This is the saddest news. I own many of his albums, which I play regularly for the sheer brilliance of his live performances.

Not completely unexpected, and likely to take a long time to sort out, but definitely a landmark. Search and advertising have been the lifeblood of the modern Internet, and this touches on both at once.

The logical next step to yesterday’s announcement. Should be fairly pricey to fill with top-tier compute modules, as they can reach $90 a pop when maxed out with RAM and storage.

But I kind of like the daughter card plus heatsink design–it’s the simplest thing that could possibly work.

My Raspberry Pi 2 cluster is showing its age, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this, especially as I would like to move to ARM64 for most things.

This is sweet. I can’t make much use of it as is, though, but I hope it inspires the next revision of the Zero or A series, because it would be perfect with 8GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage and a couple of USB-C ports on the side.

As it is, getting the base board just to bootstrap them might be an option, just not a very practical one.

As usual, Federico Viticci packs in a lot of detail into over 20 pages of tight, thoughtful prose, and highlights both some new features you may have not noticed yes and how they improve on the previous release.

Also great for weekend reading, although I suspect it’ll take a bit longer than that to reach the end.

This is so cool, and makes for excellent weekend reading (plus the rest of the site is crammed with interesting little nuggets).

I like both the form factor and the specs. $99 is a tad pricey when compared to my current favorite (the Raspberry Pi 3A+), but it has USB-C, 2GB RAM and 8GB eMMC flash (all of which I’d like to see on the next smaller Pi) besides a Google Edge TPU.

The mini is the phone I wish I could have bought instead of the XS, and I’m positive it’s going to sell in droves. It’s exactly the “right” size as far as I’m concerned, and I hope they keep the form factor around until the iPhone 14 (which is when I expect to buy a new phone for myself).

I also quite liked the new HomePod mini, but it has two major shorcomings: it doesn’t have a line out jack (I have my Amazon Input pluggeed into my office speakers, which I prefer) and it still isn’t available in Portugal (which makes it a non-starter for my living room).

It’s great to see NVIDIA updating their dev kits, but the drop to $59 at the expense of halving the RAM capacity just doesn’t do it for me.

It might be enough for running things, but as a development/model training platform I think it falls a bit short.

Update: Hackaday agrees, in general.

I once seriously considered getting the previous version since I have no NVIDIA GPUs in the house, but the software support was a bit lacking at the time.

Now I can build my own ARM64 binaries for anything, have the room to set it up - and a use case - but the original version seems to be out of stock…

Apparently RedHat is going to be on the left side of the split, and I’m curious as to what the right side will do to the managed services market (where TechM, Accenture, etc. already compete with “regular” IBM).

But the sheer size of the whole thing feels like hippos reproducing by mitosis.

Watch this space.

Also, Jason Zander’s post from a few days back.

I really like that everyone is now using the Pi as a sort of universal form factor, but also a bit sad that this is still using an Atom x5-Z8350 from ages ago (I have two equivalent Z83ii boxes) and that the HDMI out can only do 4K at 30Hz.

It’s as if everybody just keeps hashing out what they can do with Intel’s dusty low-end portfolio without even trying to lift the status quo up from “slow and pokey”, which is what this will likely be when running Windows 10.

But it supports PoE, which might be quite useful for industrial applications (I keep running across places running their OPC stuff in great hulking dinosaur PCs from another era).

I just keep expecting a little more from SBCs these days.

I was waiting for something like this to come out (for the kids), but even though it looks to be just as well built as the rest of the Surface line (and with decent specs) other, easier to repair/expand laptops with Ryzen 4700 series APUs are coming out at roughly the same price range (often cheaper if you go for the decent config at 8G/256G).

Sticking with Intel seems like a missed opportunity somehow, although I get it that the thermals were probably easier to work out.

Too bad that most interesting Ryzen laptops like the ones from Lenovo and Acer seem to be in very short supply, and not a single one of the “good ones” with a 4700 or 4800 is currently being sold in Portugal (let alone somehing with a halfway decent screen and memory configuration…).

But it’s a great little computer for the price, even if I prefer the non-laptop format in general.

Well, this took a little longer than expected, but it was pretty obvious that Google would match Apple’s stance regarding “off-store” payment methods–especially considering their app ecosystem is way more… “creative” in what concerns scalping users.

