Posts in Hardware (20 found)
neilzone Yesterday

Migrating my self-hosted UniFi controller from Network Manager to UniFi OS Server

One of the jobs that has been on my list for a while is to migrate my UniFi controller installation from the self-hosted network manager tool to the new UniFi OS Server tool. The only reason that it was a job at all is because UniFi has decided to discontinue support for the UniFi network manager. Which is probably for the better, as it contained outdated packages anyway. Frankly, I’m not massively impressed with UniFi any more. If I were starting again, I am not sure that I would pick UniFi kit, but I don’t know what I would go for instead. I simply want to run my own controller, without external access or access by anyone else, to control the network infrastructure at home. I did the migration, and it mostly worked. Here’s what I did: I read the Unifi OS Server installation instructions . I also read the Backups and Migration in UniFi instructions. My UniFi controller is running in a virtual machine, so I took a snapshot of that first. If all else failed, I could roll back the snapshot. I backed up the configuration of my existing UniFi network manager configuration. I downloaded it to my local machine. I also backed up the ssh configuration information for my UniFi devices, in line with the instructions: It is also recommended to copy the SSH username and password from Devices > Device Updates & Settings > Device SSH Settings, in case any devices need help later when connecting to the new instance of UniFi Network. I stopped the UniFi network manager with . I followed the Unifi OS Server installation instructions . It will be interesting to see how updates work. The instructions say: Captive portals will be served on port 8444, changed from port 8843 on Network Server. It did not mention that there was also a change to the port to the controller. However, the final line of the set up information showed that it was port 11443. So I changed my nginx proxy config from 8443 to 11443, and reloaded nginx. I could now access the new UniFi OS Server interface. It went downhill from here. I was intending to restore from backup, so I clicked the option for this. It then prompted me to - forced me to - sign in with a ui.com account. I’ve no idea why. It is a local controller, and I don’t want any remote access facilities. Nevertheless, I could not find a way around it. So I did, but I can’t say that I am impressed by this. It then said: We’ve discovered that you already have a self‑hosted UniFi Network installation. Would you like to import your current network settings into UniFi OS Server? But the options were not “Yes” and “No”, but rather “Continue without importing” and “Next”. This was a surprise anyway, as the instructions say: On macOS and Windows, the installer will automatically detect and offer to migrate your existing Network Server setup (if installed in the default location). On Linux, or if auto-migration doesn’t occur, you can manually migrate by installing UniFi OS Server and using the Site Export tool I am running it on Linux, so I did not expect any migration. I guessed that “Next” means “yes”, so I selected “Next”. It took me to a url ending . This was a blank screen. Nothing at all. I waited a couple of minutes, then refreshed the page. It then showed me a page showing that it was “restoring backup”, but the progress bar remained blank for quite a while. It also said that it was restoring to settings from January 2026, not last night’s backup, which surprised me. After a couple of minutes, the progress bar flashed by, and it was done. The import/migration appears to have correctly imported all my devices, and is set up to talk to them. But other aspects of the migration were underwhelming. It did not restore the settings for my mailserver. It was preset to use the “UI Mail Server”. I set it up to use my own mailserver, and it failed, with a useless error message. When I logged in to my mailserver to see what was going on, I saw . It appears that I am not the only person with this issue , albeit with a slightly different setup. They seem to have resolved it by disabling TLS, which is not an option for me. I have not yet got this to work. Even though I had configured automatic backups on the previous Unifi Network Server, they were not enabled on the new UniFi OS Server. I tried to set it up, but I was prompted for my “Ubiquiti SSO account password”. I tried the password for my ui.com account, but I got an error message of “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” Which was no use at all. Having turned off Remote Access (below), I went back to the Backups dialogue. Now, there was an option to download, or upload & restore, but nothing about automation. The info box says that I can schedule backups here, but there is no user interface for that. I took a manual backup. I cannot see a way to do automated backups to my local file system. If this is correct, this is absurd. I may see if I can do something using the command line. *Edit: yes, I can, with python and systemd. See Automating local backups of UniFi OS Server on Linux with uos-backup . “Remote access” is enabled by default, even though I am confident that I did not have remote access enabled before. When I attempted to untick it, it showed a dialogue box: So I disabled it. https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/220066768-Updating-and-Installing-Self-Hosted-UniFi-Network-Servers-Linux It did not restore my preferred time format (24 hours). I had to turn off analytics, which was on by default. It worked better than I was expecting, but that’s mainly because my expectations were very low. Why the email server and automated backups do not work, I do not know. I will need to investigate these. But at least I am now running a supported controller again. Once I’ve done a scan of the new system with greenbone, I’ll be interested to see what it reports.

tutorial Tutorial devops DevOps hardware Hardware python Python
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Martin Alderson 2 days ago

What GLM-5.3 Flash running on Chinese hardware actually means

Z.AI confirmed that their most recent model release was running all inference on Chinese manufactured hardware. While no doubt an impressive feat, Western companies still have a huge advantage that I can't see changing quickly. To start with, it's worth looking into where Chinese AI hardware is. I'm focusing entirely on the HiSilicon parts - the most competitive parts from Huawei. There are (many, actually) other manufacturers building AI hardware, but it's widely believed that they are no further ahead than HiSilicon, so I think that for brevity it's a fair starting point. One caveat before I go further: Z.AI didn't actually name a chipmaker, and didn't publish throughput or power numbers either. Nobody has independently verified the claim. So I'm assuming HiSilicon here because it's the only plausible candidate at that scale, not because anyone has confirmed it. It's also worth mentioning that the US export restrictions ( CSIS has a good overview ) of high end AI hardware have made this an enormous priority, understandably, for the Chinese. And it's definitely worth mentioning that finding accurate sources for many of the numbers I'll cite are difficult to be confident in, so take the exact numbers with a pinch of salt. The current 'scale-up' series of HiSilicon chip, the 910c series, pairs 96GB of HBM 2e memory with two compute dies, probably achieving something like 1.6PFLOP/s of INT8 compute with ~3TB/sec of memory bandwidth, at around 600W. In essence, this is substantially behind even the H100 from Nvidia, which is now 4 years old. These are around 60% as fast as the H100, and has various other footguns (no native FP8 support for example), which probably restrict efficiency further for many use cases. The next generation 950-series doesn't meaningfully increase compute as far as I can see, but does use domestically produced HiZQ/HiBL HBM memory. Interestingly the cards are configured in two variants - the 950PR and 950DT, with the former focusing on prefill and the latter on decode. In reality, the two products are very similar, but the prefill variant using slower HiBL memory vs the decode HiZQ memory. It does however support more quantisation types, like FP8. I think this shows the limitations of what Chinese hardware can do - at least for the near future. Yes, they can run inference, but so can many sets of hardware now - AMD, Google and Amazon all have competitive solutions, and OpenAI are making significant progress on their Jalapeño inference chip , which in the first published benchmarks did 1.5-1.9x the work per watt of Nvidia's GB300. Inference hardware while no doubt complex, is a pretty solved problem right now with a lot of competition - and that's before you bring in the Cerebras and Groq approach chips. The wall that these Chinese hardware manufacturers are hitting is the lack of viable EUV (extreme ultraviolet) fabrication. This is the next generation silicon manufacturing process from ASML and it is extremely hard . I'd really, really recommend reading Chip War by Chris Miller for the full story, but regardless until there is significant progress on this - and by significant progress, I don't mean the reverse engineered prototype in a Shenzhen lab. I mean reliable, scale production. The industry would be astonished if they got this to scale production before 2030. Bear in mind the Shenzhen prototype hasn't produced a working chip yet, and the more optimistic forecasts have them doing that around 2030 - volume production is a further step beyond it. It took ASML 25 years to figure out this technology - and a good 5+ years of this was scaling it up from the lab to "real" production lines. While China no doubt has incredible engineering talent and the ability to reverse engineer some of ASML's work, it's still a daunting challenge. Without EUV it is not possible to go (much) below the "7nm" fabrication size. Without being able to go below that size, you quickly hit a wall in thermal efficiency, and you reach a point where you simply cannot make the chip(s) any bigger or faster because you cannot expel the heat quickly enough. Added to that, the additional export restrictions on HBM memory to China are clearly causing significant issues, hence the strange use of two different home grown memory technologies in the 950-series - no doubt because they can't produce enough fast (which is still comparatively slow ) memory. These are really the same base constraint - without EUV manufacturing technology you can't produce the latest generations of very fast HBM memory either. Clearly the approach China is taking is instead of really looking for solid incremental leaps in compute and memory from better manufacturing techniques, the idea is to build a lot of them. Even if your fastest chips are at best 5 years behind the latest Nvidia GPUs, you can just build 10 times as many for the same overall inference capacity. And it really is roughly 10x - not against the H100 I was comparing to above, but against what Nvidia actually ships today. A Rubin VR200 is somewhere around 35PFLOP/s of dense FP4 with 22TB/sec of HBM4 bandwidth. The 910c is 60% of a four year old H100; Rubin is another order of magnitude past that. No doubt China is uniquely positioned in being able to do this - with enormous power generation capacity to power this, and huge quantities of skilled engineering and manufacturing labour to build the facilities and cooling required. But really, it's far from ideal. As models get larger, you have to split them over more and more underpowered sets of hardware. Another problem is it makes the models slow - Z.ai's own API is noticeably slower than Western providers serving the same weights. The bit I keep coming back to though is power. And here you have to be careful, because 10x the throughput gap is not 10x the power bill - the 910c pulls about 600W against something like 2000W for a Rubin part. Divide the spec sheets and you get a much less dramatic 2-3x on both compute per watt and bandwidth per watt. But the spec sheets flatter the 910c. 96GB a chip, against the 288GB or more you get on current Western parts, leaves much less room for KV cache, which forces smaller batches, and decode throughput per watt falls away badly at small batch sizes. Add a less mature software stack, and the interconnect and cooling overhead of running 10x the chips, and 5x worse on tokens per watt feels about right to me. If anything that's the charitable end. Which matters because electricity is usually reckoned to be 10-20% of the total cost of running a GPU cluster, with hardware amortisation dominating. Multiply that by five and power goes from a small component of costs to something like half your total bill. That's fine when you have China's generation capacity and you're happy to treat the difference as a strategic subsidy. It's a lot less fine if you ever want to sell inference into a competitive global market on price. Small models getting better doesn't rescue this either. They help, obviously - a 30B model serving a task that used to need a 300B one is a real saving. But it's a saving both sides get - that smaller 30B model still runs 10x as fast on Western hardware, so the ratio between Chinese and Western hardware efficiency stays exactly where it was. And assuming China doesn't have some huge breakthrough in fabrication technology - which as I said before is highly unlikely - it's probable that the gap between Western and Chinese AI hardware will widen if anything. So, to round up - yes it's an impressive feat that they've managed to do this, but there are some hard constraints on efficiency that are unlikely to be solved any time soon. And yes, China could overcome it by sheer quantity, but it's a subpar solution that has real impact on the speed, capacity and economics of their inference.

