# In This Issue

- Uber plans to have electric helicopters flying around Melbourne next year

- News from Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting

- Lizzie O'Shea gets international award for her work fighting the Assistance & Access Bill

- Xiaomi’s new Mi Band 4 has loads of features for $50

- The RX 5700 is AMD’s latest graphics card, but not it’s fastest

- Sponsored Job Ad: Technical Recruiter - Lookahead Search (Sydney)

- Old computers are so much more relaxing than modern ones

- FINAL DEPLOYMENT 4: QUEEN BATTLE WALKTHROUGH

- Cheap Tenda mesh wi-fi, PS4 & Switch games, Sonos gear, Thinkpad E595

# News

#### Uber plans to have electric helicopters flying around Melbourne next year

Uber has decided to make Melbourne the third test city for its flying taxi service, Uber Air. Melbourne joins Los Angeles and Dallas as cities Uber will fly small electric VTOL aircraft from rooftop to rooftop starting with trials 2020 and turning into a commercial service in 2023. At first they'll be flown by a pilot, but Uber envisages it'll be autonomous one day. The aviation regulator CASA is involved to hopefully make sure nobody dies. Maybe plebs like you and I will get to ride in one before Uber's ponzi scheme collapses.

#### News from Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting

Tesla had its annual shareholder's meeting today and a few interesting things popped up. Elon said that demand for Tesla's luxury cars (they're all above $70,000) isn't dropping and they're still selling more than they can make. Their acquisition of Maxwell Technologies was briefly expanded upon, with Elon saying it'll help them scale up and reduce the cost of lithium batteries - the major bottleneck for Tesla. The bottleneck is so severe that they’re thinking about entering the mining game to secure raw materials. We will see more about the Tesla ute later in the US summer. The solar roof tiles are on their 3rd iteration and still not ready for mass production despite being announced back in 2016.

#### Lizzie O'Shea gets international award for her work fighting the Assistance & Access Bill

Human rights lawyer and board member of advocacy group Digital Rights Watch, Lizzie O'Shea, has received an international award for her efforts fighting the Assistance and Access Bill. The award was presented by Access Now and previous winners of the award include "UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay, former president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, Professor Kyung-Sin Park, and Supreme Court of Justice of India Rohinton Nariman". As we know, the AA bill became law and we're kinda stuck with it for the near future, but Lizzie was one of the most vocal and eloquent people out there arguging why the bill sucks and that deserves plenty of recognition, even if the outcome wasn't what we wanted.

#### Xiaomi’s new Mi Band 4 has loads of features for $50

Xiaomi's got a new version of their awesome bang for buck wearable Mi Band. The Mi Band 4 now comes with a 0.95" color AMOLED display with 77 different watch faces, NFC support, six-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth 5, a microphone to access Xiaomi's voice assistant and a 20 day battery life. All this for just ~A$50! There's loads of videos of it on YouTube (almost none in English), but here's Xiaomi's promo video. It's amazing the functionality Xiaomi packs in to this thing compared to the Apple Watch for 10x the price. The downside is that the voice assistant is only in Chinese and the NFC stuff probably won't work with Google Pay (but could still be useful otherwise).

#### The RX 5700 is AMD’s latest graphics card, but not it’s fastest

AMD showed off a new generation of graphics cards at E3 yesterday. The Radeon RX 5700 series are powered by the Navi GPU, which is based on AMD's new RDNA architecture. Don't ask me what makes the RDNA architecture tick, it's all over my head. This Hexus article explains it if you wanna get down in the weeds. These are not "flagship" graphics cards, the current Radeon VII will remain as AMD's fastest card. These new RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT cards replace the Vega56/64 cards. We'll see what kind of performance per dollar AMD's offering closer to when the cards launch on July 7th.

### Technical Recruiter - Lookahead Search (Sydney)

We hire people who already care about technology and train them to become great technical recruiters. Sometimes that's a developer who wants to be in a more people focused role. Sometimes it's a product manager who wants more autonomy. The glue that binds us at Lookahead is that we care about technology and bringing people together. Each of us has experience in a software team, and it's that empathy for how products are built that helps us match the right people to the right companies. If you're a Sizzle subscriber, we're already off to a good start. If you are curious about what a people focused role is like, email steve@lookahead.com.au

More Details

If you’d like to let 700-ish tech savvy Aussies know about your job vacancy, drop me a line. It’s $100 for a week.

# Not News, But Still Cool

#### Old computers are so much more relaxing than modern ones

Ian Bogost wrote his latest article about using a 30 year old computer on a 30 year old computer. A Macintosh SE was fired up and according to Ian, it's was a refreshing experience. The fact it's not always on and connected means there was a clear marker between working and not working, unlike today where you've got portable, always networked devices so work follows you everywhere. Then there's just the simplicity of the thing - it doesn't do much, so you can focus without notifications going off or a dozen windows hovering around. It seems so novel now.

#### FINAL DEPLOYMENT 4: QUEEN BATTLE WALKTHROUGH

This has been sitting in my bookmarks for a year and I can't believe this wonderful pisstake of gamer YouTubers and space soldier games from Adult Swim has been sitting there so long! Why didn't I mention it earlier? Anyways, enjoy the next 20 minutes of FINAL DEPLOYMENT 4: QUEEN BATTLE WALKTHROUGH. It cracked me up and according to friends, I'm not easy to make laugh.

#### Cheap Tenda mesh wi-fi, PS4 & Switch games, Sonos gear, Thinkpad E595

- Tenda Nova MW6 3-pack mesh wi-fi system - $183.20 delivered off eBay using the code PYLON.

- Amazon's got some cheap PS4 games like Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus for $14 and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for $15.

- The Nintendo eShop has loads of Switch games on sale. Too many to list, I'm sure there's something there you'd like. Amazon also has Civ 6 for Switch on sale for $56.99.

- Klapp AV has Sonos gear on sale. The Play:1 is $183 for example. Lots of other Sonos stuff cheap. Shipping is a flat $20, but free if you spend more than $500.

- Lenovo ThinkPad E595 (15.6" 1080p, Ryzen 5 3500U, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM) laptop is just $777 from Lenovo direct.

🎶 Radiohead - Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box

😁 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.

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.​