NEWS
NBN's annual report says NBN is awesome The NBN is "on track" and the NBN's 2016 annual report is full of "the latest evidence of the benefits of the Coalition’s faster, more affordable NBN rollout". My eyes cannot roll any harder. Some headline stats from the report include: 2.9m premises ready for activation and 1.1m of those are using the NBN. 120k of those on FTTN, 822k on FTP and about 150k on wireless & satellite. For fixed line customers, the speeds people are opting for is interesting. 77% of people are getting sub-25mbit speeds, with 18% getting 100mbit. Only 5% of people want the 25/10 and 50/20 speed tiers. A PDF of NBN's full FY2016 report can be viewed here. Discuss
Google Fibre has given up and is into wireless now Meanwhile, in the USA, Google Fibre is gearing up to roll out wireless. According to the story in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Google is getting the shits trying to install last-mile fibre around the USA, so will just chuck wireless access points on lightpoles and stuff to reach homes. Advances in wireless tech like millimeter waves and the like make the speeds pretty good. Discuss
Twitter gets Pepsi stickers & NFL streaming Apple TV app soon Twitter got stickers a few weeks ago, that you can slap onto pics you post. Now we know why they bothered - so they can sell branded stickers to advertisers! Pepsi stickers will start appearing in the official version of Twitter's smartphone app. Stick a can of Pepsi on your cat's head, cool. Twitter is also busy leveraging their purchase of NFL streaming rights. Rumour is they're working with Apple to make a cool Apple TV app that will stream NFL games live, for free. No doubt with ads and tweets involved somewhere. Discuss
EV range anxiety is over-rated A freshly published study has found that people's "range-anxiety" when it comes to electric cars is mostly baseless. Researchers at the Santa Fe institute and MIT learned about driver behavior by looking at multiple databases and other studies about how people drive their cars and found that 87% of trips would easily be met with an electric car with the range of a Nissan LEAF. Bump the battery size up to 55kwh (the LEAF has 24kwh), 98% of trips would be covered without running out of power. Discuss
Nvidia has new laptop GPUs Nvidia's announced new graphics cards for laptops based off the fancy Pascal architecture. The new cards are the same as the GTX1080, 1070 and 1060, just with lower clock speeds and a varying amount of cores. They're actually very similar to the desktop versions in capability and according to Nvidia, will perform very similar. But we'll have to see how laptops handle the small thermal envelopes a laptop chassis provides. Look for these in a new MacBook Pro - a GTX1060 For Notebooks (there's no more M suffix) will be twice as fast as the Radeon thingo in the current MBP. Discuss
COOL SHIT
Google Duo is out I wanted to put this in the news bit, because someone might ask you about it, but there were too many other things I wanted to mention. Anyway, Google Duo, which was shown off at Google I/O a few months ago, is now out for Android (of course) and iOS. It's basically iMessage and Facetime, but by Google, so it'll probably work better. Discuss
Oculus Rift works with Minecraft now For the most spoilt of children (or manbaby), there's Minecraft for Oculus Rift now. I can't wait to read which private school will buy a dozen Oculus Rifts and associated fancy computer to show off how cool and awesome the school is to parents, but never actually use them in the classroom besides a treat for the non-ratbag kids. Discuss
Watch strap that supports an Apple Watch and a normal watch Look at this stupid watch band that lets you put an old school tick tock watch on one side of your arm and a dinging and vibrating Apple Watch on the other side of your arm. Look like a total idiot for only US$120. Buy now! Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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