ai AI hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 2 days ago

Building a mini Homelab that fits in my carry-on

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 multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and gives me 12 wired Ethernet connections.

hardware Hardware
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Stratechery 4 days ago

Apple Updates Mini and Studio, AI Computers, OpenAI Jalapeño

Apple and OpenAI have two completely different hardware announcements; both represent pressure on Nvidia.

ai AI hardware Hardware
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Dangling Pointers 5 days ago

Vector Value Prediction with Element-wise Stride Compression

Vector Value Prediction with Element-wise Stride Compression Yanmeng Huang, Ling Yang, Yuanhu Cheng, Junhui Wang, Quan Deng, Junbo Tie, Yongwen Wang, Hai Zhong, and Libo Huang GLSVLSI'26 This paper makes an astute observation: the contents of vector registers are losslessly compressible. There are many hardware and architectural optimizations that can be derived from this fact. This paper presents one: prediction of vector register values. The point of value prediction is to expose more parallelism to a modern processor, so that more instructions can be executed in parallel. Much like branch prediction, value prediction speculatively breaks dependencies to allow the processor backend to process a less-constrained set of instructions. If the predicted value ends up being wrong, then the processor must throw away some work and start over. One way to implement value prediction is much like branch prediction, using the PC and branch history as the index into a table which contains a predicted value and a level of confidence that the predicted value is correct. This paper describes such a technique. SIMD instructions are an orthogonal way to expose more parallelism to a processor backend. Since value prediction and SIMD are orthogonal, why not combine them? Two reasons: The predictor must predict the values of all lanes of a vector register. If any one lane is a bad apple, it spoils the bunch. The data structures needed to make accurate vector-wide predictions would consume a lot of on-chip memory (storage would grow linearly with vector width) The core idea of this paper is illustrated in Fig. 1: Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3787109.3815244 The left side of the figure shows raw (uncompressed) vector registers with varying element widths. The right side shows compressed versions. The gray rectangle represents the value stored in lane 0 (no compression). The orange rectangles hold the differences (i.e., strides ) between neighboring elements. The magnitude of a stride is typically small, so strides are stored with only a few bits per stride. Here is a concrete example: The key point here is that the base + strides representation consumes fewer bits than the raw representation. If the values in a particular register cannot be represented with the base + strides representation, then those values are not considered candidates for value prediction. Fig. 6 shows IPC improvements provided by vector value prediction across a set of benchmarks: Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3787109.3815244 Dangling Pointers I didn’t see specific handling for floating point values in the paper. I wonder if a dedicated compression scheme for those types is warranted. Thanks for reading Dangling Pointers! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. The predictor must predict the values of all lanes of a vector register. If any one lane is a bad apple, it spoils the bunch. The data structures needed to make accurate vector-wide predictions would consume a lot of on-chip memory (storage would grow linearly with vector width)

hardware Hardware performance Performance
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マリウス 6 days ago