(Their reaction to Epic’s shenanigans may have been less visible, but only because the media likes to selectively milk headlines for all that they’re worth, and Apple was a juicier target.)

The buried lede, of course, is the vague statement about “making it easier for other app stores” to exist on future versions of Android. That is clearly a pre-emptive move to put forward as part of any anti-trust conversations, and is going to be very interesting to consider from a security perspective (to say the least).

I’m just going to make more popcorn.

I’m quite a bit saddened by this, as I was quite looking forward to see how one of my favorite Sci-Fi series would translate to the screen. There is so much about The Culture that makes it a cult classic, and so much to explore.

This is interesting not just because of the rumors about ESXi, but also because it hints at collaboration with NVIDIA on future ARM platforms and an upcoming joint announcement (which had hitherto escaped my attention).

Not that I expect this to be of immediate use to most people (even companies with massive VMware deployments don’t really have that many ARM-ready workloads), but once server designs stabilize, this might be the first thing traditional IT folk look for.

As much as I am on the fence about Oracle Cloud in general, this seems like the right move to make right now.

ARM also announced new CPU reference designs yesterday, so I expect more OEMs to start shipping server-grade hardware in bulk.

Of course, possible fallout from the NVIDIA deal is a risk, but hopefully that won’t matter.

I’ve had GPT-3 on my personal to-do list for literally months, crossed it out last weekend because I needed to prioritise, and then this happens.

Guess this means I’m going to have to find a project at work to use it, if I can escape the Excel maze I’ve been stuck into of late.

Well, this was extremely unexpected. Microsoft just got itself a bunch of key AAA game studios for around $7.5B (three times what it paid for Minecraft), just in time to boost the recent Game Pass refresh and the very day before Xbox pre-orders.

And that includes two PlayStation 5 launch titles. Ha.

I’m still digesting this in the context of the broader game industry landscape (good thing I keep reading EDGE), but the weirdest thing my brain keeps looping back to is that my current employer now owns Quake.

I wasn’t expecting this to (ever) happen in a million years…

Cue jokes about freezing hell by getting into the Doom simulator business.

I love the subtitle.

That said, I have been looking at VR gear for a few months (as an offshoot of my kids learning Unity/Godot and my own quest for something fun to do, if you’ll pardon the pun) and the previous Quest was at the top of my list until they announced they would be requiring Facebook logins.

This revision’s move to make inter-pupillary adjustment a chore also makes it further unsuitable for shared/family use, so I’m going to give it a hard pass.

Which is a shame, since they had a great ecosystem going and the headset was quite indie/hobbyist friendly.

I’m not at all keen on PC-based VR (it makes no sense for the headset to be 100% dependent on a beefy computer I do not want to maintain) so I’m hoping someone else can muster the vertical integration required to get a standalone, developer-friendly, Android-based headset to market.

But this kind of “evolution” is why we can’t have nice things from most corporations.

I like it. It looks like it has everything you’d really need from the Pro at slightly less than two thirds the price tag (for the storage I deem minimally acceptable).

I’ll wait for reviews and teardowns before passing full judgement, since the Air has always been a bit of an outlier when it comes to the “consumer” iPad range in both features and lifecycle.

But getting one of these instead of a laptop is still massively appealing, and I guess that is exactly the point.

As to yesterday’s other announcements, I’m largely unfazed.

We still can’t pair a Watch to an iPad, and Apple One was especially disappointing given is US-centriciry and that I’m aleady paying for the 2TB iCloud storage plan (for device backups and photos, mostly) and am left without a way to “sidegrade” into a Family plan (which has a pitifully small amount of storage–barely anough for two people, really).

Also unsurprising. We’d been discussing this on and off for a few months now, and even though I’m also quite sad given that I actually made it through all the Quiz Show qualifiers (and was looking forward to competing on stage), it was the right call.

This was the first edition where I was looking forward to actually participating rather than presenting (even though I was going to play host to a few events, as usual).

But I’m most sad that we won’t be able to spend three days in a state of near panic herding cats as the hackathon unfolds, hanging out with the guys at Hipnose as they run the entire show, and having our traditional team dinner (which, for various reasons, we had been holding at a stakehouse after every edition, “geek Christmas” style).

These people are my extended family, and I miss them terribly.

But in between Celso’s recent move to Cloudflare (which wouldn’t stop the event, but would always add more twists) and the way the pandemic is going, there was no other option.