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Wednesday, December 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 December 2020

Washer Dryer Edition

Tech News

  • Getting a new combination washer/dryer on Friday.  The old one was starting to get rather fussy, sometimes complaining that it couldn't drain the water when it didn't have any water, and the dryer function stopped working at all. 

    And then one day recently I loaded it up and set it to work and it made an unpleasant noise followed by the rattle of bits coming off some mechanism inside and now it won't talk to me at all.

    It's over ten years old and way out of warranty, so time for a new one.


  • The recommended way to install LXC on a system not running ZFS is to create a nice big file on whatever filesystem you are using - ext4 probably - and turn that into a ZFS volume.

    That's not a good idea when you're running directly on hardware, because it prevents ZFS detecting and managing hardware problems, and adds extra CPU load to every I/O.

    But on a VPS you're not supposed to be seeing I/O errors in the first place, and if you are you're kind of hosed.  And since I'm getting acceptable performance with two cores and 4GB of RAM - until I run low on memory - a 12 core server with 48GB of RAM should be quite able to absorb that extra load.


  • New Aoi is now called Mikan, at least as far as it is concerned.  The management portal at SSDNodes doesn't let you change the name of your servers, so there it will remain Aoi forever.


  • The RTX 3060 Ti competes pretty evenly with the old 2080 Super.  (Tom's Hardware)

    So far it's not even listed anywhere as out of stock, so good luck getting one.


  • When the SSD you get is not quite the SSD you bought.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This article focuses on the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro, which has been sold in three different versions (different controllers and flash chips) without any notification or change to the model number, but Adata isn't the only company to have done this.

    And to be clear, the newer models of the Adata drive don't suck; they didn't drop from TLC to QLC flash or anything egregious like that.  But at least change the model number, guys.  Make it the SX8200 Pro S if you change from Micron to Samsung flash, or something.


  • Salesforce is buying Slack for some ridiculous amount of money.  (Tech Crunch)

    Just install GitLab.  Contains everything you need, including developer chat.  Does need at least 4GB of RAM these days, though.


  • A new experimental drug reverses age-related cognitive decline.  (Neuroscience News)

    In mice.

    Good news for Algernon, I suppose.


  • Deploying your own dedicated hardware for serverless apps.  (Cortex.dev)

    I mean, I guess.


  • AWS has announced Habana Gaudi instances.  (Serve the Home)

    These are apparently AI training engines - high-end hardware used to construct AI models that you can then deploy to cheaper systems, because learning is harder than doing.


  • HPE - Hewlett Packard's enterprise division since the Gallification - is moving from San Jose to Houston.  (CNBC)

    That's one way to solve the Bay Area housing crisis.


Not At All Tech News

  • Burn it to the ground and sow the ground with salt.

Disclaimer: Clunk thud rattle rattle rattle poing that will be a thousand dollars thanks.

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Tuesday, December 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 December 2020

Fifty Shades Of Blue Edition

Tech News

  • I have two servers named Aoi again.  Oops.


  • AMD expects AMD graphics cards to be selling at MSRP at some point.  Probably.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Probably next year though.


  • Amazon AWS has virtual Macs.  (Amazon)

    Or rather, they offer physical Macs that you can rent by the hour.

    Could be very useful for developers trying to ship both x86 and Arm versions of their apps.  Because you wouldn't want to buy one.


  • I don't want an iPhone but on the other hand would it kill Android device makers to produce a mid-range phone with a sub-6" screen?  (AnandTech)


  • Just recently officials cancelled planned renovations to the Arecibo radio telescope after a second cable snapped, leading engineers to conclude it was in danger of collapse and could not be safely repaired.

    Sadly, they were right.

    Thankfully because they were right, no-one was hurt.


  • Nvidia just launched the RTX 3060 Ti, which is 80% of a 3070 for 80% of the price.  But it includes the full 8GB of RAM, so that's a pretty good deal.

    If you can get one, which seems unlikely since it's the same chip as the 3070.




Disclaimer: And even if the answer is yes...

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Geek

New New New New New New York Server

SSDNodes is having another one of their sales.  I have a small server with them and though I don't use it heavily it basically behaves itself.  Only problem is its disk space is a bit limited (though larger than my Vultr dev system) and it's tricky to enable ZFS since they don't allow custom installs (which Vultr do).

Their current sale offers both reduced prices and extra storage, so I grabbed the largest node they had on offer.  12 cores, 48GB RAM, 720 GB of NVMe SSD, daily backups.  Since I had some account credit with them and prepaid for a year, the monthly price worked out too good to turn down.

That's where mee.ms will live to start with.  It's in Dallas, so it should be a very short ping from the mee.nu server.  Let's see...  452µs.  Yeah, that will probably do.*

http://ai.mee.nu/images/MidoriSSD-crop.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Host CPU looks like a dual Xeon Silver 4214 which maxes out at 3.2GHz, so it will definitely be slower than a dedicated system with a Ryzen or Xeon W processor, but again, for the price, it's just fine.


* Oh, right.  I was checking up to see what people have been saying about SSDNodes, and I saw from some network speed tests that they are using colo facilities with the same company that bought out the provider hosting mee.nu a couple of years back.  Which means that the two servers aren't merely both in Dallas, not just both in the same datacenter, but on the same network within that datacenter.  Neat.  I can use that.

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