Sunday, July 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 July 2019

Jebaited Edition

Tech News

  • AMD has officially cut the launch price of the RX 5700 family as rumoured previously.  (AnandTech)

    Radeon GM Scott Herkelmen posted a tweet suggested this was a planned change knowing that Nvidia would respond.

    Jebaited is a term apparently popular with the youth these days.  Others including Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus think this was a hurried reaction to a better-than expected RTX Super from Nvidia.

  • An objectively pro-fascist UK internet industry association has branded Mozilla as a "villain" for supporting DNS-over-HTTPS.  (Tech Crunch)

    This is getting beyond parody.

  • Speaking of villans [searches through tabs] 97 VPN products on the market trace back to just 23 companies, a third of them in China.  (VPNPro)

    Rule One: If you aren't paying for your VPN, it is stealing your data.
    Rule Two: If you are paying for your VPN, it is probably still stealing your data.

    Best security practice as of July 2019 is to never do anything.

  • Building the world's worst video card. 

    With individual TTL chips on a breadboard like we did in the good old days.



    Warning: This is part one and only demonstrates the timing circuit, so it stops just before it gets to the good bit.  Part two should arrive next week, and I'll post it if I remember.

  • Building the world's second worst video card.



    In this case, using an ESP32 microcontroller...  And a handful of resistors.

    This is notable because the ESP32 doesn't have any video circuitry.  None at all.

    Why not DVI or HDMI?  Surely a purely digital display would be simpler?

    The answer is nooooope.  Both these examples are working with 10MHz clocks.  While DVI and HDMI are digital, they are serial, not parallel, and the serial clock rates are ten times the pixel rates.  Regular old 1080p video has a 1.5GHz data clock.

  • So...

    Gab launched their distributed social thing.  It's actually a fork of Mastodon, rather than new software, but you shouldn't write new software unless you have a very specific reason.  New software is hard.

    Then again, Mastodon is written in Ruby and Node.js which is more than enough reason to launch it into the Sun and never speak its name again.

    Anyway.

    Mastodon disavowed Gab, and their - that is to say, Mastodon's - dedicated team of lunatics are working to automatically block Gabstodon nodes from talking to regular Mastodon nodes.  (One Angry Gamer)

    These people are fascists.  And I don't mean Gab.

  • Extra Credits, a video game streamy thing on YouTube, so you already know it's 95% likely to be pure garbage, set itself on fire over historical wargames having two sides.  (One Angry Gamer)

    When challenged on this, they said "that's not what we said" and set themselves on fire again.

  • ASRock's 4X4 Box-R1000 is an embedded Ryzen NUC.  (AnandTech)

    It's a low-end dual-core chip with only Vega 3 graphics, so it might be cheap.  If it is cheap that's great, because most cheap NUCs are Atom based and frankly not very good.

    It has three USB 3 and two USB 2 ports, one HDMI and two DisplayPort ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports and WiFi 5 (perfect for a latter-day Cobalt Cuboid), supports up to 32GB RAM (or probably 64GB with the right modules), has a 2.5" drive bay and an M.2-2260 slot.

    Which is a teeny tiny problem because almost all consumer M.2 cards are 2280 and won't fit.

  • Japan and South Korea are still mad at each other.  (AnandTech)

    Give it a rest, guys.


Video of the Day



For science!


Disclaimer: No cats were harmed during the creation of this post.  Irritated, sure.  They're cats.  Harmed, no.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 609 words, total size 6 kb.

1 RE: The excessive Progism of Extra Credits: I've only watched a take down of the video instead of the video itself, but I hope their historian colleagues who do the history videos they host on the same YouTube account collectively face-palmed at the Extra Credit team's repeated references of the Iron Cross being a Nazi symbol....

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sunday, July 07 2019 08:06 AM (jl9eJ)

2 "These people are fascists. "
Federated...unless we don't like you.  Got it.
When I read that the new Gab thing was based on Mastodon I laughed because, well, who didn't see this coming, or how butthurt the Mastodonts would be?

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 07 2019 08:41 AM (Iwkd4)

3 Well, there's another reason to finally get an ESP32. I've been using ESP8266es as the microcontroller for a homebrewing beer scale project, but the extra memory would let me upload to e.g. Google Sheets directly. The ESP8266 doesn't have enough memory to do HTTPS along with complex projects.

Posted by: Jay at Sunday, July 07 2019 09:25 AM (PkfzE)

4 I just finished watching the "world's worst video card" video, and all the talk of timing reminded me of back in the late 80s-early90s, when Linux was first coming out, brave people who had decent CRTs could actually create custom monitor timings to get nonstandard resolutions:  instead of 800x600, you might get an X desktop of 850x620 or something.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 02:04 AM (Iwkd4)

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




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