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The Pixel 8a is out. If you have a 6a or a 7a already you don't need to upgrade!
Prices for Pixel phones are examined in my recent article Pixel 8a for £281, vs 7a and 6a, and seem to be all over the place for the older models. As low as £156 for a 6a on Amazon (Renewed - Refurbished - Good). Thats a lot of phone for the money.
TL:DR – The Pixel 8a is great, but it is not measurably better, so far, than the 7a. The 7a was a truly great budget phone and still is. The 7a is massively better than the 6a due to wireless charging and a miles better camera but the 6a is still a capable workhorse. All these phones are well built and have a quality feel to them. All have 5G and the Pixel vanilla Android OS is identical. If you need the latest then the 8a is lovely, but the 7a is really just as good. If you are on a budget or need a second or burner phone then the 6a is cheap now. If you have a 6a or a 7a already you don't need to upgrade.
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Keys are simple to understand. We all have them, you can't open a door without one. Mostly they are made of metal and fit in a lock. People have been using keys for hundreds of years. Passwords and password security not so much. People are just bad at passwords. User access control policies are unwieldy and irritating and yet people get around them. I remember the induction to a well-known telecommunictions companies system where the trainer said:
"You have to change your password every three months, you can't re-use them again and they have to have a capital letter and a number, so just use something simple like the month and year and you'll always remember it, for example "May2024".
I like to think most of those employees passwords still use this easy to remember method, blissfully unaware that it renders the password itself almost completely useless.
So, what to do? You need passwords for now, they are still used in the vast majority of systems. But adding two-factor authentication with a security key as the second factor in addition to your password means there is a 0% possibility of a password attack or stolen or compromised password. That reassuring number has got to be worth a little admin and the small investment in a physical key!
And write a policy. It doesn't have to be back breakingly hard to understand and just needs to state what you can and cannot allow.
TL:DR – The benefits outweigh the costs by so much that it is hard to understand why businesses don't or won't use security keys in addition to passwords as a user access control. They massively improve user access control, and enable a business to be able to sail through the User access control section of Cyber Essentials certification here in the UK.
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My Mac Mini was not being used much, latterly it just had a reassuring role as a disaster recovery machine for my Mac Studio, but was not actually needed anymore so I thought I'd trade it.
How did I do?
Pretty well I think. Kept almost 47% of value, and cost £11.21 per month.
If someone said you could have a decent dev spec Mac Mini (16GB, 512, M1) for under £12 a month you'd take it wouldn't you?
| Original Cost | £915.84 |
| CeX Voucher | £490 |
| Difference | £425.84 |
| Percentage of original value | 46.5% |
| Months owned | 38 |
| Monthly Cost (Before Trade in) | £24.10 |
| Monthly Cost (After Trade in) | £11.21 |
TL:DR — After just over three years my Mac Mini (M1, 2020) was still worth nearly 47% of its original cost as a trade-in to CeX. Pretty decent return for a computer thats been on 24/7 and is out of AppleCare coverage.
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GNU ddrescue for hard disk imaging or recovery on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
GNU ddrescue (ddrescue) is a proven data recovery tool which you can trust. However, it is also quite a complicated command line tool. If only there was a way to make it more straightforward to use.
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Read more: Using GNU ddrescue for hard disk recovery on Ubuntu Linux
GNU ddrescue for hard disk imaging or recovery on macOS Ventura
GNU ddrescue (ddrescue) is a proven data recovery tool which you can trust. However, it is also quite a complicated command line tool. If only there was a way to make it more straightforward to use.
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It is great to see the fruit of Ubuntu's decision to embrace Flutter. App Center made it into Ubuntu 23.10 but properly cements itself into 24.04 as a flagship app. 24.04 is an LTS release, so this is a long term bet.
TL:DR — This is a massive endorsement of Flutter for Linux by Ubuntu.
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If you don't need a full scale data centre style virtualisation solution but need a local lab environment then Workstation Player uses VMware vSphere Hypervisor technology to provide simple and secure local virtualisation on modest hardware. It is far easier for a small local testing or technology exploration lab than ESXi or OpenStack and VMware’s decision to make VMware Workstation and VMWare Fusion free for all users makes it simple.
Why VMware Workstation?
VMware Workstation supports hundreds of 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems. Best of all, VMware Workstation Player is now free for all uses. You might also want to review Moving VMware Mac Fusion to PC Workstation is easy.
TL:DR — It is now easy and free to install VMware Workstation 17.6.3 on Ubuntu 24.04. YMMV.
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Read more: Installing VMware Workstation Pro for Ubuntu 24.04