Wednesday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 March 2021

Sit And Click Edition

Tech News

  • Intel's 670p is their new high-end QLC SSD.  (AnandTech)

    High end for QLC that is, which means low end.

    It's much improved over the earlier 660p and 665p.  Only problem is it costs more than a good TLC drive like my WD Black SN750 - $155 for Intel's 1TB model vs $130 for the WD.

    Intel will need to bring prices down by 30% before it makes any sense at all.


  • Speaking of 30% cheaper, if you try to order the Asus Zenbook 14 from Amazon Australia, the US model - delivered to Australia, in Aussie dollars, including Australian sales tax - is 30% cheaper than the Australian model.

    The only difference is the plug on the charger.

    The Zenbook 14 has USB-C.

    The Zenbook 14 does not support USB-C charging because fuck you that's why.


  • This could be something.



    Its a host board for the Pi Pico with microSD, USB, audio out, and from the looks of it, HDMI.

    Tom's Hardware says DVI but you can see there's no DVI connector.

    What they likely mean is a port that is physically HDMI and electrically DVI, which actually works perfectly well up to 1080p.  You don't get audio that way, but on the other hand, implementing it that way is royalty free, which matters a lot for small runs of hobby boards like this.

    Update: Oh my God.  (GitHub)

    So, DVI and HDMI use encoding called TMDS.  You can't just dump a digital RGB signal onto the cable; you have to encode each of the three colour channels as a 10-bit serial stream - at ten times the native pixel clock.

    That's precisely what they're doing.

    In software.

    They do overclock the Pico from its nominal 133MHz to 252MHz to get the necessary serial clock, but it works.  They can in fact drive two 640x480 60Hz DVI monitors from a single Pico, entirely in software.


  • I can get fried rice again.

    There are two big supermarket chains here in Australia.  One of them offered a quite nice store-brand microwave chicken fried rice in those long-life pouches that last about a year in the pantry.  A couple of months ago I went to order more and they were nowhere to be found.

    Now the other supermarket mysteriously has what looks exactly the same chicken fried rice except with their own store brand on it.

    I haven't been eating it as much lately because they recently started offering even better frozen versions that aren't much more expensive, but it's good to have a supply tucked away in the pantry.  In an emergency you can just eat it as a rice salad; it's already cooked.  Tastes better hot, but it's not bad cold.


  • It's likely that Apple will soon switch from their proprietary Lightning port to USB-C for all their mobile devices.  That will cause a lot of e-waste as people throw out existing devices, adapters, and cables because while they don't say it they expect Apple to fuck everything up.  (ZDNet)

    Why do they expect Apple to fuck everything up with the switch to USB-C?

    Because they already is.




  • Rocket Lake launches on March 30 unless it explodes on the pad.  (Hot Hardware)

    Which it probably won't because a certain retailer has already been selling them and benchmarks are out in the wild right now.

    The 11900K comes close to the Ryzen 5800X on Cinebench in both single and multi-core tests,  But the 11900K is the top of the line Rocket Lake part, and the 5800X is AMD's mid-range desktop part.  On the eleventh hand, the Ryzen 5900X and 5950X are pretty hard to find, though the 5800X seems to be in good supply.


  • I really should buy a new router to replace the one that caught fire.


Disclaimer: Because the one that caught fire ain't feeling too good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:04 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 649 words, total size 5 kb.

1 "The Zenbook 14 does not support USB-C charging"
Whaargarbl.  I didn't even use the regular charger on my last laptop.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 03 2021 04:43 AM (eqaFC)

2 Huh.  Remember that old bug where when you'd post a comment, the browser would get screwed up and, based on the appearance of the scrollbars, it looked like it thought it was actually at the top of the page?  I just got that in Edgemium, but after a couple of seconds it fixed itself.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 03 2021 04:44 AM (eqaFC)

3
  Because the one that caught fire ain't feeling too good.

The let go of it maybe? 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, March 03 2021 04:45 AM (5iiQK)

4 I watched that Louis video last night and I cracked up when he complimented the engineers at Apple for their ability to make a machine with no moving parts click.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 03 2021 04:47 AM (eqaFC)

5 Rick - pages with Twitter embeds can get screwed up because the HTML and CSS are outdated and need fixing, but I have a snippet of JavaScript that runs after page load to fix that.  That's probably what you saw.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 03 2021 08:05 AM (PiXy!)

6 Probably, yeah.  I hadn't noticed it in quite some time, just thought you'd like confirmation the bug seems to be fixed.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 03 2021 11:56 AM (eqaFC)

7 Oddly enough, for all I know, this machine /is/ from 2004. I have reasons to think it is younger than that, but I'm not actually sure how old it is.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 05 2021 12:15 AM (6y7dz)

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




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