Thanks to everyone who replied to yesterday's email with nice messages asking if I am okay. There were too many to reply to individually, but I read them all. It's nice to know so many people care! I have a "suspected fractured rib", which sounds worse than it actually is, due to the seatbelt strapping me in. Should take care of itself in a few weeks. Anyways, enough about me - here's today's news & bargains.
The first day of court proceedings between Apple and Epic went down overnight. Things kicked off with a bunch of kids calling in to the conference call (the court is semi-closed due to COVID) begging for Fortnite to return to iOS in the 20 or so minutes before someone figured out how to mute everyone. Most of the day was focused on the 70-30 cut Apple takes. We also got to find out how much money Epic makes (they're a private company, so don't release this info like a public company does) - $9b over 2 years, just from Fortnite alone. The presentations each side's lawyers gave in court are online if you want to see how Epic and Apple both justify what they're doing. MacStories has a great overview of the day's proceedings too.
Verizon is selling Yahoo and AOL (aka Verizon Media) for US$5b to a private equity group called Apollo Global Management. Verizon will keep 10% of the business which will be rebranded to simply Yahoo. If you recall, Verizon purchased purchased AOL in 2015 for US$4.4b and Yahoo in 2017 for US$4.5b, so Verizon is taking a heavy loss here. Apparently Apollo were the only ones interested in the whole Yahoo AOL beast, with most people wanting to pick at the bones and take TechCrunch or Yahoo Finance - stuff people actually use in 2021. Yahoo, man, that brand will just not die.
NBN is still planning to upgrade FTTC premises to full fibre on demand for free. To qualify for the upgrade you'll need to order a 250/25 speed plan at a minimum. Still no ETA on when this will go live, or how long the upgrade takes. NBN is also adding an extra 288 suburbs to the list of areas where they'll upgrade FTTN to FTTP if the speed a customer orders can't be provided by FTTN (e.g: you're on FTTN and you want 100mbit but your shitty copper maxes out at 60 - you'll get an FTTP upgrade). That makes 1.1m premises eligible for a free fibre upgrade. If only these premises got FTTP in the first place, hey?
Simon Hackett has a blog post about how he set up 4G fail over in his UniFi setup. It's surprisingly straightforward - get a Netgear LB2120, pop in a SIM, chuck it in bridge mode, plug it in to your UniFi router's secondary WAN port, and that's pretty much it. I've got a similar setup, but with a D-Link DWR-956 (because they gave it to me to review, but I never reviewed it and they never asked for it back - you should use the LB2120 instead). I put a Catch Connect 12m SIM in there with 60GB of data that cost me $89. My FTTP NBN is pretty reliable, but on the rare occasion it does shit itself, the switchover is almost seamless.
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.