• Canva, an online design collaboration platform, is buying Affinity, a traditional software development house that creates good applications and sells them to you.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm hoping Canva doesn't turn Affinity into a subscription service, because right now you can buy the entire Affinity suite - photo editing, design, and publishing apps for Windows, Mac, and iOS - for around $120. 
  
  Not per year; once.

• The Lenovo Legion Tab is officially coming to Europe and Asia.  (Lenovo)
  
  This month.  Better get a move on, because there's not much of this month left.
  
  Downside is that at 599 Euros the price is not much cheaper than importing the Japanese version.
  
  On paper though it's a great device, with a 2560x1600 8.8" screen, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.  CPU is a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which has a Cortex X2 as its main core, so it's both recent and fast.
  
  It includes a microSD slot and two USB-C ports.  Either one can be used for charging, so you can charge while it is connected to a monitor or a headphone adapter (no separate headphone port).
  
  I'll buy one since there is no real competition.  Not two though, not at that price.
  
  
  
• I did buy the Asus M1505, the cheaper of the two Asus models I've highlighted recently.
  
  Ryzen 7730U CPU (8 Zen 3 CPU cores and 8 Vega graphics cores), 16GB of RAM which I'm upgrading to 40GB, 512GB of SSD which I'm upgrading to 2TB, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad - not ideal but better than not having them, and the standout feature, a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display.
  
  Roughly $1000 as configured.
  
  
  
• If you have Mac Studio envy the FN60G sold by Topton is basically a shrunk-in-the-wash version.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's bigger than a regular NUC but still very small; it uses an Intel desktop CPU and a laptop graphics module.  No expansion slots apart from memory and storage, so what you buy it with is all you get.
  
  Apart from those two memory slots and two M.2 slots, it has two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort ports, one USB-C port which can also drive a display for up to five monitors in total; two 2.5Gbit network ports, and four USB-A ports on the back.  On the front, another two USB-A ports, one USB-C, headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot.  Which is a pretty good complement of ports for a small system.
  
  Prices fully configured start around $1000 and go up to $2000, which is not terrible but you can certainly build a regular PC for the same price.
  
  
  
• No further Minecraft crashes since I disabled the Strawberry Fields in Mystic's Biomes.  Though given the number of new biomes in the modpack (over 200) and the number I've seen during testing (maybe 30) there could be something still lurking.
  
  It's not entirely happy running in the default 4GB heap, but it certainly runs smoothly with 16GB of RAM, which my original efforts didn't.
  
  If I don't trip over anything else I'll publish it to Curseforge this weekend.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 28 2024 01:40 AM (rcPLc)

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