Sunday, January 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 January 2022

It Was The Both Of Times Edition

Top Story

  • The best of CES. (Hot Hardware)

    A couple of these I agree with. AMD's Ryzen 6000 looks great, the OnePlus 10 Pro with a camera-module co-developed with Hasselblad is going to be expensive but could be good, and the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition is shut up and take my money. (PC Magazine)

    It uses a 12th-generation Core i9 laptop chip - so six fast cores and eight low-power cores, up to 32GB of RAM (soldered in) and 1TB of SSD (possibly replaceable) and a 2880x1800 14" OLED display with 90Hz refresh and 100% of DCI-P3 colour.

    And the Four Essential Keys. And dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, a regular USB port, and a headphone jack. No microSD slot but you can plug a little adaptor into the USB port for that.

    Price not yet announced but likely to be a lot.


  • The Worst of CES. (The Register)

    A couple of these I've already featured here: The Samsung TVs with a built-in NFT marketplace, and the new Mercedes EQS which forbids its owners from opening the hood.

    But one I'll add is from the Best Of article above: Dell's new XPS 13 Plus not only lacks the Four Essential Keys, it lacks the entire row of function keys as well. Dell is not just copying Apple, they are copying features Apple had to walk back because their customers rioted.


Questions and Answers

  • From Hal9000:
    Do you know anything about MIDI? I have a MIDI hardware controller that I want to send CC (Continuous Controller) messages to a Win 10 app that controls a digital mixer. From what I've been able to gather, this can't be done directly. There must be something "in between" that listens for USB messages, and then forwards them.
    In any case, I want to develop a Windows desktop or web app (for personal use) to do this. What do you think of VS Community Edition? I have most (recent) experience using Python and php/ mysql (low level Raspberry Pi stuff) but could dust off my C++ if necessary.
    I don't know much about MIDI or VS Community Edition, but I do know that Python has MIDI libraries available and I use and recommend PyCharm, which also has a free community edition.

    I'd certainly give Python a try before diving into C++.


  • From badgerwx:
    Several times in 2021 you had items about chrome & recommended that people avoid it. I'm a Linux user & wondered if that recommendation also included chromium? I use several browsers (depending on the site I'm accessing) & I hope that I can keep using chromium w/o worrying about the latest evil Google is up to.
    As far as I know, yes. Chromium has a few questionable API features (that Brave, Vivaldi, and others remove in their Chromium-based browsers) but the worst of the Chrome features are only in Chrome.


  • From Gmac:
    You mentioned a Dell laptop that you were getting and I was wondering if their product line uses any of the newer [AMD] chipsets for the processor and graphics.
    Dell does have some AMD-based laptops - if you look at their Vostro range, for business laptops, or their G-series gaming laptops. I don't think they have any laptop models with dedicated Radeon graphics, only integrated graphics or Nvidia.

    The Inspiron models I have are Intel / Nvidia though.


  • From Fred Z:
    Android Firefox seems to be refusing to update dynamically created input fields on a reload. The inputs are created by PHP with a default, eg current date.
    A page left open overnight then reloaded will not show the new date even though inspection shows the val attribute has been properly set by php.
    This could be related to weirdness in Firefox's page caching. Other people seem to have run into the same problem, and the solution is to disable caching on your form page.


  • From John Henry:
    I hate that I can't get a decent size TV that doesn't have alexa/Siri/echo built in. I hate the idea that my TV track s me.
    I like your idea of using a monitor instead of a tv but expensive and small
    How about a 70"tv connected to a pc stick plugged into the hdmi port? No direct connection to the internet
    Can the TV send info out over the hdmi, through my computer and back home?
    I know that the computer will tell prime/Netflix what I'm watching on their channels. But that's it, right. The TV is just a dumb display.
    The answer to that is a resounding maybe.

    Recent versions of HDMI actually support Ethernet, so if both your TV and your your PC stick support Ethernet-over-HDMI and you don't disable it, there is a channel for all the "smart" garbage to activate itself.


  • From Nemo:
    Just what are the "Four Essential Keys", anyway? The only keys I find essential are the ones labeled "A" through "Z" and "0" through "1". OK, the space bar and the shift key and "Return" are pretty important, too. But then, I grew up with a manual typewriter, so what do I know?
    PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End. If you don't have dedicated keys for those, some common editor functions require you to hold down four keys at once.


  • From Jewells45:
    Pixy can you unban my etsy shop, pretty please?
    Oops, sorry, will get back to that today.


  • From Nathan:
    Why do people write Y2K22? Is it somehow more optimized than 2022?
    It's a reference to the Y2K bug for idiots who have generated similar bugs in 2022.


