You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.
Saturday, March 30
Daily News Stuff 30 March 2019
Your players will likely kill you, but totally worth it.
Thunderbolt And Lightning And USB Edition
Tech News
- Samsung's Galaxy S10+ goes under the microscope. (AnandTech)
Executive summary: The US version is great. The international version, which has Samsung's own Exynos chip rather than the Snapdragon 855, is... Pretty okay. The international version suffers not only from inconsistent performance but also worse photography due to the differences between the image processing hardware on the two chips.
- Sony also has a 10+. (ZDNet)
The Xperia 10+ has a 6.5" 21:9 2520x1080 display (LCD rather than OLED), 4GB RAM, 64GB flash, microSD slot, USB C, and a headphone jack. The CPU is a mid-range Snapdragon 636 with four A73 and four A53 cores, putting it two generations behind the A76 found in 2019 flagship phones.
On the other hand, it runs £349 compared to £899 for the cheapest Galaxy S10+.
My Huawei tablet has an A72 CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the A73 but uses more power. It's not slow, and I wouldn't hesitate to get this or another A73 powered device on that respect, unless you are running seriously heavy apps on your phone.
Another possible upgrade for my ageing Xperia Z Ultra...
- Apple cancelled its AirPower wireless charging pad because it couldn't make it work. (Tech Crunch)
Wireless charging is easy. Fast, efficient wireless charging of multiple devices at once is hard, and what Apple found was that the AirPower could double as an electric wok.
- The SR-71 had its own R2 astromech droid - and it may be relevant again should we fuck things up sufficiently. (The Drive)
- How not to create an open-source license, example 462.
Another example. Well-meaning idiots will get us all killed.
- How to become a 10x programmer.
Two ways: One, spend a huge amount of time and effort in memory training programs of dubious merit and on memorising API calls that might disappear entirely in six months; or two, create a little personal wiki where you record things you might need to look up again. A notepad file. Anything.
- Oracle has sent out an advisory telling customers not to use Java for anything, ever. (Bleeping Computer)
That's not what they intended, but that's what they did, saying that critical security patches to Java 8, which is still very widely used, would require a paid license after the upcoming patch release in April.
Social Media News
- What if we built a surveillance state and nobody came? (TechDirt)
Google and Facebook have built massive - and massively intrusive - surveillance systems to monitor everything their users do, for the single purpose of increasing the amount they can charge for ads.
There's an increasing amount of data suggesting that all this, basically, doesn't work, that it's pointless and harmful and enormously expensive.
Try Incorporating These Into Your Next D&D Campaign of the Day
Your players will likely kill you, but totally worth it.
Was That "Insert Tab A Into Slot B" or "Insert Tab B Into Slot A" of the Day
(Yes, fixed file uploads on HTTPS. Just a one-line change.)
Disclaimer: I'm sorry, Beelzebub does not have a devil put aside for you. You will have to take a number.
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Friday, March 29
Daily News Stuff 29 March 2019
Censourious Basterds Edition
Tech News
- Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 gets a full review. (AnandTech)
This is a mid-range system, below the Surface Pro and Surface Book, but above the Surface Go.
It seems expensive for what you get, but then I waited for a 70% off sale before buying my latest laptop so my sense of value for money may be a bit skewed. But the i7/16GB/512GB model costs twice as much as the Dell Ryzen R7 laptop we got for a co-worker this week.
- This Dell wireless keyboard just eats batteries.
- Asus engineers apparently posted their email passwords on GitHub on more than one occasion. (Tom's Hardware)
Oops. If you do anything even slightly important with your email, enable 2FA.
- Huawei's networking equipment could be backdoored without warning accordng to a British security review. (Tom's Hardware)
Although Huawei have provided source code for review, they have not provided any way to validate that the source code matches the binary files they distribute.
- LAPD reports that their high-tech policing initiative is garbage that does little but infringe upon civil rights. (TechDirt)
So they're going to keep right on doing it.
- AMD's next-gen Navi graphics may support dedicated ray tracing - possibly even better than Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti. (WCCFTech)
Unless it doesn't or it's not.