The Cables that Connect the World

At the northeastern edge of La Línea de la Concepción , on a scrubby Mediterranean beach called El Burgo–Torrenueva , there is an old battlement-tower, La Torre Nueva , and not much else. It was part of the system of coastal watchtowers during the 16th century that would defend the area against the incursion of the Barbary corsairs . The coordinates are . Walk the tideline and you would never know that buried two metres beneath the sand, a fibre-optic cable comes out of the sea here and turns into the internet. It’s the start of a line that runs across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta , on the African coast, and on toward two continents. Nearly everything you do online that crosses an ocean passes through a cable like this, ending, in most cases, underneath a similarly unremarkable patch of coast. Note: Ceuta is an interesting place by itself, that has recently gained some attention and that would also make for an interesting write-up of its own. However, the tl;dr is that it is an autonomous Spanish city of some 85,000 people sitting on the North African coast, bordering Morocco , which means the European Union has one of its very few land borders with the African continent running straight through a peninsula most people could probably not even point to on a map. It has been held by the Spanish crown since 1668, it had been Portuguese before that, and Morocco seemingly never stopped claiming it. For our purposes, though, what matters is that the small enclave, until very recently, hung off the mainland’s network by a single ageing link. When we talk about the internet we do so as if it were air. Ambient, ownerless, and everywhere. In reality, however, it is the exact opposite, because international data doesn’t (normally) travel by, let’s say, satellite, despite what most people might assume. It travels through roughly 1.5 million kilometres of very real (and very owned) fibre-optic cable lying on the seabed, surfacing at a small number of carefully chosen landing points. For these landing points you normally need a gently sloping seabed, mild currents, and little marine traffic, so that anchors and trawlers don’t sever the line. Suitable spots are scarce enough that the same beach usually becomes the shared landfall for several cable systems at once. Unlike what you might be thinking of at first, submarine cables aren’t your run-of-the-mill Ethernet or fibre cable. The hardware that does the heavy lifting out in the deep ocean is about as thick as a garden hose with roughly 25mm across and weighing in at around 1.4 tonnes for every kilometre. The part that carries your data is a small bundle of glass fibres, each one around the same thickness as human hair, sitting in the very middle. Everything else wrapped around those fibres is there to keep them alive in a deeply hostile environment. Working outward from the core, the fibres sit in a water-blocking gel inside a thin copper or aluminium tube, which is sheathed in polycarbonate, then an aluminium water barrier, then a layer of stranded steel wires that give the cable its tensile strength, then a wrap of mylar tape, and finally an outer skin of polyethylene. The copper is for power, because the cable doubles as a very long extension lead, which we will get to in a moment. Closer to shore, where trawlers and anchors roam, the whole thing gets one or two further jackets of galvanised steel armour wire, swelling it to 50mm or more in diameter and several times the weight. Hence, the cable that surfaces on our Spanish beach is buried a couple of metres down and not simply left lying on the sand. The reason a copper conductor runs the entire length is that light, no matter how pure the glass, slowly fades as it travels, and so every 50 to 80 kilometres the cable is interrupted by a repeater , which is an optical amplifier that boosts the signal back up before passing it along. Each repeater needs electricity, and because the fish sadly still didn’t manage to install power sockets on the ocean floor, the shore stations at either end have to feed a direct current of anywhere between 3,000 and 15,000 volts down that copper core, to literally power the cable from both ends at once. On top of the amplification, modern systems lean on a stack of clever tricks to keep the signal intelligible across thousands of kilometres of glass, including wavelength-division multiplexing to cram many separate colours of light down a single fibre, coherent detection to read them back out, and forward error correction to repair whatever gets garbled along the way. Length, then, is mostly a question of power and amplification rather than of the glass itself. Shorter hops can dispense with repeaters entirely, hence an unrepeatered span will happily run to around 250 kilometres on amplifiers at each end alone, which is roughly the length of the line we started this post with. At the other extreme, a single system can stretch across an ocean, and the longest of them, like the 2Africa cable encircling the continent it is named after, run to tens of thousands of kilometres. The actual manufacturing and laying of these cables is, perhaps a