NEWS
Code Club Australia wants to get 10,000 kids coding at the same time
Right now there's about 10,000 Australian kiddies participating in Moonhack, a program by Code Club Australia to beat the world record for the most children coding at once. They've come up with a curriculum to teach kids to code based around the moon landing that's available on their website for anyone to download and try out. Hopefully they get the 10,000 participants today! If you know a kid and want to do this with them, there's still time to be part of the record attempt. Or do it later, it's not going anywhere.
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Twitter lets anyone get a blue tick now
Twitter has opened up the ability for anyone to become a verified user with a blue tick. Any old schlub can now fill in an online form full of personal info and if Twitter reckons you're legit, you get a tick. The info they ask for is nothing fancy, but they do want to know why you deserve a blue tick (gotta be someone important) and might want a scan of your drivers license/passport.
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Nvidia GTX1060 reviews
Reviews of Nvidia's mid-range GPU, the GTX1060, are out. It seems pretty evenly matched with AMD's RX480 when it comes to 1080p gaming, with the GTX1060 having an advantage in DX11 games, around the same in DX12 and slower in OpenGL/Vulkan games. Right now the cheapest GTX1060 on Staticice is $469, and the cheapest RX480 is $359. Will be interesting where the prices settle once the initial "omg new GPU" rush is over. I think AMD are on a winner with the RX480. Civ 6 is a DX12 game, so for me, DX12 perf is important.
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Seagate announces 10TB HDDs
Seagate has announced that consumer grade 10TB HDDs filled with helium will go on sale soon. Whilst 10TB HDDs aren't new, they've been super expensive and pitched at dense server installs. There's three different 10TB drives coming from Seagate: the BarraCuda Pro (for desktop), the IronWolf (for NAS) and SkyHawk (for surveillance devices). They'll be out in a few weeks locally and going by US prices, should be around $700-$750 here on launch. Would be nice to chuck four of these into a Synology DS416play and get 30TB of RAID-5 storage in a little box. Good luck restoring that RAID set if it shits the bed though, hah.
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Australians can use Amazon Cloud Drive now
Amazon's Cloud Drive now allows Australians to use it and bills in Aussie dollarydoos instead of US presidentbucks. For $100/year you get unlimited storage. Yep, store all you want on Amazon's servers, with a free 3 month trial. Perfect for keeping all your Arq backups on.
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COOL SHIT
Come along to a geek trivia night in Melbourne tomorrow
I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but here's another reminder! My friend Toby is organising a geek trivia night in the Melbourne CBD and it is on *tomorrow* night, Thursday the 21st of July. It'll kick off around 6-6:30pm and yours truly will be there as well, if you wanna say hi. I heard there will be free booze and some prizes too. Should be a fun night!
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Get your daily dose of iOS apps
If you like to be kept up to date on new iOS apps, check out The Daily App. It's by Sizzle subscriber Graham Spencer and is simply a couple of screenshots a day of an app Graham likes. I've found a few handy ones via his blog, I totally recommend subscribing to it via email or Twitter or whatever.
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A blog powered by SSH
Wanna maintain a blog but just can't be arsed setting up Wordpress or some new fangled CMS that requires Git and some other bullshit? Weblog.sh lets you blog from the command line, no website needed. Just SSH a markdown or plain-text file to weblog.sh and it gets published under your username. That's it. Fuck all personal info is submitted. I like it, here's me testing it out. Dunno if I'll ever update it though.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from No Cigar, by Millencolin. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!