What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!

Wednesday, April 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 April 2022

Deamplified Edition

Top Story

  • The Brave browser has introduced a new feature to bypass Google's AMP.  (ZDNet)

    AMP was an effort by Google to improve search results and speed up page load times by, um, forcing you to host your content on Google's servers using Google's own proprietary platform.

    Since this wasn't universally supported you also had to host your content on your own severs using standards-based software.  Brave deliberately bypasses the Google version of content and always takes you straight to the standard version.


Tech News



Disclaimer: I was hoping for something maybe a little more...  Portable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 310 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, April 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 April 2022

Putting Boxes Inside Other Boxes Edition

Top Story

  • Web scraping is legal says the Ninth Circuit.  (Tech Crunch)

    If you put the data out there in public, it's out there in public.  You can mess around making it difficult to scrape (Instagram) but if the data is public, it's public.
    "We’re disappointed in the court’s decision. This is a preliminary ruling - stop laughing - and the case is far from over - I said, stop laughing," said LinkedIn spokesperson Greg Snapper in a statement. "We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make publicly available on LinkedIn.  On LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, though we don't know why, which is why we prohibit entirely legal scraping of public data."
    Well, he almost said that.  Close enough.


Tech News

  • Never back up anything.  (Bleeping Computer)

    In fact, the more important the file is, the more important it is not to back it up.  In this case, a MetaMask seed file couple with a weak password, an iCloud backup, and a bit of social engineering enabled the theft of $665,000.


  • Need a 4 port 100GbE / 16 port 25GbE web-managed switch but  only have $800?  MicroTik has you covered.  (Serve the Home)

    SFP of course; I haven't seen any switches supporting 25GBASE-T just yet.


  • Which universe do we live in?  (Quanta)

    This matters, because if we live in an Algorithmica universe then there's an easy way to break all forms of encryption and we just haven't found it yet, and if we live in a Pessiland universe then many mathematical problems are effectively insoluble but cryptography is not reliable.

    They only problem is the labels all peeled off and we can't tell which one is us.


  • The four day work week is coming.  (ZDNet)

    Not sure how you fit 100 hours of work into four days, but okay.


  • Benchmarks have already leaked for Intel's Sapphire Rapids server CPUs.  (WCCFTech)

    How do Intel's new 56 core CPUs compare to AMD's existing 64 core processors?  Not all that well, to be honest.


Disclaimer: ê™®

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 355 words, total size 4 kb.

Monday, April 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 April 2022

Unionised Water Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Dell has implemented proprietary DDR5 memory modules in its new Precision laptop range.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The single "CAMM" module supports up to 128GB of RAM - which would otherwise require four 32GB SODIMMs.  Four memory slots are rare but not unknown in workstation-class laptops.

    It's still a little better than soldered RAM, just not much.


  • Samsung's main semiconductor division is, reportedly, a mess.  (SemiAnalysis)

    The problem is corporate culture delaying necessary changes to fundamental processes - not unlike what was happening with Intel for nearly a decade.

    A lot of the article is speculative, but there are definitely delays and yield issues at Samsung's fabs, not to mention a distinct lack of progress at developing their own mobile processors.


  • Speaking of Intel its new 56 core Sapphire Rapids server chips hit 3.3GHz at just 420W.  (Tom's Hardware)

    If you're thinking that's rather a lot, that's because it is.

    This should be a pretty fast chip and provide much-needed competition to AMD's 64 core Epyc range, except that AMD is expected to ship 96 core Epyc CPUs this year and 128 core models early next year.


  • I for one embrace our new robot chef overlords.  (ZDNet)

    Where's the obligatory dig at the Chick-fil-A owners' religion - oh, there it is.  Still:
    it's renowned for good food, staff who say "my pleasure" -- and sound like they mean it -- and traffic jams at its drive-thrus.
    Which is more than most journalists are prepared to concede.


Disclaimer: Blub.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 294 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, April 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 April 2022

It Is What It Ain't Edition

Top Story

  • Why the past ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid.  (The Atlantic)

    Commies.
    The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
    Commies.
    Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
    Commies.
    There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
    Commies.
    Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
    Commies.   A universally shared loathing of journalists.


