Wednesday, July 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 July 2019

Oh No She Didn't Edition

Tech News

  • A roundup of about a third of the announced X570 motherboards.  (AnandTech)

    Not a review - that would be quite the undertaking - but at least all the specs are in one place.

  • Britain doesn't have free speech but is working hard to make things even worse. (TechDirt)

    New legislation would issue fines to internet companies for legal content.

  • What kind of idiots build high-end 1U servers with 3.5" drives in 2019? (Serve the Home)

    It also has a SATA M.2 slot. It's an Epyc platform so it has 128 PCIe lanes, and it has a SATA-only M.2 slot.

    Oh, those kinds of idiots.

  • Now if you want to take a picture of fascinating witches who put the scintillating stitches in the britches of the boys who put the powder on the noses of the faces of the ladies of the harem of the court of King Macbookticus YOU'RE TOO LATE because they just passed by. (Six Colors)

    The 12" Macbook has passed by.

    The so-called Macbook Escape - the cheapest version of the Macbook Pro, the only one that still had a row of physical function keys and thus an escape key - has passed by too.

    The Macbook Air meanwhile got a $100 price cut and version 3 of the Garbage Keyboard.

  • The Raspberry Pi 4 is a powerful single-board computer that identifies as an attack helicopter or possibly as a pair of headphones. (ZDNet)

    Some compliant USB-C chargers and cables (like all the ones sold by Apple) will refuse to power the Pi 4 because it identifies on the cable as an audio device. I expect this will get fixed pretty quickly.

  • Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is a pinball game. (Niche Gamer)

    I kept seeing references to it, but never with the word pinball associated.  Seriously, this is the announcement trailer.  Unless you watched it to the end you'd never guess what kind of game it was. 



    Well, it does say in the description below, but who reads those?

    The launch trailer is just a tiny bit more accurate.



    It actually looks kind of fun, though there are only two tables so replay value is meh until the inevitable DLC shows up.

  • Webpack crushes when tries to print a message about donating in Windows 8.1 (GitHub)
    What is the current behavior?

      Webpack-cli crushes:
        .\node_modules\webpack-cli\bin\cli.js:352

        if (!e && fileOwnerId === process.getuid()) utimesSync(openCollectivePath, now, now);

        TypeError: process.getuid is not a function


    To Reproduce

      Steps to reproduce the behavior:

        run npx webpack --config webpack.config.js --mode development on Monday


    Expected behavior

      It should not to stop a webpack process
    They asked the poor guy to send a pull request.

  • Instagram now asks users: Are you sure you want to post that you horrible screaming garbage baby? (BBC News)

    To which Instagram users reply: Have you seen Instagram?

  • Zoom videoconferencing app turns out to be complete and utter garbage on every possible level. (Medium)

    I've used it. Duh.

  • These look like a good way to jump into Pic32.

    The Pic32MX version (currently $20) only has 16KB of RAM so it's not much good for what I want to do, but the Pic32MZ version (currently $23.20) has 512KB RAM and runs at 200MHz.

    Oh, and here's a complete lecture series on using the Pic32 from Cornell University.


Video of the Day



Cat Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Never send to know for whom the pull request tolls, your code fucking breaks if it's a Monday.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:12 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 583 words, total size 6 kb.

1 "the only one that still had a row of physical function keys and thus an escape key"
And with that, one of J Greely's posts on his own blog suddenly makes sense.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 12:36 AM (Iwkd4)

2 "They asked the poor guy to send a pull request."
And he told them to get bent.  (The thing nags you to donate every Monday?  Or if you install it on a Monday?  Eeeew.)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

3 "Additionally, if you’ve ever installed the Zoom client and then uninstalled it, you still have a localhost web server on your machine"

Wow.  Hard fail.


Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 12:48 AM (Iwkd4)

4 Worse than that - it crashes while nagging you for a donation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 10 2019 12:54 AM (PiXy!)

