From Jason Koebler at 404 Media: A 13-year-old competitive Tetris player has become the first known human to beat the game on the original NES by forcing it into a kill screen. In doing so, the player, Blue Scuti, broke world records for overall score, level achieved, and total numbers of lines in the 34-year-old game. Previously, only an AI had broken Tetris. Tetris was released in 1989; it is currently the year 2024. ...
Another year, another post about how much I enjoy riding my bicycle.1 Check out prior Year in Biking posts here. A Note About Prior Years I made a mistake. In years past, I have accidentally included all sport types when calculating total year cycling mileage. Which means I overstated my cycling mileage in 2022 – oops! I’ve developed some news ways to visualize and reflect upon my cycling and sport data from the year. Below is my first attempt with these new methods. Hope it makes things interesting and informative. ...
Following my post from last month about passing through the Intel iGPU to an unprivileged LXC, here’s an interesting solution for how to pass virtual GPUs (vGPU) from an 11th-gen or later Intel CPU through to a Virtual Machine. Benefits are: You can have up to seven (7) vGPU’s. You can pass through to a Virtual Machine, not an LXC! (Big benefit, as I somewhat prefer VM’s for their portability and self-contained nature.) Downsides, though: ...
The headline from Apple’s Newsroom says a lot:1 Apple extends Emergency SOS via satellite for an additional free year for existing iPhone 14 users Tough for anyone to think that Apple would have made a different announcement, a la “That Life-Saving Feature of your iPhone Now Costs $5/mo!” However, those satellites in the sky are not free. In early 2022, there was a rumor that Apple was looking to augment its Services revenue by creating a “hardware subscription” for the iPhone. Pay a monthly fee, have an iPhone. Similar to the iPhone Upgrade Program, but the person getting the phone is not taking out a loan and paying in monthly installments. Simply, they are paying ~$60/month to have an iPhone. Presumably, they could cancel at any time, give the phone back, and move on with their life. ...
As a follow up to my post this weekend about standing up Jellyfin inside an unprivileged LXC container, @kiraso asked me on Mastodon if the Intel QuickSync iGPU could be shared with more than 1 LXC. For example, perhaps I want to run Plex and Jellyfin in two separate LXCs and have them both take advantage of hardware accelerated decoding. Possible?1 Sure is! ...
Background Given some recent bad news about Plex and those privacy-invading “Your Week in Review” emails, I decided to take another stab at setting up a Jellyfin server on my home network. At some point in the future I may decide to finally give up on using Plex day-to-day, and it would be great to have a ready alternative set up and running. Time to crack open the Ansible playbooks and spin up a container1! ...
This is how the promise of digital technology is fulfilled. From Tim Bray: Leica, the German maker of elegant but absurdly-expensive cameras, just released the M11-P. The most interesting thing about it is a capability whose marketing name is “Content Credentials”, based on a tech standard called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), a project of the Content Authenticity Initiative. The camera puts a digital watermark on its pictures, which might turn out to be extremely valuable in this era of disinformation and sketchy AI. ...
From Mike Masnick at Techdirt: And now it’s lead to this: a whole bunch of states have sued Meta for claimed harms to kids. The complaint there lists 33 states, though reports say that another 9 states are filing a separate lawsuit (I haven’t seen that one yet). Much of the (heavily redacted) complaint seems to be based on the full-on belief in the moral panic about social media and harms to kids. It takes a bunch of things completely out of context — such as the fact that Meta, like any company, keeps trying to grow its business, as some sort of proof of nefarious intent. Unless these states are trying to argue that economic growth is illegal, many of these arguments seem pretty weak. ...
Out before the sun got too hot in NJ today for the annual bike club Labor Day rides. This year four area cycling clubs got together for a joint start. Various pace options (A = faster, B = less fast, C = slower, etc) were on offer, which allowed me to fall in with a different bike club and pace than I normally ride with. I grabbed the back of the Team Evesham A-pace group! ...
The BBC has this buzz: Beekeeper Michael Barber woke up on Wednesday morning to several calls from police looking for help after five million bees fell off a truck in Canada. The hives were being transported when the straps holding them in place came loose, allowing them to slip free. Mr Barber said he arrived to “a pretty crazy cloud of bees” who were “very angry, confused and homeless”. That sounds like a scene from a horror film, or perhaps a movie about the end times. Millions of bees, buzzing around in a massive cloud on the highway. ...