Sunday, January 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 January 2023

Give A Mouse A Credit Card Edition

Top Story

  • Why is my LG washing machine downloading 3.7GB of data a day?  (Twitter)

    This is rather like giving your eight year old your credit card details and wondering why your house is full of Lego.  Why did you do that if you didn't want that result?

    And also like it in that you can't remove the WiFi settings from your LG washing machine once it's been set.

    So don't do that.

    (I have an LG washing machine.  It has WiFi.  Its total downloads to date are zero.)

Tech News

  • Bought a couple of Beelink mini-PCs on sale - the 5560U model.  I have memory and SSDs sitting around that I can use in them, and the entry level model with 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD was pretty cheap.  Their cheapest 5560U model is $289 on Amazon US right now, but the price I paid was closer to $200.

    Plan is to run Linux on them so I don't have to mess around with Windows 11's problems with virtualisation anymore.


  • Those new desktop APUs from AMD - what they call their CPUs with advanced integrated graphics - come with a catch.  (WCCFTech)

    Two catches.  Three catches.

    First, there's no PCIe 5, since they're laptop chips and PCIe 5 eats power.  PCIe 5 isn't all that much use though; graphics cards don't use it at all, and the SSDs that do are expensive and run hot.

    Second, there are fewer PCIe 4 lanes, so if you get the 8600G or 8700G you can only have 8 lanes to your graphics card.  Still, that's enough for most tasks, and if you end up wanting more performance you can upgrade to something like a 7900 while keeping your motherboard, memory, and so on.

    Third, if you get the low-end 8300G or 8500G chips, you only get 4 lanes to your graphics card, and 2 to your SSD.  That's not good.  Avoid those.

    The 8500G looks to have essentially the same specs as the 8600G at $50 less, but longer term you might regret it.


  • I also bought a new breadmaker.  I threw out the old one when I moved, since it had been sitting in the cupboard unused for about ten years after I was diagnosed with celiac disease.

    And there are plenty of gluten-free bread mixes available now, right?

    ...

    Two.  There are two.  At least, available locally.

    I can get gluten-free flour for a quarter the price I pay for gluten-free bread, though, and yeast is yeast.  I used to love experimenting with different types of bread, and I'd like to do that again.


  • The best of CES.  (The Verge)

    Any other year these wouldn't even have rated a nomination, much less an award.  They'd be in the "also appearing" wrap-up that nobody bothered to read.


  • The creator economy is ready for a workers' movement.  (Tech Crunch)

    We'll go on strike!

    That's right!  You'll have a national TikTok and Instagram influencer strike on your hands!

    And whom will that inconvenience?


  • The Funimation dub for Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is infamously awful - or should I say AWFL - not so much for the voice acting as for the translation, which inserts the usual incoherent grab bag of left-wing complaints where they don't belong.  (Not that they belong anywhere.)

    So a fan redubbed it with a proper translation using AI.  (Niche Gamer)

    Looks like an entire useless communist-infested industry is dead.


Disclaimer: Pipipipipipipipipi!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:38 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 586 words, total size 5 kb.

1 The graph shows it uploading that data, which is even goofier. Built-in sock-cam? AI load-balancer? Encrypted syslog in verbose mode?

That last one almost made it to Production at Ooma once: a developer inserted a debug log message for what he believed was a Very Rare error packet. Which turned out to trigger a thousand times a second when it was released to QA. Who didn't notice because they didn't check the logs for test boxes.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 14 2024 08:22 PM (oJgNG)

2 My son's been following the wokalizer (as he calls it) kerfuffle.  Apparently one of them wrote a 48-page screed insulting Asmongold, and he mocked it mercilessly on a livestream.  Looks like they made a similar mistake to what the Kzinti did: gloating before they had an unshakeable grip.  Several big animation houses have fired their woke localizers.

I dug out my beelink i5-1235u last night, because I got a couple of cheap DAPlinks (used for flashing and debugging ARM microcontrollers) that I wanted to try out, and they look easier to use on Linux.  I went out to Beelink's site and I can't even find that model listed anywhere, even when searching for it.  All they show are a couple of H-series models for Alder Lake.  On their forums, people are asking about a few certain problems, and their response is "send us your serial number and we'll email you a link to an updated bios."  Fortunately I don't have any actual problems with the device, but every time I fire up linux lately I am reminded the mouse acceleration or something is slightly different from how it works on Windows, and it's distracting.  Also, I hate the minimal scrollbar disease with a passion, and apparently they keep changing how you disable it.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 15 2024 02:43 AM (BMUHC)

3 I didn't have too much luck with GF bread, so I gave my bread maker to my sister.

Clayton Cramer has been having luck, but he bought the most expensive bread maker on the planet - top of the line from Zojirushi - and using the recipe in their cookbook. It also has a special GF setting - not sure what that does.

A friend also told me that The America's Test Kitchen folks have a cookbook dedicated to GF, and they make their own GF flour from a mix of stuff - mostly white rice flour and some additives. I haven't tried that, but they generally work the recipes until they come out right.
Good luck. Life without gluten sucks. I most get buy with several brands of GF crackers that I can get locally.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Tuesday, January 16 2024 04:58 PM (65Nl0)

4 This one does have GF settings, but I don't know exactly what they do.

I took a look at a GF baking cookbook, and the recipes require 130 grams of tapioca starch and 95 grams of millet flour and stuff like that.

I'll see how I go with regular GF flour first (which is usually a mix of rice flour, corn flour, and tapioca starch).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 16 2024 05:53 PM (PiXy!)

5 I don't have any experience trying to be gluten-free (I keep reading GF as girlfriend, and I'm trying to imagine a Korean bread-maker with a GF mode), but I have cooked stuff with potato starch, teff, & buckwheat, all of which should be gluten-free.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 17 2024 02:13 AM (LADmw)

6 Ah, good old Jamie Marchi, proving once again that much of the Texas anime dubbing community are to the Left of Marx.

Not that it is any better elsewhere, but the VAs in Dallas and Houston tend to be a bit more forward about their politics.  There are people I can not listen to anymore in dubs because of how annoying they were outside the studio booth.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 17 2024 11:16 AM (ZLF73)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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