### Issue 1701 - Wednesday 28th September, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Dan Andrews loves a big battery, announces two new ones & plans for 6.3GW all up by 2035
- AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs are great, Intel reminds us their new CPUs are coming in 2023
- Snowden is a Russian now, Meta stops Russia disinfo campaign (again), Oracle busted running middle eastern slush fund (again)
- A nifty list of Linux commands you might find useful
- Cheap Apple keyboard, Logitech MX 3 mouse, Boost Mobile SIM, Dell 4K monitor

## The News

### Dan Andrews loves a big battery, announces two new ones & plans for 6.3GW all up by 2035

The Victorian government announced they're gonna co-fund two big batteries - 125MW/250MWh in Koorangie (between Swan Hill and Kerang) and 100MW/200MWh in Terang (near Warrnambool) - which is cool and all, but they also announced a whopping 6.3GW target for energy storage by 2035, 2.6GW of that to be online by 2030. That's a massive amount of batteries, which to be honest, we need as coal plants are progressively shut down over the next few years. Apparently it's Australia's biggest storage target. For reference, the peak electricity demand in VIC over the last week was 6.7GW.

### AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs are great, Intel reminds us their new CPUs are coming in a few weeks

The embargo has lifted on AMD's new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, meaning a deluge of sweet benchmarks to drool over. The king shit CPU is the Ryzen 9 7950X. Zen 4 architecture, 16 cores, 32 threads, 4.5GHz base, 5.7GHz turbo, 64MB L3 cache, 170W TDP, socket AM5, TSMC 6nm fab process, on sale now for $1209 at your favourite PC store. You can check out the benchmarks yourself (Phoronix has shitloads too), but its essentially the fastest overall CPU you can get right now if power consumption doesn't bother you. In what I'm sure is a coincidence, Intel announced their competitor CPU, the Core i9-13900K. 24 cores, 32 threads, 5.8GHz boost, Intel 7 process, goes on sale October 20th. Intel's benchmarks reckon its faster in gaming than the previous-gen Ryzens.

### Snowden is a Russian now, Meta stops Russia disinfo campaign (again), Oracle busted running middle eastern slush fund (again)

- Edward Snowden is now a Russian citizen, a privilege bestowed upon him by Vladimir Putin after being a permanent resident for 2 years. Make of that news what you will, but I'm glad Ed has a bit of certainty in his life. Shame it's in Russia though. Bring him home.
- On the topic of Russia, Meta reckons it has "disrupted a sophisticated Russian influence operation", "mostly criticizing Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees or arguing against sanctions placed on Russia". 1. no shit and 2. it took Meta how long to detect and stop this??
- Oracle has "settled charges" with the SEC for its use of a slush fund in Turkey and the UAE "to pay for foreign officials to attend technology conferences" and trips to California for family members. This is the second time Oracle was caught with a slush fund.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### A nifty list of Linux commands you might find useful

commandlinefu.com is a list of Linux commands someone found useful and decided to share with the world. The most popular command of all time on the site is "sudo !!" - a classic command I picked up off a bloke much smarter than me when I used to have an office job (hello Dan). It'll simply run the last command you typed in, but appends sudo at the start so you don't have to type it all in again or move the cursor back to the start of the command if it's a long one. Lots of little "oh that's neat" gems there for the beginner Linux user.

## Bargains

- Apple Wireless Magic Keyboard - $99 from Amazon
- Logitech MX Master 3s - $125 from Logitechshop's eBay store
- Boost Mobile 12-month SIM with 260GB data - $250 (eligible for $40 cashback from Cashrewards)
- Dell S2721QS 27" 4K monitor - $356.85 from Dell

## The End

📻 Slow Jam - New Order

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