### Issue 1866 - Wednesday 14th June, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- NSW gets Apple Pay Express Mode for public transport
- NBN formally looking for low earth orbit satellite options & sale of 25mbit services increase
- Google's June feature drop for Pixel devices
- The Beatles have a new album featuring an AI-enhanced John Lennon
- Cheap Samsung soundbars, portable 15" USB-C monitor, Samsung SSD, Dell 34" monitor, PS5 console, Nokia G60 smartphone, Xbox controllers, Chromecast, North Bayouo monitor arm, Kamrui & Beelink Ryzen mini PCs, Amazon Echo Show 8

## The News

### NSW gets Apple Pay Express Mode for public transport

The lucky bastards in NSW can now use "Express Mode for Apple Pay" on public transport. This means "commuters can skip unlocking their device or authenticating with Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode when tapping on and off as they move through the public transport system". Add your credit or debit card to the Wallet app on your iPhone and you can just tap your phone on the card reader, no need to authenticate and no need to register an Opal card - it even works if your iPhone's battery is flat. Are you watching this, Public Transport Victoria and Conduent? This is the benchmark now. If you launch a "new" Myki and it can't do this, you fucked it.

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### NBN formally looking for low earth orbit satellite options & sale of 25mbit services increase

NBN has kicked off an investigation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites like Starlink and OneWeb for the ~300,000 premises it expects to remain in the satellite footprint by the end of 2024. It sounds like they want to resell access to someone's network as they continue to see people leave its satellite service and move to the superior Starlink service. Meanwhile, the latest NBN Wholesale Market Indicators Report found that an extra 125,000 premises are now on the 25mbit speed tier thanks to Telstra ending a promo where they boosted 25mbit users up to 50mbit for a year. Also Telstra still owns 42% of the NBN market - I didn't expect them to still be so dominate.

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### Google's June feature drop for Pixel devices

Google has a new "feature drop" for Pixel devices that's started rolling out today. Raise your palm to a Pixel 6 or newer phone and it'll trigger the camera timer, so you can take photos hands-free. Google Assistant gets a "safety check" feature where if you don't respond to it in within the time frame you set (i.e: hey google start a safety check for 30 minutes), your emergency contacts will be notified and your real-time location will be shared with them. The Pixel watch gets oxygen saturation monitoring and high/low heart rate notifications and a new range of bands, including a metal link band. Full list of updates is on Google's blog.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The Beatles have a new album featuring an AI-enhanced John Lennon

Paul McCartney told the BBC he's finished "a final Beatles record", which is pretty amazing, but that it only happened because of AI. According to the BBC, "the turning point came with Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognise the Beatles' voices and separate them from background noises, and even their own instruments, to create 'clean' audio". It seems like Paul used that tech on a shit quality tape of some songs John Lennon recorded in his bedroom just before he died in 1980, and is now making an album out of it. They did something similar with last year's re-issue of Revolver, which I reckon sounds pretty bloody good, so I'm keen to hear this "new" album Paul's lined up.

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## Bargains

- Samsung HW-Q990C soundbar - $1499 from Samsung
- Bimawen 15.6" 1080p portable USB-C monitor & folding stand/case - $106 from Aliexpress
- Samsung 980 PRO 2TB Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD - $206.16 from Amazon USA
- Dell S3423DWC 34" USB-C 3440x1440 monitor - $596.20 from Dell
- PlayStation 5 console (disc version) - $724 from Amazon
- Nokia G60 5G smartphone (NFC & eSIM) - $334 from The Good Guys
- Xbox Series wireless controller - $62.10 from Big W's eBay store
- Chromecast with Google TV (HD) & bonus $20 Harvey Norman gift card - $59 from Harvey Norman
- North Bayou F80 9kg Gas Strut Monitor Arm - $31.96 from Amazon
- Kamrui AM07 Mini PC (Ryzen 5 5560U, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, dual 2.5GbE LAN) - $392 from Amazon USA
- Beelink mini PC (Ryzen 7 5800H, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe SSD) - $524.25 from Amazon
- Amazon Echo Show 8 (2nd-gen) - $147 from Officeworks

## Image Of The Day

This portrait of the British pop band The Beatles, is composed entirely of the computer characters M, O and *. Created in 1968 by Jaume Estapa, it is an early example of ASCII art, a term used to refer to text based art. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which was a character coding created to enable the representation of text in computers. Early computer printers were not able to output graphical images and so characters were used instead of graphical marks.

Traditionally ASCII art is formed from any number of printable characters out of a total of 95 possibles. In this image, Estapa has employed only a small number of symbols and has overprinted to define areas of dark or shade. The alternate light grey stripes of the background were a characteristic of early computer printing paper. They were designed to make it easier to follow lines when reading printed code or wording.

Works such as this portrait were produced using an early form of impact printer, such as a daisy wheel printer. The daisy wheel printer housed a central disc off of which extended arms or 'petals' that contained raised characters. The printer would rotate to the correct character, which would then be struck by a hammer and forced onto the printer ribbon beneath, leaving a printed impression on the paper. Daisy wheel printers were noisy and could only print around 10 to 75 characters per second. By the 1980s they had been replaced by inkjet and laser printers, which were much cheaper and faster. (Victoria and Albert Museum)

## The End

📻 Les - Childish Gambino

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