Monday, March 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 February 2021

We Don't Want Your Business

Tech News

  • You can mine Ethereum on Apple's M1 Arm chip.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Despite Apple's vaunted efficiency and TSMC's 5nm process, it is half as efficient as a previous-generation Nvidia card fabricated on 12nm.  And for throughput, it delivers between 3 and 4% of a 3060 Ti.


  • I recently mentioned Redbean, the tiny run-anywhere web server.  Take the binary, add your content directly to the file (since the binary is also a valid Zip archive), and run it directly on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Free/Open BSD - or boot directly into it from BIOS.

    And now Lua.

    Redbean+Lua+SQLite would make a <1MB application server that could be distributed as a single binary for every major platform.


  • Lastpass doesn't want you to use Lastpass.  (PC Perspective)

    Why exactly does a password manager need seven third-party tracking cookies?


  • In defense of dumb TVs.  (Framework)

    Kogan - Australia's own little Amazon Marketplace - still has a couple of store brand 4K dumb TVs.  And they're stupidly cheap.  I might pick up the 50" model before they disappear entirely, otherwise it's....

    Well, Philips does sell a 55" 4K monitor.  95% DCI-P3 gamut, DisplayHDR 1000, DisplayPort input, and a built-in 40W soundbar.  But it is a fair bit more expensive.  Also a reasonably-priced 43" monitor, though without DCI-P3 or HDR.


  • After killing CentOS, Red Hat now offers free RHEL subscriptions for open source nonprofits.  (ZDNet)

    Of course, before they killed CentOS they already did that.  It was called CentOS.  And you didn't have to beg for it.


  • Planned to clean my fridge, so I typed fridge cleaner into the search box when ordering my groceries.  Soapy water and paper towels would do the job, but I wanted to see what came up.

    What came up was a specifically food-safe disinfectant.  Kills the usual 99.9% of germs, but no harsh chemicals, it promised.  Took a look at the ingredients - water, ethyl alcohol, and vanillin.  Oh.  It's basically vanilla vodka at one tenth the price.

    I'm not sure exactly what proof it is; it doesn't say on the label.  After taking a whiff, I did what any enterprising scientist would do and sprayed a small puddle on the granite countertop and dropped in a lit match.  The puddle didn't catch fire, but the match burned with a blue flame for the next thirty seconds before finally going out.

    It also works really well at cleaning glass, and smells great.

    Update: They publish a safety sheet for it.  It's 25% alcohol by volume - 50 proof - and they list the flash point as 36°C.  Which doesn't mean that it catches fire at 36°C, it just means that it can catch fire at 36°C if you apply a match to it.  As does, for example, paper.


  • Speaking of Hololive and YouTube's algorithmic idiocy, apparently best doggo got demonetised for a while and had Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague warnings attached to her videos.


Disclaimer: And the horse you rode in on.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 526 words, total size 5 kb.

1 All images are tracking images; Gruber's focus on single-pixel GIFs is so adorably out of date that it probably has a mullet. Not that that makes Apple Mail more sensible (or stable or predictable or...).

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, March 01 2021 01:02 AM (ZlYZd)

2 All images served from third parties are, yes.  Also the same goes for 3nd party scripts, and cookies, and any other media.  Time to go back to the (obviously, painfully) outdated notion of actually serving a website from a computer. (And maybe building a browser that enforces no cross-domain anything, and no prefetching links . . . like lynx! )

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 01 2021 01:36 AM (obo9H)

3 Oh, it was about apple's mail . . . just use a mail client that doesn't support HTML or frankly anything that isn't text.  I mean, you can use your fax machine if you want to send everybody the funny picture of the frog being eaten by the heron with the caption "Never Give Up".

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 01 2021 01:38 AM (obo9H)

4 Completely random question: do the old future-Pixy blog posts still exist somewhere?

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, March 01 2021 05:28 PM (ZlYZd)

5 They are around somewhere, yes.  I had to tweak things so they weren't permanently at the top.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 01 2021 09:25 PM (PiXy!)

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




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