What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Thursday, August 12
Daily News Stuff 12 August 2021
Department Of Redundancy Edition
Department Of Redundancy Edition
Top Story
- The problem with having redundant virtual servers is you don't necessarily know if they are redundant or not.... Until your cloud provider has to reboot a hardware node and your primary and secondary API servers both drop dead.
That wouldn't have been so bad except one of the nodes came back up with two copies of the core software running, with competing restart scripts fighting over the network port and overwriting each other's log files.
So downstream apps were getting random, intermittent errors depending on where the load balancer sent them and which instance was active at that moment, but there was nothing to indicate a problem in the server logs because only the instance that was working at that moment was logging anything.
Fun.
- Samsung announced their new Flip and Fold. (AnandTech)
The Flip is squarish and unfolds into a rather tall but otherwise normal phone. The Fold is a normal-sized phone that unfolds into a squarish tablet.
They look quite nice and could actually be great devices if the folding screens are robust now. But not cheap - starting at $999 for the Flip and $1799 for the Fold.
Tech News
- The hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network has returned $256 million and a thank you note. (Tom's Hardware)
What?
- Topsy-Turvy Land: The Radeon RX 6600 XT is a 160W card but only uses 75W when mining. (Tom's Hardware)
Sort of an anti-Intel.
- NSW police have arrested a man for saying mean things on the internet. (ZDNet)
Time to riot!
He allegedly threatened to harm police horses.
Riot cancelled. Throw the fucker into the volcano along with all the politicians.
- Three US senators have introduced a bill that would curtail the anti-competitive practices of of Apple and Google's app stores. (Reuters)
Which I'm all for, but with Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar attached to it, this legislation has gotta suck somehow.
- Stardock has announced Start11. (The Verge)
To the surprise of nobody. But it's welcome all the same.
Disclaimer: Blaaaaaargh.
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Wednesday, August 11
Daily News Stuff 11 August 2021
Mediocrity And Mendacity Edition
Mediocrity And Mendacity Edition
Top Story
- The Radeon RX 6600 XT is here and it's definitely a video card. (Tom's Hardware)
AMD jacked up the MSRP on this one because with cards selling as fast as they can produce them, why should the scalpers have all the fun?
And that seems to be the main point of contention in all the reviews - performance is fine, but the price hike means value is no better than AMD's cards from two or three years ago.
Well, performance is fine unless you want to run Minecraft with ray tracing enabled at 2560x1440. Then it plunges to 15fps - half the speed of Nvidia's competing RTX 3060. You can, of course, just turn off ray tracing, and then Minecraft will run on an elderly potato.
- There's also a professional version, the W6600, and there things are slightly different. (Hot Hardware)
In this case it's only slightly faster than the old model - but half the price. That really is progress.
Tech News
- You can now run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac. (Tom's Hardware)
Under virtualisation, just to make things as miserable as possible.
- Hackers stole $600 million from crypto site Poly Network. (Tom's Hardware)
Oops.
- What's wrong with Ethereum. (Tomer Strolight)
What's wrong - according to Tomer - is a pragmatic approach that tries to solve the problem that simple bugs can lead to irrecoverable losses of billions of dollars.
- Ransomware is now targeting both Synology and QNAP storage devices. (Bleeping Computer)
Not mine, though, because they're currently unplugged and switched off.
- Amazon has been awarded a secret $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the NSA. (The Hill)
We know about it because Microsoft protested the bidding process.
Disclaimer: Kiddly divey too, wouldn't you?
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Tuesday, August 10
Daily News Stuff 10 August 2021
Good News Everyone Edition
Good News Everyone Edition
Top Story
- Actual good news for once: Brickmuppet is out of hospital and staying with his folks. (Brickmuppet Blog)
He's still got some tough rehab ahead but the prognosis is good.
- File this under probably good news - the problem with running a modern-day Stasi: Anti-government hackers have stolen all the data collected by the Belarus secret police. (Current Time)
The article mentions the personal data of government officials, and passport data for the entire country, but it goes beyond that: Government phone calls, security footage from police cameras, the government's complete propaganda database, a huge volume of tapped private phone calls, and a complete log of the activities of every government informant.
Tech News
- Intel's Arrow Lake will target AMD's Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
The new chip with have up to 14 cores and 2560 graphics shaders and show up in, um, 2024 maybe.