Questions and Answers

  • From HarrysNotHere:
    Are thunderbolt graphics card boxes worth considering for gaming?
    Up to mid-range graphics cards, yes.  You'd  lose some speed from an RTX 3080 but below that it should cope pretty well.
    If so, does thunderbolt 4 make a huge difference in performance?
    Compared to Thunderbolt 3, none whatsoever.  Both have the same PCIe throughput of 40Gbps; Thunderbolt 4 just has updated USB support and a refined spec.
    Finally, because I'm a masochist, do any of them work with Linux?
    In theory they should, because it's essentially just a hardware PCIe<->PCIe bridge.  How well that translates to practice I'm not sure.


  • From Mrs. Peel:
    Remember I asked about small Android phones? Samsung has just come out with the Galaxy S22. I read some reviews, and it looks pretty good. What do you think?
    I have a lower-end Samsung phone now - the A52s - which I bought when I needed 5G support while my wired internet was out after getting hit by lightning.

    The hardware even on low-end models is great.  Well worth the money.

    The UI is a bit of a nuisance.  I'll have to see if I can get it to accept NovaLauncher as the default interface.


  • From Devildog Dan:
    Pixy, you have mentioned manufacturers of TVs putting in advertising into their systems, Jump Ads I think was the term for them. Can a Pi-Hole server block those ads without losing functionality? (Don't worry, I whitelist the AoSHQ.)
    Blipverts, right.

    There was some discussion of that on my blog.  The answer is maybe.  You do need to provide an internet connection, or otherwise your TV might connect to the first open WiFi router it can find.  But if you do that you should be able to block everything by default and then allow access only to things the TV legitimately needs to function.


  • From sithkhan:
    I am getting ready to build my next desktop PC - Windows 10 - has there been a solution to migrate all my data from the old PC to the new one yet that you would recommend?
    Good question.  I would have recommended Acronis, but given that their core product name changed from Acronis True Image to Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, and pricing changed from a one-time fee to an annual subscription, I'm not sure that it works at all anymore, for anything.

    Windows backup, maybe?


  • From Justin Castreau:
    Why does ace.mu.nu cause my cellphone to burn like its a nuclear reactor? Only happens with ace and brave browser.

    I need to turn my phone off sometimes it is so bad.
    All the content "behind the fold" on the front page of the site is actually embedded in the page, and not all browsers figure out themselves what to lazy load.  Particularly bad on iPhones and older Android devices.


  • From Caiwyn:
    Hey, Pixy. I mentioned this the other day but didn't see a reply: iOS converts all single and double quotation marks to "smart quotes" by default. It also converts three periods in a row into a proper ellipse, and the comments section here at AoSHQ doesn't work with any of those characters. If they aren't edited out of my comment, the post button throws a big red error. Is that something that can be fixed?
    Something in there is expecting modern UTF-8 encoding and something is expecting a code page.  It tries to automatically convert between the two, which is why some but not all non-ASCII characters work.  Smart quotes don't.

    It can be fixed with some fiddling.  Well, quite a lot of fiddling, probably.


Tech News

Disclaimer: COMMIES!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 922 words, total size 7 kb.

Saturday, April 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 April 2021

How Much For Just The Propaganda Engine Edition

Top Story

  • Twitter's board unanimously adopted a poison pill measure against the takeover bid that could save the company.  (WCCFTech)

    We had to destroy Twitter in order to destroy it.


  • Twitter will never be a platform for "Free Speech".  (ZDNet)

    I was about to discard this item as trash, but then read a little further, and it is a fairly sound libertarian tirade against centralised social media in general:
    As with all other social media platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Tik Tok, the structure of Twitter prohibits free speech.

    ...

    Like all who participate in social media, Elon Musk participates in the illusion that he has an identity online. For all intents and purposes, "Elon Musk" does not exist any more than any other entity. It is a name attached to a series of text snippets residing in a database constantly sorted and sifted by a platform owner at their sole discretion.

    People who have no identity have no "speech" because they are merely fulfilling the will of the platform. Because they have no speech, the notion of "free" speech is irrelevant.
    The error here is the notion that because the war cannot be won, that the battle is not worth fighting.

    Why would you turn down $43 billion in cash?

    Because it's not about the money.  It's about control.