5 Somewhat off-topic.
If one were, (theoretically) trying to put together a very basic PC which would be able to stream videos and blog, would any of the following be adequate: NVIDIA's JetsonNANO, the ODROID, Raspberry Pi4 or Bananna Pi ?
Which would be better? The NVIDIA machine is twice the cost and has better stats, but I gather it doesn't have the hobbyist support...which is important for someone who's been using the black box sorcery of Apple products for years. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, July 10 2019 08:23 AM (CgsYS)

6 I'd check the bargain Windows PC page on Woot, myself; there's usually something under $200 with decent specs, and for around $300 you can get one with more RAM and an SSD (the Lenovo M83 looks reasonable; I bought an M73 a while back to drive my CNC router).

I've never gotten fullscreen video to work on a Pi-grade system, so I wouldn't recommend it for streaming.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, July 10 2019 08:46 AM (ZlYZd)

7 A Pi would be...uh...let's say cromulent for blogging, if you're the patient type.  I wouldn't try streaming on it.  (I bought a 3B recently and spent some time using as a browsing machine.  The 4 would probably be better.
If you're not afraid to DIY and you can afford to do it, a Ryzen 2200G system on a B350 or even A320 motherboard, would be a great system for that.  Especially if you've got (say) a Micro Center nearby, because you could get a huge combo discount, and they have these dirt-cheap Inland-branded SSDs that are still much better than a hard drive.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 10:18 AM (Iwkd4)

8 Pi 4 should be okay for that.  It's a hell of a lot faster than my Nexus 7, and I still browse the web regularly on that.

A budget PC build would be faster, but I'm not sure if you could even come close to the price of the Pi 4.  Maybe a sale on an Atom-based notebook.  (If you go down that route, get 4GB RAM and 64GB storage.  2GB and 32GB both quickly become unusable because of Windows.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 10 2019 10:34 AM (PiXy!)

9 Or take a budget Atom notebook and slap Linux on it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 10 2019 10:35 AM (PiXy!)

10 It's pretty easy to get a former leased business PC that's about 4-5 years old for cheap, possibly "refurbished" by someone. Four years ago was the end of Intel 5th Gen and 6th Gen came in starting August 2015, all very capable. 4th Gen is quite decent too.

I picked up an almost complete (no monitor) 3.6 GHz 4th Gen i5 computer for less than $120 last December, though I have upgraded it to be my gaming PC with a graphics card, SSD, and more memory.

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, July 10 2019 02:47 PM (magRz)

11 The problem with those 4- and 5- year old computers is that you may have to dump more money into them in the form of RAM, SSD, etc, not to mention that you might be giving up on stuff like USB3.  Also, if you want to put a video card in for gaming, you have to make sure that you get a PC that either has a sufficient power supply, or that has a replaceable power supply!  Dell and HP, in the last few years, have both gone on another stupid money-saving kick where they use non-standard connectors and/or don't even have video card power connectors (for example, my work Dell Optiplex that I got last year has a tiny 260W power supply.  Worse, it's oddly-shaped, meaning you can't take it out and put a bigger one in.  Worse than *that* is that it uses a proprietary 10-pin motherboard power connector.  And the hard drive power connectors come off the motherboard, not the power supply.  Ultimately that means you can't put in any video card that requires a power connector, so you're limited to low-to-mid-range cards.  This probably won't matter to non-gamers.
Also, the crummy PSU coupled with goofy current limits probably set in the BIOS but unchangeable means that if you do anything really CPU-intensive like transcode video, the CPU speed drops drastically.  Like, slightly below the base clock.
Meanwhile, you can get an Asrock Deskmini A300W for $150, then drop in a Ryzen 2200G with integrated video that blows Intel's iGPU out of the water for $100 ($80 if you have a Micro Center nearby), and then a 512GB Inland M.2 SSD for $50 and 8GB of laptop RAM for $40, totaling about $350 if you run Linux.  (You could do the Intel version of the same box (the A310W) and a 6-core i5-9400 for about $70 more, if you prefer Team Blue.)
Neither one of those would be great for gaming, but for Office/web browsing/blogging/watching YouTube?  Oh yeah.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 10 2019 03:30 PM (Iwkd4)

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




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