geerlingguy

My statement is the same as I put on all my ancient blog posts (for example[1]):

    Warning
    This post is more than 10 years old. I do not delete posts,
    because even old information is still useful, but please
    know that some material on this page may be outdated or
    incorrect. Thanks!

In the past, I've engaged privately with a few of the Reddit users who are linked to elsewhere in this thread[2], and realized they aren't interested in actually talking, only proving they are righteous, and I am evil. There's a saying I've found applies to those one-way relationships: Never wrestle with a pig: You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Therefore I ignore those threads now. I have enough on my plate trying to be a good father and husband (failing often, but a little less each day!), learn more about the world and people around me, and share what I learn with other people in what ways I can.

The main reason I started HomelabFest is to bring the homelab community together, in person. Get people (myself included) away from their monitors and phones, and into real human relationships. No matter who you are or where you come from.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2009/my-cvs-workflow-updat...

[2] Note that I don't call out individuals for tarring and feathering in public. A couple times in the past I have used a name in reference to a movement or a poor business decision, and I immediately regretted it. Reducing someone to a label or branding them for one poor decision is a quick way to dehumanize the person. Every person deserves love and dignity.

Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.

Just to be clear, I've never taken a dime from Qualcomm, Apple, Raspberry Pi, etc—when I do take a sponsorship from any company I'm clear about it.

I always mark videos as sponsored if anything was provided (eg review samples) and not purchased. That never includes payments or editorial oversight, and equipment is either returned or shelved afterwards for future comparisons.

The only thing I accept money for is clearly demarcated ad integrations, like for Micro Center or Surfshark. See https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships for details.

If I wanted to hype views I would not be sinking a few thousand hours into planning an event ;)

Yes—a year is a minimum, from all the people I talked to—and I've already spent about six months prior setting up everything I could pre-announcement. I have a lot of respect for anyone who puts on an event, of any size.

Agenda won't be up until a CFP is over, but there will be 10-20 sessions including a few panels.

Just wanted to post this here, someday it might be cool to have this regionally as well, but Sep 12-14 HomelabFest will be in St. Louis, MO (technically St. Charles, which is closer to the airport). It will include a number of homelab-related content creators, talks, a bunch of cool exhibitors (mix of community and companies in the homelab space)... hopefully a good time for all!

I meant to post this earlier but was a bit overwhelmed with all the inbound email. (Planning an event of this scale is hard, I have empathy for anyone who does it lol.)

Broadcasters also keep logs of their broadcasts for verification purposes. The traffic systems that inject the ads have parameters for how often and what times certain ads are played which are quite deterministic.

One thing I like here is Raspberry Pi still lets engineers have interactions with end users like this (despite them not doing the best PR all the time).

Reading through the EEPROM repo issue[1] makes me a little more sympathetic to the "feature", but I still don't like it at all.

It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two...

But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties).

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761

Every time I login to certain sites (like my health insurance, for one) I get a passkey prompt (system dialog) with no way to keyboard-dismiss, so I'm forced to move my hand over to the mouse and figure out which of three poorly-named buttons to press to get on with the login and ignore the passkey.

It's a minor inconvenience, but happens so regularly I hate it. It also stops the login flow until I dismiss the prompt, which is also annoying as I could've already gotten to the page I wanted to get to in the time it took to dismiss the dialog.

They let their agentic AI take over system maintenance at Dreamforce yesterday like they were pushing in the talks

/s (partly)

It's surprising how often I can get an okay-ish GPS signal indoors... it seems to have a lot more to do with building materials than anything else.

Multipath reflections means the location (and thus timing accuracy) wanders a lot, but it's still great down to microseconds if you can get 5+ satellites in view.

In the spirit of a 1990s time server is I also got Timelord + Tardis working (time service over AppleTalk, tested on a Mac SE/30, courtesy of netatalk) and tested multiple NTPv1, NTPv3, and NTPv4 clients through this (and soon an Xserve G5).

It's less about getting the 1995 hardware working, and more about rebuilding the actual time server to serve the original purpose, for the next 5-10 years at least.

I'm planning on using this chassis to build up an NTP Stratum 1 server for the global NTP pool, hopefully later this year. I thought it would be a lot more fun than letting the box go to e-waste.

And leaving the guts completely untouched means I can do a full restoration someday, if I want.

The two main things I'd need to do:

1. Modify the RF chain so I can use normal GPS antennas that don't down-convert the frequency.

2. Modify the DC bias voltage so it doesn't fry GPS antennas.

After that, I could work on patching firmware, but I'd probably just use the original guts as a frequency reference and leave time to other hardware.

I could even run the Pi and the old hardware simultaneously. The old hardware providing IRIG-B, 10 MHz, and 1 PPS references that are a little more accurate (it has a TCXO, haven't measured its timing accuracy yet). And the Pi could provide PTP and NTP, using a more modern GPS chip which even supports dual band and survey-in for more accuracy.

The US has done tests with eLoran as well. The receivers are quite expensive and the signal isn't permanent yet, so it's more of a lab thing right now. Also experiments with BPS (Broadcast Positioning System) using high power TV transmitters to distribute time and position in urban areas (very hard to overpower that signal).

I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.

I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.

Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.

Somehow the RISC-V designs mostly seem to have more coherent PCIe implementations, meaning some devices are easier to get running without the arm64 quirks drivers have to work around.

Drivers still need tweaking, most of the time, since most are still built assuming an amd64 world.

I'm guessing Chick-Fil-A?

It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.

I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).

Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.

Fingers crossed some of the usual mini PC suspects pick it up as it rolls out. Though I think 4 or 8 GB is back on the menu, annoyingly. Maybe it'll get some of the mini PC vendors to stop shipping Windows 11 by default!

It's funny, too — in my testing with Asahi Linux, some benchmarks ran better on Linux than macOS on Apple Silicon!

I never said it wasn't clickbait.

If you don't like it, either install DeArrow or subscribe to my blog, where I tone it down for the more technical audience. (Or block/ignore my content, no skin off my back!)

I've used a number of mini PCs and Arm SBCs with 8 GB of RAM. Most casual use (browsing, writing, media playback) is no problem, but using "creative" software (image editors, NLEs, DAWs, etc.) quickly gets annoying.

I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it.

For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.

I run a large number of benchmarks; the Hackaday article of course focuses on the headline findings, but you can see the rest here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111

Yeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here.

I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure, but it stinks the price only applies here. It's a good deal at $699. Harder to justify at $1,000+.

No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships

Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture.

The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.

Can you please post an issue on the repo? Long on my todo list has been trying to get the Mac tests more repeatable/consistent and optimized (always easier on Linux).

They still eat battery, but at least the midrange ones, not nearly as much as they used to.

With only two USB-C ports that means you get just headphones and power if you're not using a hub or USB dock.

These tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance.

There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now).