You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.

Thursday, March 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 March 2024

Sleepfirewalking Edition

Top Story



Tech News


Disclaimer: It's turquoise all the way down.

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Wednesday, March 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 March 2024

Strawberry Fields For Never Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • The Lenovo Legion Tab is officially coming to Europe and Asia.  (Lenovo)

    This month.  Better get a move on, because there's not much of this month left.

    Downside is that at 599 Euros the price is not much cheaper than importing the Japanese version.

    On paper though it's a great device, with a 2560x1600 8.8" screen, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.  CPU is a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which has a Cortex X2 as its main core, so it's both recent and fast.

    It includes a microSD slot and two USB-C ports.  Either one can be used for charging, so you can charge while it is connected to a monitor or a headphone adapter (no separate headphone port).

    I'll buy one since there is no real competition.  Not two though, not at that price.


  • I did buy the Asus M1505, the cheaper of the two Asus models I've highlighted recently.

    Ryzen 7730U CPU (8 Zen 3 CPU cores and 8 Vega graphics cores), 16GB of RAM which I'm upgrading to 40GB, 512GB of SSD which I'm upgrading to 2TB, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad - not ideal but better than not having them, and the standout feature, a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display.

    Roughly $1000 as configured.


  • If you have Mac Studio envy the FN60G sold by Topton is basically a shrunk-in-the-wash version.  (Liliputing)

    It's bigger than a regular NUC but still very small; it uses an Intel desktop CPU and a laptop graphics module.  No expansion slots apart from memory and storage, so what you buy it with is all you get.

    Apart from those two memory slots and two M.2 slots, it has two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort ports, one USB-C port which can also drive a display for up to five monitors in total; two 2.5Gbit network ports, and four USB-A ports on the back.  On the front, another two USB-A ports, one USB-C, headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot.  Which is a pretty good complement of ports for a small system.

    Prices fully configured start around $1000 and go up to $2000, which is not terrible but you can certainly build a regular PC for the same price.


  • No further Minecraft crashes since I disabled the Strawberry Fields in Mystic's Biomes.  Though given the number of new biomes in the modpack (over 200) and the number I've seen during testing (maybe 30) there could be something still lurking.

    It's not entirely happy running in the default 4GB heap, but it certainly runs smoothly with 16GB of RAM, which my original efforts didn't.

    If I don't trip over anything else I'll publish it to Curseforge this weekend.


Disclaimer: Or, as I just noted, a rather nice laptop.

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Tuesday, March 26

Geek

And Then There Was Splat

So judging by this crash log, somewhere between the strawberry bushes from Mystic's Biomes, Oculus, Ferrite Core, Better End Island, Immersive Weathering, Serene Seasons, Friends and Foes, and Better Desert Temples, my modpack seems to crash randomly when creating new chunks.

I suspect the culprit is Mystic's Biomes, which would be a shame, but it's not essential.

Update: Mystic's Biomes is on GitHub, so maybe I can help out.

Also, now I seem to have a schrödinbug.

Update: Probably Mystic's Biomes; it had a big update just three days ago. I'll test some more and see if I can report something useful back to the dev. Something more than "one of these 200 mods is breaking my game and I blame you". It's configurable enough that I can turn off just the strawberry fields and see if the bug is specific to that biome.


The current "full" version of the modpack now runs in the default 4GB heap, though I suspect it might run into trouble in more complex regions, since it's hovering around 3.5GB.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 March 2024

Chalkled Edition

Top Story

  • Europe is investigating Apple for its malicious compliance with the new Digital Markets Act.  (The Register)

    And Google.

    And Facebook.

    Do all three companies lie and cheat and steal?  Sure.

    Are they all woke beyond possibility of redemption?  Well, Google certainly is.  Apple while woke as hell notably produces genuinely well-engineered hardware on a regular schedule.

    Do they suck less than the European government even after granting all of that?  Absolutely.


Tech News


Disclaimer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

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Monday, March 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 March 2024

Quick one today because I'm a brown paper package tied up with string.

Tech News 


Disclaimer: Where is Haruhi Suzumiya when her world needs her?

