Monday, October 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 October 2020

Why Can't They Both Lose Edition

Tech News

  • New Spare Laptop has been deployed and is currently installing six months worth of software updates.

    Update: Where did all my disk space go?  Wait, VirtualBox is using how much?  Well, those can all go for a start.

    Update 2: Oh joy, a Windows Update boot loop.

    Update 3: Okay, Windows is updated now.  But it turns out that this laptop won't charge either.  Runs fine plugged in until you do something that draws extra current like, oh, running Idle Champions, at which point it drops dead.

    Update 4: That might be a software issue.  (CNet)

    But I'll have to open up the laptop and disconnect the battery to fix it.  Ugh.

    Hmm.  At some point I reinstalled Windows on this system and scrubbed it of all the Dell-specific drivers and stuff.  Might be worth reinstalling those.

    Update 5: BIOS reports the battery is fine, so it is a driver issue.  Well, that can be fixed, one way or another.

    Update 6: "This battery charging is temporarily disable."

    Update 7: There's apparently a workaround using advanced charging schedules.  Why they even exist I don't know, but worth a shot.

    Update 8: Nope.  Time to buy a new battery from some random seller on Amazon, I guess.  I can choose from Ding brand or Binger, or Amanda, or....  The reviews say remove your battery, leave it for two minutes, then try again.  Well, worth a shot.


  • The Bolsheviks at Google and Facebook are engaged in a war with the Mensheviks at the ABC.  (The Guardian)

    (Australia's ABC, that is.)

    The ACCC has mandated that social networks pay news organisations for the right to link to them.  Google and Facebook have said they will simply disable the ability to link to news articles.

    The ABC says that hey, it could run a social network.

    The only upside to the nightmare that would be a government-run social network is that it would collapse instantly because the ABC couldn't manage a piss-up in a brewery.


  • Down the rabbit hole: I'm a paid member of Amelia Watson's channel now.  On the other hand, it works out to something like ten cents per hour of entertainment given how much she streams.

    I don't often get to catch the live streams because I'm usually working on something at the same time and need to be able to pause, and they don't allow that on their livestreams.

    I've watched a couple of dozen hours of Hololive and politics hasn't been mentioned even once.  It's infinitely better value than Netflix for that reason alone.


  • The Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module is a Raspberry Pi 4 compute module.  (Tom's Hardware)

    They've dropped the SO-DIMM form factor for some reason.  That's a shame - it breaks backwards compatibility with early compute modules and replaces a standard connector with a custom one.

    On the upside, it has one PCIe 2.0 lane.


  • Asus looks to be preparing an Intel laptop with Intel graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Nobody knows why, but the answer is probably spelled "money".


  • AMD skipped Ryzen 4000 on the desktop because the numbering had become confusing.  And then: The Ryzen 5600U and 5800U will be Zen 3; the 5500U and 5700U will be Zen 2 unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)

    This will still be a significant upgrade, because the 5700U will be 8 cores / 16 threads, where the 4700U is 8 cores / 8 threads.  So each model should be 20-25% faster than its predecessor.


  • There will be four editions of the Radeon 6900 unless there are five, or three, or some other number.  (WCCFTech)

    Rumours suggest a 6900 XE (or XLE), a 6900 XL, a 6900 XT, and a 6900 XTX, ranging from 64 to 80 cores.

    We'll know soon - AMD's Radeon event is on the 28th.


  • The Arm64 memory architecture supports address tagging.  (LWN)

    I didn't know that.  Since nobody actually had 16 exabytes of RAM, the architecture only uses 48 bits for physical addresses, and four bits of the virtual address can be used as a data type field.


  • Do not drink the cursed Elixir.  (GitHub)


  • Unlocking God Mode in Windows 10.  (Bleeping Computer)

    You just need 64 blocks of Crying Obsidian and two Diamond Anvils.

    Or, alternately, log in with admin privileges and create a folder named GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

    It will give you a version of the Control Panel with every single configuration and management option available.


Google Supports Pedophiles Video of the Day




The appeals system at YouTube, as multiple YouTubers have demonstrated, and at Twitter, as I know from personal experience, are designed solely to prevent lawsuits and not to provide any actual channel of communication.

Oh, look, I need to unlock my Twitter account again.  For...  Pushing back against QAnon?


Disclaimer: Some men just want to watch the world burn, and when it comes to social media I'm increasingly in agreement.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:12 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 821 words, total size 7 kb.

1 The comments to that battery article mention that Lenovo laptops commonly have a pinhole on the bottom with a microswitch behind them to "unplug" the battery.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 03:59 AM (eqaFC)

2 Oh, AMD.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 20 2020 06:29 AM (LADmw)

3 Normal, you have to take anything WTFTech says with a bucket of salt.  They'll print any rumor no matter how ridiculous.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 08:37 AM (eqaFC)

4 They've improved a lot over the last couple of years, from being wrong 80% of the time to being right 80% of the time.  I'm not removing that disclaimer though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 09:23 AM (PiXy!)

5 I (apparently) fried a pair of microcontrollers while trying to get the wiring right.  I knew buying several was a good idea!
I bought an electric skillet over the weekend rather than messing around with sub-millimeter pitch SMD components.  Put the board in the pan over one of the heating elements, set it for 300F, wait.  Easy peasy, although you are likely to have to fix a couple of solder bridges, which is also easy peasy.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 11:15 AM (eqaFC)

6 My brother uses a toaster oven for the same thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 12:25 PM (PiXy!)

7 If I use a toaster oven, I would have to put together a temperature-sensing-and-control circuit.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 01:15 PM (eqaFC)

8 Yeah, I think that's exactly what he did.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 04:46 PM (PiXy!)

9 I was pretty sure you were going to say that. 

Posted by: Rock C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 12:07 AM (eqaFC)

10 "Rock C"?  Dammit, Samsung keyboard.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 04:24 AM (eqaFC)

11 Well, I'm stumped at this point.  Following a guide, I built a minimal setup on a breadboard, and then flashed a bootloader onto it from an ARM Arduino.  That seems to have worked, or at least it reported success.  But when I plug the system into a USB port Windows should recognize it, and it doesn't.  The guide I followed said if it wasn't getting 12mA of current draw, but only about .3mA, to check to see if the USB port and crystal were working.  As best as I can tell I'm pulling about .25mA, but I have no idea how to check the crystal.  I rather jankily soldered it to a pair of short jumper wires to make sure it was getting a good connection on the breadboard but beyond that, I don't know what to try next.  There don't seem to be a lot of guides about doing this--everyone's mainly just using arduinos, but I want more IO pins than an Arduino gives.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 10:09 AM (eqaFC)

12 Yeah, that's when you start needing test equipment.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 21 2020 11:04 AM (PiXy!)

13 In this case I'm not sure what to even test *for*.  My best guess for what to do next is find a forum that might have some suggestions, like Adafruit or maybe a subreddit like r/askelectronics.
There don't seem to be a lot of people writing about designing their own boards like this--most people seem to just use a premade one.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 12:28 PM (eqaFC)

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




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