Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Saturday, March 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 March 2022

Sleeping Through All The Alarms Edition

Top Story

  • It is still not raining here in Sydney.  It's been three days.  Panic might set in soon, or as soon as the floodwaters recede enough that the panic shipments can get through.

    Meanwhile, it's the weekend and it's Question and Answer time.  Drop your vaguely tech-related questions in the comments today and I'll invent fake answers for them tomorrow.  Or maybe genuine ones.  Miracles happen.


  • Russia continues to do what every sane country should do and has now banned Instagram.  (Bleeping Computer)
    "As you know, on March 11, Meta Platforms Inc. made an unprecedented decision by allowing the posting of information containing calls for violence against Russian citizens on its social networks Facebook and Instagram," the Russian Internet watchdog said.
    This is clearly communist propaganda and we shouldn't believe it for one minute.


  • Facebook has temporarily allowed posts calling for violence against "Russian invaders".  (CNN)

    Oh.

    I'm not sure whose quotes those are because the claim that Russia is invading Ukraine is pretty well established.
    The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, according to internal emails to its content moderators.
    That's going to go down a treat.

    But dumb as this seems on the surface, down in the depths it is all much, much worse.
    "We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it's clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.)," it said in the email.
    1984 is a cookbook.

Tech News



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Disclaimer: More than this what, though?  More than this what?!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1185 words, total size 12 kb.

Friday, March 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 March 2022

Courtyards R Us Edition

Top Story

Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-is Video of the Day




Disclaimer: This big glowing ball in the sky?  I don't like it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 236 words, total size 3 kb.

Thursday, March 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 March 2022

Be Vewy Vewy Qwiet, We're Hunting Homes Edition

Top Story

  • I've found the home I want, it's well within my price range, and most importantly given the situation in eastern Australia right now, it's 3000 feet above sea level.

    Only thing I'm concerned about is noise since it's close to the center of town and not off on a quiet side street.  But it's old solid brick construction (13' ceilings and all that) and it's not going to be anything like where I am right now where neighbours' cars drive in and out directly outside my bedroom window.


  • The NSF is going to be funding open source projects.  (OpenSource)

    Just $21 million, but given that some critical pieces of software used by basically the entire internet are maintained by some guy in his spare time, some carefully allocated cash could go a long way.

    I expect most of this to go straight down the drain.

Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Nobody here but us frogs in damp socks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 435 words, total size 4 kb.

Wednesday, March 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 March 2022

Tammy Mae Edition

Top Story

  • Apple's Mac Studio is here with the new M1 Ultra chip.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's essentially a Mac Mini Pro.  Or a Mac Pro Mini.  Either way, it replaces the regular M1 chip with your choice of the faster M1 Max, or the much faster M1 Ultra.

    Which is two M1 Max chips glued together.  (AnandTech)

    While Apple's benchmark numbers are, let's just say, selective, these are pretty good chips.

    The Mac Studio is good, but it's not cheap, and it is entirely soldered in place.  What you buy is what you are stuck with.  You can configure it with up to 128GB of RAM (at about 3x market prices) and 8TB of SSD (at 4x market prices).

    Apple as a company still sucks, of course.  They make nice hardware but terrible policies.


  • Threadripper Pro 5000 is also out.  (AnandTech)

    From 12 to 64 Zen 3 cores.  And no, you can't get one.  Just as they did initially with the Threadripper Pro 3000 family, you can only buy it through OEMs, and when they say OEMs they mean Lenovo.


Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



To celebrate the fact that it is, finally, not.


Disclaimer: Don't knock on the wood too hard.  You could go right through.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 353 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, March 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 March 2022

Let Them Eat Eevees Edition

Top Story

  • Oh great, another one.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Local privilege escalation bug on Linux, that is.  Good argument for running unprivileged containers.  Good argument for giving it all up and taking up potato farming.  You know where you are with a potato.

    More details on the Dirty Pipe vulnerability.  (DirtyPipe)

    Fixed in kernels 5.16.11, 5.15.25, and 5.10.102, so yay, everyone gets to reboot their servers.


Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: I can't stand the rain.  Or sit the rain.  Or lie down the rain.  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 358 words, total size 4 kb.

Monday, March 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 March 2022

Born From An Egg On A Mountaintop Edition

Top Story

  • TikTok is exiting Russia.  (ZDNet)

    Alongside a lot of other companies, yes, but TikTok is owned by China.
    According to the Moscow Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law on Friday that bans what the country calls "fake" news about the military. This law will target any statements referring to the invasion of Ukraine as an "invasion", any attempt to discredit the armed forces, or calls for sanctions on Russia. Those found to be spreading so-called fake news could face up to 15 years in prison.
    The enemy of my enemy may or may not be my friend, but he ain't gonna go to prison for 15 years just to let me post Bayraktar memes.


