedia claimed that all DDR5 modules were registered - and still does, Zen 3 was due this year, and you could in fact briefly get one, humans did not live in trees,
  
  
  
• On July 30 a Grub bug nibbled a hole in UEFI, Big Navi turned out to be not quite that big - that leak was probably AMD's compute chip, and Arm's fired CEO of their Chinese division decided he wasn't fired after all.
  
  
  
• On July 31 we journeyed beyond the shoe event horizon, we had a massive philosphers' strike on our hands, and Envoy was an application router supporting layers 3, 4, and 7.

1 "a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar" Wasn't that the old WindowShade extension?  I don't bother any more with minimize and all that: just switch to another virtual desktop.  Except, does Winders offer multiple virtual desktops?  (sorry, I use evilwm, which is full of evil, so I'm not a good source for help, probably)

2 Huh? There's something wrong with crypto right now?
(Trudges off to check coindesk.com/price)
Everything seems mildly ok-ish, it's only up 7% today...

3 That's the problem.  The Slashdot crowd wants to build practical applications that use the blockchain, and for that they need stable prices.

Although Ethereum increased moderately over the year, the price of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain spiked by as much as 60,000%.

4 What are people doing on the Ethereum chain that causes the GAS price to spike 60,000 percent when bitcoin goes up 10%?
(BTW, the first time we discussed this, I went and looked at the data, but since I only pulled down the daily price average of gas I may have been missing all the spikes).

5 I find it slightly humourous that the TomShardware article brings up privacy but never mentions disabling Cortana or "check my spelling as I type".  Also: use google chrome instead of ms edge is risible in the extreme.  Pretty sure these people only use computers the way small children use tamagochis.

6 The thing with Ethereum is you can run code on it, not just send payments.  In theory, anyway; in practice it quickly uses up all the capacity of the blockchain and everything goes to hell.

7 Normal - yeah, I'd certainly trust Google less than Microsoft at this point.  The article at least points out things to be aware of.

8 I'm definitely not drugged enough to understand that Pekora video.  In fact, I'm not sure there ARE enough drugs for me to understand that Pekora video.  WTactualF was that???

9 Now that I've seen the subtitles, I understand the Pekora video rather less than I thought I did.

Though Mom embarrassing Pekora and revealing the origin of her name was priceless. 

• On June 1 the apatosaurus reached the ISS, Australia had no CDA 230 protections, transparency when moderating content was more important than getting it right - and the social networks did neither, and we got an eight-core Elbrus CPU.
  
  
  
• On June 2 Sienna Cichlid reported for NPR, Intel produced a bunch of meh, and an image of an Angel became an Angel in itself.
  
  
  
• On June 3 what was this, a console for ants, Italy tried to shut down Project Gutenberg for infringing on non-existent copyrights, and $90 tablets vs. $730 tablets.
  
  
  
• On June 4 not much happened, though the Chuwi Larkbox was small and Big Navi was big.
  
  
  
• On June 5 Sim Refinery was rediscovered, you wouldn't download a Mac, would you, and China, Russia, and Iran criticised America for not murdering protesters. Meanwhile, Instagram pretty much murdered its own API.
  
  
  
• On June 6 apparently our two million hours was up and one of our high-end 7.6TB MLC PCIe enterprise SSDs suffered from sudden total existence failure, we got the good peanuts, giving China a kill switch for the internet seemed like a bad idea, TechDirt was drunk again, liquid helium was back in stock, and Mint dumped Snap.
  
  
  
• On June 7 Brave didn't do what they were accused of, as it turned out, though they did do something slightly sus, Chromium ungoogled, C&C Remastered, the worst perfect website in the world, and where late the sweet bridge sang.
  
  
  
• On June 8 Tiger Lake was on its way, and nobody outside Intel remembered which one that was, Sapphire Rapids was on its way and nobody including Intel knew which one that was, and FoundationDB was kind of stupid.
  
