I'm back! Huge thanks to Josh & Raj for filling in while I was away last week. I'll probably take off another week or two in October, but you can worry about that when October rolls around.
A group of "Silicon Valley billionaires" have purchased around US$800m and 50,000 acres of land in Northern California between San Francisco and Sacramento to build "California Forever". Those investing in the project include "philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen". The group's website says "we have the opportunity to build a new community that attracts new employers, creates good paying local jobs, builds homes in walkable neighborhoods, leads in environment stewardship, and fuels a growing tax base to serve the county at large". Hands up who wants to live and work in a Silicon Valley billionaire's brain fart? Yeah, me neither.
Tesla announced the long rumoured major update to the Model 3. It's not an all new car, but "Project Highland" features a new front-end design, new wheel covers, an 8" touchscreen for rear passengers, ventilated front seats, RGB ambient lighting, improved sound deadening, improved sound system, better wi-fi & Bluetooth antennas, larger rear trunk and new wheelcovers. Oh and they got rid of the indicator and transmission stalks on the steering wheel! You gotta push a button on the wheel to indicate and you change gears using the touch screen. Sounds pretty shit IMHO. The drive-train and battery are the same, but due to aerodynamic and other improvements range goes up a little to 512km on the base version and 629km on the Long Range version.
Some cool and/or interesting gadgets got released the last week:
A large chunk of my time off was spent pondering about upgrades to my beloved home cinema. That will be a whole new post up on my blog, but whilst researching what I can do to exchange money for dopamine, TCL announced a new range of Mini LED TVs that seriously has me considering selling the projector and getting a big TV instead. OLED is the benchmark for image quality but a 98" OLED is $40,000. TCL's new X955 98" TV has over 5,000 dimming zones and can achieve up to 5000 nits peak brightness - brightness an OLED isn't capable of and perfect for Dolby Vision HDR. What's also interesting is that TCL is hoarding the biggest screen size for China only. The X955 tops out at 98" in Europe and the USA (Australia hasn't even got the current gen Mini LEDs from TCL, lol) but China gets a 115" version for A$17,000.
Herwart Holland-Moritz, known as Wau Holland, (20 December 1951 – 29 July 2001) was a German computer security activist and journalist who in 1981 cofounded the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of the world's oldest hacking clubs. (Volksfreund)
📻 Electricity - The Avalanches
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