Tech News

How It Started



How It's Going




Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Where is all this water coming from?  [Opens door.] [Closes door.]  Oh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:36 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 381 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, March 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 March 2022

My Bankcard 'Tis Of Thee Edition

Top Story

  • Visa and Mastercard have cancelled Russia's credit cards. (CNBC)

    All of them.

    On the one hand, yes, Russia is run by a nuclear-armed despotic thug.

    On the other hand, this is a totally reasonable move that won't hit innocent bystanders or have massive long-term blowback.

    On the third hand, this is a way to crush nuclear-armed states without kicking off World War III.

    On the fourth hand, we know - we know - that now that this has been weaponised, it will not stop here. We know because we've been here before.

    And on the fifth hand, none of this happened when Trump was president.


Questions and Answers

  • Not phrased as a question, but deserving of an explanation.

    From Fisht:
    There is nothing worse than the Gluten people. The anti Gluten Cult signaled the end of America. No basis in fact and no ability to stop talking about it. JP did a great episode on this millennial virtue scam.
    It's absolutely true that 95% of the people eating gluten-free, and all of the most vocal ones, are doing it as a fashion accessory.

    But that leaves the other 5% who will spend two days trapped in the bathroom if they accidentally nibble on the wrong brand of breadstick.

    I'd much rather not have to limit myself to eating out maybe once a year. I'd love not to have to view the words Ingredients: Wheat flour the same way I would Front towards enemy. I don't particularly enjoy paying twice as much for food and having one tenth the range to choose from.

    But I don't have a lot of say in the matter.


  • From Mel Pinto:
    If we use gab in our URL when commenting, the comment will not go thru and you get:
    Your website (gab.com) has been banned. If you feel this is in error, please contact the blog owner by email, or tech support at help@mu.nu
    Not intentional. It's probably tripped the automated spam filter. I'll remove it, but I might need to explicitly whitelist it.


  • From 40 Miles North:
    Pixy, I asked a couple days ag if you thought graphics card prices would drop. In the last two days, the price on the XFX Speedster Radeon RX 6600 XT dropped 20%! I hope to buy one shortly. It should be a decent jump from my XFX Radeon RX 460. Let me know if you think I should wait.
    If the price is right, buy it. It's a decent card and as you say, much much faster than the RX 460.

    Chip supply remains uncertain so I wouldn't hold off on something you need.


  • From Mrs Whatsit:
    I am running video processing (enhancing) software on two PCs. Same version of the software. PC's identical except one is Win 10 and the other Win 11.

    Processing the exact same video file, the Win 11 machine is significantly slower (by several hours).

    Is it possible to take a PC that came with Win 11 preloaded and roll back to Win 10?
    You can't roll back, but you should be able to download Windows 10 from Microsoft and install it on your Windows 11 system. (How-To Geek)

    Windows 11 uses the same activation keys as Windows 10 so any system authorised to run 11 is able to run 10. Some systems running 10 aren't officially supported on 11, but you won't have that problem.


  • From Caiwyn:
    Pixy, can you explain how you got into VTubers and what the appeal is? I watched the KFP video you posted a couple of weeks ago, and I found it very amusing, but I felt like I was missing some context. Do you have a place to start for someone interested in going down that rabbit hole? Is there any kind of connection to the politics that drives this site, or is it completely disconnected?
    Oy, there's a question.

    To tackle the last part first, vtubers originated in Japan and are still heavily influenced by Japan. The two largest agencies - Hololive and Nijisanji - are Japanese, as are many of the smaller ones like Prism and Phase Connect and VOMS. Japanese culture leans conservative, mostly, and vtubers are for the most part the polar opposite of the screaming campus garbage babies that infest so much of online media.

    Pipkin Pippa - Phase Connect's resident Bugs Bunny character, because apparently every agency needs a resident Bugs Bunny character - has a standing invitation to go on Nick Rekieta's livestream and no-one thinks this is odd. Precisely zero pushback.

    As to where you should start.... Um. In mid-2020 when I got into it, that was easy. There was Haachama and Coco with Hololive Japan, Pikamee with VOMS, and the three girls from the newly launched Hololive Indonesia, though I didn't know at the time that they all spoke fluent English.

    And that was about it. Almost everything else was in Japanese.