little surprising for something the entire global economy rests on, the business of only a small handful of companies. The bulk of the world’s submarine cable is built and installed by just four suppliers, namely the American SubCom , the French Alcatel Submarine Networks , the Japanese NEC , and the Chinese HMN Technologies . They own and operate the specialised fleet of cable-laying ships, which aren’t exactly the kind of boat you would recognise from a harbour, but more like a purpose-built vessel carrying thousands of kilometres of cable coiled in enormous tanks below deck, rolling it out over the stern at a steady walking pace as they crawl across the ocean. Deploying a new system is a multi-year effort that begins long before any ship leaves port. First somebody, these days increasingly a content giant rather than a phone company, decides a route is worth having and assembles the money for it, either alone or as a consortium of several owners sharing the bill. Then comes a marine survey, in which a ship maps the intended path along the seabed to find the gentlest, safest route around wrecks, trenches, and other people’s cables, followed by the permitting, which is the paperwork of securing landing rights and concessions from every jurisdiction the cable so much as touches. As we are about to see on the Spanish beach, this can generate a remarkable quantity of bureaucracy . Only once all that is settled does the cable get manufactured to length, loaded onto the ship, and laid, with the vessel simply lowering it onto the seabed in deep water and a sea plough burying it a metre or two beneath the sediment closer to shore, where the danger from fishing and anchors is greatest. A working ship covers somewhere in the region of 100 to 200 kilometres a day, so an ocean crossing takes several weeks at sea. A transatlantic system running some 7,000 kilometres typically costs in the order of 250 million USD, while a longer trans-Pacific route can easily climb towards 400 million, and the cable itself runs anywhere from roughly 6,000 to 20,000 dollars per kilometre, depending on how many fibre pairs it carries and how heavily it is armoured. Keep in mind that the spending does not stop once the cable is lit, because a submarine cable has a design life of only around 20 to 25 years and on top of that there are somewhere between 150 and 200 faults occurring across the world’s cables in a typical year. The overwhelming majority of them are not caused by sabotage or sharks, but by the combination of fishing gear and dragged ship anchors. Each break has to be mended by sending out one of a small number of dedicated repair ships, that are on permanent standby under regional maintenance agreements, to grapple the cable up off the seabed, haul both severed ends to the surface, splice them back together, and lower the repaired thing back down. This is slow and weather-dependent work that is quite expensive. With the data provided by TeleGeography ’s Submarine Cable Map I have put together a list of the (co-)owners of undersea cables and sorted it by the number of cables each individual company has a stake in. The full dataset runs to some 473 distinct owners, the overwhelming majority of which are obscure national and regional carriers you will never have heard of, so rather than just dumping the entire list here, I limited it to the hundred most prolific (co-)owners: Note: These figures are derived from the public Submarine Cable Map data, counting both, systems already in service, and those still planned or under construction (603 of the former, 91 of the latter, at the time of writing). The field is free-form text, so a few owners turn up under more than one spelling, and I had to do a little manual untangling of company names. What jumps out, at least to me, is the name sitting right at the top. For most of the history of this infrastructure the owners were telephone companies, the BTs and AT&Ts and NTTs of the world, laying cables to carry one another’s calls and, later, traffic. Google now has a stake in more submarine cables than any traditional carrier on the planet, with Meta not far behind, and Microsoft and Amazon both slowly accumulating their own share. The companies that fill those cables with traffic have, over the past decade or so, decided that they would rather own the pipes than rent them. The other thing the numbers tell you is just how long the tail is. Of those 473 owners, some 260 appear on exactly one cable, and more than 340 of them, north of seventy percent, on no more than two. These are the world’s national telecoms, each one buying a slice of the handful of consortium cables that happen to land on its particular stretch of coast, which is also why so many of the big international systems list a dozen or more co-owners apiece. The internet, seen from this angle, is less of a single network and more of a mix of local operators, all chipping in for a share of the same few very expensive ropes across the ocean. To see what it looks like where the cable actually meets the land, let’s head back to that beach in La Línea . The cable that surfaces there is called Dos Continentes , it belongs to GTD , a Chilean telecoms group , and it’s a relatively small regional system consisting of two armoured fibre cables looping across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta , the Spanish enclave on the African coast that depended on a single ageing link before this one was built. I went looking for exactly where it comes ashore, and the paper trail gives an idea about how invisible this infrastructure actually is. The cable lands in Spain, but the public Spanish government map of coastal concessions doesn’t seem to show it, because it looks like coastal permits in Andalusia are devolved to the regional government. The landfall instead shows in a regional registry , in a signed resolution buried under an expediente number. That document pinpoints where the cable enters the public maritime domain, at grid reference , just seaward of the beach manhole. The cable then runs inland, buried as the permit insists ( “no exterior element above ground level” ) to what is presumably a network node, where traffic is fed into GTD ’s pre-existing terrestrial dark-fibre network, from where it’ll eventually travel to one of the actual GTD data centres in Madrid , Barcelona , Bilbao/Sopelana , and Sevilla . On its way out to sea it crosses three older cables already lying on the seabed, namely Europe India Gateway , ATLAS , and FLAG . As can be seen (or, well, actually not) even an empty-looking patch of water off a Spanish beach is layered with other people’s infrastructure. Note: When GTD applied, it seems that the town council of La Línea formally objected and asked them to drop the project. The cable, the council said, cut straight through the main local fishing ground, “splitting it literally in two” , threatening the small shellfish and trasmallo boats that work those waters, and a protected limpet that lives on the rocks, in a town whose fleet was already squeezed by run-ins with Gibraltar over fishing rights. However, they were overruled and the concession was granted anyway, with mitigation conditions attached, for an initial fifteen years. The Dos Continentes cable ( Segment I , La Línea - Ceuta Sur ramal ), owned by GTD Cableado de Redes Inteligentes, S.L.U. , the Spanish arm of the Chilean GTD group , has a total length of ~105 km and is in service since 2020 under the signed concession resolution from the Junta de Andalucía ( Dirección General de Calidad Ambiental y Cambio Climático ), expediente , dated 14 January 2020. The two key points, as given in the resolution’s coordinate table are: Note: The resolution’s prose text gives a slightly different value that disagrees with its own table by approximately 140m. To convert the UTM coordinates I used the official Instituto Geográfico Nacional ( IGN ) Calculadora Geodésica with the following settings: and differ by only centimetres in practice, so the resulting coordinates (WGS84-equivalent) can be dropped straight into any consumer map or GPS app: Both points sit on Playa de El Burgo–Torrenueva , beside the Punta de Torrenueva tower, at the northeastern ( Levante / Mediterranean-facing) edge of La Línea de la Concepción , against the municipal boundary. The resolution describes the route as passing “muy cerca de la torre-faro existente en la Punta de Torre Nueva” . As you can see, however, you see nothing. :-) The permit requires the whole installation to be subterranean ( “no exterior element above ground level: No manholes, splices, connections or terminals.” ), hence you can stand exactly on the landfall, but it’s a point in the sand by a tower, and not a structure. On the afternoon I was there, a couple of dozen people were spread out on that stretch of sand under parasols, probably not even knowing that somewhere underneath them the link that carries an entire enclave’s traffic to another continent came out of the sea. It is interesting to see that what has changed most over the past decade isn’t the technology itself, but who pays for it. For a century these systems were built by carriers selling capacity to one another, which made the network something close to a shared utility with many owners. Today, however, the largest (co-)owner of submarine cable on the planet is an advertising company. It probably makes sense in their position, however it is a change in how the network is governed, and, more importantly, it seems to have happened almost entirely out of public view, which is worrying. If you live anywhere near a coast, there is a decent chance one of these things lands within driving distance of you, and the TeleGeography map will get you to roughly the right bay. Getting from there to the actual patch of sand takes some amount of digging through concession resolutions, planning registers, environmental reports, and sometimes the local newspaper archive. It took me an evening of reading to narrow it down, but I can recommend to do this exercise if you’re curious about the world that you’re living in and, more importantly, the hidden infrastructure surrounding you. PS: Maybe we picked the wrong word and should have called it the trench rather than the cloud ? Transformation type: Transformación de Datum Reference system: ETRS89 Input coordinates: UTM Huso (zone): 30