  • From m0lr4k:
    Sick of Windows, how practical are things like Crossover and Proton for running Windows apps on Linux? I managed to install Debian 21 years ago now, but have never kept it as a daily driver. The biggest gap I still see when I try is the garbage ecosystem around audio systems/drivers, and high end design software. (That said, saw even things like Rhino3d have been successfully kinda run with crossover.)
    I haven't done this myself recently, but reports from sites like Phoronix suggest that the situation has improved enormously over the past 12 months. Might be worth as shot.


Tech News

  • Intel's Core i9 12900HK beats AMD's Threadripper 1950X on Cinebench R20. (Tom's Hardware)

    On the one hand, the 1950X is from 2017. On the other hand, the 12900HK is a laptop chip.

    On the third hand the 12900HK is 20% faster than AMD's current fastest laptop chip but uses twice the power. (WCCFTech)


  • QNAP's new TS-464T4 NAS has Thunderbolt 4 and 10GbE. (Tom's Hardware)

    It's a compact 4-bay NAS with dual M.2 slots for caching drives, 2.5Gb and 10Gb Ethernet, dual Thunderbolt ports for directly attaching laptops, and HDMI to directly attach a monitor,

    Price not yet announced but likely to be a lot.


  • In a surprising turn of events, the Webb Space Telescope still has not exploded. (NASA)

    Not sure what is going on here.


  • Half a billion users of the free Avira antivirus software - from the same shitheads who own Norton these days - now get to experience the joys of mining crypto. (Krebs on Secuity)

    The same company - formerly Symantec, now called NortonLifeLock which is a totally reassuring name after their enterprise division was sold off to Broadcom - also bought Avast last year, for another half a billion victims customers.


  • What's wrong with this picture?

    http://ai.mee.nu/icons/MumeiPollC.jpg

    Mumei from Hololive Council did a meme review stream just now. She had around 8000 viewers, which isn't too bad.

    But she also ran a poll - which got over 44,000 votes.

    The only way to vote on the poll is to watch the stream, and getting even a 50% response rate to a poll is pretty good on YouTube.

    Meaning they are massively undercounting live viewers.

    I noticed that Kaneko Lumi of Cyberlive - the one who plays Kerbal Space Program and sings duets with herself in Swahili - has abandoned YouTube for Twitch. Twitch is run by idiots, yes, but they don't seem to actively despise content creators the way YouTube does.


Not At All Tech News

  • Currently reading Tim Powers' Stolen Skies, the third book in the Vickery & Castine series.  Powers doesn't really do sequels; other than this series there's Earthquake Weather which was mostly solid and Hide Me Among the Graves which was not - his only novel in 30 years that came up short.

    The first of these was great, classic Powers; the second was pretty good but not quite as good; the third is shaping up to be better than the second.  Recommended.

    Also recently read (or re-read) Lawrence Watt-Evans' Obsidian Chronicles - Dragon Weather, Dragon Society, and Dragon Venom.  Turns out I had never read the third volume before - I would have remembered that ending.  Quite a change from the more light-hearted Ethshar stories; people die in all sorts of gruesome ways throughout the series.


  • Let's call the whole thing off.



  • Totally Not Feds R Us



This Is Getting Out of Hand, Now There's Five of Them Video of the Day


Sana and Baelz of Hololive Council, Luto and Sara of Prism Project, and now Neena of Production Kawaii.  There might well be more; my watch queue is perpetually full these days.  And Haachama as an honorary Aussie of course.

I only spotted Neena because this popped up in my feed:


Her accent isn't so obvious in that clip but that's the brand of peanut butter I buy.  Used to be Kraft, but it was sold to a local company and rebranded a few years ago.



Party Like It's 1980 Video of the Day



Sydney band Flowers might be slightly more familiar under the title of their debut album they adopted as their band name the following year: Icehouse.



Disclaimer: Are we not forest fairies? We are Pomu!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1637 words, total size 13 kb.

1 Did a couple of items disappear? (Let's call the whole thing off.  Totally Not Feds R Us)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 10 2022 05:26 AM (Ix1l6)

2 Those are Twitter embeds.

Which browser are you using?  There seems to have been a recent change that's taken out Twitter embeds, but they are showing for me in Brave and Vivaldi, so it might be specific privacy settings.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 10 2022 08:43 AM (PiXy!)

3 The Twitter embeds load fine in Epic, Opera, and Safari on an iMac running BigSur. However, in Epic and Opera it took so long to load the embeds that I started to type that it hadn't. It took almost a minute. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, January 10 2022 12:03 PM (5iiQK)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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