- Office Depot faked malware scans to rip people off on expensive tech support. (Ars Technica)
They've been fined $35 million, but someone should be in jail over this.
- The FCC has fined robocallers $200 million in the past four years. (Ars Technica)
The robocallers have coughed up 0.0003% of the total fines levied, because the FCC lacks statutory authority to enforce such fines.
The FTC meanwhile has collected 8% of the fines it has levied over the same period.
- How to use Google Sheets as a database. (codecentric)
Step One: Don't.
- A four-socket Supermicro server gets put through its paces. (Serve the Home)
The Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs used here are 12-core parts that cost $7000 each. Ouch.
Both Intel and AMD will have 48 core CPUs available this year. Maybe wait for those.
Social Media News
- Google is busy censoring the app store for... Religion. (Tech Crunch)
- Instagram is busy censoring commenters for... Who the hell knows anymore? (Tech Crunch)
Alex Jones is still on Instagram by the way.
- Australia wants Facebook to censor paid content relating to elections. (ZDNet)
- The New York Times ran an op-ed piece accusing teenage gamers of Nazi sympathies. (One Angry Gamer)
Written by an "assistant professor of game studies", a job title that makes minimum wage laws look like a bad idea.
- Microsoft calls for more online censorship. (One Angry Gamer)
Specifically, they want to use advanced AI to instantly scrub any content depicting real-world violence from the internet. And once that's done, they plan to turn their attention to "toxic" speech.
Maybe you should ask Tay how well that is likely to work, you fucking retards.
Disclaimer: Try or try not. There is no do.
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Thursday, March 28
Daily News Stuff 28 March 2018
Fuck Skype And Fuck Google Hangouts Too Edition
Fuck Skype And Fuck Google Hangouts Too Edition
Tech News
- Cisco: We fixeded it!
Testers were using Curl to exploit an open vulnerability in Cisco routers, so Cisco "fixed" it by blocking web requests that identified themselves as coming from Curl. This is about as effective as trying to stop a pyroclastic flow with a paper sign saying "Volcanoes Keep Out".
- PyCharm 2019.1 is out.
New features include.... Nothing much, really. But the previous version was already very good.
- Samsung's Galaxy A70 is a mid-range phone with a microSD slot. (AnandTech)
Huge 6.7" 2400x1080 OLED display, unspecified mid-range CPU, 6GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB flash.
Social Media News
- US Rep. Eric "nuke the peasants" Swalwell resubmitted his stupid bill making it a crime to assault journalists. (TechDirt)
Which is, of course, already a crime, and the bill is blatantly unconstitutional.
- Netflix submits that ChooseCo are idiots. (TechDirt)
If you agree, go to page 11.
If you disagree, go to page 94. Yes, that's the page were you got eaten by a bear the last three times you chose it.
- Just in case anyone needed a database of 5 million lesbians. (Tech Crunch)
Actually this is kind of serious, since China's government is entirely capable of rounding people up and shipping them off for re-education, for any reason or none at all.
My rule is this: Don't post anything online. Just don't.
Disclaimer: This post is a volcano free zone.
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Boneless Chicken Ranch 28 March 2019
Live From Waukegan, Illinois Edition
Live From Waukegan, Illinois Edition
I think I know how that can be arranged.
Freedom wing of the freedom party.
This explains everything.
This also explains everything.
I'm sure he'll tell the truth this time.
From your lips to Vint Cerf's ears, Paul.
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Wednesday, March 27
Daily News Stuff 27 March 2019
Hinamatsuri. I completely missed it when it aired last year, and it's really good. One of those shows that you watch in one go and then Google the name plus "season 2".
Apparently there's plenty of manga remaining for another season, but Blu-Ray sales have been disappointing.
Hinamatsuri Edition
Tech News
- Try our new twitter and bitchute tags, fresh caught every day.
- Yes, I'm still banned on Twitter. No response to my appeal.
- Huawei launched their P30 and P30 Pro phones. (AnandTech)
These are focused heavily on photography, with a 40MP main camera in both models, an ultrawide camera at 16MP and 20MP on the standard and pro models respectively, and an 8MP telephoto camera with 3x or 5x zoom.
