Last year I put in my $5 deposit for a Steam Deck. Valve was so overwhelmed that day that I couldn’t get my order to accept until late in the afternoon. That put me at the end of the order queue and I’ve been waiting ever since.
Valve has promised me Q2 availability which ends in 3 days. Will they make it? The answer is yes!
A few hours after I tweeted about this I got my confirmation!
There’s an amateur radio on the International Space Station. Usually it’s configured in repeater mode which is how I was able to contact a fellow HAM in upstate New York. I communicated through this ISS radio in repeater mode which received my signal and re-broadcast it out.
Sometimes the astronauts talk to people on the ground too. This weekend was the National Association for Amateur Radio‘s annual Field Day event where amateurs around the world make contacts out in the field using battery or emergency backup power. Astronaut Kjell Lindgren was participating in the event making contacts on the ground. You can see a list of stations he received on his notepad in the photo.
Apple Keynote’s new dynamic backgrounds are really cool. Update to 12.1 to get them. Keynote always stays ahead of the pack on presentation software.
A company called Pepcom puts on mini-trade shows in NYC for the media every couple of months. As with everything the pandemic really disrupted indoor gatherings like this but they are now getting back to a more normal cadence. My latest video is from the Pepcom event that took place on Thursday, June 24th.
The June show is usually the lightest of the year but there were a few things that interested me. From a gadget perspective the Drop Keyboards were the standout item. These are super high quality artisanal keyboards designed for people who like typing. Their flagship keyboard weighs over 10 pounds and is hand crafted in New Jersey! I also picked up a sample of a Kidde smart smoke alarm and air quality sensor that I’ll likely be looking at this week.
The highlight of this video is catching up with my friend Dick DeBartolo who has co-hosted the Gizwiz podcast for the last sixteen years but also had a long career at Mad Magazine where he was known as Mad’s maddest writer! Dick also appears regularly on ABC News and I grew up watching him on Nickelodeon back in the 80’s.
This is the first of these shows that I shot “one man band style” with my GoPro. I think it worked out pretty well but I’ll probably attach a light to the rig next time. Here’s a livestream I did the other day setting it all up.
You can see all of my previous dispatch videos here. These are always fun to do.
I picked up this fanless Mini PC on the suggestion of a viewer for review. You can see my full review here. It is powered by an Intel N5105 Celeron chip (part of the Jasper Lake family) along with 8 GB of DDR4 RAM in dual channel mode. This model also came with 128GB of eMMC storage as its boot drive.
While it’s not possible to upgrade the RAM you can add a M.2 2280 NVME SSD. It also has a microSD card slot on the back. It supports dual 4k 60hz displays and would work well as a Plex server, but I do not recommend Windows PC as home theater devices these days. The Nvidia Shield is still the best choice for media consumption IMHO.
A few other value-adds here is its built in Wifi 6 radio which performed quite well in my testing along with a fully licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro. In my testing I also found it to be compatible with the latest version of Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux. Just note that right now Linux based browsers do not seem to decode 4k video from YouTube very efficiently.
Performance-wise this is a nice bump from prior Gemini Lake PCs in graphics and CPU performance making this a good choice for old games & emulators along with game streaming. Performance is light years beyond what you might get out of a Raspberry Pi 4 for light server and desktop usage.
The only real downside on this one is their decision to not follow the USB-C PD standard for charging and making the USB-C port only for power. You will need to use its included AC adapter to power it. Other Mini PCs at or around this price point have full service USB-C ports that work with docking stations.
Other than that I can’t find much to complain about here. This is a nice PC that can do a lot of basic PC and server tasks silently with great performance.
Scammers May Have Found A Way To Hide Defective Memory On Used Mining GPUs – Hot Hardware
I was at a very busy Grand Central Terminal this morning and still managed to pull down 1.8 gigabits per second! Uploads aren’t anywhere near that but still respectable for such a busy place.
I am a sucker for cool modern hardware for old retro hardware. YouTube channel The Retro Shack has this awesome and comprehensive review of an “everything” add-on device for the Atari 800 computers called the Fujinet.
What do I mean by everything? It’s pretty much the kitchen sink here with emulation for 8 floppy drives, a modem (connects via Telnet), a printer (writes out PDFs), realtime clock, a cassette deck for cassette based software, and a network adapter that connects via Wifi. Even crazier is that it allows for mounting disk images remotely over the Internet! It’s not all that expensive either at around $80 or so.
