Dithering Digest 7 - Weekly Roundup | Intelligent Dithering

Welcome to issue #7 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Roundup of tech news and links!

Enjoy!

How to use Case statements in Bash scripts

This is really handy. I don’t do a huge amount in Linux on a daily basis but this will come in handy for sure. I honestly didn’t even know that case statements could be done in Bash and this will certainly clean up a lot of nested ifs!

🔗 https://www.howtogeek.com/766978/how-to-use-case-statements-in-bash-scripts/

Apple increasing options for the self-repair program

Apple have slowly been bowing to pressure from consumer rights groups about the repairability of their devices, locking out self-repair or even taking your device to a 3rd party repair shop. They are slowly improving in this area and are releasing the Apple Diagnostics software to the public, first in the US and then Europe early 2024. This will be super useful in my work where we manage a large fleet of iPads!

🔗 https://www.howtogeek.com/you-can-now-fix-your-own-iphone-15-m3-imac-and-more/

Pimoroni open pre-orders for their RPI5 NVMe base

Pimoroni (quality purveyors of maker goods) have announced their new base for the Raspberry Pi 5. It will allow connection of an NVMe drive underneath the new Raspberry Pi 5 connected via the PCIe connector. This vastly improves the I/O speed of the Pi and could make for an excellent daily driver!

🔗 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/nvme-base?variant=41219587178579

Home Assistant look back on “Year of the Voice”

Home Assistant has made huge strides this year in the arena of voice assistants. Looking to move away from Alexa and other proprietary assistants, they have built out an entire system to allow you to control your home using voice devices you control. For the privacy conscious and just those who love to customise and tinker, this is huge.

If you are not already using Home Assistant you should be! It is amazing for home automation and a tinkerers paradise!

🔗 https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/12/13/year-of-the-voice-chapter-5/

CloudFlare Internet Year in Review

Internet Infrastructure specialists CloudFlare have released their annual internet stats report for 2023 and it makes for fascinating reading.

🔗 https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review/

Northern Ireland cops count human cost of August data breach

Following a major oopsie by an administrative staff member in what was branded “the most significant data breach that has ever occurred in the history of UK policing”, names and details of all serving police officers in Northern Ireland were published by mistake. In Northern Ireland in particular, this information is incredibly sensitive and has real life-threatening consequences for the staff involved. GDPR and data security often feels like unnecessary bureaucracy but this is a reminder that data leaks can have real-life repercussions.

🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/psni_data_breach_forces_officers/

UK government woefully unprepared for ‘catastrophic’ ransomware attack

In more cyber news, you will never guess but it appears a government is totally unprepared for digital attacks! You would think that after the major ransomware attacks on the NHS in years past, lessons would have been learned. But it would appear not!

🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/14/uk_jcnss_ransomware_report/

Computer Joke of the Week

There are 10 types of people in the world:
those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

See you all next week! Stay safe and keep dithering!