    Now, there's 11 members of Hololive English and 6 in Hololive Indonesia, both with more on the way, 11 members in Prism Project who all speak fluent English, 14 (last I counted) 20 in Nijisanji's English-speaking branch, plus Phase Connect, Tsunderia, Cyberlive, MyHoloTV, VOMS, major indies like Kson, mid-rank indies like Shizukou, Vyolfers, and Reiny, and small indies like Nymroot and Mooyü.

    So... Kind of depends what you like.

    Someone fighting the meme wars on the side of righteousness and/or chaos? Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect.

    The nicest person you could possibly imagine but with a weakness for terrible, terrible puns? Ninomae Ina'nis (Ina) of Hololive or Pina Pengin of Prism Project.

    Salty gamer girl with a heart of gold? Amelia Watson and Gawr Gura of Hololive.



    Manic chaos fairy? Pomu Rainpuff of Nijisanji.

    Dark Overlord of All and honorary Aussie? Haachama of Hololive Japan.

    As Australian as Vegemite on toast? Luto and Sara of Prism Project, and Baelz and Sana of Hololive.

    Classic RPGs and weird dating sims? Mooyü.

    Be prepared to be totally lost as far as the "lore" goes. It doesn't matter what "bottom left" means, or why Pekora's name comes up alongside the Geneva Community Guidelines, why all the penpals want to jump in the bioreactor, or who Pomura and Ayunda are, and you'll pick up Japanese terms like yabe and ponkotsu quickly enough from context. There will be plenty of context.

    And be prepared to drop in and out of streams. Hololive alone puts out a hundred hours of content a day, though only a quarter of that is in English.


  • From DaveX64:
    Do you have a favorite Keyboard - Video - Mouse (KVM) solution when you need to control more than one computer from the same place or do you favor more of a Remote Desktop type solution?
    I would like to control a Windows and a Linux box from the same dual monitors, keyboard and mouse without a lot of hassle. They're desktop computers in tower cases, not laptops.
    I haven't used one for a while, but the one I did have was an Aten unit that supported dual PCs with dual monitors, and it worked pretty well. They still make those.


  • From Catherine:
    Pixy, I'm no longer up on tech or computers. But my kid in college is looking into buying a laptop for school. She will study at least some computer programming as a math major and computers minor, and I would not be surprised if she ends up with two degrees. She could spend what I consider to be a mint on a laptop ($3k would not break her financially). What is in stock and capable if computer science is her plan? We have ordered Dells in the past and they've held up well. I'm so sick of buying from woke companies, but it doesn't seem like there is hope not to pay foreigners or woke idiots. We try to buy American, but we're also realistic . . . and we are in the Midwest US but would order too. Feel free just to drop a link and not spend much time. I'm sure you get this often.
    I have a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus and I quite like it. Fast, mostly quiet, great screen, half the price of an equivalent MacBook. It's not a gaming system but more than capable for stuff like Minecraft. Plus you can pop it open with a screwdriver and upgrade the memory and storage yourself - it's not soldered in place on that model, and Dell provides a detailed service manual.


  • From Dudeman:
    My kid is looking for a laptop when he begins college next year. He wants a Framework laptop. Is this a good option? What is a better option?
    If you want something you can do basic upgrades and repairs on yourself, there is no better option than the Framework right now. A single screwdriver (provided) is all you need and everything is labeled and replaceable. The four I/O ports are swappable to whatever you need - USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort, and little storage modules up to 1TB. And it runs well under Linux.

    It will soon be slightly out of date - it's 11th generation and 12th generation laptops are starting to appear - but if you're not buying for a while there might be a newer model out by then.


  • From RayG:
    Pixy, I get the "secure" lock icon when I enter https://ace.mu.nu on my desktop Chrome. I don't get it on my iPad no matter what I do. Also, on my desktop, when I follow the link for Comments at the end of the "above the fold" part of your post on the main page, I do not get the lock icon. I can enter "https://" in front of the URL myself and get it.

    Why is the site not always secure by default? Why can't I get the lock icon on my iPad?
    I can certainly force it the HTTPS by default. I'm not sure why there's an issue on your iPad, but I can try Safari on my iMac and see if it does the same thing.


  • Also from RayG:
    Another question: when I use the "Continue reading" link instead of the "Comments" link on the main page, I get a page with a link that says "Access Comments" but it goes to e.g. http://minx.cc/?post=398108 when never opens, browser says "minx.cc took too long to respond." Is this a bug or what?
    Yeah, we need to update the templates and rebuild all the pages to get rid of that link.


