### Issue 1641 - Monday 4th July, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Australian Digital Passenger Declaration is no longer mandatory
- Google to auto delete sensitive location search history
- Victoria releases a plan to phase out natural gas in homes
- The 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro is not very good
- Cheap Aldi ergo keyboard, AKG headphones, Jabra earbuds, iPhone 11, Ironwolf HDDs, Dell monitor arm, Apple gift cards, Telstra 4G burner phone, WD 20TB HDD, Apple Watch, iPad Air, Crucial SSD

## The News

### Australian Digital Passenger Declaration is no longer mandatory

Anyone that's traveled overseas lately is aware of the shitshow that is the Digital Passenger Declaration - a craptastic app designed to replace the paper slips you'd fill in on the plane when returning to Australia. Crikey has a good article explaining the app's "glitches, poor design and (lack of) redundancy". The DPD is so bad that after $60m and years of work, the government is indefinitely scrapping it as of the 6th of July. Home Affairs minister Clare O'Neil said the app "needs a lot more work" and reverting back to paper slips will speed things up at Australia's airports.

### Google to auto delete sensitive location search history

Google is going to "start automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters, weight loss clinics, and other potentially sensitive locations from users' location histories in the coming weeks". As more and more people are aware of how data like this can be demanded by law enforcement and used against them thanks to unjust laws passed by fanatics, even Google is realising that the best way to avoid being put in a situation where they have to hand over data on someone morally innocent (i.e: getting an abortion) is not to have the data in the first place. Fucking finally.

### Victoria releases a plan to phase out natural gas in homes

Victoria has outlined how it plans to stop sucking at the natural gas teat in the Gas Substitution Roadmap. Victoria was once blessed with loads of cheap natural gas and forced all homes to connect to the gas pipe network. That's finally going away! You're now allowed to build a gas-free home with heat pumps and induction cooktops - something that until now was a pain in the arse with most builders. The state government said they're also working on incentives to replace gas appliances in existing homes. Here's a PDF of Victoria's Gas Substitution Roadmap.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro is not very good

Heads up to anyone looking to buy one of the new 13-inch M2-based MacBook Pros, they kinda suck. The biggest problem is in the base model with 256GB of storage. Instead of 2x 128GB chips, Apple configured this unit with a single 256GB chip. This results in much slower read speeds as the reading isn't happening in parallel. Things get even worse if you've only got 8GB of RAM as you're relying on the speedy SSD to pick up the slack and that SSD isn't so speedy now. The chassis also struggles with dissipating the heat coming off the M2 SoC under load and throttles so hard that at full load an M1 chip is probably going to be faster.

## Bargains

- Bauhn Ergonomic Wireless Keyboard - $14.99 + shipping & CC fees from Aldi online
- AKG K371 over-ear closed back headphones - $180.31 from Amazon
- Jabra Elite 3 wireless earbuds - $85 from Amazon
- Apple iPhone 11 64GB/128GB - $647/$727 from Amazon
- 2x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16TB HDDs - $912.46 from Amazon USA
- Dell MSA20 single monitor arm - $157.92 from Dell
- 20x Flybuys points on Apple Gift Cards (max 50,000 points per Flybuys card) at Coles
- Telstra Lite 2 4G (can be used as a hotspot apparently!) - $9 at Woolworths
- WD 20TB Gold HDD - $668.15 from Amazon US
- Apple Watch Series 7 (GPS) 41mm (Red) - $499 from Amazon
- Apple iPad Air 5 2022 (10.9", Wi-Fi, 64GB) Purple - $886 from Amazon (can get Officeworks to price match)
- Crucial MX500 500GB 2.5" SATA SSD - $71 from Amazon

## The End

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