• The crowdfunding campaign for the Chuwi Larkbox has succeeded.  (Indiegogo)
  
  And by succeeded, I mean passed the 2000% mark.  Though the target was pretty low, since Chuwi already manufactures devices like this and was really just using this for marketing.
  
  The CPU is the quad-core Atom Celeron J4115 which should be acceptably fast for basic tasks.  It has 6GB RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage, an M.2 2242 slot for a SATA SSD such as this, HDMI, two USB ports, micro-SD, WiFi 5, and a headphone jack.  It also has a USB-C port but that seems to be just for power input.
  
  The main selling point is that it is seriously tiny - just 61x61x43mm and weighing 127g, a fraction of the size of a NUC.  And pretty cheap at $155 without operating system.
  
  
  
• Milan has broken cover unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Three engineering samples of AMD's Zen 3 Epyc range have been spotted.  On the surface they look a lot like the current generation - still maxing out at 64 cores and 256MB of cache.  The difference is that instead of two 4-core CCXes per chiplet, a chiplet now contains eight cores and a 32MB L3 cache in a single unified design.  We've already seen from the low-end Ryzen parts that having all the cores unified this way produces significantly better performance - but there's a limit to how many cores you can connect to a single bus.
  
  Zen 3 is also expected to bring major IPC gains, though I don't think AMD has mentioned any numbers.
  
  Of course, the exact same chiplets will be going into the next generation of Ryzen desktop parts, also expected before the end of the year.
  
  
  
• 1TBVPS is your one-stop shop for 1TB VPSes.  (1TBVPS)
  
  In fact, that's the only thing they offer.  One configuration, one price.  It's not a bad configuration or a bad price - VPSes with large storage capacities aren't easy to find.  The storage is disk-based with an SSD cache, so great for file storage and probably adequate for light database use.
  
  For $25 per month you get 8GB RAM, 8 threads, the aforementioned 1TB of storage, and 20TB of bandwidth.  For comparison, a $20 DigitalOcean VPS has 2 threads, 4GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and 4TB of bandwidth.
  
  It's run by IOFlood who I've looked at before for dedicated servers.  They actually have a nice offer right now - older 20-core Xeon systems with up to 256GB of RAM and brand new NVMe SSDs - but I need to finish retiring the old servers first.
  
  
  
• Ooh, they've even done a custom keyboard.  (CommanderX16)
  
  Well, custom key labels, at least.
  
  This is the next-generation Commodore 64 that the 8-bit Guy is involved with.  It uses an 8MHz 6502 (actually the W65C02S) and has 512K flash and up to 2MB of RAM, plus another 128K of graphics RAM.  And four expansion slots, all in a mini-ITX form factor.
  
  I still think they should have used the W65C265S, which has an unmultiplexed  24-bit address bus and wouldn't need bank switching or external logic, but they didn't listen to me.
  
  PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and VGA video.
  
  
  
  
  I like that keyboard.  It's the layout I was looking for when playing with my own design, but never managed to find.  Full set of function keys and the essential PgUp/PgDn/Home/End.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 12 2020 12:56 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 12 2020 01:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Still ow.  Been in bed reading manhwa all day - A Stepmother's Märchen and Dungeon Reset.
  
  I particularly liked the dark fairytale style of the first chapter of A Stepmother's Märchen - though I wouldn't want to read an entire book like that.
  
  Both of them are quite good, and although presented in the vertical scrolling style rather than traditional pages, they show that Korean artists are really getting a handle on telling stories like this.
  
  China less so; the output is there and the art is often good but the writing is barely grade-school level.  Haven't found any...  Manhua is the Chinese one, right?  Any manhua I'd recommend so far.
  
  I already had today off, but had planned to spend it a bit more actively than that.
  
  My Mangadex reading list is here but a few of those you'll need to find on another site because they've been taken down.
  
  
  
• A wild Threadripper 3995WX appeared!  (Guru3D)
  
  When third-generation Threadripper was first discussed, there were rumours of multiple chipsets, including TRX40 (which is what we have now) and TRX80 (which has been conspicuously absent).
  
