### Issue 1640 - Friday 1st July, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Apple allows 3rd party App Store payments in South Korea & Netherlands, with a catch
- The Boring Company opens a new stop in Las Vegas Loop
- Robocar party, Amazon are cowards in the UAE, Samsung kick off mass produced "3nm" semis
- Rufus is an easy way to make Windows 11 ISOs without the annoying stuff
- Friday Forum Update
Cheap Paramount Plus, microSD cards, Xiaomi Mi Band 7, $250 cash for Victorians comparing energy retailers, $10 off anything coupon from JB Hi-Fi

## The News

### Apple allows 3rd party App Store payments in South Korea & Netherlands, with a catch

Apple has released how it plans to adhere to regulations in South Korea and the Netherlands mandating the use of 3rd party payments. Xcode now has a StoreKit External Purchase Entitlement, which you apply for access to via Apple. This will unlock the ability to link to one of Apple's approved payment providers in South Korea, or link out to a website in the Netherlands (for dating apps only). I have no idea why you'd bother doing this however, as Apple only gives you a discount on app store fees of 3% - you're still on the hook for a 27% commission to Apple for the payment. Greedy motherfuckers.

### The Boring Company opens a new stop in Las Vegas Loop

We are all familiar with the Boring Company's tunnel that inefficiently shifts people between parts of the Las Vegas Convention Centre in Teslas. They've now opened a new station in the loop that links the Convention Centre to Resorts World Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. This station forms the first stop on a much bigger Las Vegas Loop that'll go along the rest of the Strip and link the airport, stadium and downtown areas. Apparently 57,000 passengers will be able to travel through the tunnel system per hour. Is that good? I don't know, but what shits me the most about these tunnels is the fact there are human drivers. Tesla's "self driving" is so crap that it can't even drive itself in a goddamn tunnel! You'd think this would be the perfect place for a self-driving car!

### Robocar party, Amazon are cowards in the UAE, Samsung kick off mass produced "3nm" semis

- Nobody knows why a dozen Cruise robocars clogged up an intersection in San Francisco for hours last night. Go look at the pics. All those lost cars just stopped in the middle of the road, lost and confused, waiting for their human operators to pick them up and return them to the depot.
- Amazon has "restricted search results for LGBTQ+ related products such as books and rainbow-coloured flags" in the United Arab Emirates. Homosexuality is illegal there, so Amazon is taking the coward's way out and saying they're just adhering to local laws instead of quitting the backwards country in protest.
- Samsung's kinda forgotten about in the battle of TSMC and Intel, but they've just announced mass production of Gate-All-Around FET transistors (aka GAAFET) - the first company to do so. They call it "3nm", but those numbers are just marketing fluff. Like megapixels or megahertz, 3nm means nothing without context.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Rufus is an easy way to make Windows 11 ISOs without the annoying stuff

Rufus has long been a great way to make bootable USB drives from ISO files, but now it has some new features that make it very handy for installing Windows 11. It'll let you make an ISO that can skip checking for TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot (great for older PCs, or dual boot PCs where Secure Boot gets in the way), give you the option to make a local account (so you aren't forced into using a Microsoft account, which I absolutely hate) and install on systems with less than 4GB of RAM/64GB storage (dunno why you'd do this to yourself, but whatever). Technically this means Windows 11 is "unsupported" on that PC and might one day stop receiving updates, but that hasn't happened yet to any Windows 11 users.

## Friday Forum Update

Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.

- Noblejoker is after a very cheap and very easy way for community group volunteers to communicate with each other
- shermozle wants to know what's so good about Plex and how to use it properly
- Mitty got an Atari 2600 and is showing it off
- yaakov wants a mainboard with Thunderbolt 4 and the ability to send the signal from a GPU out that Thunderbolt port
- andyb wonders why the hell Victoria taxes EV drivers

## Bargains

- Sign up for JB Hi-Fi Perks and get a $10 off almost anything coupon
- 1 month trial of Paramount Plus instead of the usual 1 week
- Compare energy providers with Victorian Energy Compare and get a $250 cash payment
- SanDisk High Endurance microSD Card 128GB - $22.95 + delivery from Shopping Square
- Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Fitness Tracker (Global Version) - $57 from Hekka
- Samsung 256GB EVO Plus microSD card - $38.95 from Amazon

## The End

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