It's finally happening - Kayo is getting 4K support! Formula 1, AFL, NRL, cricket and netball will be in 4K starting on the 29th of February 2024. Not sure if this means all AFL games will be in 4K or just select games. I don't see why not, but Foxtel would only broadcast certain games in 4K, but I think that was a limitation of only having one or two 4K channels. It's also an interesting lineup of sports. Must be a licensing thing that prevents popular US sports like NBA, NFL, etc from not available in 4K on Kayo as they are 4K on many pirated streaming services! Pricing has changed too, with new Kayo One and Kayo Basic tiers. If you want 4K you'll need Kayo Basic (basic gets 4K, that's not confusing at all), which is $35/m and gets you 2 simultaneous streams. I can't wait to see the North Melbourne Kangaroos lift the 2024 Toyota AFL Premiership cup on that last day in September in glorious 4K.
Lots of people on Reddit have noticed YouTube sucking lately and have naturally blamed YouTube for degradation of video playback for those with ad blockers installed as a way to get them to turn them off or pay for YouTube Premium. According to the developer of uBlock Origin, "in the current instance, the issue is specifically Adblock Plus 3.22 and AdBlock 5.17" and not anything malicious on YouTube's end. So if you're noticing shitty performance on YouTube and use you AdBlock Plus (or one of its knockoffs), wait for an update that's coming soon according to the AdBlock developers or use the much superior and less scummy (one guy who takes no money, not even donations vs. a company that has an "Acceptable Ads" program) uBlock Origin instead.
Microsoft's Copilot obsession is now available in Pro form for all Microsoft 365 Personal or Home subscribers for an extra A$33/m. Buying Copilot Pro "includes the ability to generate entire PowerPoint slide decks from a chatbot-like prompt, and inline Copilot experiences in Word to rephrase paragraphs, generate text, and summarize documents. Copilot will also appear in Outlook.com to help you reply to emails or generate new ones, and a preview version is available in Excel to analyze data, generate graphs, and much more". Copilot Pro "also includes access to the latest OpenAI models, improvements to the Image Creator from Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator), and the ability to build your own Copilot GPT". If anyone's using this stuff drop a comment on the forum, keen to know you find it valuable.
Since macOS 11, it has been a pain in the fucking arse to install Rogue Amobea's Audio Hijack, Piezo and Airfoil audio manipulation apps thanks to Apple's security policies. On the Apple Silicon Macs you need to boot into Recovery Mode and switch to "Reduced Security" to allow kernel extensions, even from identified developers like Rogue Amoeba, to run. It's an embarrassing state of affairs for everyone involved. Anyway, good news is that Rogue Amoeba is "very close to removing those obstacles completely" and their apps will "feature an installer-free setup that won't even need your administrator password". On the topic of Audio Hijack, back in November they released an update that lets you convert speech to text on the fly using a new "Transcribe" block, so you can pipe audio from any app or file to this block and get a transcript. Pretty cool.
Here we have a trio of Bebox from Be. Inc. The two with the gray bezels on the outside are Revision 06 from 1996 and were the ones shipped to developers as dual-66mhz PPC 603 machines...the one in the center is one of about 30 prototypes built using two of the AT&T Hobbit CPU's prior to AT&T discontinuing the processor. It was made in 1993 and came from the offices of Be Inc. when it shut down. (kdanvers2002 / Flickr)
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