  This looks like the TRX80 version: It supports eight channel memory and registered DIMMs, up to 2TB in total.  This makes perfect sense, because it's just an Epyc part binned for clock speed rather than power efficiency.  In effect they are already selling these CPUs; they just need to convince a partner to make a suitable workstation motherboard.
  
  It also fills a gap in AMD's lineup.  Intel already has workstation parts that support 1.5TB of RAM, but they max out at 28 cores.  AMD has 64-core workstation CPUs, but they max out at 256GB of RAM.  And people who need 64 cores often need more than 256GB of RAM.
  
  Update: An afterthought - I wonder if they will unlock all 128 PCIe lanes?  Current Threadripper parts only have 64 lanes in total.  8 connect to the TRX40 chipset, which provides another 16 lanes.
  
  Epyc motherboards don't (as far as I know) have chipsets, because all Ryzen family CPUs have built-in SATA and USB controllers anyway.  So this might be a chipsetless design aimed at high-end workstations with all or mostly NVMe storage.
  
  
  
• Who said irony was dead?
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Chinese telecommunications equipment is riddled with vulnerabilities.  (ZDNet)
  
  They have Telnet active on the WAN port.  You can log in as guest with no password.  And there are local privilege escalation vulnerabilities so you can jump from there to root - including the ability to list account passwords, which are apparently not even hashed.
  
  This surprises absolutely no-one except TechDirt who are drunk again.
  
  
  
• That's so obvious I never even thought of it.  (The Verge)
  
  The upcoming Arm-based Macs will support Thunderbolt.  This is an obvious minimal requirement since Thunderbolt is the only port most Macs have these days.
  
  But no Arm products - including Apple's, even their new developer kit - currently support Thunderbolt, so it's not clear exactly what they are doing or how.
  
  
  
• MongoDB 4.4 is at RC12 - that is, their twelfth release candidate.
  
  That's probably a longer shakedown cruise than they had planned, but I'm not waiting on any specific features in this release and 4.2 is working well, so I'd much rather they take the time and knock out the remaining bugs.
  
  
  
• Facebook updated their API and broke everything.  (9to5Mac)
  
  We have a Facebook integration with our software platform at our day job, and every time I log in to Facebook I get a notification that their API has changed and we need to update to the new version.
  
  It's kind of annoying.
  
  Elasticsearch does this bullshit too.  Oh, sorry, we deprecated that.  You'll just have to rewrite every single search query.
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, July 12 2020 09:34 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2020 01:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: jabrwok at Monday, July 13 2020 07:04 AM (T4WaI)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2020 09:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, July 14 2020 05:49 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 14 2020 08:03 AM (PiXy!)

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• If you slip on some wet tiles and fall and hurt your back and not the next day but the day after that you call in sick because your back has seized up and you find you can no longer bend - or rather, unbend - and you are lying there in bed with a bag of peanuts and a bottle of iced tea and another bottle of ibuprofen and feeling slightly guilty about malingering because when you're just lying there it's not so bad and it only hurts when you move and then you move and it hurts so yeah not malingering at all and watching Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya because why not even though it's no Magical Girl Pretty Sammy but then what is and even though you have avoided contact with the entire Fate ecosystem since its foundation and you get to the end and move on to Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz and the suddenly wonder if you missed an OVA or they're pulling a Dawn then the answer is you skipped an entire season.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
  
  
• RediSearch is a search engine implemented on Redis.  (Redis Labs)
  
  I don't know why it is, but it is.
  
  
  
• Reddit is spying on you.  (Smitop)
  
  The new site redesign just happens to include a barrage of digital fingerprinting techniques to work around people blocking ads and cookies.  It's sad because there are a number of subreddits I quite like.
  
  
  
• The Fraunhofer Institute ran security scans on 117 current-model home wifi routers.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  117 of them failed the test.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 10 2020 07:08 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 10 2020 11:46 AM (PiXy!)

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• Ow.
  
  
  
• Hivelocity - the hosting company where this blog is presently located - just opened sixteen new datacenters.  Though I expect many of them are actually a couple of locked cabinets in someone else's datacenter.
  
  I looked at the map, and noticed that it covered basically the whole world except Australia.  Well, and also except South America and Africa, which kind of shows my bias, and nothing in central or southern Asia either.
  
  Anyway, I scrolled down the page and yeah, I always forget how far south Sydney is.  They only have two configurations available in their smaller "datecenters" and they're not exceptionally cheap, but they're priced comparably to a fast virtual server from Vultr (who also have a Sydney datacenter that is probably a couple of locked cabinets).
  
  
  
• Thunderbolt 4 is coming this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's no faster than Thunderbolt 3 - the cables and transceivers don't really allow for that yet - but it cleans things up a bit.
  
  And it looks like USB 4 ports will be labelled 20 and 40 rather than with some arcane sigil or USB 4.0 gen 3x2 or whatever.
  
  Now they just need to retroactively rename all the existing ports.  In theory, there's two different 10Gb modes that are actually different speeds, but no-one implements USB 3.2 gen 1x2 without also implementing 2x2 so that probably doesn't matter.
  
  
  
• Hot Chips 2020 is...  Wait, this looks awfully familiar.  (AnandTech)
  
  I'm not going crazy, they bumped the story from May since the date is now approaching.  I also note this time around that since it's virtual, the price for attending the whole thing is just $125.  I don't think I will since (a) no time and (b) my dryer just dropped dead but that's a pretty good deal for any industry people.
  
  
  
• The Phanteks P500A is kind of large, kind of cheap, kind of absurd, and kind of going into my next PC build.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a full-size ATX case with 10 3.5" drive bays, so you can just shovel it full of disks.  The basic model without RGB nonsense is $99, which seems pretty reasonable.
  
  Oh, and it has room for a second ITX motherboard just in case you need both Windows and Linux running on bare metal - which I do.
  
  This won't be happening this year, but my newest desktop is now two years old and my iMac is approaching five, so next year looks like an upgrade year.  Zen 4 here I come!
  
  Come to think of it....  If I contine to use my two Dell all-in-ones as 4K monitors (they have HDMI input) they can run Linux and the new system just needs to run Windows.  Maybe.
  
  
  
• The World Health Organisation has concluded that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague can be transmitted through coughing and sneezing and not just Chinese restaurants.  (New York Times)
  
  Actually, no.  The debate is over whether the virus itself can be airborne rather than carried in tiny droplets from coughs and sneezes.  The answer is, maybe.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 09 2020 02:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, July 09 2020 02:44 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 09 2020 06:15 AM (obo9H)

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• Slack and the terrible horrible no good very bad day.  (Slack)
  
  As terrible horrible no good very bad days go, this wasn't all that.  They had a problem with an autoscaling script, and didn't notice because they had a problem with their autoscaling monitoring.  When users screamed, they found it and fixed it.
  
  They did not, for example, take down all their datacentres across the entire planet with a single rogue BGP packet.
  
  
  
• Ryzen XT is real and it's meh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  We expected a small clock speed bump, and that's what we got.  The 3600XT benefits most, and the 3900XT least, because the TDP remains the same and the 3900XT didn't have much headroom.
  
  The benchmarks here show the 10900K in a rather more positive light than PassMark.  It is, after all, a desktop processor with a gaming emphasis, where a Ryzen 3700X is a server chiplet that didn't pass muster and was passed down to the desktop market.  Still, my ardor for that W-1290P server has substantially cooled.
  
  
  
• Pricing for Ryzen Pro 4000 desktop APUs has leaked and appears to top out at around $300.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A Ryzen Pro 4750G is cheaper than a Ryzen Pro 3700X - assuming the leak is correct - and has integrated graphics.
  
  
  
• Amorphous boron nitride could be the next big thing in semiconductors unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Crystalline boron nitride (Borazon) has similar properties to diamond, combining elements 5 and 7 in an array so that the result looks and acts rather like a crystal of element 6 - carbon.  Amorphous boron nitride similarly acts rather like graphene, also a substance of interest in semiconductor research.
  
  
  
• Free chips!  (FOSSi Foundation)
  
  Okay, so you need to design them yourself.  And they're produced at 130nm, which is paleolithic at this point.
  
  But for, say, the retrocomputing hobby market, where certain chips are becoming unavailable even second hand, this could be a godsend.  The original 6502 was manufactured on an 8 micron process node; this offers thousands of times the areal density.
  
