• Amazon will offer users an hidden option to stop their viewscreen reporting everything straight to Big Brother.  (VentureBeat)
  
  We rate this post five Sure, Jans out of five.
  
  
• Amazon will also be killing their Dash buttons at the end of this month noting that customer update had "significantly slowed" since they stopped selling them.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You can hack your existing Dash buttons to send a different command over WiFi - to make them handy buttons to control anything with a network connection - but you need to use Amazon's Dash app to do so.  Which Amazon are killing at the end of this month.
  
  
• AMD sold 79% of CPUs in July.  (TechRadar)
  
  At German retailer Mindfactory.  So just retail parts for users assembling their own desktop systems.  And of course this was a much-anticipated release.  Still a striking number; the 3700X alone almost matched Intel's entire product range.
  
  
• And stay out!  Gigabyte's latest BIOS release has removed PCIe 4.0 support from X470 motherboards again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• How much RAM does Windows really need?  (ZDNet)
  
  
• 1.5TB.  (ZDNet)
  
  Okay, they don't actually say that, it's just amusing that the two articles are immediately adjacent.
  
  
• Ooflets devs and Epic Games CEO double down on antagonising customers.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I somehow do not see this as a sustainable business model.

Had lunch with my brother today (found a very nice and reasonably priced local Thai restaurant with gluten free dishes), picked up my developer kit for the A750, and took a tour of his new workshop / office, which I think I did visit briefly once before but had forgotten.  (I'd dropped by his previous space plenty of times.)

He showed me his test equipment and current customer projects and tools and bins of parts. 

And he has a pick-and-place machine.

That's the device PCB assemblers use to assemble PCBs.

It's second hand and only a 25-reel baby unit with minimal intelligence, but it's a few minutes drive from my house rather than being in China.  And it should do fine for assembling a small pre-production run of A750 boards.

I'll still need to outsource getting the boards printed - no-one sane does that by hand anymore - but that's relatively cheap and straightforward.

Of course, first I have to do something useful with the developer board - get some code running and see what happens when I hack the LCD control registers.  The results of that experiment will determine whether I need an FPGA to make the whole thing work.  If I can just do it in software everything becomes cheaper, easier, and more reliable.  I added the idea of a separate monochrome console port to the project precisely because any mistake on the FPGA would mean losing your video output.

But step one is the same as always: Use a 480MHz superscalar RISC processor to make an LED blink.

Speaking of picking and placing, there is an open-source pick-and-place-machine project.

"So apparently this is a ninety-seven step assembly process, and I'm up to step...  Three."

Episode #1081: How to Kill a Computer.

Actually this method doesn't work very well.  Stick with the tried-and-true approach of teleporting space junk directly into the main memory core.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 05 2019 02:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Monday, August 05 2019 03:56 AM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 05 2019 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

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