The Commodore 64C took a four-year-old motherboard and put it in a nicer box. Anonymous beige, beautifully so, wrapped around the same clapped out guts. Now they’ve found the original moulds and dropped an FPGA inside. Took me ten seconds to to preorder one.
The halogen bulb in my wake-up lamp went. The replacements I’ve tried don’t look much like a sunrise.
The worst thought about dropping off my old electronics for recycling is they end up in a landfill in some other nation. But European law seems strict on this. Now to wipe any lingering personal data first. If they’ll even power up.
My MacBook Pro met an unfortunate end at the AWS London Summit. Replacing it has been more complicated than expected.
As poorly as Westworld season 3 is regarded by large parts of the audience, I liked Engerraund Serac as the antagonist. He wanted to build a system of invisible control to prevent human extinction. He succeeded up until the moment he failed. Today’s corporate AI plans are heading the same way.
It’s remarkable to me how connecting to hotel wifi isn’t standardised. The password could be your room number, a captive portal asking for your room number. Or, as here, a code that appears when you turn on the hotel TV. Which I never do, because of streaming.
Computing started out expensive and then got cheap. Now it’s becoming expensive again. People need to get back into their garages to develop affordable personal computers, using parts the AI providers have no need for. We did it during the 8-Bit computing era. We can do it again.
The RAM shortage could last years
According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.
Planned a two-hour Dungeons & Dragons session but since we haven’t played in months it takes 20 minutes just to get everyone back up to speed. The grand finale then becomes “You open the door two doors away from the boss… and we’ll leave it there for tonight.”
Lana Del Rey’s “First Light” has a better title sequence than most contemporary Bond films.
In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead two famous nothings hurtle towards a Shakespearean end. Watching them question their reality when offstage from Hamlet has some interest, but it’s a slog to get to their hangings. “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” 🎬
Because Dune 3 has every IMAX screen locked this Christmas, Disney have gone the “Corinthian Leather” approach for Avengers Doomsday. They’ve invented a brand certification: Infinity Vision. That non-IMAX screen with its laser projector and Dolby 7.1 surround? It’s “Infinity Vision.”
Setting up an AI to GM a two-player play-by-email RPG for myself and a friend. It would take less time to just make more friends.
After a disappointing experience with a PowerMac G5’s design flaw, the author now carefully selects durable technology to ensure it lasts for five years.
Every time I go to Las Vegas the place looks more and more clapped out. $25 for a bottle of water in your hotel room and the entertainment is a stage show from someone who was popular in 2005. Online gambling must have been incredibly disruptive for Vegas.
I just turned on third-party integration in WhatsApp, an EU interoperability mandate, and now people on BirdyChat and Haiket can message me. One is business only and the other is in waitlist preview. I don’t expect a blizzard of messages. Or any.
Watched: Deadwax Season 1 📺 A short form horror for vinyl record lovers. Like The Ninth Gate a tracker gets drawn into assembling a cursed item at the behest of an obsessed wealthy person. This is soaked in noir dread that builds through the episodes. A good supernatural mystery.
Oil prices are going to be high for a while to come and there will be no quick end to the Iran war.
Trump orders US naval blockade of Strait of Hormuz
US President Donald Trump has ordered a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s “unyielding” refusal to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad. … Yesterday, the US military announced that two US warships had transited the strait at the start of a mine clearance operation.
I’m a big fan of Small Language Models. The technology to distill a Large Language Model down to something that generates tokens at decent speed is now there. I had a Python application costing me 17 cents per run in API calls, so I started to muck about with Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 under llama.cpp, and after some tuning got good results. Ministral is energetic and verbose. I had to be clear that inventing answers when the input was thin was not acceptable.
The real heat in Ireland’s fuel protests isn’t the Iran war, it’s the rising carbon tax. We’re told it’s ringfenced for climate action, except the base rate of €20 a ton isn’t. The only climate target the state is on track with is the tax take.
Windows 11 is garbage because the top people at Microsoft are all focused on trying to keep Azure from burning to the ground. How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars