### Issue 1312 - Thursday 25th February, 2021

## In Today's Issue

- Biden to sign executive order to try and fix USA's loss of semiconductor supremacy
- Telstra's InfraCo lights up dark fibre around the country that's been sitting idle for decades
- Some SSDs wearing out faster than expected in the M1 Mac Mini
- Synology's new short-depth NAS units would fit nicely in even the crappiest rack
- Cheap Synology NAS, Command & Conquer, Dell 32" monitor, Logitech MX Anywhere mouse, AirPods Pro & $250 free OVHcloud credit

## The News

### Biden to sign executive order to try and fix USA's loss of semiconductor supremacy

US President Joe Biden is a massive gamer. Bloke loves firing up his Xbox after a long day in the Oval Office being leader of the free world and jumping on Fortnight with his buddies to relax. Joe and his fellow gamers are so upset that the PS5 and Xbox Series X are still in short supply that he will be signing an executive order to conduct a comprehensive review to improve American semiconductor manufacturing. Okay, half of that is true - Biden isn't a gamer, I don't think he's physically capable of aiming a crosshair using a console controller, but he is concerned about the underinvestment in US semiconductor development (aka TSMC shitting on Intel) and rightly so.

### Telstra's InfraCo lights up dark fibre around the country that's been sitting idle for decades

Telstra/InfraCo is finally going to light up the dark fibre (aka unused fibre strands in cables already in the ground) on its massive 250,000km national network - no doubt spurred on by Bevan Slattery's HyperOne network plan. According to InfraCo's fibe executive, "250 pre-defined paths across six state capitals that are connected to 68 metro data centres, 78 NBN points of interconnect, and two cable landing stations are now available". This means companies can tap directly into the un-used physical layers of Telstra's fibre network rather than simply paying Telstra to use their multi-layer services. How competitive pricing would be, I don't know, but hey, better late then never.

### Some SSDs wearing out faster than expected in the M1 Mac Mini

More than a handful of people are cracking the shits that their fancy M1-based Mac Mini (hey that's the same computer I use as a daily driver) is pegging the SSD like crazy to the point it might prematurely fail. You see, SSDs have limited life spans. A flash memory chip can only be written to so many times until it just dies in the arse, that's why you see SSD warranties with endurance stats like 600TB of writes or something like that. Anyways, nobody knows what's causing this to happen, it might just be a bug with how the SSD controller reports drive usage back to the operating system, first-gen product and all that.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Synology's new short-depth NAS units would fit nicely in even the crappiest rack

Synology has a new short-depth rackmountable NAS unit! The RS1221+ has 8x 3.5" bays, is 2U high, only 306.6mm deep, sports a AMD Ryzen V1500B 4C/8T CPU, has 2x ECC SO-DIMM slots for a max of 32GB RAM, 4x 1GbE ports (should be 10GbE imho) and a PCIe slot. Synology units are still the best overall NAS if you can't be stuffed with Unraid or straight up Linux/FreeBSD I reckon. Just plug and play and run what you want via Docker. Only downside of the RS1221+ is the $2,100 price-tag. That buys a lot of HDDs when using a commodity PC.

## Bargains

- $250 free credit on OVHcloud, valud for 2 months, new users only
- Synology DS920+ 4-bay NAS - $726.48 from Computer Alliance's eBay store if you're an eBay Plus member, use Cashrewards and pay with a 5% off gift card
- Command & Conquer Remastered Collection - $14.39 from Fanatical
- Dell S3221QS 32" curved 4K monitor - $452.76 from Dell
- Logitech MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse - $68 at Harvey Norman & Amazon (can get Officeworks to price match & reduce by 5% too)
- Apple AirPods Pro - $299 + shipping from Kogan

## The End

📻 Dimension M2 - Stereolab

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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.​