- Apple was planning to encrypt cloud backups but dropped the plan after the FBI bitched at them. (Reuters)
So... It's all just sitting there wide open like a Belarusian police station?
- Don't buy QNAP storage devices, I said. Stick to Synology, I said. They're relatively secure, I said. Well, fuck, I said. (Bleeping Computer)
This doesn't seem to be too severe, just that there aren't enough safeguards against brute-force guessing weak passwords. A secure system will lock accounts for, say, 15 minutes after a few failed logins, and apparently these don't.
- Chinese scientists report having created an amorphous carbon compound - basically carbon-based glass - that is harder and stronger than natural diamond. (National Science Review)
Natural diamonds have flaws and are softer than artificial ones, so this doesn't mean that the new substance is the hardest known.
Disclaimer: The hardest-known unnaturally occurring substance is two pieces of chicken frozen together when you only want to thaw one of them.
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Monday, August 09
Daily News Stuff 9 August 2021
Optimistically Underwhelmed Edition
Optimistically Underwhelmed Edition
Top Story
- So, my new laptop arrived this morning - the Dell Inspiron 14 7000. It's not physically impressive; it's small, and light, and completely silent. The keyboard is perfectly fine, with decent travel and no noticeable flex. The screen is clear, sharp, and vibrant, without being aggressive about it. I plugged it in, and when I checked a while later, it was fully charged.
It has an 11th-generation Intel laptop chip, which are rather better than their desktop counterparts. And Nvidia MX350 graphics, which are not much faster than the latest Intel Xe integrated graphics but do offer an extra 2GB of dedicated VRAM.
Oh, and it has a tiny physical camera shutter, so you don't need electrical tape. Basically, there's nothing to complain about. Everything works just like it should.
They just discontinued that model.
- Screw you, Microsoft Edge. (Charles Petzold)
Almost as soon as Microsoft shipped Windows they started think up ways to ruin it. They keep trying to shove ads into it, and people always, always hate it, and they have to take them out again.
This time - as the title suggests - it's not Windows itself but the Edge browser. Same deal, though. To be useful, an operating system or a browser must be a neutral platform. Anything else is cancer. Or maybe anthrax.
Tech News
- A Ukrainian TV station sent a takedown request to google to remove links to content hosted at 127.0.0.1. (TorrrentFreak)
The piracy is coming from inside the house!
At least it wasn't 0127.0.0.1. Who knows what would have happened then?
- A list of things that work in Windows 10 but are currently broken in Windows 11. (Bleeping Computer)
Guess I'll have to worry about this after all, since I now have a computer capable of running Windows 11.
In fact, with the amount of hardware I have that is experiencing problems - or has suddenly died outright - I might soon have no computers left that can't be upgraded.
- Testing a high-end NVMe SSD across three different CPUs. (Serve the Home)
And... It doesn't really make much difference. The WD Black SN 850 is fast on all three platforms, and on many benchmarks the numbers are almost identical.
And that suggests that CPUs are ready for PCIe 5.0 - which is expected to show up by the end of the year.
- It's 2021. Who the hell assigns 256MB to /boot?
Disclaimer: Look out, there are llamas!
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Sunday, August 08
Server Move Progress
Won't be complete today, but I was able to sneakily fix a corrupted index while the server was running, so I don't need to worry about that during the move.
I also have a new editor I'm trying out that actually generates and displays BBCode directly, rather than the messy mix of BBCode and HTML we use right now. While BBCode is dated it does solve real problems when you're running a multi-blog environment like this.
Won't be complete today, but I was able to sneakily fix a corrupted index while the server was running, so I don't need to worry about that during the move.
I also have a new editor I'm trying out that actually generates and displays BBCode directly, rather than the messy mix of BBCode and HTML we use right now. While BBCode is dated it does solve real problems when you're running a multi-blog environment like this.
Update: And the damn server crashed again. Ugh.
Update: Here's what the new editor looks like, after a couple of minutes tweaking the theme settings.
Update: Here's what the new editor looks like, after a couple of minutes tweaking the theme settings.
It supports complete customisation of the BBCode, so all the fancy tags no-one uses because they don't know about them can be buttons in the editor.
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Daily News Stuff 8 August 2021
Alive And Brilliant Edition
The smallest and largest bodies in the Universe are black holes, ranging from the size of a proton to - in the case of 618 YOURMOM - eleven times the width of our entire solar system.
