Tireless volunteers are the lifeblood of community I've been involved in open source communities for over a decade. I helped organize events and initiatives, I've donated photography services, and in general I like to give back. For me, a lot of this stems from my faith background—the motto of my Jesuit high school was 'Men for Others'. But I would consider myself a 'moderately active' volunteer, compared to some. I might give a few hours here and there, or help at a major event for part of the time, but there are people who have a drive and passion for helping others that's far beyond my cap ..read more

What Eben Upton said about RISC-V Earlier this month, I was able to discuss with Eben Upton (co-founder of Raspberry Pi) the role RISC-V could play in Raspberry Pi's future (among other things—watch the full interview here). Jeff Geerling May 18, 2023 ..read more

Self-hosting with AT&T Fiber Internet Today I got AT&T Fiber Internet installed at my house, and I thought I'd document a few things I observed during and after the install. They trenched fiber boxes between pairs of houses in my neighborhood. It seems like they have little fiber hubs for 8 houses in a set, and those little hubs connect back to the main neighborhood box with an 8 or 10-strand cable, directly buried in the ground. Apparently my street's main run was kinked somewhere, and only one of the strands had full signal, so I'm the lucky winner who signed up first, and I get tha ..read more

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 especially Home Assistant, which lets me monitor all aspects of my home. Some people rely on individual cloud services from IoT vendors and have a bunch of apps to connect to each type of device independently. As someone who has deal ..read more

First look: ASUSTOR's new 12-bay all-M.2 NVMe SSD NAS Last year, after I started a search for a good out-of-the-box all-flash-storage setup for a video editing NAS, I floated the idea of an all-M.2 NVMe NAS to ASUSTOR. I am not the first person with the idea, nor is ASUSTOR the first prebuilt NAS company to build one (that honor goes QNAP, with their TBS-453DX). But I do think the concept can be executed to suit different needs—like in my case, video editing over a 10 Gbps network with minimal latency for at least one concurrent user with multiple 4K streams and sometimes complex edits, witho ..read more

Testing a 96-core Ampere Altra Developer Platform If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing: I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine: Jeff Geerling April 21, 2023 ..read more

Secure Computing with Zymbit's D35 Every few months, I try to test a number of new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-based projects, and at this point I've looked at over 100 boards that use the CM4 to fill some need—general computing, industrial controls, media playback, or even clustered computing! This month, among other projects, I spent a bit of time with Zymbit's Secure Edge Node D35: Jeff Geerling April 6, 2023 ..read more

TV for one million: Exploring KSDK's broadcast tower KSDK-TV broadcasts to well over 1 million households in the St. Louis metro area. And my Dad and I went to their broadcast tower last month to explore how the digital TV signal is delivered through the air to so many people. On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital. And we even found strange artifacts of the past, like this random microwave dish that received a signal through the roof of the ..read more

RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this: The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think! The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V. Jeff Geerling March 3, 2023 ..read more

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 greeted by this page: I thought that was a bit strange, since I shouldn't have any restrictions... but then I noticed it listed [redacted] School as the reason I couldn't do this. Jeff Geerling February 24, 2023 ..read more