• In somewhat better news, I've found that both major supermarkets have surprisingly good store brand gluten free frozen satay chicken and rice for $3.  With actual real identifiable chicken.
  
  Chicken korma too, though that one's a little spicy for a korma.  The butter chicken has the same branding but is clearly made by someone else and is terrible.
  
  This matters to me because a lot of the gluten-free products I usually eat have been out of stock for months.  Fruit and vegetables and meat are naturally gluten-free but who has time to bother with such stuff?
  
  
  
• I bought an oven.  I was looking for an air fryer but the ones at Kmart are perpetually out of stock, and they had a 12L benchtop convection oven for $45 and I thought, why not give that a try?
  
  Well.  It arrived.
  
  It's basically a big bowl of heat-resistant glass with the heating element, fan, and controls all sitting on the (mostly also glass) lid.  Being almost entirely glass makes it dead easy to clean and it's surprisingly large.  My microwave is nominally, what, 25L?  And this one has much more usable room.
  
  Going to give it a try tomorrow and cook some chips (fries) or tater tots or something.
  
  
  
• Also joined Minds.
  
  Seems to be a nice clean design and the site works well.
  
  It's not like Twitter or even Facebook, more like, well, mee.nu.  And I already have one of those.
  
  Actually, to be fair, it's more modern and cleaner than mee.nu, offers global search, and lets you construct your own feed.  Discoverability still not great even so.
  
  Plus it's open source and there's an API maybe and you can run your own node oh fucking hell.
  
  
  • 3 Cassandra Nodes (Min 30gb RAM, 1TB SSD, 8 CPU)
  • 1 ElasticSearch Node (Min 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, 8 CPU) #2 nodes are recommended for failover
  • 1 Docker Machine (Min 60gb RAM, 50GB SSD, 32 CPU)
  
  I do all my Mana testing on a 2 core VM with 4GB RAM, to run everything, including all my non-Mana development stuff.  Admittedly I'm moving to something large because it actually costs less, but those starting requirements are yikes.
  
  
  
• Intel at Virtual CES spoke about Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Jasper Lake, and Alder Lake.  (AnandTech)
  
  Then they took questions from the press.  Sort of.

  Intel has been teasing its next generation Rocket Lake desktop processors for several months now, with arrows pointing to PCIe 4.0 and we already know about the backported CPU and GPU cores.  There are big questions as to what this means for performance and power, and Intel answered exactly zero of our questions.

  
  
  
• Lulu is a firewall for MacOS that blocks unexpected outgoing connections.  (Objective-See)
  
  MacOS, which is the major problem app on Macs these days, still exempts itself and does whatever the fuck it wants though.
  
  
  
• Ubiquti has had a data breach at their cloud provider.  (The Verge)
  
  They don't know what data might have leaked, and I'm not sure what you can do via Ubiquiti's website, but if you use their products it would be a good time to check.
  
  
  
• The challenge of decentralising the web in 2021.  (Medium)
  
  Extra tricky when hosting providers act by bills of attainder and the default assumption of corruption of blood.
  
  
  
• Intel has added hardware-based ransomware detection to 11th generation CPUs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Everything in that headline is a lie.  This is clearly software-based and detects load patterns and will probably cause problems all over the place.  But it's worth trying and they might eventually get it right, or at least to a point where it is worthwhile.
  
  
  
• A bipartisan group of Australian politicians is looking into whether American social media companies are breaking Australian law.  (ZDNet)
  
  Science Minister Karen Andrews:

  That is the absolute lack of transparency and the subjectivity that I am most concerned about. There needs to be fairness, it needs to be very clear that these rules are being applied in a consistent manner. And it's pretty obvious that at the moment they're not.

  Our current Acting Prime Minister:

  McCormack on Tuesday also declared "all lives matter" during a press conference.  He also said most of what his colleagues have said is true and that people on Twitter need to "toughen up".

  
  
  
• Germany and France have also taken note of the actions of the Bay Area Mafia.  (Fortune)
  
  Looking forward to years of multi-billion-dollar fines.  I'm totally against the European Union as a concept and as a real-world entity, but I'm fine with them as a boot kicking techno-fascists right in the wallet.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 13 2021 07:33 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 13 2021 08:07 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 13 2021 11:44 AM (PiXy!)

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• Parler will be down for a while; apparently the major cloud providers have all refused to provide services.  So they're all either openly fascist or so risk-averse that they are bending to the fascists.
  
  They have all the data and will be back.
  
  Don't ever use cloud services, except for stuff you can afford to drop without notice.  Always have a backup on an entirely separate platform and preferably in a different country.
  
  One report said they were paying Amazon $300,000 per month.  That's a crazy amount of money, but Amazon is crazy expensive.
  
  
  
• The 2021 HP Envy 14 has the Four Essential Keys but nothing much else to recommend it.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, it's not garbage, but it has an Intel CPU and soldered-in RAM, so it's certainly not good great.  [Changed that slightly out of misplaced fairness.]
  
  
  
• If you cut and paste a link from the Edge URLbar, the result is target-dependent.  In Notepad++ it gives you just the link.  In the Minx editor, it gives you HTML, which is exactly what I don't want it to do.  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Testing the Threadripper Pro 3995WX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  64 cores, eight memory channels, 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  They plugged in an RTX 3090 and ran games on it, an it's about 8% slower than a 10900K (though it lags behind the 5900X by a wider margin).
  
  On tests that could take advantage of all those cores it was either the fastest or narrowly behind the regular Threadripper 3990X.  It's no faster in itself; it just supports more memory and I/O for applications that need that.
  
  Serve the Home also got their hands on one.
  
  
  
• I mean, you're not wrong.
  
  
  
  
  
• Member is a messaging platform that stores messages in Bitcoin Cash.  (Member.Cash)
  
  I don't know how well it works, but I'm looking into something not entirely dissimilar.
  
  Discussion on Hacker News notes that the front end of the example node is running on AWS and says:

  Ask Parler how that's working out.

  
  
  
• Oh yeah, fuck Stripe.  Hardly the first time they've done something awful.
  
  
  
• New Zealand's central bank got hacked.  (AP)
  
  The hackers didn't managed to do anything but probably gained access to confidential information.  But what's the point?  Who would want to hack New Zealand?  An angry sheep?
  
  
  
• That $2 trillion COVID relief omnibus shitbill contained a law requiring all US intelligence agencies to release their data on UFOs within 180 days.  (CNN)
  
  Probably the least stupid part of it.

First I Was Like What and Then I Was Like Oh Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 12 2021 12:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 12 2021 02:47 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 12 2021 04:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 12 2021 05:58 AM (6y7dz)

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• Yeah, about that, Jack.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Move Amazon over to the Fascist column. (Instapundit)
  
  Instapundit in turn links to Buzzfeed, which uses Facebook comments. which rather illustrates the problem here.
  
  Ah. Let's try this.
  
  

  Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out. #speakfreely

  -- John Matze 🇺🇸 John Sunday, January 10, 2021

  
  I'll have to see if there's a way to generate that embed from the URL.  This is a new feature; they didn't have embeds last time I looked.
  
  Update: There is a way to do it automatically, but automatic or manual it glitches slightly if you - oh, wait.  Yeah, fixed.
  
  
  
• I signed up with MeWe in the meantime.
  
  This is their privacy policy.
  
  It's pretty solid. It's about as good as it is possible to be and still maintain a functioning social media site. The site itself seems to work well and loads quickly, though it all looks a bit 2012-ish. But then so does Facebook.
  
  Don't seem to be able to read anything unless you're logged in, though.
  
  
  
• Walter Duranty has a YouTube channel.
  
  
  The article is paywalled, and it's a British paper that's actually bothered to report in this.  I haven't seen any coverage from the American mainstream media at all.  Australia's Sky News has good coverage of China, and we're currently in a low-key trade war with them so there's not a lot of positive sentiment for the commie bastards generally.
  
  Here's a longer article from last year about the wumao - China's fifty cent army.  (Medium)
  
  Because that's how much they're paid for each piece of propaganda they post.
  
  They should really talk to the New York Times again.  They would do it for free.
  
  
  
• There are engineering samples of Zen 3 desktop APUs floating around.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure that means much since you still can't get your hands on Zen 2 desktop APUs.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Max-Q could deliver 26% of the performance of a desktop 3080.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  That's...  Not great.  They've had to clock it wayyy down to get it into a laptop power envelope at all.
  
  Also - if leaked information is correct - some RTX 3070 mobile parts will be faster than some RTX 3080 mobile parts.  I'll wait for Nvidia to confirm that before I jump on their heads though.
  
  
  
• There are also reportedly Ryzen 5800 and 5900 - non-X - models on the way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  8 and 12 core 65W parts respectively.  Same disclaimer as above - wait, let me check.  Yep, same disclaimer as above.
  
  
  
• It's not just an American - or even Western - thing.  (The Lowdown)
  
  Interesting tale of how Alibaba buys smaller companies and destroys them through the usual mix of arrogance and incompetence.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk told his Twitter followers to drop Facebook for Signal.  (Digital Trends)
  
  
  Not sure what problem that really solves, but fuck Facebook, so okay.
  
  
  
• Fuck Discord.
  
  The UI is a disaster anyway.
  
  
  
• Fuck Mozilla.
  
  The Brendan Eich situation was bad enough, but now they've clearly aligned themselves with the fascists.
  
  
  
  
  
• But while I was looking for that tweet, I stumbled onto something that reminded me I was thinking too narrowly.
  
  
  My thinking was mostly that American Big Tech had told America they are not to be trusted.  But that's too narrow.  After all, I'm not American.
  
  American Big Tech has told the entire world they are not to be trusted.
  
  That's a completely different proposition.  Under the Biden Administration, there aren't going to be any rulings curtailing their depredations.  But every other country in the world will be taking note of this.
  
  Lots of interesting discussion on this point from Indian techies on Twitter.  Let a thousand social networks bloom.
  
  
  
• Section 230 ruined the internet.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Wait, what?
  
  It's actually an insightful and well-written piece.  It points out that Section 230 promotes centralised platforms at the expense of smaller ones, bad moderation at the expense of good, and uniformity of thought at the expense of individualism and free expression.

Comfy Block Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 11 2021 02:30 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 03:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Monday, January 11 2021 03:47 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 03:48 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 04:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 05:56 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 11 2021 06:36 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 06:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 07:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 07:31 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 11 2021 08:18 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 08:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 09:26 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, January 11 2021 12:37 PM (u/3ql)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 01:25 PM (PiXy!)

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• This.
  
  
  
  
• Fuck Google. (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• Fuck Apple. (Input Mag)
  
  
  
• Fuck Reddit. (Gizmodo)
  
  
  
• Fuck Twitter. (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Fuck Facebook and Shopify as well. And Twitch and Discord, and Instagram and YouTube specifically and separately from their parent fucks. And fuck anyone who approves of this. Fuck you, Joe Manchin. Fuck you, Jason Snell.
  
  Update: Fuck CampaignMonitor.
  
  
  
• Microsoft and Amazon have managed not to be openly fascist this week. Good for you, Microsoft and Amazon.
  
  
  
• Trump moved to Parler, naturally. That effectively gave Parler the hug of death - the site is up but not really working. And it's pure coincidence that the usual suspects immediately moved to wipe Parler off the map.
  
  Build your own social network, they say. That makes you an easier target.
  
  
  
• Acer has a new Chromebook. (WCCFTech)
  
  You'd have to be nuts to buy a Chromebook, unless you can wipe it and install regular Linux.
  
  
  
• Twitter also banned the account of Sci-Hub, a site that freely distributes scientific papers from paid journals. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sci-Hub is being sued in India by Elsevier, which holds a huge percentage of the market for paid scientific journals. The site is popular there because Elsevier is eye-gougingly expensive, and it gives Indian scientists a chance to keep up with the literature.
  
  That doesn't make it necessarily legal or morally right, but why exactly is Twitter banning them, when they don't publish anything there?
  
  
  
• You can download the torrents here, at least for now. (gen.lib.rus.ec)
  
  Though at last count it was about 55TB, which is rather a lot.
  
  
  
• The Chinese genocide propaganda account is still up on Twitter, so apparently that's just fine.
  
  Update: Huh. It's gone. That's a first. Tiny, tiny bit of credit to Twitter for not openly supporting the forced sterilisation of entire ethnic populations.
  
  
  
• GNAP is the next generation of OAuth. (FusionAuth)
  
  This is what is becoming OAuth3. It is completely incompatible with OAuth2, so congratulations on a good job there guys.
  
  
  
• Roku has bought the content of the deceased Quibi for some amount below $100 million. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Quibi launched in April last year, burned through $1.7 billion in cash, and died in December. Roku frankly overpaid for their content, but it will be available to their customers for free.... Which means their customers are also overpaying.
  
  
  
• The Asus TUF Gaming A17 might be coming sooner than expected. (WCCFTech)
  
  Ryzen 5800H, RTZ 3070, 17.3" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
  
  
  
• Half the memory in Tohru has evaporated.  I was wondering why it was slow.  It's showing 16GB found, 8GB usable.
  
  I haven't put the new RAM in yet, so this will get fixed one way or another.  This is almost certainly related to my earlier crashes.
  
  
  
• I've watched Gura's undying gawrilla Minecraft stream now* and replaced all the YouTube videos from December 31 onwards with the new quick-load format.  I'm thinking of making that global.
  
  Now I'll backup some essential files and reboot this thing to see if it finds its other 8GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Update: Well, that was weird.  Windows Memory Diagnostics found no errors.  The Dell BIOS diagnostics found no errors.  Resetting page file allocation (one suggestion I found) did nothing, and setting and clearing the maximum memory allocation** in MSConfig did nothing.  There's no option in the BIOS to adjust reserved memory, and the BIOS shows 16GB of RAM present as it should.
  
  And now it's working.
  
  
  

Kiara Minecraft Compilation Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, January 09 2021 01:56 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:46 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:08 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 10 2021 05:56 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:16 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:19 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:42 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:53 PM (kqK5x)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:30 PM (PiXy!)

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• Lenovo has a new range of Ideapads.  (AnandTech)
  
  These include the IdeaPad 5G based on Qualcomm's 8cx processor, which no-one should buy because it's terribly slow, the IdeaPad 5i Pro based on Intel's 11th generation processors which no-one should buy because AMD is much better value and also isn't available in the US, the IdeaPad 5 Pro 14" which has an AMD APU but is also not available in the US, and the IdeaPad 5 Pro 16" which has an AMD APU, will ship in the US starting in May, and...
  
  Well, I personally don't like numeric keypads on laptops - or desktops, really - but it does effectively give you the Four Essential Keys so there's that.
  
  1920x1200 120Hz display, Nvidia MX450 graphics in addition to the APU's integrated graphics, and up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD.
  
  
  
• Sealed court records were exposed by the SolarWinds debacle.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  The article also covers speculation that the SolarWinds breach was enabled by an earlier breach of JetBrains - makers of IntelliJ and PyCharm and more significantly here, TeamCity.
  
  What a fiasco.
  
  
  
• Running Windows on the Arm-based Mac Mini.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Using a technical preview of Parallels Desktop and an insider preview of Windows on Arm, so not something any sane person would want to do.  You'd be better off with DOSBox-X and Windows Me.
  
  
  
• Facebook has removed the likes count from public pages.  (New York Post)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Fuck ZDNet...  No, wait, it's always that one idiot.  Why they keep him on staff I don't know, but the rest of the site is still more-or-less worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Blockchain Stalin is at it again.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Saw an unfamiliar host logging in to one of my servers just now with a private key.
  
  Minor heart attack until I realised that it was the backup server doing its daily duty and the hosting company had changed their reverse DNS settings.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 09 2021 07:40 AM (eqaFC)

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• Adata is working with Gigabyte and MSI to prepare for DDR5-8400.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entry spec for DDR5 is 4800, but manufacturers are hoping to have 8400 at launch.  This would be huge for future desktop APUs.
  
  
  
• AMD's upcoming 32-core Epyc 7543 is just 5% slower than Intel's far more expensive 28-core Xeon 8280 assuming you are using two Xeons.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And the Xeon is Intel's current top of the line, while the 7543 is the middle of AMD's range.
  
  With base and boost clocks of 2.8/3.7GHz, this chip is clocked nearly as high as my desktop, and since it's Zen 3 and not Zen1 like I have, would run around 50% faster on even single-threaded workloads.
  
  
  
• Sonnet has a rather neat little eGPU in their new Breakaway Puck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not particularly cheap at $600 for a 5500XT and $900 for a 5700XT, but I'm not sure there are that many options in this space.  Most such devices are built to take a full-size graphics card.
  
  It also serves as a basic dock - Thunderbolt in and out, two USB 3, plus HDMI and Displayport.
  
  
  
• The EPYC3451D4U-2L2T2O8R is a previously undiscovered novel by Hugo Gernsback.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Or possibly an Epyc Embedded microATX motherboard from ASRock.
  
  It's still based on Zen 1 parts, though AMD recently announced Zen 2 Epyc Embedded chips so we might see an upgrade soon.
  
  Compared to full-size  Epyc it uses a much smaller socket and much less power (sub-100W).  Compared to desktop Ryzen - which does make a good CPU for small servers - it offers four-channel memory and RDIMM support for up to 512GB here and 1TB in theory, and more PCIe lanes.
  
  This board is also the first I've seen supporting the built-in 10G Ethernet found in every Ryzen part.  About time.  It also has dual Intel 10Gb and 1Gb ports and yet another port for remote management, plus four U.2 NVMe ports and twelve SAS ports, so a full complement of both networking and I/O for a small board.
  
  
  
• The NYSE is isn't is delisting three Chinese telcos.  (ZDNet)
  
  The companies are, of course, under the thumb of the CCP and the Chinese military and busy stealing any data they can get their hands on, because that's simply how China works.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding a newsfeed to the Windows taskbar.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  So that users can disable it until Microsoft abandons the idea.
  
  That's not my take, that's everyone's take.
  
  
  
• Fuck Apple.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Also Twitter, Facebook, and Tech Crunch.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile I'm trying out Vivaldi as an alternative to Chrome.  But given the recent hacks I'm not sure I want to give it my passwords, so kind of a pain.

Fuck Apple Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 08 2021 07:14 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 09 2021 03:50 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 04:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 09 2021 04:45 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, January 09 2021 09:03 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 09 2021 09:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 12:37 PM (PiXy!)

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• Jim Keller has been named CTO of Tenstorrent.  (AnandTech)
  
  He's been behind a lot of what's good in CPUs over the last couple of decades, working on the DEC Alpha, AMD K7 (Athlon) and later guiding (but not designing) Zen, and working for P.A. Semi and then Apple on Arm designs.
  
  Tenstorrent makes AI processors rather than general-purpose CPUs so this isn't likely to become a consumer product.
  
  He was most recently at Intel before telling them to shove their office politics where the sun don't shine resigning to spend more time with his family.
  
  
  
• DOSBox-X is DOSBox only X.  (DOSBox-X)
  
  It supports Windows 95, 98, and ME, and also the NEC PC-98, Roland MT-32 emulation, internet access, and useful tricks like snapshotting your machine state.  (Perfect for games with crappy save systems.)
  
  
  
• Android Things is the latest member of the Google Deadpool.  (InfoQ)
  
  It is no longer accepting new projects and will be shut down entirely exactly 365 days from now.
  
  
  
• GitHub has received a US license to operate in Iran.  (ZDNet)
  
  Countdown to it being banned in Iran...
  
  
  
• Telegram lets you triangulate the precise location of any idiot who turns on the People Nearby feature.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Telegram's response so far is yeah, whatever.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 07 2021 12:17 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 07 2021 04:29 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Jay at Friday, January 08 2021 12:52 PM (0jVI9)

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• Sydney has gone into, well, not a lockdown, but a something, with masks mandated for pretty much anyone out in public.
  
  We had five Bat Flu cases yesterday.
  
  I mean, it's not like I want to go outside anyway.  Sydney is catching the edge of the Cyclone Imogen storm system right now and it's absolutely pissing down.  And Warragamba Dam is 98% full already, so we can expect flooding in western Sydney at any moment.
  
  (This time last year it was 63% full and western Sydney was on fire.)
  
  
  
• Crypto miners say fuck you to anyone hoping to get a new graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With Bitcoin and Ethereum on the zoom again it's likely that mid-range and last-gen cards will quickly become impossible to find as well.
  
  And it's not just theoretical.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Some guy got hold of 78 RTX 3080s and built them into a mining rig.  Some other people are slightly peeved.
  
  If crypto prices keep increasing, AMD CPUs will also become viable, and the shortage of 5000-series parts is already causing increases in 3000-series pricing.
  
  
  
• Original Linus says fuck Intel and their short-sighted policy on ECC memory.  (Tom's Hardware)

  ECC absolutely matters.
  
  ECC availability matters a lot - exactly because Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation.

  He also doesn't like 80 character line limits.
  
  
  
• A Windows guy is taking a look at the new Arm-based Mac Mini.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Just an unboxing so far, but he's pretty fair with both praise and criticism and not a member of the tame Apple press, so the follow-ups should  be worth reading.
  
  
  
• There's a new PlayStation game out: Magic Castle.  (Engadget)
  
  Where by PlayStation we mean PlayStation.  None of this numbered bullshit.
  
  
  
• Ether - the Ethereum currency - has hit $1000 again.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Coupled with high gas fees this makes the network completely unusable.  But I should be able to swap a tiny amount of ETH for a ton of Matic for the work I'm doing at my day job.
  
  
  
• Alibaba CEO Jack Ma hasn't been seen in public since October due to a scheduling conflict.  (Reuters)
  
  The conflict being not wanting to get vanned by the CCP.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 06 2021 02:16 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Wednesday, January 06 2021 04:05 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Wednesday, January 06 2021 06:59 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2021 09:16 AM (PiXy!)

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• Crucial's DDR4-5100 RAM delivers an average of nearly 1% better performance than DDR4-4400.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $900 for a 16GB kit, basically any other hardware upgrade will deliver better value for money.  This is a marketing gimmick, nothing more.
  
  
  
• URL shorteners track you for advertising revenue.  (Like Miles)
  
  Even if they don't show you an ad, they set ad cookies using an intermediary redirect.
  
  
  
• An overview of USB 5GbE adapters.  (Serve the Home)
  
  After reviewing three different adapters, the takeaway is just buy the Sabrent.  It's the most reliable and also the cheapest.
  
  They're planning to review a QNAP model, which I hope will also be good.  QNAP is an established brand for networking gear and I would hope they're not selling garbage even if it's just an OEM product they've put their name on.
  
  
  
• Facebook bad.  (The Atlantic)
  
  They do have a point here, but there's a reason I refer to them as Fascist Quarterly.
  
  
  
• Apple has decided not to ban the MacOS app Amphetamine after all.  (9to5Mac)
  
  They said the app - which simply gives you fine-grained control over your computer's sleep settings - broke the App Store guidelines on drugs and alcohol.

  Your app appears to promote inappropriate use of controlled substances. Specifically, your app name and icon include references to controlled substances, pills.

  Apple is run by morons.  Common sense prevailed in this instance, but that's not going to last.

• Lessons learned from the SSDNodes outage: They have pretty good support for a budget VPS provider.  30 minutes to resolve a host node problem at 1AM on a Sunday is fine, though perhaps better monitoring could have caught this earlier.
  
  Also, the backups appear to be snapshots attached to the host node.  Fine if you accidentally splatted your database, not so useful if the entire node goes down.
  
  After the reboot, I averaged 487MB per second creating a 60GB file (for setting up a ZFS filesystem).  I've seen it running faster but that's quite acceptable, and faster than you get on Digital Ocean volumes for example.
  
  
  
• Need 5GbE?  Only have USB?  Not sure what to buy?  Serve the Home got you covered.
  
  Sabrent NT-SS5G.
  StarTech US5GA30.
  TRENDnet TUC-ET5G.
  
  In short: Don't get the TRENDnet.  It bad.
  
  The others only deliver around 3.5Gbps, because they run USB 3.0, which is only 5Gbps itself and has its own overhead to account for.  But if you're otherwise stuck on plain old Gigabit Ethernet that's still a pretty big gain.
  
  
  
• Global app spending reached $407 million on Christmas.  (SensorTower)
  
  Apple removed 39,000 games from their Chinese app store on New Year's Eve, including 95% of the top 1500 paid titles.  (Reuters)
  
  For every hard-won success there is an equal and opposite China ruins everything.
  
  
  
• ZipFly generates Zip files on the fly with Python.  (GitHub)
  
  That is, it doesn't need to write to disk or build the entire file in memory first.  This is great if, for example, your app needs to deliver multiple CSV or JSON downloads at once in a convenient form.
  
  I have a use for this.
  
  
  
• Tohru went splut again just now...  At the exact moment my new combination washer/dryer switched from the wash cycle to the dry cycle.
  
  Which might be a coincidence except that my home office is on the same power circuit as the laundry.
  
  Time to look for a small UPS, I think.  I have one lying around but it's pretty old and at this point it's more of a hazardous waste boat anchor.
  
  My iMac didn't blip, but it wasn't running anything and the screen was off, so it wouldn't have been drawing much power anyway.