The telephoto camera is the interesting one: It uses a prism to refract light through 90 degrees to give the lens elements enough room.
CPU is a Kirin 980 - Arm A76 - coupled with 6GB or 8GB of RAM. The base model has a headphone jack and 128GB of storage. The one real flaw is that it uses Huawei's proprietary nano-flash cards for expansion. Oh, and their user interface, but you can just install Nova Launcher to fix that.
- Asus says what, we got hacked, and a million of our laptops too? (Tom's Hardware)
Rare triple facepalm.
- Fire the whole goddamn lot of them. MEPs who just voted to destroy the internet say oops, we pushed the wrong button. (TechDirt)
- Google just made email radically more annoying and probably less secure. (Tech Crunch)
With any luck they'll kill it in six months.
- 42 is the new 33. (Quanta)
Now that a solution has been found for 33, 42 is the only number less than 100 that has not either been shown to be the sum of three cubes or proven not to be.
Numberphile did a video just over three years ago discussing the problem.
And now has a video where they talk to the discoverer of the answer for 33.
- UC Browser, which I have never heard of but apparently has 500 million users is dangerously insecure and should be shot on sight (Bleeping Computer)
- Everything you didn't want to know about Apples new content platform and couldn't be bothered to ask. (Six Colors)
- Discord employs crazy people to censor your speech. (One Angry Gamer)
Anime Opening of the Day
Hinamatsuri. I completely missed it when it aired last year, and it's really good. One of those shows that you watch in one go and then Google the name plus "season 2".
Apparently there's plenty of manga remaining for another season, but Blu-Ray sales have been disappointing.
Re: Zero is getting a second season though, as is Re: Slime, and of course Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid.
Disclaimer: Snow sushi contains zero calories.
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The New Bitchute Tag
This is a test post, please ignore the fireworks.
Update: Well, that was easy.
This is a test post, please ignore the fireworks.
Update: Well, that was easy.
[bitchute=https://www.bitchute.com/video/RBnjHfyejg0/]
[bitchute=RBnjHfyejg0]
[bitchute=RBnjHfyejg0 size=640x360]
[bitchute=RBnjHfyejg0 size=720x]
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Extra Boneless Chickens
The new [twitter] tag is great. You can just sit there all day mocking Politico and it doesn't matter if Twitter has banned you.
The new [twitter] tag is great. You can just sit there all day mocking Politico and it doesn't matter if Twitter has banned you.
Democrats Find Out Santa Isn't Real
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The New Twitter Tag
It's lazy and doesn't attempt to preserve the tweet details (which I can't do without the Twitter API, and my account is disabled) so if the tweet gets deleted it just ends up blank. But it's very easy to use: Just paste in the link.
One other note: Firefox's tracker blocker feature breaks this, and there's no easy way around it that I can see.
[twitter=link media=yes|no parent=no|yes]
[twitter=https://twitter.com/bitchute/status/1110089991298809856]
[twitter=https://twitter.com/bitchute/status/1110089991298809856 media=no]
[twitter=https://twitter.com/ModsReloaded/status/1110098911086170112 parent=yes]
[twitter=https://twitter.com/ModsReloaded/status/1110098911086170112 parent=no]
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Boneless Chicken Ranch 27 March 2019
Only the second worthwhile appearance of Aquaman ever.
Internal DNS Failure Edition
A Daily Roundup of Exceptionally Interesting Tweets for Some Value of Interesting
That's sure to help the next time a hate crime is reported.
We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to echo whatever we hear, which is exactly what we did.
We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to echo whatever we hear, which is exactly what we did.
Ha. That worked. I can create an "embed tweet" tag now.
Update: This post has been converted to use the new [twitter] tag.
Fuck the EU of the Day
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Tuesday, March 26
Daily News Stuff 26 March 2019
Still Banned Like It Was Yesterday Edition
Tech News
- You probably can't scroll to the bottom of this page right now. I know why and will have it fixed tomorrow.