  
  
• On June 9 your motherboard was simultaneously killing and not killing your shiny new Ryzen CPU, Cerebras sold two computers - for $5 million, Apple might or might not have been planning an Arm-based Mac, and MongoDB 4.4 was almost released.
  
  Oh, and I officially fell down the rabbit hole.
  
  
  
  I was watching for for the first Hololive link as I went through the year, it came earlier than I thought. Figures it was Miko.
  
  
  
• On June 10 I had a fun morning when IBM Cloud - which hosts most of our core services at my day job - dropped dead worldwide due to a routing issue, Baldur's Gate II in your browser, Crystal 0.35 arrived, Lakefield - whichever one that was - had 64 EUs, and peanuts were out of stock.
  
  
  
• On June 11 we compared Windows 2004 with Ubuntu 2004, it only took one packet to take down IBM's Cloud, and Twitter went full Karen.
  
  
  
• On June 12 Itch.io released a good bundle for a bad cause, Sony announced their inverse penguin, Jim Keller told Intel to shove it, async was bad, and I forgot about that time we got hit with thousands of requests per second by Microsoft.
  
  
  
• On June 13 Xbox bigger, PlayStation faster, Zoom bad, Huawei bad, HSBC migrated what to what, and Twitter accidentally did something good.
  
  
  
• On June 14 always mount a scratch puppy, I fell down the fantasy console rabbit hole, and how to grow your project to 13,000 dependencies with one line of code.
  
  
  
• On June 15 AMD's latest APUs continue to work just fine when the fan isn't even touching the chip, Reddit thought GitHub was stupid, and what, are you crazy?
  
  
  
• On June 16 Amazon Prime on the Moon, eight of one, two thirds of a dozen of the other, and social distancing for TCP packets. Oh, and I forgot that Lagrange Points are a thing.
  
  
  
• On June 17 Google lied through their fucking teeth, NBC were only pretending to be insane, 20% of people still trusted social networks, and Bootstrap 5 was on its way.
  
  
  
• On June 18 Intel's Copper Lake - Cooper Lake? Really? Intel's Cowpie Lake platform arrived, Ryzen 4000 desktop parts would arrive this year and indeed sort of did, and Google decided that only they had the right to steal your data.
  
  
  
• On June 19 content moderation at scale was impossible if you hired morons to do it, it was a fucking triangle, Twitter's user interface sucked, Mozilla offered a VPN tailored precisely for people who didn't need it, and Twitter went censorship Inception.
  
  It was at roughly this point during the year that I started to become irritated with the course of events.
  
  
  
• On June 20 the server exploded an event that I am still recovering from, and CERN asked for $24 billion to see if they could accidentally destroy the Earth. As I said at the time, go for it.
  
  
  
• On June 21 Wakfu season four was announced, cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm, and the case of the terrible, horrible, no good very bad MacBook.
  
  
  
• On June 22 I remoted-mounted a CD-ROM from the other side of the planet, the Washington Post reported that Google Chrome was spyware with an online article containing over 150 ads and tracking cookies, Epic Games was trash, and what happened to the Oxford vaccine anyway?
  
  
  
• On June 23 Apple did not mention Arm once, France dumped France's new hate speech laws, the New York Times threatened to doxx healthcare workers, Twitter screwed up but much less than usual, and we got a Foundation trailer from Apple. Filming had to be stopped due to plague, but is apparently under way again.
  
  
  
• On June 24 the server that had the SSD suddenly vanish had more problems, Parler was meh but at least it existed, and everyone went full Kafka.
  
  
  
• On June 25 Amazon announced an absurdly expensive platform for mobile apps, TikTok was spyware, Wirecard left $2 billion in the back of a taxi, the Perl guys pretended Perl 6 never happened, and GitHub renewed its focus on people who don't use GitHub.
  
  
  
• On June 26 Twitter's kafkabot went insane, a very, very accurate emulator for 8-bit computers, embedding Javascript in favicons, and rumours surfaced of an Xbox Series S - that turned out to be 100% accurate.
  
