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Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Tuesday Night News Catchup (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 28-November-2023  23:34:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ok, time to finally catch up and clear out the news box. First up, a story from a month ago from IntelInside, that says your iPhone MAC address was not as private as you may have thought. With the release of iOS 14, Apple promised to protect iPhone users from having the MAC address of their devices being tracked. That feature was fundamentally broken. Until now. With power bills on the rise, it can't hurt to have a power-efficient PC - so HotHardware have a guide to building one. Working and gaming on a PC that requires lots of power has a negative consequences. Using more power will have an impact on your electricity bill, and in the warmer summer months your A/C may have to work overtime to deal with the added heat being pumped out by a powerful PC. Thankfully, there are plenty of power-efficient components to choose from today, that still offer excellent all around performance, and they won't break the bank either If you've got an old Google account laying around that you still want, you should log into it to avoid it being deleted for inactivity. Act now if you want to keep your old Google accounts. Starting this week, on Dec. 1, Google will start deleting inactive Google accounts, it said, and all their contents, including Gmail messages, Photos, Calendar appointments, Contacts records, YouTube videos and Drive documents. .. To reduce this risk, Google said, starting in December, if an account hasn't been used or signed into for at least two years, it may delete the account and its contents. That means if you've not logged into an account since 2021, Google may get rid of it. It seems like every few years we hear about diamond wafers making for faster chips, but here we are again. Those keeping a close eye on the tech sphere can already see this happening with slowing advances on GPU and especially CPU architecture, but manufacturers have been pondering this issue for much longer and are working on new solutions, like synthetic diamond and purified glass! This slightly bends my brain but someone managed to essentially make a ramdisk inside the CPU cache and it is, unsurprisingly, blisteringly fast. So while L3 cache (which is where 3D V-Cache fits into the hierarchy) is a ton faster than any SSD that exists today, each 3D V-Cache chip only has 64MB of storage. Even if you include the L3 cache integrated into the CPU chiplet itself, the total amount on the 5800X3D and 7800X3D is only 96MB. Although you won't be using your CPU's cache for storage ever, the above benchmark run helps attach a number to one of AMD's most celebrated innovations. The Government have released their Terms of Reference for the recent major Optus outage, with a particular focus on the impact on 000 calls. The Optus outage impacted approximately 10 million people, causing significant disruption to the ability of Australians to communicate, run small businesses, and left some people unable to call emergency services. The Review will consult widely with industry and consumer stakeholders as well as with Australian Government and state and territory agencies, and will provide a report to Government by 29 February 2024. NASA's Curiosity Rover recently celebrated 4000 days on Mars. Four thousand Martian days after setting its wheels in Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover remains busy conducting exciting science. The rover recently drilled its 39th sample then dropped the pulverized rock into its belly for detailed analysis. In an otherwise generally bleak news cycle, it's nice to hear a well-reasoned positive outlook on the future - from a co-founder of Ethereum. It's a long read which I haven't fully grokked yet, but I agree with this sentiment: I love technology because technology expands human potential. Ten thousand years ago, we could build some hand tools, change which plants grow on a small patch of land, and build basic houses. Today, we can build 800-meter-tall towers, store the entirety of recorded human knowledge in a device we can hold in our lands, communicate instantly across the globe, double our lifespan, and live happy and fulfilling lives without fear of our best friends regularly dropping dead of disease. Monday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 27-November-2023  15:57:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg Portable & Prebuilt: Best Black Friday Laptop Deals on HighPerformanceLaptops. ASUS ROG Strix G16CH Gaming PC on Tweaktown. Dell Inspiron 16 Plus Laptop Review: Understated Beauty And Brawn on HotHardware. Dell XPS 9730 (2023) Productivity & Gaming Laptop on Tweaktown. ASRock 4X4 BOX-7840U Barebones Mini-PC on TechPowerUp. Power Supply: Thermaltake TOUGHPOWER PF3 1050W Platinum Power Supply on FunkyKit. Tewaycell Teze K5 1200W/1050Wh Portable Power Station on NikKTech. XPG Core Reactor II 1200w ATX 3.0 80 PLUS Gold PSU on Tweaktown. Audio Visual: Ploopy Open-Back Planar Magnetic Headphones Review - DIY Fun! on TechPowerUp. eufy eufyCam S330 4K Solar Security Camera on NikKTech. Cooling: CORSAIR iCUE Link XG3 Hybrid GPU Block (RTX 4080/4090) on TechPowerUp. TeamGroup T-FORCE SIREN GA360 ARGB AIO cooler on Guru3D. DeepCool AN600 Low Profile CPU Cooler on FunkyKit. Furniture: OdinLake Ergo MAX 747 Office Chair on ThinkComputers. Thunder X3 Ultimate CORE LOFT Gaming Chair on Tweaktown. Misc: ASRock B650E Taichi Lite Motherboard on OCInside. Corsair Darkstar Wireless mouse on TechPowerUp. Corsair MP600 Mini 1 TB Review - TLC Storage for the Steam Deck on TechPowerUp. Thermaltake CTE C750 TG ARGB Snow case on APHNetworks. Zyxel NWA220AX-6E AXE5400 WiFi 6E Access Point on LanOC. Retro Misc Pics (5 Comments) (link)  Friday, 24-November-2023  13:32:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg Crikey, it's Friday again. In late November. In 2023! WTF. Anyway, here's Retro Misc Pics from January 2011: 7th Jan 2011: 14th Jan 2011: 21st Jan 2011: 28th Jan 2011: Sizzlethon 2023 (17 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 22-November-2023  13:27:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg Our fellow Aussie tech nerds over at TheSizzle are running a charity fund-raiser called Sizzlethon. Until 11:59PM tonight I will be donating $5 to Ballarat's Child & Family Services for everyone that signs up for a free trial of The Sizzle. So far we've raised almost $700 and with a little nudge from OCAU we could make it $1,000. :) If you sign up using this link you get a 90-day free trial instead of the usual 30-day one - and you support a good cause, without it costing you anything. What's not to like?

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