jammiescone

Must admit I'm wondering where to go from here - I get a free LastPass Family membership through my employer, and have been preparing to onboard the rest of my family, but now I'm wondering if it's smart to continue - I'm waiting for the 'actually we stored some of your passwords in plaintext by accident' email...

Worth noting that US listed prices usually do not include taxes, whereas UK prices do

Worth noting that US listed prices usually do not include taxes, whereas UK prices do

Haha, would be a pretty big move for me

That is a very sweet deal for a 12 core processor, wow!

Source: https://www.eteknix.com/amd-price-drops-its-ryzen-9-3900x-processor/ AMD have officially dropped the price of the Ryzen 9 3900X in response to the launch of the Intel 10900K. Is this enough to keep people flocking to team red? Gaming performance is certainly in the Intel camp but productivity still lies with AMD for now.

Certainly a lot of embracing going on!

Native GUI/GPU Support Coming 'This Year' For Windows Subsystem for Linux Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/19/wsl2_gui/ Through collaboration between Canonical and Microsoft, it looks like WSL is going to be getting a big upgrade to include native GUI and GPU support later this year. While it's been possible to get a GUI environment working for some time, this will be the first out-of-the-box support. Would you have use cases for GUI or GPU support in WSL?

Currently you have to physically go into the branch to activate the card, at least the way NatWest are running it. The video suggests that there may be scope to activate it through a mobile app in the future, but I suspect the in-branch method will stay too.

Original source from KitGuru. UK-based bank NatWest is trialling new debit cards with built in fingerprint readers, in order to improve payment security. Currently, in the UK, NFC payments can be made with your card under the contactless scheme for payments up to £30, without the need for any further authentication. Adding the fingerprint sensor to the card will allow users to remove that cap, effectively replacing the current chip-and-pin system. NFC payments made using Apple or Google pay are already unrestricted in many major stores. The technology has been developed by Gemalto, and is explained in their video here: All fingerprint data is stored locally on the card and is not transferred to the bank's servers. Hopefully this will improve the security of contactless payments, and I think it could be a step in pushing reluctant adopters to use it more often.

I'm not sure it was intentional, because I think Microsoft knows that there are still sysadmins out there who use it responsibly when it's required. It will be an accidental security improvement for regular users who had it activated without knowing, but I don't reckon there's many of those around since it's not something you can really enable by accident! More likely to just cause minor headaches for those using it as a last resort tool!

New from Microsoft: Slightly-less-functional-than-before-Windows 10 1809 (SP36)

A fair point, I think most people probably go about things the same way now. I do know a fair few people though who do enable it periodically for serious troubleshooting, particularly if having issues with a specific user account.

That's a user admin account. These days the default system admin account has to be enabled manually, usually for a specific purpose, hence I don't see it affecting too many people overall!

Source: https://www.eteknix.com/windows-10-october-update-may-ruin-admin-account/?fbclid=IwAR1etKL1YiWwgzVF9t1hAX8TihPk27RAfPfD50NdTqACZc7lTwE1SqnbZb8 It looks like the Windows 10 October Update is not out of the woods yet with new bugs still rearing their heads. This time, it's being reported that under a specific set of conditions, the default Administrator account can end up being invalidated after upgrading from 1803 to 1809. According to the reports, originally from GHacks: The biggest thing for me on this is that Microsoft's recommended fix is that you either: Create a separate account with admin privileges BEFORE installing the update, to use going forward, or; Avoid meeting the criteria Neither of these feel like real solutions to me, and there is no advice offered for anyone who might already be in this position. I can't imagine this having too much of a drastic effect for most people, but it's just another issue to add to a long line of issues, and I'm not a big fan of Microsoft's response. Anyone here who uses the default administrator account and could be affected by this?

