Saturday, December 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 December 2020

Post-Derpmas Coma Edition

Tech News

  • A useful little mini-PC from Azulle.  (PC Perspective)

    It's a quad-core Atom so it's not going to set any speed records, but it provides dual Ethernet ports and WiFi, five USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA, and costs $225 with 4GB RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage.  You can add an M.2 NVMe drive and/or a 2.5" SATA drive, and another 4GB of RAM in theory.

    In practice these Atoms reportedly work just fine up to 32GB.

    Would make a nice home router / media box, or a server for your home office if you don't want to fuss around with VirtualBox.


  • Some settings to adjust whenever you install Windows.  (Tom's Hardware)

    For example, Storage Sense.  Make sure that fucker is turned off.  Nail it in place if you have to.


  • Did you know that there's a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar?  I don't know what it is, but I hit it a couple of minutes ago and was left hunting frantically for this post.


  • Also I may have too many Chrome windows open.


  • When you've lost Slashdot...  (Slashdot)

    A self-serving article from Coindesk about the bright future of crypto in 2021 - neglecting entirely to mention that 2020 was a fucking disaster - and the commenters piss all over it.


  • A Korean tokamak sustained 100 million degrees for 20 seconds.  (Phys.org)

    Practical fusion power is now only 19 years away.


  • iOS 14 has almost caught up with Android 4.  (9to5Mac)

    Widgets on the home screen, you say?  How novel.


Essential Minecraft Mod Video of the Day


The conversation between the Minecraft rabbit Pekora and the Minecraft rabbit Pekomama is 100% real.

Pekora promised her fans that she'd come out to her family when she hit a million subscribers - she'd been keeping it secret the entire time that she was a cartoon rabbit.  And she followed through, inviting her mother to join her live on stream, with 130,000 viewers, completely cold.

When her mother used her own trademark peko she died of embarrassment.  Twice.


July

  • On July 1 Apple killed the PC as we knew it, if "as we knew it" was "a Mac retaining any semblance of openness", Amazon delivered snowcones, and ruining open source projects for fun and profit. Speaking of fun and profit, EOFY reporting requirements suck.


  • On July 2 we dove deep into Intel's crappy Lakefield thing, LG produced a 17" laptop weighing less than three pounds, the Rust compiler will never be fast, Microsoft made the start menu somewhat less worse, and the Color Maximite 2 arrived, runnin Basic code about as fast as a 6502 could run assembler. Also a whole bunch of anime was pushed back to 2021.... Which is now almost here.



    Non Non Biyori season 3 airs starting January 10.


  • On July 3 don't use archive.org as a CDN, beating the Blub Paradox, 23,000 MongoDB databases got hacked this time, and Facebook shut down Lasso and Hobbi.

    Who?


  • On July 4 the Ryzen 4700G (which you can't get) matched the 3800X (which you can), Cronk returned, Walmart converted 160 unused parking lots into drive-in theatres, John was kind of a jerk, and Twitter removed sanity checks. Also we wished America a happy Independence Day.




  • On July 5 we predicted that the next big thing from Apple was higher prices and shit no-one asked for - and we were right, relativity explained Mercury - both the planet and the element, and we did not end up getting a W-1290P.




  • On July 6 Brython was a bad idea, don't buy $2 USB-to-Lightning cables, and using DEX as a dump stat.


  • On July 7 Slack imploded, then exploded, Ryzen XT was meh - compared to Ryzen X, which was and is great, pricing for Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs leaked and you still can't get one, and amorphous boron nitride either was or was not the next big thing.


  • On July 8 Thunderbolt 4 was on its way, and so was Hot Chips 2020, the Phanteks P500A had room for two motherboards, and the World Health Organisation noted that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague was, and I quote, "a thing".


  • On July 9 we were slacking from work due to a back injury and accidentally skipped an entire season of Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya and got very confused, some lunatic turned Redis into a search engine, Reddit was spying on you, and 117 out of 117 home routers failed security scans.


  • On July 10 Threadripper Pro appeared - a fully unlocked Epyc for the workstation market, Google banned its competition, I asked a question that I still don't know the answer to, and Facebook broke everything.


  • On July 11 1TBVPS.com sold 1TB VPSes, engineering samples for Epyc 3 showed up in benchmark results, and the Commander X16 should have used a W65C265S.


  • On July 12 Threadripper Pro started at just 12 cores, presumably for tasks that didn't need much CPU but used a ton of RAM, I first discovered MariaDB support for temporal tables, and the WD Blue SN550 performed good.


  • On July 13 Github went down again, WeWork was wildly woverwoptimistic, and no, you idiots, Microsoft is not about to abandon x86.


  • On July 14 New York celebrated a mountain of corpses, you couldn't get a Ryzen 3300X - and you still can't, and a crowdfunded AMD NUC appeared just in time to be obsolete.


  • On July 15 Google ruined everything, Patch Tuesday fixed 123 vulnerabilities, and the Ethereum disaster was just beginning.


  • On July 16 we banned Tencent, Twitter got hacked, and Zen 3 did not support DDR 5, as it turned out. It could, but it doesn't.


  • On July 17 it wasn't Twitter accounts that got hacked, but Twitter itself, and with inside help, my perpetual license for FontAwesome 5 got planned obsolencensed, and Patreon shot itself in both feet.


  • On July 18 Twitter attackers "were not able to view previous account passwords" - just your email address and phone number, Cloudflare went down and took GitLab, Patreon, Authy, and Downdetector with it - and also Digital Ocean, the Asus PN50 broke cover, and no, you're not shadowbanned, we've just, um, banned your shadow.


  • On July 19 Citrine was an incredibly bad idea, remote work could destroy Silicon Valley, and if not there's still a chance of a wandering comet, and the Children's python was not named for its diet after all.


  • On July 20 we installed Windows and Steam on a Raspberry Pi - or at least, some unfortunate soul did, Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs, and H.R. 6666 had 66 sponsors.


  • On July 21 AMD officially launched their desktop APU range which, yes, you still can't get, AnandTech benchmarked all the things, and Samsung remotely bricked every single one of their Blu-Ray players. With an XML file.


  • On July 22 Metacritic saw a bright new future in fraud, 10.16 == 11, and Comet Neowise put on a show over the SpaceX launch pad.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/NeoSpace2.jpg?size=640x&q=95


  • On July 23 the Xioami Mi 10 offered near-flagship specs at flagship prices, TechDirt was still drunk, PyPy had a huge problem with Mustache partials, and oh, how quaint, the Ethereum gas price spent most of the day below 100.


  • On July 24 Intel's 7nm process was a year late, and won't show up for at least another two years, and I was hyped for 5nm Ryzen APUs which also won't show up for at least two years. The next release looks set to be at 6nm, which is a minor (but worthwhile) update to 7nm rather than a brand new node.


  • On July 25 TechDirt was tilting at wombats imagining they were windmills, Yahoo nuked its comment system, and Ethereum continued to be Ethereum, a condition that would persist through the remaining months of the year.


  • On July 26 Intel's Xe graphics were on their way, no, there aren't going to be hydrogen-powered Airbi any time soon, and it turned out there a world outside of Europe.


  • On July 27 PHP 8 caught up with ALGOL 60 - in one specific feature, don't give third-party sites access to your private GitHub repos, do not watch this video.


  • On July 28 a Suikoden sequel crashed Kickstarter by giving it too much money, Intel's crunchy ice pickle, S3 considered harmful - for anything that isn't... for anything at all really, Arm-based Macs entered a quantum superposition, and we discovered Campbell's Law. Or rather, we knew of the fact, we just discovered that it was named Campbell's Law.

    Oh, and we also fell into the derpy otome villainess isekai manga subsubsubsubsub-genre with Bakarina and Bertia.




  • On July 29 Wikipedia claimed that all DDR5 modules were registered - and still does, Zen 3 was due this year, and you could in fact briefly get one, humans did not live in trees,


  • On July 30 a Grub bug nibbled a hole in UEFI, Big Navi turned out to be not quite that big - that leak was probably AMD's compute chip, and Arm's fired CEO of their Chinese division decided he wasn't fired after all.


  • On July 31 we journeyed beyond the shoe event horizon, we had a massive philosphers' strike on our hands, and Envoy was an application router supporting layers 3, 4, and 7.


Disclaimer: Mostly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:00 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1566 words, total size 14 kb.

1 "a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar" Wasn't that the old WindowShade extension?  I don't bother any more with minimize and all that: just switch to another virtual desktop.  Except, does Winders offer multiple virtual desktops?  (sorry, I use evilwm, which is full of evil, so I'm not a good source for help, probably)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 27 2020 08:45 AM (obo9H)

2 Huh? There's something wrong with crypto right now?
(Trudges off to check coindesk.com/price)
Everything seems mildly ok-ish, it's only up 7% today...

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, December 27 2020 09:33 AM (Clxcy)

3 That's the problem.  The Slashdot crowd wants to build practical applications that use the blockchain, and for that they need stable prices.

Although Ethereum increased moderately over the year, the price of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain spiked by as much as 60,000%.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

4 What are people doing on the Ethereum chain that causes the GAS price to spike 60,000 percent when bitcoin goes up 10%?
(BTW, the first time we discussed this, I went and looked at the data, but since I only pulled down the daily price average of gas I may have been missing all the spikes).

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:43 AM (Clxcy)

5 I find it slightly humourous that the TomShardware article brings up privacy but never mentions disabling Cortana or "check my spelling as I type".  Also: use google chrome instead of ms edge is risible in the extreme.  Pretty sure these people only use computers the way small children use tamagochis.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:48 AM (obo9H)

6 The thing with Ethereum is you can run code on it, not just send payments.  In theory, anyway; in practice it quickly uses up all the capacity of the blockchain and everything goes to hell.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 11:09 AM (PiXy!)

7 Normal - yeah, I'd certainly trust Google less than Microsoft at this point.  The article at least points out things to be aware of.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 11:11 AM (PiXy!)

8 I'm definitely not drugged enough to understand that Pekora video.  In fact, I'm not sure there ARE enough drugs for me to understand that Pekora video.  WTactualF was that???

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, December 28 2020 05:55 AM (Bkp4m)

9 Now that I've seen the subtitles, I understand the Pekora video rather less than I thought I did.

Though Mom embarrassing Pekora and revealing the origin of her name was priceless. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, December 29 2020 06:26 AM (5iiQK)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




66kb generated in CPU 0.0148, elapsed 0.1067 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.0972 seconds, 354 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.