The Atari 800 has an innovative serial bus that in some ways works like USB where a whole chain of devices can be attached to a single cable with each uniquely addressable by the system. The creator of this hardware went on to work on the USB standard.
I have an Atari 800 in the basement here. My father-in-law purchased one back in the 80’s for use as a family PC but it hasn’t been booted up in decades. If you’re interested I might do a video or a stream where we power it up to see if there’s any life left in it!
The 800 is of course also faithfully recreated on the MiSTer.
Per WCNews.com a group called CD1188 Entertainment is working on upscaling the now super low resolution video from 1994’s Wing Commander 3. You can see it on their YouTube channel, it’s looking pretty good given the source footage they are working with!
Wing Commander is one of my favorite games of all time. Wing Commander 3 really pushed the envelope back in its day. It required a pretty fast 486 or Pentium, double speed or better CD-ROM, and a whopping 8 megabytes of RAM at a minimum.
The Wing Commander series was know for being a great space shooter but it also had equally good story elements. In the first two games they consisted of animated cut scenes with a few minutes of voice acting. For the third game Chris Roberts went all out with professional actors (including Mark Hamill, Malcom McDowell and John Rhys-Davies to name a few).
I talked about my love for Wing Commander in this video. You can see how the series progressed as technology improved over the course of its five mainline games and spin-offs.
My latest video is a review of the new Synology RT6600ax router. Synology got into the routing business a few years back with products that by far have the best user interface in the business.
Their previous router was released 5 years ago (wow!) and I found in my review of it at the time to be a solid product. In fact it is still running a portion of my network today. Still, users wanted more out of it including the ability to set up network segmentation using VLANs and of course WiFi 6 capabilities.
The RT6600ax resolves many of those wants but still leaves me desiring more. The good news is that it does include VLAN support with the ability to have five separate networks managed by the device. The even better news is that this functionality is also coming to the prior router too. I also found its WiFi 6 performance to be outstanding.
But it leaves me desiring more.
Oddly the unit only has one 2.5 gigabit port on it. If you have a multigig connection none of your other ethernet clients can connect at full speed. And for a router that supports so many segmented networks it unfortunately only has four ethernet ports on its switch and only 3 if using the 2.5 port for connecting to an ISP. I’m sure cost factored into this decision but it’s a shame its performance potential is hindered by a lack of connectivity options.
Another issue is that Synology doesn’t offer much in the way of meshing options other than buying a second RT6600ax and turning it into a mesh access point. Hopefully they release some WiFi 6 mesh points at a lower cost in the future.
But for a small home or office network it’s a good choice. It’s not very complex even when setting up more complex networks.
The RTL-SDR makes an appearance on the History channel’s Secret of Skinwalker Ranch! They are really fun devices for exploring the radio spectrum through software defined radio (SDR for short). This link will take you to my series on the subject which was my “gateway drug” to amateur radio!
The History Channel show is about a ranch in Utah that is connected to the US government’s studies of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Apparently the government spent quite a bit of money trying to make sense of it all. Visitors and residents of the ranch have experienced quite a bit there: UFOs, poltergeist activity, cattle mutilations, strange creatures, you name it.
A recent book entitled Skinwalkers at the Pentagon details some of the work of those government investigators.
This 6ish hour series probably could have been done better as a two and a half hour feature film but it was great Star Wars nonetheless. Well worth a watch.
It was great to see Vader on screen again with 91 year old James Earl Jones voicing him. I really liked seeing this transitional Vader that still had movements and elements of the prequel films’ Anakin Skywalker. And of course Ewan McGregor was awesome – he really jumped right back into a role he hasn’t played in almost twenty years.
The series enhanced well established characters and their relationships (especially Vader/Anakin) without ret-conning anything. I’d love a season 2 with Ewan McGregor doing Jedi things without messing up the Skywalker timeline.
Behold the Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon – Ars Technica
Sunbathing walrus sinks boats in Norway – NBC News
Vegas Company Promised Fast Internet. Rural America Waits…and Waits – Wall Street Journal
Kellogg to Separate Into Three Companies Focusing on Snacks, Cereal and Plant-Based Foods – CNBC
Megaupload Pair Plead Guilty, Kim Dotcom Turns Anger on Former Friends – TorrentFreak
The media went haywire over a recent government report on crashes involving Level 2 driving technologies like Tesla’s autopilot.
