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May 9, 2022 at 7:21 pm in reply to: Russiagate, Geopolitics, National Politics, Gas, Ukraine and us #69515
One for PM, Bomb carrying, cheap Turkish drones (one sixth the cost of US equivalents) are giving Russian troops a hard time.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/the-turkish-drone-that-changed-the-nature-of-warfare
Sounds interesting. GOG had the PC version of ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ on sale, so I bought it. I was wary of a Console to PC conversion, but it is extremely good. The conversion gives what appears to be full 4K, which works extremely well on the Utah-like open world (raccoons and wild turkeys abound). I like ‘pretty’ open world RPGs and for me this game ticks all the boxes for both graphics and play-ability.
I do not own a PlayStation so I do not know how 4K PC graphics compare with the original console release, but I’d guess that the game-play is identical so a PC version may not add anything for many people.
IMO this PC review is fairly accurate, but maybe a little unfair on things like characterization given the fact that the PC release is years behind the original Play Station release. I guess also that the developers worked on the time taken to optimise the screen. I had no such issues but maybe that is because my PC and graphics card is quite high-end. It dropped me into ultra and 4K without a blink.
The only criticism I had was that finding all the key/mouse combos for the controls took quite a lot of Google-foo.
As I suspected, the update failed, but it does not seem to have broken anything! Time to try again.
Yes it has been one of those days. The Sat Nav software on the car complained that it needed updating and played awkward yesterday during use. So this morning I started what I thought would be a 30 minute job – hell it took me over 30minutes to be able to decipher the illegible update instructions in the software, followed by an interminable 28Gb software download – the update itself has only just begun and is due to finish in 10minutes. Sods law says that it will break the existing Android software on the car and require yet another download!
Normally I’d say the hell with it and do without the update — BUT I know darned well that in today’s cars the car management software sits in the media centre/Sat Nav, and I dare not just ignore updates.
Just to add on to Dave’s comments. While I agree a VPN is not of much value unless you are looking to bypass geographical restrictions, if you travel away from home and use ‘free’ WIFI you may want to protect your mobile content using a VPN. A home VPN setup on a Raspberry Pi might be the most secure option in that situation.
https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn/raspberry-pi/#comments
Note the need for a Dynamic DNS service. I thought that IPv6 was going to get rid of the need for that, but we still seem to be stuck with it.
Does Hirens handle SSDs? I seem to recall that I read somewhere that it might be an ‘in extremis’ tool for SSDs..
Thanks for the info. I suspect that we are only seeing the very tip of supercapacitor development as they have very real military applications. From what is publicly available it seems at this time that military research is directed towards EMP weapons such as THOR to fry the electronics in aircraft and drones. However it does not need a lot of imagination to extend that application to airborne weapons that fry an enemies electrical infrastructure and comms.
Typically commercial use of military tech comes about 10 years after it first appears in military use. On that basis the bigger real-world things will start to happen in the 2030’s. Maybe then, electric cars will get a lot lighter and have a 1000 mile range, and UK solar powered houses can go completely off-grid.
Great that they can make a battery that will last 20 years. Batteries are important but my hopes are that someone will perfect commercial supercapacitors, of the sort being used by the military for laser and EMP weapons.
If they can get all the bugs out of it, they will make energy storage and electric cars far more efficient. Even the measly amount of sunlight we get in the UK should then be enough to photoelectric power an average home throughout the year.
Looks like the UK Government have provided a legal framework for censorship of sites put up by ‘banned individuals’. If they wanted to Kaspersky could be placed on this list.
Unfortunately Les, if you ask the Chinese they would say that the latest strains of Covid kill the old and vulnerable just as effectively as the first strain but are far more infectious.
This is the reason you will read that cities such as Shanghai have spent many long weeks in complete lock down.
Europe and the UK can afford to be more relaxed because the MRNA vaccines have proved very effective in protecting the old and vulnerable.The Chinese use a less effective traditional ‘Oxford’ type vaccine.
If you read the journals you will find that these sectors of the population are just as prone to catching (and re catching) the virus, but it rarely kills, and often just makes people feel they have a bad case of flu.