  And you can't beat free.
  
  
  
• I slipped on a wet floor and hurt pretty much everything.  Not recommended.
  
  Had a remarkable moment of clarity in what couldn't have taken even one second: Uh-oh, falling, going to land hard, make sure arms are clear and don't let your head hit anything thump oof well that went about as well as could be expected.
  
  
• Chrome is going to strangle JavaScript.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oh, throttle as in slow down.  Much less exciting.  But if you leave a bunch of tabs open on your laptop, this simple change could add a couple of hours to your battery life.
  
  Which tells us that websites are garbage.

• Brython is Python in your browser.  (Brython)
  
  Much as I loathe JavaScript I'm not convinced that Python is the best alternative in an environment so openly hostile to semantic whitespace.
  
  If you do want to head in this direction, though, Brython is just one of six alternatives available.  (Anvil)  There's even a complete port of the PyPy JIT compiler, though load time for that is not stellar.
  
  
  
• Don't buy $2 USB-C to Lightning cables for your MacBook.  (WCCFtech)
  
  Also, don't buy a fucking MacBook.  The current limiting circuit cut in only after smoke started coming out of the computer.
  
  
  
• Dual Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 cards with NVLink: 20% faster than a Radeon 5700 XT.  (Serve the Home)
  
  In GeekBench.  Using OpenCL.  YMMVAPW.
  
  
  
• I stopped watching Konosuba and switched to Bofuri.  I've already read a bunch of the manga, but judging by the opening credits the anime goes past where I've read.
  
  It's even more absurdorable when animated.  Maple is an idiot, but she's not stupid, if you catch my drift.
  
  
  
  Nothing in the rules says you have to use INT as your dump stat.
  
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, July 07 2020 01:36 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 07 2020 09:49 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 07 2020 01:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 08 2020 02:26 AM (Iwkd4)

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• What's next for Mac hardware?  (Six Colors)
  
  Higher prices and shit no-one asked for.
  
  
  
• The set of all sets that are sets of themselves.  (Simone.Computer)
  
  Okay, technically it's a collection of websites that look like desktop GUIs, but the site itself, well, take a look.
  
  Try this one for example.  (WinXP.Now)
  
  
  
• Relativity explains both the orbit of Mercury and why it is a liquid at room temperature.  (Chemistry World)
  
  Wait, what?  Never mind, close enough.
  
  
  
• That W-1290P server is back.  (WebHosting Talk)
  
  Slightly different config, but works out to effectively the same price if I remember the original config correctly.
  
  The W-1290P is the workstation version of the 10900K.  I'm a little surprised to find that the 10900K is barely faster than the 3700X on server workloads.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  It's 19% faster on the single-threaded benchmark, which is no small improvement, but only 6% faster on multi-threaded despite having 25% more cores and essentially twice the power consumption.  That's very meh, honestly.
  
  

• The Ryzen 4700G appears to match the 3800X in Cinebench.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not astonishing since they're both 8-core 16-thread Zen 2 parts (the Ryzen 4700U though is 8-core 8-thread).  But the 4700G has only one quarter the cache - 8MBvs. 32MB - and a 65W vs. 95W TDP.
  
  Which means, going forward, that unless you need more than 8 cores, or specifically need PCIe 4.0, the desktop APUs might be a better buy than the CPUs.
  
  
  
• If regular Motif and CDE just aren't doing it and you need an Irix fix that too is now available.  (MaXX Interactive)
  
  64-bit retro for everyone!
  
  
  
• Cronk is back!  (The Guardian)

  The recipe calls for sassafras, sarsaparilla, hops, chamomile, cinnamon, ginger, green tea and molasses, said Belding.

  Uh.  Yeah, I'll pass.  Thanks all the same.
  
  
  
• Writing a Basic interpreter in assembler, 80s style.  (Able.bio)
  
  Wait, I looked at the code.  That's a macro assembler!  It has while loops!  That's cheating!
  
  
  
• Walmart is converting the parking lots of 160 of its stores into drive-in theatres.  (The Verge)
  
  Sounds like a great idea to me.
  
