• Endless Space is free at Humble Bundle for the next 24 hours.
  
  You just need to sign up for their newsletter.  Your email address has probably been leaked a thousand times by now anyway.
  
  
• Xiaomi's Mi 9 has (reads specs) no headphone jack.  (AnandTech)
  
  Please stop doing that.
  
  
• Sega's Genesis Mini comes with 42 games for $80.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That price is a bit high for the hardware - it's just another emulator running on a cheap Arm microcontroller - but it includes two controllers and the bundled game lineup looks solid.  I never owned a Sega console but I recognise most of the game titles even so.
  
  
• AMD's twelve-core Threadripper 1920X was discounted to $199 at Amazon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two problems: First, it requires an expensive motherboard that looks likely to be obsoleterated very soon, and second, I say was.  It's already out of stock.
  
  
• Asus' dual screen Zenbook Pro gets a full review.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys on this one.  They have an excuse - there's not much room because they had to move the trackpad to the right of the keyboard to squeeze in the second screen above. 
  
  I harp on this because my own fairly nice Dell laptop with its 4k screen doesn't have those keys either.  I used to have a keyboard and monitor in the office so the days I was working there I would plug those in and everything would be great.  But now we don't have a permanent office because most of the Sydney-based staff worked from home anyway, and it turns out that not having those keys drives me nuts when I'm trying to code.
  
  And my new HP laptops don't have those keys either.  Sigh.
  
  
• Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny.  (Nature)
  
  Well good, because that's been bugging me.
  
  
• ChocoPy is a subset of Python 3 designed for teaching compiler construction.
  
  Only problems are the compiler is written in Java and it compiles to Risc-V, which makes it basically useless.
  
  
• King Canute eat your heart out: France wants to block Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency at the border.  (ZDNet)
  

Earlier this year there was a video from David Murray, The 8-bit Guy, discussing his dream retrocomputer.  

Now he and a busy little team of hardware and software hackers are making it.

While the specs are still subject to revision, it looks like it will be an 8 MHz 6502 with 128K of ROM and 2MB of RAM - about 40K direct mapped and the rest bank switched - and an FPGA for video.  They have both an emulator and working prototype hardware.

The 6502 is not a good CPU, but it's a very familiar CPU to a lot of programmers, and that has huge benefits.

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:20 PM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:25 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 15 2019 01:26 AM (Iwkd4)

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