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Sunday, March 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 March 2024

Lone Pine Mall Edition

Top Story

  • The global economy runs through a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That road leads to a mine producing the purest quartz in the world, and the factory that processes it.  There is no naturally occurring substitute.

    The quartz is used to create crucibles which are used to produced silicon wafers, which are in turn sliced and cooked and dice to produce computer chips.

    It is possible to make the quartz synthetically; we just don't right now because there's an enormous pile of it sitting underground in this one spot.  But it would be a few difficult years if anything happened there.

Tech News

  • This seems like a bad idea: EVGA changed the connector layout of its GQ 1000W power supply without changing the model number.  (Tom's Hardware)

    If you buy a new one the cables have changed too, and everything works.

    If you have one already, and it's faulty and is replaced under warranty, then congratulations!  Your existing cables will plug in just fine and deliver 12V on the 5V line to all your disk drives.


  • The CEO and founder of Stability AI - creator of Stable Diffusion - has resigned.  (Tech Crunch)

    The official announcement doesn't say much and neither do his own tweets, but reading between the lines it seems he's pushing hard for actual open source solutions and the company's investors want bullshit that makes money like ChatGPT.

    Doubly interesting in that he apparently owns a controlling interest in Stability AI.  This is the same kind of conflict that recently roiled OpenAI, and led to Elon Musk's pending lawsuit against that company.


Disclaimer: Watch the new Philosophy Civil War documentary, the Grue and the Bley.

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Geek

Minecraft Modpack Mathematics

I was wondering why memory usage and load time seemed to be increasing exponentially as my Minecraft modpack grew.

The answer turns out to be that it seems that way because it is.

And the culprit turns out to be the utterly innocuous and very useful Every Compat (Wood Good), which is in itself only 2MB.

What this mod does is let you create any wooden item from any type of wood, whether the item and the wood are in the base game or in a mod.

So if you add a mod that lets you craft new types of wooden roof - Macaw's Roofs, for example - that works with every type of wood, automatically.

That mod is also just 2MB.

And if you add a mod that adds new type of wood, like the mauve wood in Regions Unexplored, that can be used to craft doors and pickaxes and any other wooden item in the game, automatically.

That mod is still small at 5MB.

But when you have a couple of dozen mods of each type, adding in Every Compat multiples them together and eats as much memory as all the other mods combined - about 2.5GB.

So now I'm well within the 4GB limit again, and can put back some of the mods I took out.

Update: All of them, in fact.  Blue Skies is back, as is The Undergarden, and Better Nether and Better End.  I'll see if I can configure Naturalist and Dungeons Arise to behave themselves and I can put those back as well.

Update 2: Well, not quite.  While it did start up and let me generate and enter the world, the Java heap filled up quickly after that and the game started to lag badly.  So if it's to be playable I either need to trim things back or increase the heap allocation.  I've set it to 8GB for testing, which is better than the 12GB I had previously, but there will probably be some cuts to the mod list.

2024-03-24
  • Dropped Naturalist in favour of Untamed Wilds and Exotic Birds.
  • Removed Sky Villages because neat as it is, there's no config file and they keep showing up at spawn.
  • Further trimming is likely.  Base Minecraft 1.20.1 has 1146 different items in it.  My modpack increases that to 29,675, or counting Chisels and Bits, around 1012000.

2024-03-26
  • Rebuilt a "lite" version that runs acceptably in the default Minecraft memory settings (4GB heap).
  • Lite version removes most of the large mods, including BetterEnd, BetterNether, Blue Skies, Twilight Forest, Aether addons, and Biomes O' Plenty.
  • Still includes Nullscape, Incendium, base Aether mod, and also Create and the Steam and Rails addon.  Additional biomes are supported by Terralith (100+) and Regions Unexplored (70+).
  • Item count is now 19,167, including 1146 from Minecraft itself, while reducing the modpack size from 949MB to 232MB.  Plus the 1012000 from Chisels and Bits.
  • Also includes the new wolf variants that will be in 1.21, plus four original wolf variants, four cat variants, a new fox variant, and many variants of chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs.
  • Also an annoying camel.
  • Bird life added with Exotic Birds.
  • Fish life expanded thanks to Unusual Fish.
  • Miscellaneous mammalia introduced by Untamed Wilds.
  • Arthropods courtesy of Canes Wonderful Spiders.
  • Reptiles provided by What the Geck'o.
  • Creepers supplied by Creeper Overhaul.  You're welcome.
  • Big box of crayons purchased at Dye Depot, doubling the regular in-game dyes to 32.  This works with wool, carpets, terracotta (including glazed terracotta), glass, and concrete.
  • Big boxes of chalk found at Chalk and Chalked - one for building and one for writing.
  • Quarks irradiated by Quark.

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Saturday, March 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 March 2024

Fragility Plus Edition

Top Story

  • If I'm presented with two resumes for a new hire, one a recent Harvard graduate with a PhD in precisely the field I am hiring for, and the other a community college dropout whose only programming experience is putting together a popular Minecraft modpack, I'm hiring the Minecraft kid.

    Just saying.


  • A quick and perhaps useful summary of the Apple antitrust case.  (Tech Crunch)

    The one thing of note is this line describing Apple's response to the suit:
    And in regulating the behaviors that the DOJ claims are monopolistic, Apple’s competitive advantage in the market would be diminished and iPhone customers negatively impacted in the process.
    Well, yeah.

    Diminishing competitive advantage in the market is the entire point of antitrust actions.

    And Apple claiming that following the law would negatively affect its customers has been the company's response to every interaction with regulators for the past decade at least.  

    It's kind of boring, guys.  At least come up with a new lie.


  • Meanwhile The Verge barfed up this.  (The Verge)

    There were some in yesterday's comment section arguing I was favoring the woke fascist idiots at the DOJ over the woke fascist idiots at Apple who at the end of the day at least produce something.

    But if you read even a small part of this pile of drivel - and I certainly wouldn't suggest reading more than that - I think we can all agree that the worst of the lot are the journalists reporting on this story.

    In this case we're dealing with Sarah Jeong, the journalistic equivalent of Cymothoa exigua.

    Don't look that up if you don't want nightmares.

    You should probably avoid looking up C. exigua as well.

Tech News

  • Micron has shown off samples of its new DDR5-8800 256GB MCR memory modules.  (AnandTech)

    These use two sets of memory chips the same way other high-capacity modules do, but with a difference: The chips are interleaved so that bytes of data are read from both banks of chips at once, doubling the bandwidth.

    This is how a high-capacity server module can be as fast as the best overclocked desktop modules.

    Kind of neat, but not something that's likely to trickle down to the consumer space any time soon.

    It does give a single-socket 4th generation Epyc server nearly 900GB per second of memory bandwidth, though.  That used to be a lot.


  • The first nuclear fusion rocket engine is ready for delivery.  (Interesting Engineering)

    I'm not sure how seriously to take this report, but the device does spray ionising radiation all over the place, so it's doing something.


  • Users are complaining on Twitter that Instagram and Threads are restricting political content from recommendation results.  (Ars Technica)

    This apparently is a new setting in the respective apps, which silently appeared and was silently turned on for everyone.

    On the other hand, Threads did specifically announce that they intended to do this.


  • 34 nations met in Brussels to pledge to build more nuclear reactors.  (Associated Press)

    This has upset all the right people.
    "Nuclear, all the evidence shows, is too slow to build. It’s too expensive. Much more expensive than having peasants ploughing the fields by hand," said the remarkably named Lorelei Limousin of Greenpeace.  "The government must focus on developing real solutions that work for people - like abandoning the poor to starve in the dark while I swan off to Majorca - not nuclear energy which has been established as safe and reliable for decades.  Shit.  One of you polish that up before it goes to press."


Disclaimer: Based on a false story.  Only the names have been left unchanged to indict the guilty.

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Geek

Minecraft Modpack Mayhem

So I added in Create, and Create: Steam and Rails, and Botania, and Graveyards, and When Dungeons Arise, and Born in Chaos, and my modpack still loads and plays fine on my work laptop.

Looks like it's using a maximum of 6GB of RAM.  This is only a problem for me because the stuff normally running on this laptop uses about 14GB, so if I don't shut all of that down first it grinds to a halt.  If your computer isn't filled with junk, 16GB should be fine.

So time to stop adding stuff and start tweaking.  The spawn rate for When Dungeons Arise is far too high, for example; in the last three tests I've had "dungeons" show up that are visible from the spawn point, and one time I had three of them.

Main Features

Crafting
  • Botania
  • Create

Building
  • Blocks +
  • Chisels and Bits
  • Chipped
  • Dawn of Time
  • Every Compat (Wood Good)
  • Diagonal Fences / Walls / Windows
  • Macaw's Doors / Fences / Roofs / Walls / Windows
  • Seafoam's Dyeable Blocks
  • Stoneworks

Mobs
  • Born in Chaos
  • Canes Wonderful Spiders
  • Creeper Overhaul
  • The Dawn Era
  • Enderman Overhaul
  • Friends and Foes
  • Naturalist
  • Plenty of Golems
  • Unusual Fish

World Generation
  • Biomes O'Plenty
  • Ecologics
  • Geophilic
  • Graveyard
  • Immersive Weathering
  • Nyctophobia
  • Serene Seasons
  • Tectonic
  • Terralith

Dimensions and Dimension Upgrades
  • Incendium
  • Nullscape
  • The Aether
  • The Twilight Forest

Structures
  • Better Villages
  • Overhauled Village
  • Repurposed Structures
  • Sky Villages
  • Tidal Towns
  • The Lost Castle
  • Underground Villages
  • When Dungeons Arise
  • Yung's Better (everything)

Transport
  • Immersive Aircraft
  • Mythic Mounts
  • Small Ships
  • Steam and Rails

Food and Cooking
  • Aquaculture
  • Croptopia
  • Farmers Delight (plus addons)

Multipurpose Mods
  • Clutter
  • Quark
  • Supplementaries
  • Trails and Tales +

Quality of Life
  • Better F3
  • Corpse
  • Death Finder
  • Pickable Pets
  • Save the Pets
  • Save Your Pets
  • Skin Layers 3D

There's a lot more but I want to leave some of it as a surprise.  Though when I publish the modpack you'll just be able to look it up anyway.

Update: Hmm.  It's using 4049MB out of the 4096MB default heap.  That's not going to be very stable - it's already broken on me once - so a couple of things need to go.

Which reminds me of the most important mod of all: Ferrite Core, which reduces memory usage by about 40%.

I'm making a clean rebuild and so far it's using 2.6GB out of 4GB of heap.  I've removed Naturalist, Born in Chaos, and When Dungeons Arise for now, each for different reasons.

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Friday, March 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 March 2024

Juice Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Apple is not a monopoly like Windows was a monopoly.  (Tech Crunch)

    No.

    Windows succeeded because anyone could develop and sell software for it without having to give Microsoft 30% of every transaction.


  • Oh, and there's this: An security flaw in all Apple Silicon Macs leaks encryption keys if an attacker can get you to run suspect code.  (Ars Technica)

    It's another "side channel" attack; these are subtle and not very efficient but very hard to avoid.  Intel, AMD, and Arm have all seen side channel attacks in recent years.

    It's kind of like figuring out someone's password just by listening to them type, and matching the sounds of the keys to letter frequencies.  Takes forever - or 26 minutes, whichever comes first - but very hard to guard against.

    Encryption software can be rewritten to avoid the flaw, but that will make it much slower.


Minecraft Modpack Mayhem

http://ai.mee.nu/images/MCMLoading-S.jpg
http://ai.mee.nu/images/MCMGame-S.jpg

Got my modpack to load and run smoothly on my laptop (i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, 2880x1800 screen, integrated graphics).

If you figure that each 1MB of mod will need 10MB of memory, you'll be pretty close.  I took an axe to the existing pack starting with the largest mods.  Sorry, Better Nether, but you were using close to 1GB of RAM all by yourself.


What Year Is It Videos of the Day



Opens today.

The trailer doesn't entirely sell me but this is a direct sequel to the 2021 Ghostbusters Afterlife and that was actually good.




Yep, that one is back too.

Things could be worse.


Disclaimer: Could be raining.

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