Oppo shows off under-screen selfie cam on a notchless smartphone
Commonwealth Bank told to lift its digital privacy game by the OAIC
Top ARM engineer joins Apple, fuels speculation on ARM based Mac
Bitcoin reaches 18-month high, apparently due to Libra excitement
QLD developing a space strategy while SA spends $8m on space startup incubator
FloppyCasts, podcasts that fit on a floppy disk
Run macOS in a QEMU virtual machine in minutes using this set of scripts
Cheap Elgato Stream Deck, iTunes & Spotify gift cards, Vodafone TV, Nintendo Switch, Nokia 8.1, Google Home Max
Oppo is the first company to show off an under-screen camera in public. This allows for smartphones makers to essentially get rid of the (in my opinion) annoying notch on the front of a smartphone. Oppo says the display uses a "custom transparent material that works with a redesigned pixel structure so that light can get through to the camera" and display quality isn't compromised, but you can see the camera in certain lightning conditions. Photo quality isn't the best though, but Oppo has come up with software to compensate for "haze, glare, and color cast". You'll see it in a production phone "in the near future".
The Commonwealth Bank has been slapped with an court enforceable undertaking from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) over two privacy breaches. One is from 2015, where it lost magnetic storage tapes containing the statements for over 20m customers. The other happened in 2018, where it was found to have "inadequate internal access controls to customer data", meaning any old pleb at CBA could check out your shit. The OAIC is making CBA review all its privacy policies and assess all its IT systems under the eye of an independent external reviewer reporting to the OAIC.
One of ARM's lead engineers, Mike Filippo, is now an Apple employee. Whilst working at ARM, Mike was the big dog when it came to designing "consumer, automotive, and infrastructure CPUs" and prior to ARM, "he was the chief architect on a 24-core, 96-thread system-on-chip for Intel, and did design work on AMD's Athlon and Opteron processors". Apple is a big player in the ARM space with the industry leading SoCs it designs and uses in iOS devices, so it's no surprise they're hiring an experienced CPU engineer, but the real juicy stuff is Mike's work on "proper" CPUs and the prospect of an ARM based Mac.
Bitcon is continuing its latest boom, with one bitcoin trading at around AUD$18,200 - an 18 month high. According to Reuters, the reason for this latest jump in price is because "investors looked for safety in alternative investments amid geopolitical tension, and cheered prospects that Facebook Inc's Libra token could push cryptocurrencies into the mainstream". I still find it amazing Bitcoin has value to investors, considering it creates no value. It's an asset that does nothing, it's value is tied to feelings, not creating things. I hate it and everything about it.
Australia's space industry got a little more love in the past 24 hours. The Queensland government has said it's going to develop a Queensland Space Strategy to find out how it can benefit from the federal government's development of the Australian Space Agency. Can't wait to see a giant can of XXXX orbit Earth and crash into a weather balloon shaped like the Bundaberg Rum polar bear. Over in South Australia, they're giving $8m to startup whisperers Chalk & Stone to manage a space industry incubator. Dunno what SA would launch into space - a Farmers Union Iced Coffee? The 1998 Crows premiership cup?
Andrew Roach is trying to fit 30 minutes of speech on to a single 1.44MB floppy disk. I don't know why and neither does Andrew, but it's a fun little experiment to test the limits of modern audio encoding technology. The current status of his tests is that an Opus/Ogg encoding sounds decent at a minuscule 1.2MB, but it's not exactly something I'd be keen to listen to for 30 minutes. A slightly larger 1.5MB (still too big for a floppy disk) MP3 sounds superior to my ears. I like the mental image of people listening to podcasts off floppies on some sort of portable contraption made with a Raspberry Pi.
Wanna run macOS in a virtual machine on your Linux box but have been turned off by the complicated process in the past? Foxlet's macOS-Simple-KVM set of scripts on Github is a pretty easy method of getting a macOS VM set up for free. Clone the git repo, run a script to download macOS from Apple's server, create an empty virtual HDD for QEMU to install macOS on to, then run another script to kick things off. I got it running on Ubuntu with no problems - the catch is that the UI is pretty slow thanks to the lack of GPU acceleration. If you've got a PCIe GPU attached, you can pass that through to the VM and speed things up.
Elgato Stream Deck Mini - $99 + delivery from Mwave
15% off iTunes and Spotify gift cards at Target
Vodafone TV (Android TV unit with Chromecast & PVR built-in) is now $72 delivered
Nintendo Switch console - $367 at Amazon AU (don’t forget to use Cashrewards or similar)
Nokia 8.1 smartphone (Android One) - $436.05 delivered from Toby Deals (grey import)
Get two Google Home Max speakers for $599 from Google’s online store
🎶 Freakin' Out - Graham Coxon
😁 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
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.