Update: Hmm. No, seems to just be Firefox. Will fix anyway.
- Swift 5.0 is out, available right away on MacOS and Ubuntu and approximately never on every other platform.
I need to choose a language that can compile to a standalone binary for a small side project. Go would certainly work. Since I've never used it before I spent an hour yesterday learning it.
Go sucks. The implementation may be fine, but the language design is 50 years of congealed bad ideas.
Swift is a much better language - not great, but not something that would cause constant severe abdominal pain - but can't, so far as I know, produce standalone binaries.
C and C++ are out because are you freaking kidding me.
Julia is probably out, because while it's actually a fine language, the static compilation story is meh at best.
Crystal might work, but it hasn't reached 1.0 yet. Same with Nim.
Nuitka might actually work. The project is active, and since it compiles Python to standalone binaries I don't need to fuss about with a new language and new libraries.
I shall try Nuitka.
- CLion now supports remote toolchains over SSH so you can now sit at your Windows PC and build Linux apps. But the CLion Python plugin doesn't. PyCharm does, of course, but then it doesn't support all the other languages CLion adds (C, C++, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, and, for some reason, Fortran).
- Uber decides it isn't losing money fast enough, steps on the gas. (Tech Crunch)
- I've switched from Chrome to Firefox for these posts. It works much better. I originally switched from Firefox to Chrome because Chrome coped better when I had many tabs open; now the situation has reversed. Also the latest versions of Chrome act weird with this editor which I have a replacement for but have yet to actually replace.
- About a million Asus laptops have been compromised after Asus Live Updater got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
The nasty files fed to users by this channel were thus signed and supposedly verified by Asus.
It looks like this was a targeted attack, and the malware was dormant for most users. Not clear yet who was behind it, or why, but for select users it would download a second set of malware and send data off to a remote server.
- Final Fantasy apparently includes a species of rabbit that reproduces via parthenogenesis and this has made some people very angry (One Angry Gamer)
[Imagine a picture of said rabbits here only the forced redirect to HTTPS that I'm testing here has broken uploading which is exactly why I'm testing it here before rolling it out to everyone.]
Social Media News
- The European Union has passed its terrible horrible no good very bad copyright legislation into law. (CNet)
Any company offering internet services of any kind in any EU country is out of its mind.
- New Zealand is still rounding up wrongthinkers and locking them up without bail because this is a democracy you see which means you have no right to either free speech or due process. (TechDirt)
Git pull request for Tom Wolfe: The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe and New Zealand.
Also, you may well ask what the hell is going on in the comments at TechDirt. I'm going to go with "performance art".
- Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament of Clowns wants to enact criminal penalties for video streaming services whose users stream videos of violent crimes. (ZDNet)
Leaving such streams up for minutes is simply not good enough."They can get an ad to you in half a second; they should be able to pull down this sort of terrorist material and other types of very dangerous material in the same sort of time frame."
I regret to report that Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is retarded.
Elsewhere
- After spending three years screwing up the stories of Trump's political rise, Russia's political meddling, and the blatantly nonsensical allegations of collusion between the two, the American mainstream news media has learned... Precisely nothing.
CNN prez Jeff Zucker: "We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did." https://t.co/DiUjr7Nkbg
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 26, 2019
- They're just not very bright.
Mueller came forward right away when he felt he’d been misrepresented even indirectly by Buzzfeed. You think he’d allow Barr to misquote him? It’s amazing people won’t let this go. https://t.co/jZ3ABy0CQr
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 26, 2019I hope I'm not putting this too harshly, but you have to be the world's dumbest person to believe Mueller filled his report with incriminating collusion claims, but he - and his whole team - are sitting silently while his long-time friend Bob Barr lies about what's in his report.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 25, 2019
- Neither is this guy.
.@MichaelAvenatti tweeted Monday that he planned to hold a news conference about @Nike. Less than 45 minutes later, federal prosecutors charged him with trying to extort the company. https://t.co/noxBAOFXdQ
— The Associated Press (@AP) March 25, 2019
Don't Drop the Bunny of the Day
Disclaimer: Do not taunt happy fun bunny.
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