Alive And Brilliant Edition
Top Story
- Scenes from the Sydney lockdown.
My American friends might ask why we're not marching in the streets over this. Well, we are, in our own way.
The little dog is emblematic of how Australian voters deal with government overreach.
(I'm not convinced this is a recent photo. Not sure it's not, either. It's winter here, and it's chilly today, but we just had a couple of warm days so.... Maybe.)
- Another tame Apple press outlet weighs in and it's not good for Apple. (Tidbits)
The writers go out of their way to afford Apple every courtesy, and still find themselves in line with the company's harshest critics:Apple’s head of privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, told the New York Times, "If you’re storing a collection of C.S.A.M. material, yes, this is bad for you. But for the rest of you, this is no different."
Some readers are still drinking the Flavor Aid and one of the writers pushes back firmly in the comments:
Given that only a very small number of people engage in downloading or sending CSAM (and only the really stupid ones would use a cloud-based service; most use peer-to-peer networks), this is a specious remark, akin to saying, "If you’re not guilty of possessing stolen goods, you should welcome an Apple camera in your home that lets us prove you own everything."Correct. We don’t know anything except they’re building a system that they entirely control, offer no transparency into, and will not allow outside audits of.
A system that is designed specifically to spy on children.The best way for totalitarian governments to implement surveillance is on the back of systems that people all agree are necessary.
The tame Apple press can bark after all.The most dangerous phrase in the world is "trust me."
- Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Um. I swear there was a tweet here.
Tech News
- Still pissed off about my dead HP Spectres. New laptop should arrive tomorrow though - the Dell Inspiron 14 7000.
And I'll likely be getting an Inspiron 16 Plus as well. They're pretty much Dell's equivalent of the MacBook Pro 13" and 16" models - exactly the same screen resolutions and close to the same weights, though the 14" Dell is actually a few ounces lighter than the 13" Mac. Probably has worse battery life, but that's not the deciding factor for me.
The Inspiron 16 is faster than my current desktop and will be my desktop system - plugged into a couple of 27" monitors - until graphics cards become affordable or there's a game more demanding than Minecraft that I want to play.
- Stop putting numeric keypads on gaming laptops, dammit. Or at least offer some with a sane keyboard layout, like HP.
Gigabyte has some models that are priced similarly to the Inspiron 16 but with better specs - RTX 3070 and 4K OLED screen. But the Dell is 40% off and much easier to get sign-off on for a company purchase.
If the Gigabyte had a sensible keyboard layout though, I might buy it with my own cash.
- You can now expand the storage on the PlayStation 5 you don't have because it's not available anywhere. (Tom's Hardware)
You need a high-end PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD, with a minimum read speed of 5.5GB per second. And a heatsink, since the expansion slot isn't cooled by the PS5's fan. But the Samsung 980 Pro was tested and works fine, loading as fast as the integrated storage, and writing much faster.
Write speeds were probably not a priority when Sony designed the PS5 - even if you have gigabit internet and are downloading at full speed, the cheapest SATA SSDs from 2015 would cope just fine.
- EVGA is pushing a firmware patch for its GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 graphics cards. (WCCFTech)
These are the ones most often cited as being killed by Amazon's game New World. Problems extend to other Nvidia cards and even some AMD ones, but the 3090 and specifically EVGA 3090 cards are hardest hit.
- If your EVGA card has already died and you need a replacement right away, you might be in for a bad time. (WCCFTech)
They asked for a deposit of €1,728.20 to replace a 3080. Which is double MSRP for the card itself.
- Why CAPTCHA photos are so unbearably depressing. (Clive Thompson)
If we ever get general AI and put it in an autonomous vehicle, it will probably commit suicide.
- If you have one of the listed WiFi routers, either patch it right away or yeet that sucker straight out the window. (Bleeping Computer)
The list includes models distributed by Verizon and Telstra so it might not even be one you bought yourself.
- Go and Rust are vulnerable to that weird mixed octal/decimal IP address thing. (Bleeping Computer)
The problem is, decades ago when octal was still in use - I'm old enough to have seen an octal core dump, but I've never used one in anger - someone had the bright idea that the addresses 127.0.0.1 and 0127.0.0.1 would go to entirely different locations.
It was never much used and pretty much all software gets it wrong. Except routers, which follow the spec to the letter and will send your packets to somewhere you never expected.
