Recent content on Jeff Geerling
Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo , Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13 . Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year. I ran the XPS…
Proxmox today announced their Proxmox Virtual Environment is now available for 64-bit ARM . I tested it on my Ampere Altra Dev Platform —the same machine on which I've booted Windows on Arm the first time, messed with multiple GPUs, and most recently tested Houdini's native arm64 support . Install was easy, as the Ampere Altra uses UEFI / ACPI for its hardware, meaning Proxmox didn't have to…
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only…
In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness. It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge . Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted to see if I could complete a personal project end-to-end, without editing a…
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. When you plug a computer into a network, tools…
The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi . A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4 . But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s. What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s…
This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years 1 , mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many…
I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework computers. It fits in any available Framework Expansion slot—even on the…
Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints . While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years:
Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one . But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC , Raspberry Pi Connect , or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are…
My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category. My nephew is…
Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question: Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna? A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like an antenna, if you squint the right way. Really, anything (or anyone) can be an antenna, given enough…
A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes). It's…
On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit . Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years) 2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years) Following that cycle, one would expect a Pi 6 3-4…
At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT . Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization…
Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again . I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer I had to do that…
Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago , in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work? Through the magic of buying…
Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C . I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a…
Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect , Raspberry Pi's free remote access service. When they announced Pi Connect in 2024 , I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid remote access solution after Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' was launched. The service was helpful for those who had…