NEWS
ASX shat the bed yesterday due to a hardware fault The Australian stock exchange was down for 90 minutes yesterday, preventing trade due to a "hardware failure in the main database" used by the trading system. The ASX made clear it wasn't a cyberattack and that it will get to the bottom of how and why this happened so it won't happen again. I don't know what this means from a financial perspective, but I know from working in IT that someone is gonna be thrown into a pit full of lions and left for dead because some dudes in suits couldn't swap virtual slices of companies they don't care about for 90 minutes. Discuss
Loads of new cameras announced at Photokina Photokina has begun over in Germany and there's loads of new cameras to check out. Panasonic revealed that the successor to the GH4, the GH5, will do 4K/60fps video recording, a very nice looking 1" sensor compact LX10 and some other random cameras to fill out their product line. Fuji is back in the medium format game with the GFX50S coming early next year. Sony announced their flagship SLR, the a99 Mark II, which can do 4K video with no pixel binning direct to the internal storage, using a lens mount nobody cares about anymore. Xiaomi are entering the ILC market with the Yi M1, which has a 20MP Sony sensor and looks like a cheap Leica. GoPro announces the Hero5 Black camera and a drone called Karma. Nikon announced some action cams too. Discuss
Twitter loosens up on the 140 character limit in tweets It's been in the works for a while, but Twitter now officially doesn't count photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted tweets towards the 140 character limit in tweets. Hooray! It'd be nice if Twitter also allowed one hashtag to not count towards the character limit, and one shortened link too. Maybe even the first @username in the tweet not to count as well. So you could load up a tweet to someone with an image, a link and a hashtag and it'd technically be 0 characters, hah. Discuss
Google event scheduled for the 5th of October at 3AM Google has announced an event for the 4th of October (US time) where they're expected to launch the rumoured Pixel smartphones. These things are supposed to be a successor to the Nexus range of smartphones. It's also thought that there will be other stuff like a Daydream VR headset and controller combo to further what Google showed off at I/O earlier this year and some new tablets. There's a teaser site and the event will be streamed live on YouTube - 3AM on the 5th of October AEDT. Discuss
US federal government is all over this self driving car stuff President Obama has written an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette saying that self-driving cars are fucken awesome and the government won't get in the way of making sure this tech is widespread and useful, but will still ensure it is safe. This has been backed up by the US government's new set of rules for self-driving cars that all the car companies think is great. The full rules will be published tomorrow, but an outline has been chucked up on the White House website, mainly focused on the responsible testing and deployment of self-driving cars. Discuss
COOL SHIT
A neat box from IKEA to hide all your nerd shit in If you've got a rats nest of cables in your house where all your computer shit lives in the hallway because that's where the phone socket is, check out this cool IKEA hack/product/whatever. It's a MOLGER storage stool that is perfect for hiding the router, NAS, modem and any other crap away due to the gaps between the pieces of wood that are great for ventilation. You can chop off the legs and mount it on the wall too if you want. You can also chuck things on top and run the wires through to the inside. Discuss
Calibrate your TV ya chump Did you get one of those 65" 4K Aldi TVs over the weekend? Get the most out of it by calibrating the colours! Campbell over at Gizmodo has written a guide on how to do just that. I personally use the THX Chromecast app to do some basic colour calibration. Gets it good enough for my shitty eyes. This appplies to any TV you've got as well, if you just took it out of the box, turned it on and left it there with the factory settings. Discuss
Report reckons Australians are gonna love electric cars RenewEconomy has had a preview of a research paper from Advisian (dunno who they are), who reckon Australia will adopt electric cars very quickly and that by 2035, practically all cars here will be powered by electricity. There's apparently four barriers to EV adoption - up front cost, charging infrastructure, the cost of charging and oil companies throwing a hissy fit to protect their assets. Interesting read if you're like me and contemplate this sort of stuff when you should be doing something more productive. Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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