• Not much tech news at the moment, and what there is, is mostly either stupid or depressing, so I'm going to try a year in review since there are twelve days left before we escape from 2020 for good.
  
  
  
• But here's an article discussing using Nextcloud to replace Google.  (Kira McLean)
  
  Nextcloud supports email, file sharing, document editing and collaboration, calendars and contacts, video calls and meetings, and has a built-in CMS for basic websites.  I'll install it once I've upgraded Rally and give it a try.

• On January 1 I noted that Google is rotten to the core, and suggested that investors short it.  I'm not wrong, but if you come to me for investment advice you're crazy.
  
  
  
• On January 2 Samsung's DRAM production was derailed by a 60-second power outage, a theme that would become familiar as the year went on.
  
  
  
• On January 3 Python 2.7 reached EOL.  Or at least we recovered sufficiently to note that Python 2.7 had reached EOL.
  
  At my day job we switched to PyPy and we're still running happily so far.  We've set up a service worker system for code that can't run on Python 2 and will migrate our main apps at leisure.
  
  
  
• On January 4 we had a warning that SSD prices might rise sharply over the course of the year.  This didn't happen, though prices didn't decline as sharply as in some recent years.
  
  Also, everything in Australia was on fire, my air conditioner wasn't working, and the New Yorker published their obscene hagiography of thoroughly deceased terrorist general Qasem Soleimani.
  
  Oh, and there was a 32" 4K monitor from LG on sale for $300.  
  
  
  
• On January 5 Bruce Perens resigned from the OSI over stupid open source licenses.
  
  In brighter news, Mangadex returned from a three-day outage forced upon them by an idiot uploader and a panicked hosting company.
  
  
  
• On January 6 we received a warning about brown M&Ms, and Ricky Gervais didn't so much roast Hollywood as flame-broil them.
  
  Also the video that introduced me to Saint Motel has since been age-restricted by the fuckwits at YouTube and can no longer be embedded.
  
  
  
• On January 7 the American ABC posted a map showing that all of Australia had burned down, China ruined everything, and AMD announced their Ryzen 4000 APUs which are still in short supply.
  
  
  
• On January 8 Google announced a grand total of nothing at CES, and IBM abandoned Apple's Swift for server code.
  
  
  
• On January 9 the Jussie Smollett case permanently imploded, AMD confirmed Big Navi, which still isn't available anywhere, and it turned out that humans glow in the dark.
  
  Also, YouTube flagged Happy Tree Friends as child-friendly.
  
  
  
• On January 10 scientists fitted cuttlefish with 3D glasses, and original Linus told us not to use ZFS and we all ignored him.
  
  
  
• On January 11 John Carmack discovered that $30 1TB USB drives are indeed a scam.
  
  
  
• On January 12 NASA discovered the first known Class M planet.  Other than this one.
  
  
  
• On January 13 Razer showed off a desktop PC - which still hasn't shipped, though they showed it off again earlier this month.
  
  
  
• On January 14 we were informed that AMD's WRX80 platform did not exist.  This is what is now known as Threadripper Pro.
  
  
  
• On January 15 a critical security bug was discovered, reported, and fixed before it could lead to disaster, a pattern that...  Well, fuck.
  
  
  
• This is taking longer than expected.
  
  
  
• On January 16 Microsoft's new version of Edge was released - and turned out not to suck - and Apple literally made people disappear.
  
  
  
• On January 17 I ordered my NBN upgrade, which was painless and has been very reliable, which one would expect after it took ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS TO ARRIVE, and Betelgeuse failed to explode.
  
  
  
• On January 18 I got the date wrong, HP's protection racket got unmasked, and California asked tech companies "What are you going to do, move to Texas?"
  
  
  
• On January 19 I really need to note what the videos I embed are, because going back now half of them are dead, the Connes Embedding Conjecture was proven false - unrelated, and $3.75 donuts.
  
  
  
• On January 20 I predicted that an astoundingly stupid post from a mainstream journalist would shortly be deleted.  Unlike half my videos of the day, it is still there.
  
  
  
• On January 21 I switched to DuckDuckGo, and the price and release date of the Playstation 5 leaked out - completely accurate, minus the availability woes.
  
  
  
• On January 22 AMD's 5600XT turned out better than expected.
  
  
  
• On January 23 how to deal with getting $60,000 in unexpected donations - the answer is to call your payment processor and stay on the phone until it is resolved, and the roadmap to Swift 6 was announced.  There is no Swift 6.
  
  
  
• On January 24 Log Horizon season 3 was announced - for October - and I wondered what had happened to Non Non Biyori season 3.
  
  Log Horizon season 3 premieres January 13, and Non Non Biyori season 3 on January 10.
  
  Also, NBN arrived.  I initially only got 50Mbps down, but some poking increased that to 82Mbps, which is good enough.  Oh, and YouTube fucked things up, a theme that is universal throughout human existence.
  
  
  
• On January 25 Nvidia was so panicked by AMD's 5600XT that they targeted it with an RTX 2080, and Quora was awful.  Also, and I quote, You can't copyright a number, you wombats.
  
  
  
• On January 26 oh look another vanished video, but at least I can note that it was the opening credits to Blake's 7, and some crazy people overclocked a 32-core Threadripper to 5.4GHz on all cores.
  
  
  
• On January 27 - just an average day - the Doomsday Clock moved to two minutes to midday.
  
  In a year where more peace agreements were signed than most decades.
  
  
  
• On January 28 - also an average day - Intel got hit by another speculative execution attack.  Remember when we worried about those?
  
  
  
• On January 29 we refused to eat bugs or live in a pod, and AMD posted yet another record quarter.
  
  
  
• On January 30 we hoped that Torchlight 3 would not suck, and the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague confirmed cases chart went vertical.  The official numbers from China, before they went back to pretending it didn't exist.
  
  
  
• And on January 31 YouTube fucked everything up.

I check out the official Hololive subreddit pretty regularly, because it's impossible to keep track of all the goings on, and I don't want to miss a moment like Haachama live-streaming her tarantula hotpot cooking session.

Cries of Oh god, it's real fill the chat starting at about the six-minute mark, for those of you who are interested.  The whole stream lasts about two hours.

Anyway, being Reddit there's a lot of nonsense, but it is moderated by company staff and some of Hololivers do participate.

Oh, hey, A-chan is streaming right now.  She's the only member of the staff who has a character design and actually livestreams and joins in the insanity.

Anyway - sometimes it throws up gems like that Amelia vs. hydraulic press video, or this one.



Their actual Minecraft streams are total chaos, ranging from getting blown up by a creeper while trying to prank another team member to trying to remodel an aquarium while the fish are still in it and having to recover them from all over the building when they escape.  Although they had an amazing spontaneous moment in their Christmas special which I won't spoil for you.