- It doesn't matter how secure your hashing algorithm is if your password is 123. (ZDNet)
So... Don't do that.
- To sum up, again:
Elasticsearch built a search server, based on the open source Lucene library, and released it as open source. So far, so good.
The reserved certain features for paying customers. Okay, gotta make a living.
This reservation extended to even the most basic security mechanisms, so anyone using the free version was left completely open to attack. And this led to a whole string of data breaches. I was reporting on them weekly for a year. Not so good.
Amazon came along and offered their own paid Elasticsearch-as-a-service, even calling it Elasticsearch, which Elasticsearch had trademarked. Also not good.
Elasticsearch responded by changing the licensing of their code so it was no longer open source. Double plus ungood.
Amazon responded by taking the last open source release of Elasticsearch, forking it, and releasing it as OpenSearch. This is kind of a jerk move given where Amazon started out, and would have been better received if another party had done it, but here we are.
Elasticsearch responded by breaking API compatibility so that code libraries for Elasticsearch no longer work with OpenSearch. (The New Stack)
Elasticsearch uses semantic versioning - supposedly. Moving from 7.13 to 7.14 can add new features and can certainly fix bugs, but shouldn't break your code. They've always been bad at sticking to that, but this time the sole purpose of the update was to break things.
And now Amazon has responded by forking the API clients as well to restore compatibility.
It takes talent and determination to make Amazon look like the good guy. Congratulations, Elasticsearch.
Curiously enough I was recently talking to one of the original developers of Lucene and he apologised to me when I mentioned using Elasticsearch extensively. But it's not Lucene I have a problem with.
- A network of 350 fake accounts have been spreading Chinese propaganda. (BBC)
Tree fiddy, you say?
A Long Way to a Your Mom Joke Video of the Day
The smallest and largest bodies in the Universe are black holes, ranging from the size of a proton to - in the case of 618 YOURMOM - eleven times the width of our entire solar system.
Disclaimer: I ain't gonna give you no tree fiddy.
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Saturday, August 07
Daily News Stuff 7 August 2021
Unexpectedly Edition
While he works on getting better, here's a bouncy anime girl playing Kerbal Space Program. New agency, Cyberlive, which like PRISM seems to be based in Japan but targeted at an English-speaking audience. They just launched two weeks ago.
Gotta love her self-description: Konlumi! I'm the star known as Gliese 667C and space's greatest thief, Kaneko Lumi!
Update: Nope, US-based.
Unexpectedly Edition
Top Story
- Working on the server move. I panicked because this server went down again and we might miss an update on Brickmuppet's status, but when I got it back up and checked he'd already posted.
Situation isn't great and he'll be in rehab for weeks, so time to smuggle him catgirls and computers.
Wonderduck chimed in over there. He's still recovering too.
Properly puts my personal upsets into perspective.
- Surprised by pushback over their massive violation of the privacy of children, Apple poured oil on troubled waters... And lit it on fire.
Dismissing the entire security community, which has universally decried this, and the entire privacy community likewise as "screeching voices of the minority" shows exactly where this is coming from.
They are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong. They know it will harm people. That's why they kept it secret. They just don't care.
This is the end result of intellectual monoculture. To whatever small extent they spoke to any security or privacy advocates about this, their concerns were overridden because by definition anyone objecting to this was evil.
Cupertino delenda est.
Google is no better, except that - well, we'll get to that in a moment.
- The problem with perceptual hashes. (Rent-a-founder)
Perceptual hashes are numbers that are supposed to represent what a picture looks like. They're what Apple plan to use to spy on children. Click through to that link to see what a computer considers a match of perceptual hashes of two images. I won't spoil it for you.
Tech News
- Tame Apple press regurgitates indefensible press release, gets torn to shreds in the comments. (9to5Mac)
Even Apple fans aren't buying this.
- Tame Apple press says Apple's spying software won't spy on you if you tick the please don't spy on me box. (iMore)
Retards.
- Secure messaging app WhatsApp says Apple is full of shit.
WhatsApp got bought up by Facebook and has since succumbed to the lure of the sus side of the Force, but he's not wrong here.
- CalyxOS is a de-Googled fork of Android. (CalyxOS)
All the good stuff, none of the bad stuff, which is possible because despite all of Google's flaws (we'd need a bigger blog if we went down that road) Android itself is open-source.
The problem with CalyxOS is that it only supports a handful of devices, mostly Google Pixels. So you're still stuck with Google. There are other projects with similar goals though.
- Intel will be spending up to $120 billion to build a new chip fabrication site. (Tom's Hardware)
The site would host six to eight factories to be constructed over ten years.
The company is also spending $20 billion to expand capacity on its Arizona site.
- If you look at an existing Ryzen CPU under a microscope, you can see the connectors AMD will be using to add the extra 64MB of stacked cache. (LinkedIn)
About 23,000 of them. They've been in place on all Ryzen 5000 chips all along.
- The International Wushu Federation, based in Switzerland, is demanding an Australian court force US-based Google to hand over details of a Turkish channel reposting their content and saying mean things about them. (TorrentFreak)
Mostly saying mean things about them.
Can you say venue shopping, boys and girls?
- Gigabyte got hit by a ransomware attack. (Bleeping Computer)
The company said they had restored from backup, but their websites seem to be down right now. Not great if you need a driver update.
- Intel's high-end next-gen NUCs will have discrete Intel DG2 graphics with up to 16GB of VRAM. (WCCFTech)
Not clear why, exactly. The DG2 is not a small chip and should provide decent mid-range gaming performance. But it means these NUCs could draw 300W, as much as my entire desktop system including 4K monitor.
- A battle is raging between two bipartisan groups of idiots over whether the Senate infrastructure bill will be passed as is and destroy blockchain activity in the US or be amended and still destroy blockchain activity in the US only take a few more months to do so. (CNBC)
The bill as written would regulate and tax pretty much anyone and anything related to the blockchain. The proposed amendment would relax these rules but only on proof-of-work blockchains - that is, the ones that have made graphics cards vanish from the shelves and use more electricity than most countries.
Brickmuppet Bait Video of the Day
While he works on getting better, here's a bouncy anime girl playing Kerbal Space Program. New agency, Cyberlive, which like PRISM seems to be based in Japan but targeted at an English-speaking audience. They just launched two weeks ago.
Gotta love her self-description: Konlumi! I'm the star known as Gliese 667C and space's greatest thief, Kaneko Lumi!
Update: Nope, US-based.
Disclaimer: Damn you and your fairy stories, they're smashing up my house!
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Friday, August 06
Daily News Stuff 6 August 2021
Sigh Edition
Sigh Edition
Top Story
- Hoping for good news from Brickmuppet soon.
- In Apple's defense, they're only spying on your children. (Ars Technica)
Ace touched on this: Apple's touted new feature for iOS 15 is that it will secretly scan all the photos on your device and your cloud storage, secretly compare them with a secret catalogue of designated bad things, and then very publicly send the details to the feds.
Initially it will only - they say - invade your privacy this way if you're a child. Which makes everything so much better.
Even (most) of the idiots at Ars Technica are up in arms about this. Wade far enough into the comments and there's someone who will excuse anything. (Rule One: Never read the comments.)
End-to-end encryption means that nobody in the middle can see your private content. But when one party - which is to say, Apple - controls both ends, they can do whatever the fuck they want. And what they want to do is spy on you.
For your own good.
The EFF is unimpressed. (EFF)
This is not so much a slippery slope as an express elevator to hell.
- Remember, Apple cares about your privacy. They won't allow anyone else to violate it.
Fans of YouTubers can no longer send in gifts - even via a management company - thanks to Apple's AirTags. I think a really big induction coil could solve this problem though. Drop it from orbit right into Cupertino.
Tech News
- Intel's upcoming Alder Lake CPUs include up to 8 high-performance cores and 8 high-efficiency cores, to reduce power consumption when you're not running heavy workloads.
How well does this work? Signs are, it doesn't. (WCCFTech)
Power deliver specs for the new 12th gen chips are 50-100W higher than for 10th and 11th gen, which are infamously power hungry.
On the other hand, it comes with PCIe 5.0. That could account for a chunk of that increase; running I/O at 32Gbps isn't easy.
- Adata has announced ECC DDR5 memory modules running at up to 12600MHz in capacities up to 64GB. (WCCFTech)
Still no dates or prices, but the capacity is new information. I was certainly not expecting 64GB modules this soon.
- The Ryzen 5600G and 5700G desktop APUs are available now. (WCCFTech)
I checked and it's true. I might switch around the planned config for my new Linux system. Again.
