### Issue 1995 - Thursday 14th December, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Vodafone's 3G network turns off tomorrow
- Threads starts testing ActivityPub support at last
- Tesla forced by NHTSA to add more Autosteer safety controls
- Where does my computer the time from?
- Cheap Osmo Little Genius kit, Laser CarPlay/AA screen, Lenovo 44.5" monitor, Alan Wake 2, Crucial SSD, Seagate HDD, Sony BT speaker, Amazon Echoes

## The News

### Vodafone's 3G network turns off tomorrow

Heads up - the Vodafone 3G network in Australia is turning off permanently on the 15th of December. That's tomorrow! Vodafone has an FAQ page explaining what's going on. One question it doesn't answer is what happens in areas that only have 3G coverage? I presume those areas will be shit out of luck until the spectrum used for 3G is refarmed for LTE and I don't know what the time frame is for that to happen. The lack of 3G also means that 4G/LTE devices that don't support VoLTE (i.e: all iPhones prior to the iPhone 6, plenty of Android phones) will be unable to make or receive phone calls, even to 000 - only data will work. Telstra turns off its 3G network on the 30th of June 2024 and Optus will do the same in September 2024.

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### Threads starts testing ActivityPub support at last

Zuck posted to Threads last night that they're "starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this". Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram/Threads, followed up with "we're starting with the ability to follow threads users from activitypub clients, but we will get to the ability to follow accounts from activitypub servers on threads as well". This will be great as there's a lot of people I miss from Twitter that didn't either quit social media entirely or come over to Mastodon, but are active on Threads. Please Meta, don't fuck this up.

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### Tesla forced by NHTSA to add more Autosteer safety controls

The NHTSA has "recalled" basically every Tesla in the USA over safety issues with the Autosteer feature. The recall is a software update that'll "incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged, which includes keeping their hands on the steering wheel and paying attention to the roadway", "more prominent visual alerts on the screen" and "additional checks upon engaging Autosteer and while using the feature outside controlled access highways and when approaching traffic controls" that can lock you out if you "demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility while the feature is engaged". How the fuck was this not the case when the feature was launched???

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Where does my computer the time from?

Tony Finch has a delightful blog post trying to answer a relatively simple question - where does my computer get the time from? The answer is an NTP server, but where does the NTP server get its time from? GPS probably. Okay, well where does GPS get its time from? Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado! And where does Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado get its time from? The US Naval Observatory Alternate Master Clock on base. But that master clock gets the time from the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC that uses atomic clocks. You think we're done now? Oh no, there's still more links in this chain that would be rude of me to fully go into here and deprive the author of some well deserved website traffic.

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## Bargains

- Osmo Little Genius starter kit for iPad - $79.50 from Big W
- Laser NAVC-BHUD-982 7" CarPlay/Android Auto touchscreen - $138 from Bing Lee's eBay store
- Lenovo R45w-30 44.5" 165Hz 5120x1440 curved monitor - $997 at Officeworks
- Alan Wake 2 for PC - $40.71 from the Epic Games Store
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB Gen4 M.2 SSD - $105.43 from Amazon USA
- Seagate ST16000NM000J 16TB EXOS X18 3.5" SATA HDD - $311 from East Digital HK's eBay store
- Sony SRS-XB100 portable Bluetooth speaker - $56 from Amazon
- Amazon Echo (4th Gen) - $65 from Amazon
- Amazon Echo Pop or Echo Show 5 (2nd-gen) - $29/$56 from Amazon

## Image Of The Day

Microsoft Year 2000 Resource CD (fgv112 / Internet Archive)

## The End

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