Not sure if this sort of content (promoting a personal project) is allowed or not here, so please, let me know if not and I'll remove! Background bumpf comes first, tech stuff further down! I'm currently working on a short film project in the UK, for which I'm the post-production supervisor. Since I've used a lot of info from both LTT and the forum to make informed choices about the tech contribution to this project, I thought I'd share what we're doing so you can take a look if you're interested! Links to social/fundraising will be at the bottom. About the film: In Need Of Adventure is a ten minute short film, following the journey of David, a young man recently made unemployed, and a teddy bear which he finds on his travels. The bear has been on several adventures with previous owners, documented by a collection of photographs he keeps in his rucksack. Upon finding the bear, David decides to take him with him, and together they embark on a series of new adventures. Over time, the unlikely pair find themselves developing a strong emotional bond, so when they have to part ways in the finale it is a difficult moment for them both. The novelty of the film is that we are portraying the emotions of the bear through the musical score, with dialogue limited throughout, which we are hoping will create a wonderful film to be enjoyed by all audiences. We're currently at the pre-production phase, mostly concentrating on promotion, fundraising and logistics, while the director/scriptwriter get the final script nailed down. Current timelines put us on for principal photography in February, with a first draft complete through post-production by April/May. We're hoping to submit to film festivals later next year, and then look for some form of public release in 2020. Tech stuff: As post production supervisor, my role is where the tech-heavy stuff comes in starting with camera. I'll be working on set as a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT), which involves the footage offload/transcode/backup/colour(optional) processes. This bit's for the camera buffs. We'll be shooting using the ARRI Alexa Mini (http://www.arri.com/en/alexamini), a Super35mm cinema camera, which is widely used in Hollywood-grade features. For us this is really exciting, since it will hopefully result in a film of stunning quality. We're pairing this with the Samyang XEEN 5 Lens Kit (14mm T3.0; 24mm T1.5; 35mm T1.5; 50mm T1.5; and 85mm T1.5), which are an excellent "budget" set of quality cinema lenses. While the ARRI is capable of shooting RAW, our current plan is to shoot ProRes4444, simply to alleviate data transfer concerns. We're already fairly crushed on our post-production time allocation for the project, and the current thinking is that the additional benefits that RAW brings are outweighed by its sheer inconvenience in terms of footage management. On set, I will be using our DIT cart to offload the footage from the Alexa as we go. It's kitted out with the new MacBook Pro (I know), a 24TB G-SPEED Thunderbolt 3 Raid 5 Array, Blackmagic scopes/monitoring and a Flanders Scientific DM240 monitor, plus a handy dandy UPS. We're using 256GB CFast cards from SanDisk with the camera, which should give us about 40 minutes of footage, in ProRes 4444 at 3.2K, at a time. They're rated for 525MBps reads, and the G-SPEED in RAID 5 is expected to give us ~750MBps writes (not personally tested), which should give us an offload time of under 10 minutes. I'd love to confirm this, but the ARRIs have not yet arrived so I can't do any effective testing as of right now. Data rate calculations can be found here. Transcodes for proxies and dailies will also take place on set. I'm also going to be working with our cinematographer to produce custom LUTs, once we have the cameras available for testing. Hopefully we'll be able to use these to give a realtime preview on set, and possible even us DaVinci Resolve's live grading feature to make tweaks as we go. Post-production: In post, we'll be working primarily in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve, with likely ProTools as our main DAW. We will be mastering for cinema, and our main distribution method will be DCP, so we'll be mixing in both stereo and 5.1 surround. I'm currently working on a DCP automation/creation tool for my dissertation and final year project at university, so hopefully I'll be in a position to use that to create a high quality DCP for delivery! Our first screening will happen a working cinema in Birmingham - it's yet to be confirmed which, but I'm gunning for the Electric (oldest working Cinema in the UK!). We have access to dedicated editing/grading/mixing suites, which all run on Mac Pro trashcans - currently not sure of the specs but I know they're 4K edit capable. I also have my own PC at home, running a 6700K and GTX1060, 32GB RAM, which I use as my workhorse and should mean we have plenty of options in case availability for the dedicated suites. That's my ramble about over! If you've had a read and are interested, please check out our social links below, and if so inclined, our IndieGogo campaign where any donations are more than appreciated! Likes, shares and follows are also massively helpful for us. If you have any questions, queries, advice, comments, or anything in between, please go ahead! I'm really excited about this project and love discussing it, and always love to hear new takes and opinions! Links: IndieGogo: https://igg.me/at/inneedofadventure/x Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inneedofadventure/ Instagram: @inneedofadventure_

Seems like a sensible decision. I was planning to wait for the X but my 6 died on me - camping weekend was the final straw! I got the 8 plus, and am happy with everything about it except what I'm paying. £100 less and I probably would have felt like it was worth it.

