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Daily Tech News 24 January 2023

Top Story

• Storaxa is a NAS/router/WiFi access point/VM host/media server/thingy. (Liliputing)
  
  It has five 3.5" drive bays and four M.2 slots for storage, plus another M.2 slot for the boot device. Four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, WiFi 6E, four 10Gb USB ports (plus another two USB 2.0), and HDMI and DisplayPort for video out. It runs Proxmox VE to provide virtual servers, and TrueNAS and OpenWRT - which is exactly what I'd use if I were doing this myself.
  
  CPU in the base model ($399) is an Intel Atom N6005, but for about $80 more you can upgrade to a Ryzen 5800U which provides dramatically faster, well, everything basically.
  
  All in a neat little box - 7x8x10".
  
  What's the catch? First, it doesn't actually exist yet, it's a Kickstarter project. Second, like most interesting and reasonably priced devices, it's made by a small Chinese company you've never heard of.

Tech News

• A Google investor is pushing for the company to lay off 20% of staff - about four times what has been announced so far - and also slash salaries. (Blind)
  
  Hang on. Wait. You can't do that.
  
  I need to make popcorn first.
  
  
  
• If you need an M.2 2230 SSD, the Sabrent Rocket 2230 is one. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Kind of in the name.
  
  Regular M.2 drives are 2280 - 22mm wide and 80mm long. 2230 are tiny little things usually used as WiFi adaptors, but also as the SSDs in small laptops like recent models of Microsoft's Surface Pro. So if you're stuck with a 256GB Surface, unlike a MacBook, you can actually swap out the SSD.
  
  You just had to be able to find a suitable replacement, and there kind of weren't any.
  
  This model is DRAMless, but it's TLC rather than cheaper QLC, so it should do fine for most things you'd run on a small laptop.
  
  
  
• If you want a mini-ITX system but need 128GB of RAM the ASRock DeskMeet B660 is that. (AnandTech)
  
  It's not particularly pretty but it gets the job done. $191 gets you the motherboard, case, and power supply. It's up to you to add the other bits, whatever those are.

Hololive-Related Thingy of the Day

Holocure 0.5 is due out February 10, bringing with it new maps, new music, and all of JP Gen 1 and Gen 2 as playable characters. I was a bit confused why there were only nine new characters shown, but then remembered that Fubuki was included with Hololive Gamers in the 0.4 update, and she was a Gen 1 member before she created Gamers with Mio, Korone, and Okayu.

The game is mostly notable because it's loaded with little nods to Hololive fans - like the fact that you can pet Amelia Watson's real-life dog Bubba - but it's free and it's more fun than a lot of the stuff that sells for $70 plus day one DLC.



I played a lot of Holocure last year when I was travelling all the time and didn't have a computer at hand that could even handle Minecraft competently. Don't regret it.


Disclaimer: The catch is, there is no catch.