typescript TypeScript data Data hardware Hardware programming Programming
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マリウス 1 weeks ago

Flipper BUSY Bar

Yes, it is in fact real, I’m holding it in my hands, and after what feels like years of Flipper teasing everyone with this ominous device in various online posts, I can finally confirm that it is real. The BUSY Bar is a 250 gram desk device by Flipper Devices , the company behind the Flipper Zero and the still very much in-development Flipper One . It’s basically a little display that shows various things on a 72x16 RGB LED matrix, and as of writing this it’s main selling point is that can run a Pomodoro-style focus timer , and that it has a ful-blown HTTP API that’s available over USB, over the local network and over the internet, that let’s you control this thing. The BUSY Bar has a five-position selector on the top, that switches between the two focus modes ( BUSY and CUSTOM , which are functionally identical and only differ in their defaults), a OFF position that in reality is more of a sleep mode which turns both screens off, an apps position that currently only holds a clock, and a settings position for, well, the settings. A large mechanical button in the middle starts and pauses a session, a scroll wheel adjusts the timer and doubles as an OK button, and last but not least there’s a back button for when you have to navigate back. Speaking of back, the backside of the device has a 1.54 inch monochrome OLED that shows the timer, the battery percentage and the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB indicators. This way the device remains usable to its own user as well, even when clipped to the top edge of a monitor using its built-in mount, pointing its primary matrix display away from its user. The device measures 168.6 x 55.2 x 40.8mm and weighs 250g/8.82oz. The body is made out of PC/ABS with a PC front and back panel, and the monitor mount padding is TPE. The bar fits monitors up to 21mm thick and I can confirm that it works on curved displays as well. However, if you have a particularly thin monitor (say, one of these portable displays) it won’t be able to sit on top of it. The full specifications, as published in Flipper’s own documentation , are as follows: The 72x16 matrix is driven by the ICND2153 , a 16-channel constant-current PWM sink driver with a 16-bit grayscale shift register, LED open detection and a pre-charge circuit for ghosting reduction, and the ICN2012 8-channel power switch. One thing that is a bit sad in 2026 is the 2.4 GHz limitation for Wi-Fi. In an office environment full of devices and microwaves the bar is on the most congested spectrum available. The USB side is also kept, let’s say lightweight , with its 12 Mbit/s maximum speed, which, however, is certainly enough for a virtual ethernet interface serving a web UI and an HTTP API. On the charging side the documentation asks for an 18 W or higher PD charger for the 2.5 hour figure, while the device itself only appears to use 5V⎓3A (15 W) and 9V⎓1.5A (13.5 W) as its PD modes. There is one discrepancy with regard to the display brightness, where the tech specs page lists no brightness figure at all, the product page currently says 400 nits, and the launch coverage from CNX Software and XDA both quote 800 nits. I don’t have the equipment to measure it, so I can’t really tell which it is, but I can assure you that even in a brightly lit space it’s plenty bright. Flipper published an official disassembly guide on iFixit , which is awesome. Its 21 steps describe a device that’s designed with repairability in mind. The back cover is held by 8 clips and comes off with a plastic card. Below it are 5 Phillips PH1 screws, one on the bottom and four on the back. The battery has a press-latch connector and needs to be disconnected before anything else. The display flex cables use spudger-release latches, the main PCB is held by 3 screws, the control PCB by 5 latches, the front display back cover by 6 latches and the button stabilizer by 3 screws. The monitor mount legs are friction fits. Nothing is glued and the battery is a standard 18650 cell on a 4-pin connector, which means a replacement is easily and cheaply available from most electronics shops. For a 2026 consumer device this is probably something that my fellow Right to Repair advocates will love. The firmware sources are on GitHub as . Most first-party code is GPL, the library is MIT, graphical assets are CC-BY 4.0 and fonts are OFL 1.1, all of which are declared in a REUSE manifest. The build system is FBT , the same SCons-based Flipper Build Tool used for the Flipper Zero , and the dependency list is a usual embedded stack with FreeRTOS underneath Flipper’s own abstraction, lwIP for TCP/IP, TinyUSB for the USB device side, Mongoose as the embedded HTTP and WebSocket server, mbedTLS for TLS and LVGL for the UI. The bar also includes JerryScript in , wired up through and a service. That is the same JavaScript engine the Flipper Zero uses for its scripting apps. With the engine already in the firmware the only thing that still seems missing is the documented way to load your own scripts onto the device. The BUSY Bar runs an HTTP server and speaks the same API over three transports, documented as OpenAPI 3.1 . Plugging the device into a computer over USB brings up a virtual ethernet interface with the device at a fixed , printed on the back of the unit. is the local web interface, is the API reference generated by the firmware currently on the device, and is the base URL for said API. No authentication is used over USB, but it can be used via Wi-Fi and it must be used when going through Flipper’s cloud. This request responds with the current power status. The battery current is in mA, and both battery and USB voltage are in mV, which means that you can graph the device’s own power consumption without any extra hardware. Note: Access over Wi-Fi is disabled by default and has to be turned on from the local web interface over USB first. Once enabled, you can pick a token for authentication, which would go into an header, if you decide to set one: Access over the internet goes through Flipper’s cloud with a bearer token generated at , scoped either to a single device or to the account: Flipper maintains for Python with both a synchronous and an client. It maps method names onto API paths directly, so becomes and becomes . That makes the OpenAPI document usable