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.

I recently tried using the Minisforum DEG1 GPU Dock with a Raspberry Pi 500+, using an M.2 to OCuLink adapter, and this chenyang SFF-8611 Cable.

After figuring out there's a power button on the DEG1 (which needs to be turned on), and after fiddling around with the switches on the PCB (hidden under the large metal plate on the bottom; TGX to OFF was the most important setting), I was able to get the Raspberry Pi's PCIe bus to at least tell the graphics card installed in the eGPU dock to spin up its fans and initialize.

But I wasn't able to get any output from the card (using this Linux kernel patch), and lspci did not show it. (Nor were there any logs showing errors in dmesg).

Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs.

The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500:

Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs, and a separate post about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard.

The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500:

For years, I've had a couple Macs running at home and at my studio, which I use to remotely manage my video projects or some coding project.

It's nice to have a workstation set up that you can access anywhere via Screen Sharing to check on progress, jot down a note, etc.—and not be tied to a web app or some cloud service.

I run a Wireguard VPN at home and at my studio, so I can remotely log into any of my infrastructure through the VPN—Macs included.

I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago. In that time Raspberry Pi upgraded the CM4 to a CM5, so I ordered a set of 10 16GB CM5 Lite modules for my blade cluster. That should give me 160 GB of total RAM to play with.

This was the biggest Pi cluster I've built, and it set me back around $3,000, shipping included:

Almost 15 years ago, I wrote Grab a Single Frame from a Video in QuickTime X. And for many years since, I slightly modified that workflow. Instead of using Preview, I would use pngpaste, and paste the copied frame from QuickTime player into a file.

For example:

1. Open a video in QuickTime and scrub to the frame you would like to save as an image.
2. Press Command-C
3. Switch to Terminal
4. Run pngpaste image-name-here.jpg
5. Profit!

However, there are two problems with that workflow:

For a great many tech YouTube channels, views have been markedly down from desktop ("computer") users since August 10th (or so).

This month-long event has kicked up some dust—enough that two British YouTubers, Spiffing Brit and Josh Strife Hayes are having a very British argument¹ over who's right about the root cause.

Spiffing Brit argued it's a mix of YouTube's seasonality (it's back to school season) and channels falling off, or as TechLinked puts it, "git gud", while Josh Strife Hayes points out the massive number of channels which identified a historic shift down in desktop views (compared to mobile, tablet, and TV) starting after August 10. This data was corroborated by this Moist Critical video as well.

These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller.

Many YouTube content creators, myself included, noticed something in early to mid-August: views were down.

After being on the platform since 2006 (though for me, not being a 'professional' YouTuber until about 5 years ago), I'm used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes.

But this was substantial.

I had 4 10/10 videos in a row, which is unprecedented. I mean, my content could just be terrible all the sudden, and I've lost all but my core audience. But there are other explanations. Especially when the exact same thing happened to a large number of my peers on YouTube.

I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf in 2025, my first 'new' car in 15 years. The above photo was taken by the dealership; apparently their social media team likes to post photos of all purchasers.

I test drove a Tesla in 2012, and quickly realized my mistake. No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never drove one of those) could match the feel of pressing the throttle on an electric.

I started out with a used minivan, which I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Olds that I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Camry that I bought before we had kids, when I had a 16 mile commute.

Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi.

I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My configuration for these Arm NASes is up on GitHub.

Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5.

A few years ago, I admit it was rare to find someone running Arm hardware more powerful than a Raspberry Pi in a homelab (or more serious) setting, outside of cloud providers running Ampere or custom Arm CPUs.

But as Pis and Rockchip boards have become more powerful (and efficient), and Apple's M-series silicon has become more interesting (the M4 mini being an excellent value proposition for a quiet, tiny server), and even Ampere Altra pricing coming down a bit since it's an 'old' server CPU now, still offering 64 or 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4... I don't think I'm weird in suggesting Arm is a viable platform for reliable, even powerful servers.

Even for storage.

Continuing the retro computer series, I've recently completed the first part of a restoration of my Aunt's old Macintosh Classic.

This Classic was handed to me alongside my Uncle Mark's Apple II, which I'll probably cover later (we've played a game of whack-a-mole with issues on that machine! Well worth it but I haven't hit a point where enough things are working to cover it well, heh).

The Classic is a strange Mac—it was introduced in 1990 as a budget version of the 1986 Macintosh Plus, with a 68000 CPU in an era when the 68030 was the new hotness.

This is not a Raspberry Pi Pico. Despite it's tiny size and castellated edges, this is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.

Well, sorta. At Open Sauce, probably the most interesting encounter I had was with Jonathan Clark.

You see, I was on a Reverse Engineering panel at Open Sauce, but I mentioned on Twitter, I wouldn't call myself a reverse engineer, more like a 'guy who breaks things sometimes taking them apart, and learns many ways to not break things, sometimes.'

Framework casually mentioned they were testing a mini-rack AI cluster in their Framework Desktop presentation back in March.

Imagine my surprise when Nirav Patel, Framework's founder and CEO, was at Open Sauce a couple weeks ago, and wanted to talk! He said they had seen my Project Mini Rack posts earlier this year and thought it was the perfect application to try out their new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395-powered Mainboard, as it's mini ITX dimensions fit inside a 10" rack.

I've been playing with Meshtastic a lot, since learning about it at Open Sauce last year. I'm up to 5 little LoRa radios now, and I'm working on a couple nicer antenna placements, so I can hopefully help shore up some of the north-south connections on the MeshSTL map.

To better understand the protocol, I wanted to visualize Meshtastic communications using SDR (Software Defined Radio). I can do it on a Mac or PC, just setting GQRX, SDR++, or SDR#, and watching the LongFast frequency centered on 902.125 MHz: