### Issue 1510 - Wednesday 8th December, 2021

## In Today's Issue

- Bloke claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto yet again avoids having to prove it
- Telstra and Optus spend $2.1b on extra 5G spectrum, Optus announced mmWave trial
- Miscellaneous news
- Nice documentary about Handspring, a Palm/3Com spinoff that invented the smartphone
- Cheap Jabra earbuds, Seagate 4TB portable HDD, Far Cry 5, ISS LEGO, 65" Aldi TV, Samsung Z Flip3, Lenovo smart home bundle, Telstra phone plan, 5%/10% off everything at JB

## The News

### Bloke claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto yet again avoids having to prove it

Craig Wright, the Australian dude who keeps claiming he is Satoshi Nakamoto (the creator of Bitcoin), has "won" a court case against him in Florida by the family of a deceased former business partner. Old mate is happy with the outcome despite having to hand over US$100m to the former business partner's family, because the case never got to the point where he had to prove he was actually the creator of Bitcoin - something he's never done in all these years he's claimed to be Satoshi. Unfortunately for the rest of society, it means he will keep on running his grift and $100m is just a speeding ticket on the highway to ponziville.

### Telstra and Optus spend $2.1b on extra 5G spectrum, Optus announced mmWave trial

Telstra and Optus have snagged more juicy sub-1GHz spectrum in the latest ACMA auction. Twelve lots of 900MHz spectrum went to Optus for $1.48b and Telstra won four lots of 850MHz spectrum for $616m. TPG/Vodafone "elected not to bid, believing its existing holdings from the merger of TPG and Vodafone to be sufficient for its network plans". All this spectrum will be used to improve indoor 5G coverage. Meanwhile, Optus has announced a "proof-of-concept" of mmWave 5G at Oakleigh Inflatable World (lol why here??) that it plans to base a future "5G Max" home internet service on that is capable of multi-gigabit speeds.

### Miscellaneous news

- South Australia has a bunch of electric car incentives on offer now. Free rego, $3,000 off the price of a new EV or hydrogen car and $2,000 off the price of a home smart charger that can "monitor and respond to household and network events".
- Amazon Web Services in the US-East-1 region shat the bed for a few hours last night/this morning, taking down random stuff all over the internet. It also took down some of Amazon's own products like Alexa, IMDB and even their warehouses.
- Intel is spinning off its robocar subsidiary Mobileye into its own company via an IPO mid-2022. The market is frothing for autonomous driving startups and Mobileye actually has products that work, so good timing from Intel.
- Microsoft's OneDrive and Dropbox have announced they're going to release native Apple Silicon versions of their apps. I'm surprised it's taken them over a year to even make this announcement for such popular services.
- Tesla has apparently made it possible to play the built-in video games (yes the car has built-in games) whilst the car is in motion. This must be recent as I tried on my Model 3 and it wouldn't let me.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Nice documentary about Handspring, a Palm/3Com spinoff that invented the smartphone

The Verge made a documentary called "Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone" and as someone who was barely a teenager when this stuff went down, found Handspring's story quite interesting. We are all familiar with Palm and their legendary PDAs - Handspring is the scrappy startup that came about in the late 90s as Palm's owners (3Com at the time) kept kicking own goals with what the Handsprings folks correctly, but maybe prematurely, thought was the future of computing. Maybe people older than me will know, but were Handspring big in Australia? I don't recall seeing any of their devices around, but vividly remember Palm's devices.

## Bargains

- 5% off computers & phones (but not Apple) and 10% off everything else (with some exceptions) at JB Hi-Fi until Sunday. Double up with 15% off gift cards from Coles!! ($1000 item becomes $765)
- Jabra Elite 75T or Jabra Elite Active 75T - $147/$148 from Amazon
- Seagate 4TB portable external HDD - $119 from Amazon
- Far Cry 5 + New Dawn Deluxe Edition bundle for PC - $29.99 on Steam
- LEGO Ideas International Space Station 21321 - $79.20 from Target
- Bauhn 65" 4K smart TV - $499 at Aldi in 10 days time
- Samsung Z Flip3 128GB/256GB - $999/$1099 from Samsung, take $500 off if you h ave a phone to trade-in
- Lenovo Smart Home 7-piece starter kit - $89.10 at JB Hi-Fi
- Get a $500 JB gift-card if you port to a $69/m Telstra plan with 80GB of data/m on a 12m contract (works out to $27.34/m)

## The End

📻 Downer Surrounded by Uppers - Mrs. Piss

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