  
  
• Twitter is removing language with racist overtones from its code and technical documentation.  (CNet)
  
  So terms like master and slave, which are common in technology but have unfortunate connotations in this age of universal stupidity.
  
  And also...  Grandfathered, sanity check, and dummy value, because they failed the second of those.
  
  
  
• Meet John Smith.  John works for Google.  As a bot.  (Search Engine Land)
  
  Every day John signs up with online retailers, puts items in his cart, then abandons them.  John is kind of a jerk.
  
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 05 2020 05:38 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 07:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 07:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, July 06 2020 06:48 AM (5iiQK)

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• Pre-EOFY craziness and post-EOFY reports are all done.  Free at last!
  
  
  
• The chief competition for QLC SSDs is DRAMless TLC models.  Removing the DRAM does hurt performance, but saves money, and TLC is faster and more reliable than QLC.
  
  The Crucial P2 is one such, an update over the earlier P1.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reads on the P2 are actually slower than the P1, but writes beyond the pseudo-SLC cache have improved dramatically.  450MB/s sustained might not match a Samsung 970 Pro - or even a 970 Evo - but it's hardly slow.
  
  
  
• A leaked benchmark of Intel's upcoming Core i7-1165G7 suggests it is up to 20% faster on single-threaded benchmarks than AMD's current Ryzen 7 4800U unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Still slower on multi-threaded workloads, to no-one's surprise; even constrained to a 15W envelope an 8-core part is going to kill a 4-core part.
  
  Of course, AMD is preparing to release Zen and Ryzen 4000 desktop and Ryzen 5000 APUs, so Intel will not likely maintain this lead for long.
  
  
  
• Don't knock it, it works.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Re-examining the Blub Paradox.  (C2)
  
  Of course in the sense of Turing Completeness, all programming languages are equally powerful; they vary in degree of expressiveness.
  
  
  
• Why larger virtualisation nodes are better.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is why we went with Threadripper servers for our new cluster at my day job, instead of a larger number of smaller Ryzen servers.  If I need to throw 24 cores and 128GB of RAM at a single task, I can, without needing to farm it out across multiple servers.
  
  Warning: Do not read this while hungry.
  
  
  
• 23,000 MongoDB databases left exposed online have been hacked and are being held for ransom.  (ZDNet)
  
  MongoDB doesn't force you to create an admin password by default, but it does yell at you until you do so.  And by default it only binds to localhost and isn't available on the public network at all.
  
  Which makes me wonder about AWS NAT.  If you bind a database to the private IP, is NAT making it publicly available by default, since AWS instances don't have explicitly bound public IPs the way classic virtual servers do?  This still wouldn't expose MongoDB by default, but seems troubling.
  
  I should look into that, though I don't really use AWS much.  Apart from Route 53 at work, where we have about 170 domains that need rock-solid DNS.  AWS has probably already thought of and dealt with this, but it's something I should know.
  
  
  
• The Windows Alt-Tab function to cycle through all your open applications will also cycle through every single Edge tab.  (The Verge)
  
  Of course, you can prevent this by not using Edge.  Once you manage to get the blasted thing to close.  Yeah, I just got the latest Windows update.
  
  
  
• Facebook is shutting down Lasso and Hobbi.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Never heard of them?  That's why.
  
  
  
• Apple stores are closed again.  Louis Rossman hardest hit.  (9to5Mac)
  
  As Louis would say, Die, Corona, die!
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:58 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 04 2020 01:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:35 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 04 2020 04:10 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: David at Saturday, July 04 2020 04:10 PM (UmjNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 05 2020 01:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 05 2020 04:32 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Reminder that there are two new Dresden Files books due this year - Peace Talks lands this month, and Battle Ground in September.
  
  This was originally planned to be a single volume but Jim Butcher couldn't make it work.  Eventually his editor suggested making it two books, and Jim said, oh, yeah, and went away and rewrote it all.
  
  
  
• If you need a shiny new dedicated server, redacted has the brand new and very shiny wait where did it go?
  
  They did have an offer on the brand new W-1290P, the workstation version of Intel's Core i9 10900K, but the post seems to have disappeared.  
  
  You can read about the W-1200 family even if you can't get one just yet.  (Intel)
  
  
  
• A deep dive into Intel's Lakefield.  (AnandTech)
  
  I do not find this particularly exciting - one Core core and four Atom cores makes for a barely adequate experience at best - but maybe it's just what someone, somewhere is looking for.
  
  
  
• HBM2E is memory taken to ludicrous speed.  (AnandTech)
  
  3600MHz is pretty common for DRAM these days, but having a 1024-bit bus on a single chip less so.
  
  
  
• A closer look at LG's Gram 17.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a 3lb 17" laptop with a full keyboard and a 2560x1600 display.  If you need a big screen laptop that weighs less than some 13" models, this might be for you.  It's not exactly cheap, though, and gaming performance on the Core i7-1065G7 rates a "meh".
  
  
  
• How much Python does a Python need to be a Python?  (Snarky)
  
  Asked in the context of getting something better than goddamn JavaScript to run on browsers, since WebAssembly's security model makes a full Python implementation problematic.
  
  The article also reminded me that there's an effort under way to implement Python in Rust.  (GitHub)  And that already runs under WebAssembly.
  
  
  
• If you really miss Motif and CDE, SerenityOS might be just what you are looking for.
  
  
  
  Only...  Why?
  
  Well, aesthetics aside, it does seem to be a lightweight and fast little Unix-like OS.  Nothing wrong with that.
  
  
  
• Rust is designed from the ground up to compile slowly.  (PingCAP)
  
  Much of this also applies to Crystal. 
  
  
  
• Don't use closed-source encryption.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The EncroPhone network - popular among the criminal set - was infiltrated by law enforcement, mesages intercepted, and several hundred people arrested across Europe.
  
  My American readers will laugh though, to see the British police boast alongside siezing two tonnes of narcotics and 28 million tablets of very off-brand Valium, 1800 rounds of ammunition.
  
  
  
• BDFL just don't mean what it used to.  (ZDNet)
  
  Salvatore Filippo, also known as Antirez, is stepping down from his role as chief maintainer of Redis.  Basically because he was finding he was spending more time as a manager than as a programmer.
  
  
  
• The Blackview Tab 8 is a $160 Android tablet that doesn't seem to skimp too much on anything.  (ZDNet)
  
  Android 10, 1920x1200 display, 8-core 1.6GHz A55, 4GB RAM, 64GB EMMC, USB-C, SD card, dual SIM cards, headphone ja-
  
  Wait, 10" screen?  Then why did you bloody well call it the Tab 8?  Grumble grumble.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is updating the start menu from being a shrieking dumpster fire to being merely a loudly cursing dumpster fire.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Don't look at me, I've been running Start8 since back when it was still called Start8.
  
  
  
• Kongregate is shutting down.  (TechRaptor)
  
  Not surprising given that Flash is dying at the end of the year, but a sad end of an era, brought about by Adobe's fuck-upedness.
  
  
  
• Remember last year when I was fiddling with the idea of building a computer based on an embeded Arm chip and nothing ever came of it because that would actually require work?
  
  Well, someone actually did it.  (GeoffG.net)
  
  The Colour Maximite 2 is based on the same family of ST Micro Arm microcontrollers that I was looking at (and that I actually have a development kit for).
  
  It's not a complete custom board, using a rather nice module from Waveshare that includes the CPU, 8MB of RAM, headers for absolutely everything, and a USB port.
  
  The only problem is that the module itself costs US$30 and I was aiming for a system cost of around that.  I was using the cheapest member of the family but got derailed when I realised that it was not possible to do everything I wanted with the 100-pin package that version came in, and upgrading would instantly double the unit cost.
  
  Also I don't really know what I'm doing with this stuff, but I rarely let that stop me.
  

• Should any of us actually survive 2020, Non Non Biyori Nonstop is scheduled to air in January 2021.  (NonNonTV)  (Japanese)
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Re:Zero season 2 part 1 will start airing this month with part 2 also arriving January.  (Crunchyroll)
  
  
  
• Log Horizon season 3 has also been pushed back from October to January.  (ComicBook)
  
  Sounds like Winter 2021 will be a stellar season, if we can just fight off the laser cats.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 03:58 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 03 2020 12:05 PM (obo9H)

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