Daily Tech News 14 January 2023

• Why is my LG washing machine downloading 3.7GB of data a day? (Twitter)
  
  This is rather like giving your eight year old your credit card details and wondering why your house is full of Lego. Why did you do that if you didn't want that result?
  
  And also like it in that you can't remove the WiFi settings from your LG washing machine once it's been set.
  
  So don't do that.
  
  (I have an LG washing machine. It has WiFi. Its total downloads to date are zero.)

• Bought a couple of Beelink mini-PCs on sale - the 5560U model. I have memory and SSDs sitting around that I can use in them, and the entry level model with 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD was pretty cheap. Their cheapest 5560U model is $289 on Amazon US right now, but the price I paid was closer to $200. They were a little cheaper on Black Friday, but I missed that sale and I've been regretting it, so I grabbed them this time.
  
  Plan is to run Linux on them so I don't have to mess around with Windows 11's problems with virtualisation anymore.
  
  
  
• I also bought a new breadmaker. I threw out the old one when I moved, since it had been sitting in the cupboard unused for about ten years after I was diagnosed with celiac disease.
  
  And there are plenty of gluten-free bread mixes available now, right?
  
  ...
  
  Two. There are two. At least, available locally.
  
  I can get gluten-free flour for a quarter the price I pay for gluten-free bread, though, and yeast is yeast. I used to love experimenting with different types of bread, and I'd like to do that again.
  
  
  
• Those new desktop APUs from AMD - what they call their CPUs with advanced integrated graphics - come with a catch. (WCCFTech)
  
  Two catches. Three catches.
  
  First, there's no PCIe 5, since they're laptop chips and PCIe 5 eats power. PCIe 5 isn't all that much use though; graphics cards don't use it at all, and the SSDs that do are expensive and run hot.
  
  Second, there are fewer PCIe 4 lanes, so if you get the 8600G or 8700G you can only have 8 lanes to your graphics card. Still, that's enough for most tasks, and if you end up wanting more performance you can upgrade to something like a 7900 while keeping your motherboard, memory, and so on.
  
  Third, if you get the low-end 8300G or 8500G chips, you only get 4 lanes to your graphics card, and 2 to your SSD. That's not good. Avoid those.
  
  The 8500G looks to have essentially the same specs as the 8600G at $50 less, but longer term you might regret it.
  
  
  
• The best of CES. (The Verge)
  
  Any other year these wouldn't even have rated a nomination, much less an award. They'd be in the "also appearing" wrap-up that nobody bothered to read.
  
  
  
• The creator economy is ready for a workers' movement. (Tech Crunch)
  
  We'll go on strike!
  
  That's right! You'll have a national TikTok and Instagram influencer strike on your hands!
  
  And whom will that inconvenience?
  
  
  
• The Funimation dub for Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is infamously awful - or should I say AWFL - not so much for the voice acting as for the translation, which inserts the usual incoherent grab bag of left-wing complaints where they don't belong. (Not that they belong anywhere.)
  
  So a fan redubbed it with a proper translation using AI. (Niche Gamer)
  
  The AI voice acting is... Not good... But in that it is indistinguishable from the average anime dub.
  
  Looks like an entire useless communist-infested industry is dead.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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