As the door hit Trump's arse on the way out of the White House, he pardoned over 140 people - one of which is Anthony Levandowski. You might remember him as the guy that quit Waymo to start his own startup that was quickly purchased by Uber, and got in trouble for taking Waymo's "trade secrets" with him and used them at Uber. He received an 18 month jail term for this crime, but it was suspended because Levandowski claimed he had health conditions that meant going into jail during the COVID-19 outbreak would put him in danger. Due to the pardon, he will now never have to serve any prison time. It's particularly galling because way more worthy people in the tech scene, like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden were overlooked. Helps to have Trump sycophants Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey as mates.
The ACT's latest budget has a fat stack of cash of no-interest loans for buying an electric car and 24 months of free rego for anyone who buys one between May 2021 and May 2023. The loan scheme will give $15,000 (means tested) to those wanting to buy an EV, reducing the burden of higher up-front costs compared to petrol cars. You can also use those same loans to upgrade appliances (e.g: move from a gas stovetop to induction, gas heater to a reverse cycle unit, or get a heat pump hot water system) or get solar panels at home. To further add to the EV love going on in Canberra, they're gonna fund 50 fast charging stations - which for an area the size of the ACT, is heaps. There aren't even 50 in all of Victoria right now. ACT already gives you a discount on stamp duty for an EV too.
Many nerds were disappointed that Red Hat decided to snuff out CentOS, a free clone of the paid Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so soon after being purchased by IBM. Today they've made changes to the Red Hat Developer Program that try and make up for tightly holding a pillow over CentOS's head and not letting go until its legs stopped thrashing in the bed. You can now use RHEL on up to 16 systems on the one free Red Hat account. Red Hat even said that it "isn't a sales program and no sales representative will follow up" - understanding how much nerds that use CentOS hate talking to sales reps. As Serve The Home says, 16 systems sounds like heaps, but if you're the kind of person that runs each app in its own VM (may I introduce you to Docker???) that 16 system limit might get eaten up kinda quickly. Red Hat also dropped hints about some sort of "low-cost" subscription to RHEL but hasn't said what that would be yet.
Hands up who remembers apps like Adium, Trillian, Miranda and Pidgin (which actually still exist, dunno if anyone uses them though)? They were designed to centralise all your instant messaging contacts because back in the day we had mate on MSN, ICQ, AIM and heaps of other places. Nothing's changed in 2021, with messages coming in from Discord, Slack, iMessage, Facebook Messenger - you name it, I've got a friend on it where it's just about the only place I can get hold of them. The 2021 solution to this 2021 problem is Beeper. It leverages Matrix (an open source federated messaging protocol) to ingest pretty much every messaging service you can think of, even iMessage, into the one, decent looking app. I haven't tried it out yet, but if you're sick of having a dozen different apps just to chat with people, Beeper could be your salvation.
📻 I'm Your President - Mother's Cake
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