  
  
• On June 27 we dove head first into Brave New World, Telegram sowed the seeds of its downfall, and astronomers found a... thing.
  
  
  
• On June 28 the Pico-8 was upgraded to 32 colours, Python got a case statement, maybe, TikTok and 52 other apps were spyware, and Mixer self-deceased.
  
  
  
• On June 29 GitHub went down worldwide, Russia said very specifically that it had not suffered any accidents at any nuclear power stations when no-one was asking, and blame New York.
  
  
  
• And on June 30 MongoDB indexing was a Swiss Army chainsaw, the modern web was awful, and Reddit went full Twitter.

1 Link to June 26 seems broken.


I haven't followed tech news in years, so the retrospective has turned up a few things very relevant to my interests.  BlueMaxima's Flashpoint in particular.  (The developer behind Gemcraft had put up everything except Chasing Shadows up when I checked a few years ago.  So Chasing Shadows available again is new.  IIRC.)

2   I wish I knew where to go to for good tech news, but a lot of the sites that started out as decent tech news sites have gone full left-wing with tech sprinkles over the last ten years.

3 I've had to prune out a few of my sources for that reason - Ars Technica, Axios, and TechDirt are a lost cause - and one other site for heading full tilt in the opposite direction.

There are a number of good YouTubers, but that's a far less time-efficient medium if you just want to keep up with events.

• On May 1 the Ryzen 3700X was still the new hotness, the sale of .Org was called off, don't use the browser that comes with your phone, server monitoring dashboards sucked - and we didn't know the half of it, and Mail-in=a-Box was.
  
  
  
• On May 2 Intel was up to its old tricks, Quibi died, and we've all had days like [tweet deleted].
  
  
  
  
  
• On May 3 ASRock's IPMI worked, California passed a well-intended law that made things worse, and there was no documentation for LXD networking. (I since figured it out, more or less.)
  
  
  
• On May 4 YouTube banned David Icke for spreading the wrong type of conspiracy theory, and how to get your problems solved for free. (Hint: Post the wrong answer on the internet.)
  
  
  
• On May 5 we set case sensitive = true, B2 gained S3 compatibility, and Julia captured Heisenbugs.
  
  
  
• On May 6 Elasticsearch was a disaster, Microprose returned, Twitter reloaded, aimed at its feet again, and pulled the trigger, and seven times never edit a running shell script.
  
  
  
• On May 7 Microsoft released new Surfaces, the EU said that your site has to work without cookies even if it needs cookies to work, and the 1600AF was a 2600.
  
  
  
• On May 8 Apple, Sonos, and Spotify were battling for the worst developer support crown, USB 4 was DisplayPort, the Ryzen 3300X was really good and good luck getting one, and there would be 600-series chipsets from AMD. (There weren't.)
  
  
  
• On May 9 LG's Vervet was released, Go was still hipster COBOL, and Google put all its eggs in one basket prior to dropping the basket.
  
  
  
• On May 10 Meizu released a 17" smartphone - unless they didn't, Intel's DG1 was faster than a PS4 - unless it wasn't, Tesla moved to Texas, and a paladin checked your dovecote for rogue perfume weasels.
  
  
  
• On May 11 /r/animetitties was safe for work, Swift 5.3 supported Windows though no-one was entirely clear why, and iridescent tempered chocolate.
  
  
  
• On May 12 birdless Birds, the Ryzen 4700G peeked out from behind cover only to disappear again and never be seen, the 4900U likewise, and the 125W Intel 10900K used 235W. 235 is more than 125.
  
  
  
• On May 13 we had fun with virtual machines under LXD for versions of fun that involve a surprising number of swear words, if everything requires HTTPS then any sites only supporting HTTP will cease to be, and a question was asked and answered.
  
  
  
• On May 14 Nvidia announced their Ampere A400, recent laptops are faster than cloud servers - sometimes a lot faster, Wordpress was broken yet again, Amazon's Fire HD 8 did not entirely suck, and Deno was Node.js only using TypeScript and written in Rust, which is like building a skyscraper by gluing blocks of cheese together but only using premium Campania mozzarella.
  
