News written by Petteri Pyyny (May, 2020)

Yes, you read the headline right. The 8-bit computer back from 1980s is still very much alive. Sold mostly in Japan and in various European countries back in the day, the MSX hobbyist are making sure that the MSX will be relevant, also in 2020s.

So, to bring the almost 40 year old computer to modern times, there's now Instagram client for it: instagr8. Software itself works on both, the original MSX standard (dubbed nowadays often as MSX1) and on more modern MSX2 computers. As one might expect, the picture quality of Instagram photos is much better when used on MSX2 computers.

Here's a short demo of the software, running on original MSX1:

MSX1 specs aren't exactly top notch nowadays: mere 3.52MHz CPU (or, in modern terms: 0.00352GHz) and with 25kb of free RAM memory to run your own software. To make up this shortfall, most of the code itself has been shifted to server-side processing. Basically, the proxy server in between does most of the heavy lifting and converts the image to be better suited for the ancient computer model. But nevertheless, the project is quite awesome, as you can see from the videos here!

instagr8 is open source project and its code can be found from itse official Github page. As MSX1 standard doesn't include any form of network connectivity, the software also requires a cartridge called GR8NET that adds HTTP layer, network connectivity and more to the MSX1 device.

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Microsoft's feeling towards open source community have taken a full U-turn during the past couple of years. Most notably, company acquired the beloved GitHub back in 2018.

Besides acquiring GitHub, Microsoft has also realized its own importance in history of technology and has open-sourced several of its historic products. Most notably, company released the source codes of MS-DOS operating system back in 2018.

Now, the trend continues, as Microsoft has decided to release the source codes for GW-BASIC, the BASIC programming language intepreter that originally shipped with MS-DOS 2.0, back in 1983. Intepreter has been developed with 8088 assembly, meaning that in order to tinker with it, you need to know assembly - not high-level programming languages, like C or Java. But the source is there, so anyone can get it and start developing even better BASIC intepreter, if they feel like it. And of course, the source code is available through GitHub. Obviously.

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It might sound like a very small change, but it is interesting decision nevertheless. YouTube has recently changed its video quality classification in a way that no longer categorizes 720p video as High Definition (HD) video.

From now on, only videos with 1080p resolution or higher are being listed as HD videos in YouTube listings. This is also visible when user changes the quality of the video playback - there, the small HD label appears only for 1080p and beyond.

YouTube itself hasn't commented on the change, but the trend is pretty clear. A decade ago, yes, 720p could be realistically categorized as "high definition", as most videos were still using 480p resolution (or worse) and 1080p was the de facto best video quality available for most people. But since then, 4K videos have become commonplace, as have TV sets and services that are capable to ourput such videos.

For comparison, the good olde 720p video has 921'600 pixels in each video frame. Meanwhile, the most common 4K videos, using UHD resolution, have 8 294 400 pixels per frame. Thus, 4K videos have almost ten times higher resolution than 720p videos.

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President Donald Trump has extended the ban of several Chinese telecom manufacturers, namely Huawei, to May 2021.

Ban essentially bars American compnies from using telecom equipment manufactured by Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE, citing national security risk as the reason.

However, The U.S. Commerce Department has granted several extensions that have allowed U.S. companies to continue business with Huawei. Current extension is set to expre on Friday, but it is highly likely that it will be extended once again.

The trade war between United States and China is most visible with Huawei's consumer products where company has abandoned the use of Google services. Basically all new Huawei phones are sold without Google Play, Youtube and other Google products. It also means that consumers buying new Huawei phones can't access the Google Play to download new apps, but they have to rely on much more limited selection of alternative app stores.

Rooting Huawei phones has proven to be tricky, so there are no easy options for those who want to buy Huawei phone, but also want to use familiar Google services.

Several sources claim that Google is planning to retire its popular Chromecast media streaming device line and replace it with Android TV -based device.

According to rumors, the upcoming device would carry Google Nest brand, to be in line with company's other "smart home" devices. Device itself would use Android TV, like many other popular media streaming solutions, such as Roku and Android Fire TV.

Chromecast itself isn't an independent media streaming solution, but rather a playback device where user can "cast" videos from his/her phone or computer that the Chromecast would then happily output to user's TV set. Android TV-based device, however, would be completely independent device, allowing user to use a traditional remote control to watch material from select providers, such as YouTube and Netflix.

Chromecast fans wouldn't be forgotten: the rumored device would also include Google Cast support, meaning that it would still function exactly like Chromecast does, if needed.

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