Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait.

I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650!

I finally upgraded to a mechanical keyboard. But because Apple's so protective of their Touch ID hardware, there aren't any mechanical keyboards with that feature built in.

But there is a way to hack it. It's incredibly wasteful, and takes a bit more patience than I think most people have, but you basically take an Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, rip out the Touch ID, and install it in a 3D printed box, along with the keyboard's logic board.

A few months ago, GitHub user @yanghaku dropped a 15 line patch to fix GPU support for practically all AMD GPUs on the Raspberry Pi (and demoed a 3080 running on the Pi with a separate, unreleased patch. This week, GitHub user @mariobalanica dropped this (larger) patch which does the same for Nvidia GPUs!

I have a Raspberry Pi and an Nvidia graphics card—and I'm easily distracted. So I put down my testing of a GB10 system for a bit, and compiled mariobalanica's branch.

This air quality monitor costs $250. It's called the Air Lab, and I've been using it to measure the air in my car, home, studio, and a few events over the past few months. And in using it over the course of a road trip I learned to not run recirculate in my car quite as often—more on that later.

Networked Artifacts built in some personality:

Out of the box, if you buy a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, install it on the official CM5 IO Board, and install a fan on it (e.g. my current favorite, the EDAtec CM5 Active Cooler), you'll notice the fan ramps up to 100% speed after you shut down the Pi.

That's not fun, since at least for a couple of my CM5s, they are more often powered down than running, creating a slight cacophany!

I'm working on a more in-depth test of some newer AMD GPUs on the Raspberry Pi, now that the 15 line kernel patch is (IMO) nearly ready for upstreaming.

But this blog post shows how to quickly get almost any modern AMD GPU running on a Raspberry Pi 5, CM5, or Pi 500+, thanks to this patch on the Pi Linux fork.

We finally have Intel Arc GPUs working on the Pi somewhat stably—it required overcoming many small hurdles, but it looks like support could land in Raspberry Pi OS if we can get a simple patch upstreamed¹. If that happens, all you'd need to do to use an Intel card on a Pi is install a firmware package.

The cards I've spent the most time with so far are:

The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year. But everything else about this thing is different.

What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got... is something different.

Video

Hate reading? I also published a video on the MS-R1 on my YouTube channel. Watch it here, or scroll on past.

When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma.

While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation, where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the plasma arc from the hot dog turns that modulation into audible sound.

Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 1995¹.

The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?

Well, apparently the engineering:

The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino.

It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that.

Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.

My normal process for transferring video footage from my Sony cameras to my computer is as follows:

Earlier this year, I inherited a bunch of old Macs and computer parts, including the PowerBook 520 pictured above. And, for the past three years I've been trying to visit VCF Midwest up in Chicago, where there's this odd blend of old computers, radio, broadcast gear... Honestly, it's hard to pin down exactly what it is.

And I also had no idea how overwhelming the two-day event would be. Overwhelmingly awesome, that is.

While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB.

In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5.

Late in the cycle while researching CubeSats using Pis in space, I got in touch with Ian Charnas, the chief engineer for the Mark Rober YouTube channel.

Earlier this year, Crunchlabs launched SatGus, which is currently orbiting Earth taking 'space selfies'.

The way it works:

Qualcomm just announced they're acquiring Arduino, the company that introduced a whole generation of tinkerers to microcontrollers and embedded electronics.

The Uno R3 was the first microcontroller board I owned. Over a decade ago, I blinked my first LED with an Uno; the code for that is actually still up on my GitHub.

If the size of the current AI bubble can be estimated by how many

• AI job offers
• AI product review offers
• AI service paid sponsorship offers
• AI creator representation offers

I receive per day... then I'd say we're nearing the pop.

There is no way the trillions of dollars of valuation placed on AI companies can be backed by any amount of future profit.