If you just want basic graphics - enough for playing Minecraft and running two 4K monitors - these will handle it without paying the current 50-100% markups on video cards. Performance doesn't trail too far behind the CPU-only versions - and they're actually cheaper.
- I might be getting a second Dell laptop, since they're having a major sale (they usually are, true) and I just had two HP laptops expire on me.
This one would be the Inspiron 16 Plus. 8-core Intel CPU, 3072x1920 16" screen, 16GB RAM (upgradeable), 512GB NVMe SSD (also upgradeable), RTX 3050 with 4GB RAM, which again is plenty for Minecraft, and a... Numeric keypad.
Not my favourite layout, but probably better than not having the Four Essential Keys at all.
With the SSD, it actually has two M.2 slots. One 2230 size, and one 2280 size. It seems to ship with a 2230-size drive, so you can just drop in a full-size unit to upgrade it.
There's a model with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 3060, but it's not on sale so it would cost twice as much. And I already have 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
- A personal tale of getting put on a secret list. (Areoform)
The author had the good fortune to share the name of someone working with a sanctioned company. That meant they couldn't receive funds from, basically, anyone. And they couldn't get taken off the list either, because none of this is coded into law and there's no oversight whatsoever. And that leads to lives being destroyed, if not cancelled entirely:In my case, when the programmers punted to the KYC department and legal, a bunch of transactions were cancelled. In this case, the police will raid your house and arrest you for "child porn.â€
A recent test showed that putting a label that said "iPod" on an apple fooled an image recognition AI into believing that it was an iPod.
The image they will raid you for wouldn’t even necessarily have to be an adult one. Computers are strange. They are very literal beings. They do exactly what they are told, which is both their greatest asset and weakness. For example, this neural network thinks that this cat is guacamole.
And that's what Apple is foisting upon you.
- Oh, and the US government plans to track you everywhere you go. (The Intercept)
If you're going to tax cars by the mile you have to know how many miles they travel, and they are planning to do this in the most invasive way possible.
The data - if this goes through - will of course also leak. All of it.
- Google's new Nest cameras work even without a subscription fee. (Ars Technica)
Well, that's novel. Almost as if you own what you bought.
Disclaimer: Thanks to Apple for putting a couple of grand extra into my Linux server budget. If an issue comes up at work and I need a Mac to fix it, it just won't get fixed.
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Now Is Not A Good Time, Server
Server went down again. Fixed again.
Will really try to get us migrated this weekend. I don't need this right now.
Server went down again. Fixed again.
Will really try to get us migrated this weekend. I don't need this right now.
Update: Preparing the move now. I'm going to see if I can migrate us from MySQL to MariaDB at the same time. If this goes well we will only need half an hour of downtime, and we've already had more than that, repeatedly.
Update 2: If you need to repair indexes, do that in the identical release first, then upgrade.
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Thursday, August 05
Daily News Stuff 5 August 2021
Okay Now I'm Annoyed Edition
Okay Now I'm Annoyed Edition
Top Story
- Brickmuppet suffered a stroke.
He was able to call an ambulance and even post to his blog, so hopefully he'll be okay, but these are difficult things and he could use all our support.
- I haven't had time to even look at my twin HP Spectres recently. Just did. I shouldn't have.
Both of them have suffered severe battery bloat and are now little more than e-waste. And I've hardly had the time to use them.
I do have a new notebook arriving any day, but it would have been nice to still have the old notebooks. I don't know why these suffered from battery bloat in particular; my old Dell has been running for years and while its battery is wearing out it still works fine.
I could just replace them with... Well, the only option I know of is the Surface Pro, and two of those with the same config would set me back $8000. So I'm more than a little ticked off.
- Minisforum has announced a couple of NUCs. (AnandTech)
There's an Intel model which is maybe interesting for some specific tasks, and a rather nice AMD model. Ryzen 9 5900HX, up to 64GB RAM, one M.2 and two 2.5" drives, 2.5Gb Ethernet, two DisplayPort and two HDMI outputs. It's 7.5x7" so rather larger than a typical NUC, but a typical NUC fits at most one 2.5" drive.
On the other hand, it has a 120W power supply, which seems like a lot.
Tech News
- Supercomputing can help address blockchain's biggest problem. (ZDNet)
Which would be...
- The IRS has seized $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency this fiscal year. (CNBC)
Oh, right.
Disclaimer: There's probably some news out there somewhere, but I'm not sure I want to know anymore.
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