I took a deep dive into the report to see what was (and was not) in it.
The report covered 392 incidents and said Tesla’s vehicles were involved in 273 of them. By comparison there were an estimated 6.7 million car accidents and almost 43,000 highway deaths nationwide during the period of time the report covers.
Having used this technology for the past four years I believe it is safer when used appropriately. Tesla’s own data backs that up.
About half of the report’s narrative is spent telling readers how inclusive the data is. This includes the fact that the only cars that actually report telematics data on crashes are Tesla’s. So for other brands the driver would have to explicitly report that the car was under automated control to a police officer or the government. Tesla is also shipping far more cars with this technology than any other automotive brand.
But that didn’t stop the media from jumping to conclusions as I spell out in my latest Weekly Wrapup video. I also give a short demo of Tesla’s full self driving in action.
Incidentally the same radar cruise and lane keeping technology that Tesla started with was installed in many other cars but those manufacturers dialed it back out of fear of government regulators.
It’s astounding that with only 392 incidents to investigate the government report does not indicate who was at fault in these accidents.
Tesla isn’t guilt-free in this either – as I point out in the video they didn’t counter-message against influencers who were using the system inappropriately beyond what it was designed to do. The name autopilot also suggests a capability that goes beyond what it could actually do. This was especially true with their first generation technology that relied on radars that don’t detect stationary objects at highway speeds.
According to the Washington Examiner, a NATO official has stated the obvious when it comes to Telegram’s security:
“Telegram is not really as it used to be,” Janis Sarts, the director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, told the Washington Examiner. “I do have reasons to believe that there is not full integrity. … Certainly, I would not see it as a secure platform.”
I covered this topic a few months ago when I did a deep dive into the popular messaging and social media platform. I suspect that it’s insecure by design – governments won’t need to ask for user data when they can very easily pluck it off the wire.
My amateur radio adventure continues. This evening I finally managed to get my gear connected to a packet radio BBS! These are simple bulletin board systems that have been around since the 80’s.
What’s cool about packet BBSes is that they do not require any type of communications infrastructure other than the radios on both ends.
When Customers Say Their Money Was Stolen on Zelle, Banks Often Refuse to Pay – NYTimes
Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up? – The Atlantic
Telegram is ‘not a secure platform,’ NATO-backed strategic comms chief warns – Washington Examiner
As cryptocurrency tumbles, prices for new and used GPUs continue to fall – Ars Technica
Another week is upon us! Today will be the first real video I shoot at 4k so I’m eager to see how it all comes together and where things might fall apart. I got some great feedback from all of you on the visual quality and will be making some adjustments to cut down on the motion blur some of you noticed.
The big issue I see right now are file sizes. My raw 4k files are significantly larger so I may need to upgrade the SSD I use in the production machine for recording. The main clip from Saturday’s video is over 11.48 GB in size yet is only 2 minutes and 45 seconds in length!
I use Vmix’s lossless codec which offers the highest quality for the lowest amount of system resources. It’s pretty crazy how little CPU it uses during the production. At 1080p30 (what I used to record at ) it consumed about 55GB an hour. At 4k30 (my new format) it uses a whopping 175GB an hour!
On tonight’s Weekly Wrapup I’m going to talk about the recent government safety report on self driving cars. The media jumped to some conclusions without actually reading it so we’re going to look at what the report ACTUALLY says.
Later this week I’ll have a review of the new Synology RT6600ax router (affiliate link). This one is (hopefully) my last 1080p video. Following that we’ll have a review of a couple of new mini PCs (one of them fanless) and if I have time I’d like to do a new MoCA explainer based on some feedback I’ve been getting from folks as to how it works.
A little later in the week I’ll be attending a Pepcom event to get a preview from a few major brands on their new releases. If there’s enough to talk about from the show I’ll do a dispatch video too.
Stay Tuned!
Dolphin Builds for Windows on ARM Are Now Available to Download – /r/Emulation on Reddit
Amazon removes Developer Options from Fire TVs with latest software update – AFTVNews
Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day Interview on the 80’s Arcade Scene – Ted Dabney Experience Podcast
AirTag Shipments Reportedly Grown Over Time, Making Second-Generation Model More Likely – MacRumors
