NEWS
You can now buy a Google Home speaker & Google wi-fi router in Australia
Google has announced its wi-fi router and home assistant things will be available in Australia. The wi-fi router is a mesh deal, very much like the Netgear Orbi or TP-Link Deco. A single one is $199, a pack of 3 is $499. The Google Home speaker is the same as the ones in the USA, you talk to it and it does stuff - just now it has an Australian accent. It's also $199 a pop, but no discounts for buying multiple. Both are out 20th of July and you can buy em from Google directly, Harvey Norman, JB or Officeworks.
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Foxtel's online streaming service died when everyone wanted to watch Game of Thrones
Ahh Foxtel, you useless mongrels. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed Foxtel banging on about how the only legit way to watch Game of Thrones in Australia is to give them money. A subscription to Foxtel Now is the cheapest way, with loads of people grabbing a 2 week free trial to see how Foxtel Now performs. Can you guess what happened next? Yeah, it shat the bed right when everyone wanted to watch it! You seriously don't want to get in the way of people and their stories - it's like Foxtel wants everyone to hate them. Of course, GoT was available to download in 1080p before Foxtel showed it, so yeah, fuck ya Foxtel.
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Indonesia forces Telegram to moderate channels for terrorism chat
Indonesia cracked it with Telegram, banning web access to the secure messaging platform and threatening to ban use of the smartphone version it Telegram didn't do something about all the terrorists using it to brainwash people and plan attacks. So to placate the Indonesian government, Telegram, which is based in Berlin, said that it has deleted the channels the government was concerned about and will form a moderation team "with knowledge of Indonesian culture and language" that will hunt out these sorts of channels and shut them down too.
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Big 3 telcos come out and say the NBN tax on their non-NBN services is bullshit
All the big telcos have come out in the past 24 hours saying that the NBN tax (aka the Regional Broadband Scheme), that'll hit all fixed line broadband customers to subsidise the satellite and wireless portions of the network, is bad. Telstra and Optus think it's unfair the tax covers enterprise and wholesale connections that don't even compete with the NBN. TPG reckons companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google should pay the tax too, as they benefit from the NBN yet don't pay for it. What an arse backwards country we are, taxing privately funded internet because it competes with the government's stupid internet.
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Atari release pics of their new console, coming one day, in the future
Atari are making a console, their first in 20 years. They announced it at E3 last month, but now we have pics of what the Ataribox (that's what it's called) will look like. It looks a lot like the iconic Atari 2600, wood grain and all. There's a HDMI port, 4 USB ports and SD card support. Other than we don't know what it'll do or what games it'll play. It appears that it'll be more than just a cheap little box loaded up with old Atari classics, like the mini NES and SNES units - but also some of Atari's more modern games. Date, pricing and all other details about this thing will probably be drip fed over the next few months, ugh.
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COOL SHIT
Cheap iTunes, GoPro accessories, Aldi power meter & Sydney based VPS
eBay has another 20% off at selected stores again sale. I'll comb through it in the next few days and see what's worth buying. But for now, here's some non-eBay bargains for ya. 15% off iTunes at Woolworths starting tomorrow. Harvey Norman has loads of GoPro accessories (mounts, cables, harnesses, etc.) on clearance. Aldi has a $15 power meter that goes on sale on the 22nd. Useful to measure how much power appliances draw. Alibaba Cloud has launched in Australia and to celebrate, they're offering some very cheap cloud servers (1GB RAM, 40GB SSD, 1TB/m for US$30/yr).
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Creating content in the right format for Netflix is more complicated than I thought
Wondered what sort of files you need to send Netflix to get your video up on their service? Wonder no more, as the specs are online in Netflix's Production and Post-Production Requirements document. Anything you submit has to have been recorded with a true 4K camera (they have a list of cameras they allow) and have a bitrate of at least 240 Mbps. Any other cameras you want to use need to be approved by Netflix before you use em. There's info on the colour spaces they want you to use, example pipelines on how to record and edit, VFX quality standards and delivery specs (IMF is the file format Netflix want - they do all the compression, not you). It's way more complicated than I thought. I assume most productions just have a nerd or two involved just to make sure all the specs and shit line up and quality isn't impacted?
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Invites go out for first Tesla Model 3 handovers
Some lucky bastards have received their invitations to collect their Model 3s from the Tesla factory in Fremont. 7PM (San Francisco time), on the 28th of July is the ceremony which I think will be live streamed, if not by Tesla, then by any one of the fanboys or media attending. We still don't know how much the damn thing will cost, what options it'll have available or even basic stuff like range and official interior pictures. Goddamn it Tesla, when are you gonna release this info?!
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Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
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