  
• On May 15 TSMC committed to building a 5nm fab in Arizona, Facebook bought Giphy, all the social networks withdrew from France, and this blog sucked at code formatting.
  
  
  
• On May 16 I tried out SSDNodes and pronounced it good as long as you knew what you were doing, distributed transactions were tricky, and the Mac had been x86 longer than it was previously PowerPC or 68k. Apple set itself to correcting that.
  
  
  
• On May 17 GIFs were considered harmful, WSL was pronounced weasel, supercomputers were mining cryptocurrencies, and Doom was doomed.
  
  
  
• On May 18 we learned how to add ZFS on servers after the fact, Universal Basic Internet was a bad idea, Google banned a podcast app for doing exactly what it said, Docker was sometimes less worse than it was the rest of the time, and one of the X-37B space planes took off for orbit.
  
  
  
• On May 19 QNAP devices got QNAPped, Minecraft sold 2)) MILLION COPIES which is quite a lot, and formatting code was hard (and not just for this blog).
  
  
  
• On May 20 Intel's Comet Lake arrived, whichever that one was, early samples of Zen 3 showed up, and Windows Terminal hit 1.0.
  
  
  
• On May 21 Twitter fucked Twitter up yet again, PCIe 4,0 showed up on Intel motherboards - though not on Intel CPUs, the Alienware M17 R3 had everything including a power brick the size of a Volvo, and Terraria got another big update.
  
  
  
• On May 22 Rocket Lake leaked, whichever that one was, AMD planned the release of what became their XT CPUs, and, um. not much else really.
  
  
  
• On May 23 we lited fictional inventions by year of publication, some Zigs were moved, and the Dynabook Portege X30L-G weighed 870 grams. Also, Castle was Scooby Doo.
  
  
  
• On May 24 we had pizza arbitrage and safe spaces.
  
  
  
• On May 25 Elasticsearch did what it's best at - leaking private data, quantum computing was proved both possible and impossible, and GitLab got social engineered.
  
  
  
• On May 26 Ryzen 3000XT arrived, every iPhone got jailbroken, and Gigabit NBN arrived, except that it already existed and no-one can get it.
  
  
  
• On May 27 DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES UNINSTALL THE LAUNCHER, a guide to the Lakes District, Twitter was a garbage site run by garbage people,and MacOS Catalina was a garbage OS designed by idiots.
  
  
  
• On May 28 Twitter was the problem with Twitter, Python gained two new string functions, and we got eight gigabytes of Pi.
  
  
  
• On May 29 Twitter hated roof Koreans, nobody knew anything, everything got hacked, and YouTube was run by morons.
  
  
  
• On May 30 Hivelocity declared war on catgirls, TechDirt was garbage, and critics were angry with Facebook for not censoring more people.
  
  
  
• And on May 31 all of D&D - all of it, Cities Skylines, the MSI Modern 14, SpaceX and NASA launched an apatosaurus into orbit, website port-scan you, and social networks should just die already.
  
  
  

1 KitGuru link should be this: Asus PN50.

-j

2 Thanks, fixed!

3 S2 of Yuru Camp begins in exactly two weeks from Christmas Eve.
Yuki Aoi is also the voice for Shuten-Douji in Fate Grand Order.  Yuki Aoi is also the character design for Shuten-Douji.  Slap a pair of horns on Yuki's forehead and... well.

4 Talented young lady.  And Winter 2021 is looking to be the best season of anime in quite a while.

1 Retired several years ago as a COBOL programmer.  I wanted to work a few more years, but got really tired of being treated as an unwanted step-child.   Management kept going from one 'Whizbang New Whatever' to another, and none ever seemed to do the job.  Last I heard, all the COBOL programmers went to greener pastures and management is in a panic because they had no idea how many huge data pulls and reports were from COBOL.