I get your point, we have a lot of features now. My main issue is that we now have manufacturers charging the same astronomical prices for half the innovation we got last year, which I think could be why we’re seeing a lot of this fatigue. OnePlus started on the right track with trying to bring us high quality, well featured phones without the crazy price tag, but they are starting to follow the upward price trend. IMO the iPhone 8 and the pixels are too much for too little.

You could be right - there’s not really been anything that’s made me jump out of my skin this year

Source: https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/matthew-wilson/apple-reportedly-cuts-down-iphone-8-production/ It looks like Apple may have already started decreasing production on the iPhone 8. This is the soonest Apple have ever reduced production of a new flagship. Obviously there are a number of people holding out for the iPhone X, but with recent data showing that iPhone 7 sales are outperforming the iPhone 8, I think there could also be a large number of people who just don’t think that the 8 and the X are worth the much higher price tags. The seven is still a great phone and in my opinion probably the best value of everything being offered right now. I have jumped from the 6 to the 8 Plus, which is a huge difference for me, especially in the battery life are, but having used a friends 7 Plus I can’t honestly say that the 8 is worth the extra money over what you can get the seven for right now. Could this year be a year of new iPhone fatigue?

Its 'final form' will be a 13 inch 2 in 1 laptop rather than the tablet format it's coming out in initially, but yes the wireless charging tech is housed in the keyboard, so you couldn't just charge the tablet portion on its own. I guess the idea is that in the future of coffee shops with built in wireless charging in their tables you'll be able to drop in with your laptop and charge while you work and drink, but for now we don't have anything like that infrastructure in place so it doesn't really make sense yet!

https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/laptops/matthew-wilson/dell-is-selling-the-first-wireless-charging-laptop-but-the-convenience-will-cost-you/ Dell is planning to release the Latitude 7000 series this year featuring wireless charging technology. The first implementation of this will come in the form of the 12 inch Latitude 7285, which will actually be a tablet by default with the keyboard, which contains the charging technology, being sold as an optional extra. Later down the line they plan to sell the 7000 series as a 13 inch 2 in 1 product with keyboard included. As it stands, the tablet will set you back $1,199, but to add the WiTricity wireless charging tech you'll need to spend a further $549.99 on the keyboard, bringing the total to $1750. With the specs being an i5-7Y54, a 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, the price tag for me pushes this into the realm of nonsensical. Is $550 a worthwhile price for simply ditching the wire? And is wireless charging tech valuable in a laptop? I can see it being useful once the technology becomes more widespread, perhaps on trains and planes built into tables, but the way I use my laptop currently (usually in bed) the wire isn't really an issue.

https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/featured-tech-news/matthew-wilson/oculus-to-launch-200-standalonewireless-rift-headset/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-13/facebook-said-to-plan-200-wireless-oculus-vr-headset-for-2018 Bloomberg are reporting that Facebook plans to release their standalone, wireless Oculus Rift headset in 2018 for the much lower price of $200. This seems to be 'heard on the grapevine' rumour information, as the article contains a lot of - 'a person familiar with the plans' sources. However, it seems a sensible suggestion that Facebook will be aiming around this price arena, which is not too far from Samsung's Gear pricing, however without the need for a $700 smartphone to power it. It is reported to be using a Snapdragon processor of some sort but no confirmation on that from Qualcomm. This seems to be an entertainment focused device, with suggestions that people will carry them for watching films on planes, much as you might with a tablet. For gaming, it will likely be more powerful than something like the GearVR, but obviously a far cry from the full PC VR experience of the current Rift. Importantly, it will not have the positional tracking technology. What do folks think about a $200 VR media consumption device? Could this slot into a gap in the market?

Just the one? I thought this might be a good option for the next LMG staff bonus!

Me too - hard to make a judgement without full specs, but it could be interesting. Build quality should be exceptional