Normally viruses DO tend to evolve to be more infectious and less lethal. I guess though that the Covid virus is ‘happy ‘ with its low lethality towards the young and fit who unwittingly act as efficient virus transmitters. As a result it maintains its lethality towards sections of the population as there are no pressures for it to change.
If you look at the detailed stats the virus is quite racist in its lethality. Some may well be due to social factors, but some, such as its lethality towards orthodox Jews must have diet or other non-social causes.
The ONS figures do not actually use ‘area’. They express their numbers as percent of population, and each ‘area’ consists of about 7000 people. You then get a rate/100000 from this. I’m not sure how they work the stats when consolidating these small electoral areas into a big area, but I guess they just average them.
Unfortunately Wales refused to use the same low level granular approach so afaik it is impossible to compare (say) one of the small valley towns with an equivalent one in England. If it were possible I’d compare it with (say) Coleford Glos as that has similar social habits to the ones you mentioned.
All that said, I would not argue that it was the young and social gatherings that drove the rate of infection, but I think England had an unannounced policy of herd immunization and balanced economic impacts against death and disease. Wales may have done the same, but put more weight on the death and disease cost.
Of all the federated states within the ‘UK’, Wales has handled the latest Covid outbreak better than all the others. Scotland despite its more stringent controls has fared worst. The latest ONS data bears this out
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/cases
Normally Ethernet is also my first port of call, but I did have to use WIFI for a pond thermometer that I attached to a Pi4, and that was where I first discovered the pi4 interference problem. That one was actually cured by just using an SD card and a Pi Zero which was actually a much better solution all round! In this case the Pi4 was only used to write the code and I was too lazy to take things apart for an in-situ trial (nearby shed used to house Pi and electrics with a long waterproof lead to thermometer sensor)
As I understand it, the interference is not so much chip to chip, but USB3 cable electrical noise, hence a ‘cure’ is to route the cable away from the WIFI aerial which is easily visible on the Pi mobo. SSDs are supposedly the worst offenders because of the large amount of high frequency data going to and fro (assuming the Swap file is on the SSD).
I have found one unfortunate issue with using an SSD with the USB3 link – it stuffs up 2.4 GHz WiFi. Apparently this is a known USB3 issue (even Intel acknowledges it). In order to fix it, move the USB3 cable as far away as possible as it acts as an aerial. One other possible ‘fix’ is ferrite beads on the cable and extra (earthed) cable shielding. (USB3 cable with extra shielding is available on-line but I have not tried it)
My ‘fix’ was to abandon WIFI and use Ethernet.
i grant that is an issue. However, according to this article the real kicker is that the mobo must be UEFI compatible to use as a boot device.
I think your ‘cloning’ step may be the problem. Installing from a USB drive accomplishes two things, it puts the necessary boot sectors on the M2 and identifies the M2 as the boot device.
Provided that you disconnect all other drives, I cannot see why a simple SSD install from USB would not work. Maybe the procedure given here, with or without the UEFI option might work.
I think that disconnecting all other drives may be the important step.
smart phone
As the Pi is a hdmi Linux box and quite command line heavy, I think a mobile screen may be a little small to use. I have connected a Pi to a 4 inch hdmi screen, and it was very difficult to use.
Imo the smallest usable screen is a 7 inch IPS Touch Screen Capacitive 1024×600 HDMI Monitor (cost about £60), but that required that I programmed in some touch buttons to do anything useful. I think getting that to work on a mobile or Android pad would be one challenge too many for me! Without programming any on-screen functions a laptop screen would be the smallest practical setup for me.
tbh I do not know the answer for legacy mobos, but I do remember having to be extra careful in my mobo settings on an ASUS Strix board. I assume you checked page 16 of your Gigabyte manual as that seems to be just as picky.
However, I probably made my own life hard in that at the time it was much cheaper to buy two half-size M2’s rather than one full size, so I set up my Windows boot drive to use storage spaces, and pfaffed around using a bootable usb stick to get Windows installed. I’m sorry but I now cannot remember the details other than it being a bit of a PITA.
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