There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper , the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which i

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab rea

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips , sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s . Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21 , arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server). Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly. To do both of those things well , you need a smart interface. And at least with APC, there are tons of older UPSes that use Network Management Cards. The on

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server , so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours ! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868 , for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively. My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Contro

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s . So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multip

For a mobile 'mini homelab' project I'm working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary 'on-to-go' connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I'm building in a fixed location. I'll have more on that project soon, but I figured this project was a good way to check out Ubiquiti's solutions, especially considering many of their smalle

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display , which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution! Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the fo

In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters ( example ), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Ima

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 tailo

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 lin

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 lik

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 work

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 Framewo