Tech News

  • What happened at Atlassian?  Two things, neither one good.  (The Register)

    Intending to deactivate a single app, they deactivated the entire cluster.
    And intending merely to deactivate that app, they instead ran a secure erase procedure for regulatory compliance.

    And that scrubbed clean large parts of the data for 400 customers.

    They have backups, but the backups are designed to restore server nodes, or entire customer databases, not parts of the data into an otherwise operational platform.  So they're restoring the databases onto recovery nodes and then gluing the pieces back into the production nodes manually.

    I've done this kind of restore process before.  It's not fun.


  • TSMC is expecting 2nm chips to arrive in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)

    With manufacturing beginning late 2025 - a year behind Intel's planned rollout of 18A.  Though TSMC has been rather better at sticking to its schedules than Intel this past decade or so.


  • Russia plans to be producing chips at 28nm by 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That's not quite 20 years behind the rest of the world.


  • The latest Linux kernels aren't just an improvement for Intel's Alder Lake.  (Phoronix)

    AMD's Milan-X chips - which have 3D cache just like the 5800X3D - can also see performance gains of as much as 30% depending on the benchmark.


  • Vtuber Kaneko Lumi announced her "graduation" - retirement - from CyberLive a few weeks ago.  I was sorry to see her go; although there are too many vtubers for me to follow all the ones I find entertaining she seemed smart and talented.

    She also kept on streaming.

    Took me a while to figure out it wasn't just a delayed graduation; she'd gone independent while retaining the character.  That's unusual.  Coco and Aloe from Hololive both went independent but left their characters behind.  Suisei brought her character to Hololive, but was independent beforehand so she was free to do so.

    Now she and former teammate Amaris Yuri have joined Phase Connect, the same agency as Pipkin Pippa.  I hope they do well there, and without knowing the reasons behind this move I have great respect for CyberLive for allowing this to happen.  Until recently it was common not only for the character to remain the property of the original agency, but for all content to be erased upon graduation.


  • That new dinner set I ordered arrived today. It's rather more substantial than I had expected for a hundred bucks.


Disclaimer: Ouch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 641 words, total size 5 kb.

Friday, April 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 April 2022

On The 105th Day Shall You Rest Edition

Top Story

  • Slept in this morning.  My year started with a blockchain meltdown requiring me to come back from a long-awaited holiday, and that delayed other work so that I've ended up working night and day ever since up to and including having to find a new place to live.

    Today I got to sleep a little.  After this things get really busy.

    Should return to normal in July.  I might be sleeping on the floor and working at the kitchen counter for a week or three in between.


  • Elon Musk has launched a $43 billion all-cash hostile* takeover bid for Twitter.  (Ace of Spades HQ)

    Twitter isn't worth that much.  Under current management it's not worth 10% of that.  But under new management that is not completely insane it could be.

    * It's not Musk that's hostile here.  The current board and management team view Twitter as their private political playground, and the shareholders - never mind the users - can die in a fire if they don't like it.


  • Buying Twitter is not a way to make money, says Elon Musk.  (The Verge)

    Yeah, no shit Elon.  Still glad you put the honey badger among the pigeons.


  • The corrupt US government is trying to find a way to intervene to preserve its corrupt defender, by which I of course mean Twitter again.  (Ace of Spades HQ)

    Fortunately for Elon Musk, both Twitter and the US federal government are as incompetent as they are corrupt.

    And of course all this kicked off half an hour after I posted yesterday's update.


Tech News

  • AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X3D may in fact be the fastest gaming CPU around.  (Tom's Hardware)

    And that's a $449 CPU that drops into existing motherboards, competing with Intel's new factory-overclocked $739 Core i9-12900KS.

    Outside of games - which don't use more than 8 cores because that's what consoles have - chips like the 12 core Ryzen 9 5900X (currently as low as $379) and the 8+8 core 12900K soundly beat the 8 core 5800X3D on heavy multi-threaded workloads.

    It's a bit of a niche chip but it's not bad at general purpose stuff and it's not overpriced.


  • Renesas - which if you're not familiar is a Japanese electronics giant formed after divisions of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC were spun off and merged -has introduced the first PCIe 6 chips.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Given how long the industry was stuck at PCIe 3, it's amazing how quickly these new generation shave been adopted.  I don't know if PCIe 6 will actually hit the desktop market any time soon, but I didn't think PCIe 5 would be here already and it is...  Sort of.


  • If you want to run the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 on an Alder Lake CPU, you probably want to manually upgrade the kernel.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Which is a bit of a nuisance, but upgrading from 5.15 to 5.16 brings on average a 14% performance improvement specifically on Alder Lake.


  • An ounce of undo is equal to a pound of are you sure.  (HTTPie)

    Particularly when all your are you sure prompts look exactly alike, whether you are deleting a single file or an entire disk drive.


  • There was an incident with GitHub actions.  (GitHub Status)

    Some people were just slightly concerned.




  • A free Windows 11 Toolbox script did bad things.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Very bad things.

    I thought I might have mentioned this one here, but now I don't think I did.  I did mention a toolbox app for the Kindle Fire, but that's completely different.


  • The Asus Zenbbook 14X OLED Space Edition is now available for pre-order.  (Liliputing)

    It's close to the perfect small laptop: Core i9 12900H CPU, 32GB LPDDR5, a 1TB SSD, a 14" 2880x1600 90Hz touchscreen OLED display, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, USB-A, headphone jack, and microSD card, a physical privacy shutter over the webcam, and a pressure-sensitive pen.  Oh, and a MIL-STD-810H chassis so you can just hose it out.

    All that and the Four Essential Keys.

    Around $2000.  Perfection doesn't come cheap.


Disclaimer: I'll wait for the AMD version.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 693 words, total size 6 kb.

Thursday, April 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 April 2022

Build Back Bunker Edition

Top Story

  • Contracts exchanged today.  I also bought a new dinner set that matches the colour scheme of the new house.  (Gibson Elite Casa Gris in case you're wondering.)

    I'm going to need to stay up to 3am playing Minecraft until I recover.


  • My current ISP doesn't offer adequate business broadband plans.  They offer cheap 100/40 plans, and expensive plans at 250Mb symmetric and up, but not the common 250/100 plan.  So I'm probably going to finally switch providers.

    I'm currently on a 100/40 plan - but that's the best I can get here.  At the new house that's almost the starting point.


  • Nvidia's RTX 3090 Ti is here and it's, well, expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Not bad, just expensive.  Not much more expensive than the regular 3090 but that is already very very expensive - close to $2000 if you can even find one.

    AMD's own overpriced minor upgrade is also on its way.

    The 6950 XT appears to be even worse value for money.  The model they spotted is water-cooled, yes, but it's over A$3000, when a regular 6900 XT can be easily found for A$1700.

Tech News

  • Zero Nines Uptime, or, Atlassian and the terrible horrible no good very bad #TwoWeeks.  (Pragmatic Engineer)

    How a major cloud services provider achieved worse uptime than some random guy running 100,000 websites on a broken $50 server.


  • The gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy if the events are not independent.  (Stranger Apologies)

    There, saved you from reading 90,000 words looking for the part where he bothers to explain why he's not obviously wrong.


  • I've described Docker before as the world's least efficient package manager but it doesn't have to be.  (Florin Lipan)

    You can create a 186k Docker container that provides a working web server.  It's just that no-one does.


  • Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake parts could hit 5.8GHz.  (WCCFTech)

    That's on the high-performance P cores, with the low-power E cores hitting 4.5GHz.

    Ryzen 7000, also due later this year, is expected to have all-core clocks over 5GHz.

    The current models from both companies are already extremely fast, and these improvements should be pretty substantial.  AMD could improve by more than 30%, and while Intel will have a smaller single-core speed boost, they will double the number of E cores from 8 to 16 to provide a significant increase in multi-threaded performance.


  • Constant notifications are ruining your produc - hang on, I have to take this - tivity.  (ZDNet)

    It's not like I have 164,033 unread emails in my main inbox either.


  • The Lenovo Legion Y700 is now available... In China.  (Liliputing)

    $499 for an 8GB/128GB model configured with the English language and the Google Play store.  $599 for 12GB/256GB.

    This is a high end small Android tablet, with a pretty recent Snapdragon 870 CPU and an 8.8" 2560x1600 screen.  And a headphone jack and a microSD slot.

