Jeff Geerling

Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

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…

My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

This weekend I wanted to create a new App in Azure so I could help a local nonprofit automate one of their donor relations processes via email through Office 365. So I tried registering an app by visiting the App Registration Portal. I signed in to my personal Microsoft account, clicked 'New registration', then was…

I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

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…

Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

I've had a busy week, so I didn't have time until today to read this news about Red Hat locking down RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription. I repeat the title: Red Hat, are you dumb? When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise…

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB…

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt…

1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…

M4 Mac mini's efficiency

I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…

The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…

I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…

Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

I am frequently away from home (whether on family vacation, a business trip, or out around town), but I have a number of important resources on my home network—as any homelabber does. There are services I like to access remotely like my NAS with my giant media library, my edit server with all my active projects, and…

They stole my voice with AI

UPDATE 9/23: The CEO of Elecrow responded. I've posted a follow-up blog post with my reaction to the response and some other thoughts on AI voice cloning. Listen to this clip: Your browser does not support the video tag. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty familiar. I mean I would like you to subscribe to…

I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution. The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux…

Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor

A few months ago, I found this Hacker News post about the AirGradient DIY Air Quality Monitor. I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home's CO2 levels, but the high price and limited 'ownership' of the data coming from it turned me off. So I built two AirGradient DIY air…

Starlink review, four months in

SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber. SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish…

UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster

You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…

I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

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…

Everything I know about Kubernetes I learned from a cluster of Raspberry Pis

I realized I haven't posted about my DrupalCon Seattle 2019 session titled Everything I know about Kubernetes I learned from a cluster of Raspberry Pis, so I thought I'd remedy that. First, here's a video of the recorded session: The original Pi Dramble 6-node cluster, running the LAMP stack.

I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

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…

Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80…

The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…

Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

A few months ago, I upgraded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of internal storage, using a then-$269 DIY upgrade kit from ExpandMacMini. At the time, there was no option for upgrading the M4 Pro Mac mini, despite it also using a user-replaceable, socketed storage drive. But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if…

BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

I came to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show this year with my Dad to learn more about time in broadcast and live production. I was expecting to learn more about grandmaster clocks, AV sync, timing in protocols like Dante, Livewire, AES67, and more—and I have. But then on the first day here I found…

AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code. It's likely the bot was running through…

I gave away my books and sales increased

In March, I made my DevOps books free to help anyone who wanted to learn new skills during the global pandemic lockdown. In April, Device42 generously extended that offer for another month. I originally had the idea to give the books away on a whim on a Sunday night, thinking I'd give up a fair chunk of revenue, but…

Setting up Starlink

In March, I got an email from SpaceX saying Starlink was available at my address, and I could pre-order. I paid $500 for the equipment, plus $25 for a Volcano Roof Mount, and $99 for the first month of service, and a few weeks later, I got the kit you see in the image above. I was a little too excited about getting…

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

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…

It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

Last month I asked people to hack part of my YouTube video, specifically to de-pixelate the contents of a folder I had pixelated starting at the 4:57 mark. Your browser does not support the video tag. For years, people have used the censor tool to blur or pixelate out parts of videos where there's sensitive…