I hosted my linkblog on del.icio.us from the early days, but moved to Pinboard after it’d been sold/bought and changed one too many times.
I’d been using IFTTT to mirror the links I saved to Pinboard over to del.icio.us, but noticed today the links stopped months ago. My credentials still work on the del.icio.us site, and IFTTT still lists the account as active, but when I re-connect in IFTTT I get a credential failure.
It’s not the end of the world; del.icio.us has had more down than a quilt of late, and I was just using it as a mirror. But it’s yet another step in the once-great service’s gradual demise.
Speaking of the Mac Pro, HP’s Pavilion Wave looked interesting when Clara and I were last wandering around JB-HiFi. In lieu of a shiny cyliner, the machine is enclosed in a rounded triangular prism made of fabric and plastic.
Unlike the Mac Pro, the Wave has a standard(ish) Mini-ITX motherboard, albeit stretched to include more inline ports. It also has no space for a discrete graphics card (or two), and only two memory slots.
In a way, it’s a Mac Mini with a proper speaker and current parts, in the form factor of a Mac Pro. In light of Apple’s comments that the Mac Pro’s thermal limits thwarted upgrades, maybe this is the logical conclusion for this form factor.
Professional podcaster Stilgherrian, seen here photobombing Saturn, implores us to refer to fake news by what it really is, which may be one or more of the following:
disinformation
propaganda
lies
mistakes
wardrobe malfunctions
parodies
One of those was fake. Listen to the latest 9PM Edict to find out which one!
I’d also add that those who dismiss “fake news” as “not being new” probably also smugly retorted “no, really!?” when Barry Manilow and Ricky Martin announced their orientations. Their intelligence is wasted on Twitter!
Lance Ulanoff and John Gruber got the Apple scoops of the century yestrday, and I’m still processing it all myself.
For some background, I wrote in January how I was worried for the Mac desktop. I was the billionth person to observe this, which itself is telling:
Tim sent out his now-famous message to staff about people’s desktop Mac concerns late last year. While people were trying to tease out meaning and read between the lines (or “nuance”, if I wanted to be a cringe-worthy 2016 hipster), I was more fascinated with him needing to release such a message at all.
And my post when they first announced the new Mac Pro in 2013:
I for one am disappointed [sic] at the lack of expansion, but I suppose we’ll wait and see what expansion options people come up with.
So many external peripherals and cables! But I digress.
The Mac Pro on shelves today hasn’t changed since that post was written. The iMac has fared better, but is still technically behind. I don’t buy into the consumerist idea that we all need new machines and phones every year, but that’s not the issue here.
People run businesses on Mac hardware. Or put another way, their livelihoods depend on it. Xcode developers have to use what they get, but creative professionals have been either moving back to Windows, or building Hackintoshes.
Apple’s level of access and transparency on their hardware plans was unprecedented, as both Lance and John point out. But glaringly absent was an assurance from Apple that the issues that caused this cycle of innovation to abandonware won’t happen again.
Until this is specifically addressed, I’d still be wary of buying Apple hardware for professional business use. Who’s to say their attention won’t be drawn away once Phil Schiller delivers his innovated arse again?
On a personal note though, I am relieved we’ll see some new Mac desktop hardware. My PowerMac G5 and 1,1 Mac Pro have never had proper replacements. Please can we have some internal expansion again?
Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it’s time to say goodbye. We launched CodePlex in 2006, [..] at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there.
I thought I’d be happy about this. I’ve written many posts over the years about Microsoft’s “not invented here” syndrome, and their seeming need to duplicate other products when perfectly good alternatives already existed.
But since then, I’ve realised consolidation is dangerous.
For all its usability issues and lack of hg awesomeness, Git is a decentralised alternative to the likes of Subversion (which I still prefer, though you’re not supposed to admit that). We’re going backwards in this regard with dependence on GitHub, and its already had consequences.
Don’t get my wrong, I’m a complete hypocrite and use GitHub and GitHub Gists for everything professional and personal now. But with CodePlex shuttering for MSFT projects, the ecosystem shrank a little further.
(As a reference, Canonical’s Launchpad and Atlassian Bitbucket are still going, but I can’t shake the feeling they’re living on borrowed time themselves).
My first non-TV job in high school was being a .NET code monkey, so a part of me also feels melancholic about an aspect of that universe changing, even though I haven’t interacted with it in a decade.
We’re all keyboard nerds at work, so naturally a colleague just referred me to this crowdfunded kit. The Penna is made to look like a typewriter, right down to the circular quays and side lever. It even comes in a wood option, which even most old school keyboards didn’t include.
Some observations:
Can I get a Bakelite version?
Have we reached peak hipster? All I need is a grubby shirt, a thin veneer of arrogant aloofness poorly hiding the same shallow consumerism I pretend to loathe, and a bad taste in music.
Cherry MX switches aren’t Topres (or Model-M buckling springs), but packing them into a portable keyboard I could use with my ungainly iPhone 7+ would be amazing.
If we haven’t reached peak hipster, is it visible on the horizon yet?
We had some sad news this week in the manga world, as translated by the Anime News Network:
Writer and manga creator Daisuke Satō passed away due to ischemic heart disease on March 22. He was 52. His immediate family have already held a funeral service, and his younger sister Yūko Shinmyō was the chief mourner.
This hit home pretty hard. My dad is still in recovery having just had surgery for this last month. My thoughts are with his family who didn’t get to feel the relief and joy that my sister and I did.
Satō was a prolific author of fascinating alternate-history books, and the writer behind the Imperial Guards manga. I’ve been meaning to check out more of his stuff; now I will be.
For most anime and manga fans though, he’ll go down in history as the literary genius behind Highschool of the Dead, the obsessively over-the-top apocalyptic epidemic zombie mutation virus horror series without regard for decency or physics!
Joking aside, it was friggen amazing series; equal parts Shaun of the Dead and serious commentary. It remains the only horror (and ecchi, let’s be honest!) anime series I’ve ever finished and enjoyed.
A pretty low-key birthday today, but that’s always been my style. I was terrified about turning 30, but recent family adventures render me happy, relieved and feeling very fortunate for making it this far ^_^.
As far as years go, my 30th on this planet was amazing. I met so many of my foreign friends in New York, Philly and New Jersey; made progress on several personal fronts; advanced in my career at a company with colleagues I’d consider friends. After so many years of veritable shit, I have much to be thankful for now.
I’m looking forward to next year, when I become fully 32bit compliant. This whole time I’ve been backporting binaries from future me, and recompiling them for my insufficient 16bit brain.
There was that period in the 2000s when anyone worth their salt build their game machines with AMDs. Athlons were faster, cheaper, and had that underdog status.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to build another AMD machine since my last machine a decade ago. My first game machine in years almost had an FX, but I got an i5 when it became obvious Intel had a clear thermal advantage; an important consideration for Mini-ITX builds.
Fast forward to this year, and I’d decided on the budget Xeon E3-1220 v5 for my Microserver replacement NAS. And low and behold, AMD threw this down:
ECC is not disabled. It works, but not validated for our consumer client platform.
Validated means run it through server/workstation grade testing. For the first Ryzen processors, focused on the prosumer/gaming market, this feature is enabled and working but not validated by AMD. You should not have issues creating a whitebox homelab or NAS with ECC memory enabled.
yes, if you enable ECC support in the BIOS so check with the MB feature list before you buy.
In the words of Spock: “fascinating.” Provided your board has support, ECC memory is within the reach of consumer tech for the first time. I’ve always wondered why ECC was limited to high end workstation and server rigs.