  • From Daniel Ream:
    My existing cobbled-together whitebox RAIDZ server needs updating. I've got 4x3TB drives plus a 500GB HDD for the OS. i7-875K CPU, 8GB RAM. It's moderately loud and produces a fair amount of heat. it just holds media and some personal files, no need for much performance.
    I'd like something cooler and quieter in some kind of non-rackmount form factor; haven't decided yet whether I'm going to add more drives to the pool or just buy a set of newer, bigger drives but I'd like both options, which means more than 4 3.5" HDD bays. Any recommendations for CPU/mobo/case?
    Even the new Core i3-12100 ($124) should do fine for that; modern CPUs are amazingly fast. Motherboard I'm not sure of, best to browse around for something reasonably priced with lots of SATA ports.

    As for the case, there is something that came out just recently: The AeroCool Cipher. It's a fairly standard ATX tower case, matte black with a mesh front and zero RGB nonsense, but it has room for 15 drives - 11 3.5" and 4 2.5".

    Supposed to be $75 plus tax but I couldn't find it on Amazon or Newegg to confirm.


  • And from rd:
    MS Edge says AOSHQ is unsecure. No httpS, just http.

    Is there a missing certificate? How do I fix this?
    Click here. The server is not forcing HTTPS on new connections, so if your browser has remembered the old HTTP URL it will keep defaulting to that.

    All browsers now try HTTPS first, so this doesn't happen for new users.


Tech News

Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Disclaimer: The peeps don't like it! Drop the gas price! Drop the gas price!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2319 words, total size 17 kb.

Saturday, March 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 March 2022

IP Over Tin Cans And String Edition

Top Story

  • Weekends are Question and Answer time, unless I have to work, or I just worked two 18 hour days back-to-back, or I need to pack up and move house to a house I don't have, or my internet is down again, or my entire state is under flood and storm warnings, or every gluten-free foodstuff I normally eat is out of stock at the same time (possibly related to eastern Australia being underwater right now), or it's freaking World War III, but if it's all of those they cancel out somehow so Q&A is on.


  • In the first sensible move of any of the participants in this whole debacle Russia has banned Twitter and Facebook.  (CBS / MSN)

    And over 140 other domains including the BBC.  Sadly we are not on the list, but this is just new additions and we may have been blocked previously.

    The BBC has responded by restarting its shortwave news broadcasts.  (The Verge)

    Everything old is new again.


  • Russia doesn't have anything like China's Great Firewall but US companies are stepping up to help with leading provider of bad internet backbone connections Cogent cutting off access to Russia.  (ZDNet)

    They're justifying this by a broad reading of new EU regulations, but the regulations never actually say Russia has to go back to acoustic couplers and hope.


Tech News


Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Believe it or not, my internet's down, I never thought it would take this long.  Browsing the web at dial-up speeds, can't even preview that song.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:38 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 830 words, total size 8 kb.

Friday, March 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 March 2022

Why Shouldn't I Keep It Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • If you need a 12-core (sort of) NUC with dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports ASRock has one.  (Anandech)

    Two, in fact.  Should be pretty zippy; these use the new Alder Lake laptop chips.  4 fast cores plus 8 efficiency cores, which combined should be about twice the speed of the previous generation 4-core parts.


  • The Intel Core i3-12300 is good value for money.  (AnandTech)

    This is a 4-core part priced at $143.  While four cores is not a lot these days, the new design makes it about as fast as my 2017 Ryzen 1700 system that I am typing this on right now - with half the cores.

    On single-threaded tasks it's about 80% faster.  

    And cheap.  Did I mention cheap?


  • Russia declares war on Apple in 3... 2...  (9to5Mac)

    Apple Maps has been updated to show that Crimea is part of Ukraine and no longer Russian territory.  Unless you're actually in Russia.


Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day




Disclaimer:  Don't think I've used this one before.  Pretty sure.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 318 words, total size 3 kb.

Thursday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 March 2022

Or Possibly Edition

Top Story

  • Found a six-acre plot of land neatly in my price range, on the edge of town, with power, water, and internet available.  Bit of a walk to the shops but since I have my weekly groceries delivered that's not a huge issue.


  • Aaaand my internet just went down again.


  • UCIe is PCIe for chips.  (AnandTech)

    AMD has used its own Infinity Fabric for its chiplet-based designs since 2017, while Intel has used, um, whatever it has used.

    UCIe is a shared specification developed by Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC (among others) so that chips designed to the spec can easily be plugged together and might even work.

    Speeds go up to 256GBps, which is a lot.


Tech News



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Well, poop.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 213 words, total size 2 kb.

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