    It's not cheap but there just plain aren't any real alternatives right now, unless you can find stock of Huawei's MediaPad M6 somewhere

    .
  • One of my nuggies tasted funny at lunch.  Not bad, but as if the coating was a different mix.  Just waiting to see if I accidentally got glutenated, which I have successfully avoided for more than two years.

    Update: Didn't get sick.  Was that a nugget-sized chicken tender?  The same company produces gluten free chicken tenders as well and they do have a different coating.


Disclaimer: Bacon and eggs are gluten-free.  Just sayin'.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:37 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 584 words, total size 5 kb.

Wednesday, April 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 April 2022

Full Auto Detailers Edition

Top Story

  • Contract: As is, subject to all wear and dilapidation, blah blah blah.

    Reality: We're getting the builders back in to touch up the paintwork for you and make sure everything is perfect.  Oh, and there's spare paint and tiles left in the storeroom should you need them.

    Inspection report found a few minor issues - like a partial blockage in that $2000 digital shower head - and they're getting them fixed prior to settlement.  And if the inspection noticed little things like that, I'm pretty comfortable that there aren't any big things.  I would have said This fancy shower head kind of sucks and probably just used the other shower.

    Which is very different from when I was looking at the heritage-listed house a couple of weeks ago, where it was more It's 145 years old.  Comes with the territory, kid.  This place even has a warranty.

    Also, there's a storeroom?  I know exactly where that would be, but I thought that door was just for access under the house.  We don't really do basements in Australia.


  • The Atlassian outage that started a week ago is expected to be over in no more than another couple of weeks.  (The Register)

    The outage affects specific customers rather than the entire platform, but hundreds of them.  I'm sure that knowing their project management platform will only be down another two weeks will bring them comfort in these trying times.

    Atlassian used to have a "free candy" offering where you could get any of their products for a small team - 3 to 10 users depending on the product - for $10 per year, and run it yourself.  

    Now all of that is going away because The Cloud is the Future which means that when the cloud gets screwed up there is Absolutely Nothing You Can Do.

    With even a minimally competent IT team, an on-premises install would limit the recovery effort to restoring last night's backup and re-entering the most recent details.  With a cloud service, you have nothing.
    "We know this outage is unacceptable and we are fully committed to resolving this," Atlassian's spokesperson said. "Our global engineering teams are working around the clock to achieve full and safe restoration for our approximately 400 impacted customers and they are continuing to make progress on this incident.  Two weeks."


Tech News

Disclaimer: It plugs the external GPU into the M.2 slot or it gets hosed out again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 732 words, total size 6 kb.

Tuesday, April 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 April 2022

Pixylon 5 Edition

Top Story

  • There are curtains in the bedrooms.  Not in the media room or the main living / dining area though.  The listing photos didn't show any curtains at all, but they were there by the time of the video walkthrough.  (Brand new house.)

    I don't mind installing matching curtains in the other two rooms, even if that accounts for half of all the windows in the house.  I get to see just how they fit in with carpet and paint colours rather than having to guess.

    And I was leaning towards curtains rather than blinds anyway because as a modern design there's not a lot of warmth or soft edges and also blinds suck.


  • Pinterest plans to block all climate misinformation.  (The Guardian)

    Wait, there's information on Pinterest?
    Pinterest is defining misinformation broadly: the company will take down content that denies the existence or effects of climate change or its human causes, as well as content that "misrepresents scientific data” in order to erode trust in climate science and harmful, false or misleading content about natural disasters and extreme weather events.
    Awesome!

    So the idiots who blamed the Tongan volcanic eruption on global warming?  Banned.

    People who claim to be fighting global warming but also oppose nuclear power?  Banned.

    Michael Mann?  Banned.

    NPR?  BANNED!

    Wait, they're not actually going to enforce their rules?  Well, that sucks.


Tech News



Disclaimer: mu.nu - still only eight cents a day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 497 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, April 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 April 2022

Hold The Roomba Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Disclaimer: Shift fifteen boxes full of books and what do you get?  A broken toe from when you dropped one of them and you weren't wearing shoes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:07 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 296 words, total size 3 kb.

<< Page 2 of 4 >>
118kb generated in CPU 0.0265, elapsed 0.1658 seconds.
56 queries taking 0.1462 seconds, 367 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using http / http://ai.mee.nu / 365