as the library’s reference documentation: The library also has a module that scales and re-encodes images and audio for the device, an mDNS discovery helper for , and a firmware compatibility check. On top of that there is an official TypeScript library for all the soydevs, and a community-maintained .NET client . And there is also a Zig library, but… more on that in just a moment . :-) The BUSY Bar presents itself to Matter as a single on/off endpoint, an emulated switch with a configurable startup state of , , or . Turning it on starts the BUSY timer and turning it off ends it, making the integration is a trigger. Reporting the state back to Matter requires switching on Settings ➔ Smart home , at which point focus sessions can power automations like dimming lights or locking a door when a timer is turned on. Pairing is done using a QR code on the back screen or in the web interface, and the device can be commissioned into multiple fabrics at once. The Home Assistant integration is done through the HTTP API using the generic REST facilities, which works in both directions, meaning the device as an automation trigger, and the device as an output for anything else in the house. The BUSY Bar comes with mobile apps for your smartphones. I have tested its iOS app and, well, it was okay, I guess. I’m not a huge smartphone app user to begin with, but I’ll give my two cents here. The app basically mirrors the current state of the bar and offers rudimentary control over it. When you start a timer and you have the app set up (via Flipper’s cloud) you’ll see the app pushing a permanent notification that displays the timer on your smartphone’s lock screen. It’s also possible to configure a Do not Disturb mode that prevents other apps from interrupting your focus session whenever a timer is currently running. To me these are gimmicks, but to others these features might be worth something. Having that said, the apps aren’t rated particularly highly and while I didn’t encounter any issues during the few days that I’ve tested the iOS version, the app did leave a somewhat cheap impression by the way it looks and functions. It felt like one of these apps that corporate boomers at large hardware manufacturers would come up with, falsely believing that they are in-line with what today’s generations might want. There are a few things that bother me, however none of them are actual dealbreakers. The Wi-Fi authentication is a single shared numeric key, constrained by the API schema to , sent in a plain header over unencrypted HTTP on the local network. At the four digit minimum that is a 10,000 value keyspace, and I have found no documentation of rate limiting. The access mode enum also includes an value alongside , which means that the API can be opened on the LAN with no key at all. Hence, it’s probably a good idea to use a ten digit key and keep the device off networks you don’t control. Then there’s all the coming soon . Installing user apps, the JS SDK, the Windows application, and the expanded app library, those are all future promises. I don’t doubt the Flipper team that they will eventually arrive, but I could imagine that for a non-technical user it is probably very frustrating to have bought a device that can barely do anything at all at the moment, especially on a Windows machine. The device that arrives today is a focus timer, a clock, and a status display. Lastly, the price. It launched at USD 179 for waiting list members, then USD 199 for the first 3,000 units, with USD 249 quoted as the eventual retail price. At 249 it is a very hard sell, especially in the current software state. If you’re buying this because you’re a technical user and you really want to fiddle with it, it might be worth the Pesos, but as I’ve demonstrated in the past you can build a similar device significantly cheaper yourself, especially if you’re already deep into the tinkering rabbit hole. Flipper built the device I would have expected them to build, which I mean as a sincere compliment. The hardware is over-engineered for a status light in the same way that Flipper hardware always seems to be, with a real mechanical switch, a real encoder, a replaceable 18650, an official teardown guide and no glue anywhere in it. Whether it is worth the money depends entirely on what you intend to do with it. As a device that tells your coworkers to go away, it is way too expensive and not at all effective, because people who interrupt you are not deterred by a sign that tells them not to. Let me put it this way: For roughly $50 below the BUSY Bar ’s retail price you could place one of several Smith and Wesson models on your desk and it would likely be a more effective way to deter co-workers from talking to you. However, as a small, well-built, fully scriptable RGB matrix with an 8 GB filesystem, a WebSocket, and an elaborate priority system, so that several programs can share one screen without overwriting each other, it is the most open and probably best thing in its class, and I expect the community will find uses for it that Flipper hasn’t thought of yet. PS: Turning off the BUSY bar is like quitting Vim, in the sense that it doesn’t offer an obvious way to do so. Yes, the switch on top has an “OFF” position. However, that simply turns off the displays, but it keeps the busy bar running and connected to WiFi. If you want to fully shut down the device so that it won’t consume any battery, you will have to put the switch into the “Settings” position, navigate to System , Power , and Shutdown , and confirm the poweroff with Yes . Only then the device actually turns off. As mentioned before, I have a little bonus that I’d like to share with this review, which is a Zig library that implements the BUSY Bar ’s current OpenAPI specification as closely as possible, and that brings a command line tool that lets you control the device over its HTTP API. The library supports all of Zig’s platform targets as it only uses Zig’s library, and it is fairly lightweight and easy to use. I’m using it with my BUSY Bar and it has been working great for me. The command line tool contains a few quality-of-life features like simple commands for starting and stopping the busy mode, which would otherwise require manually writing JSON payloads. Long story short, if you’re one of the people that have ordered the BUSY Bar and are maybe looking to integrate it into Zig tools, or even just into your desktop environment using your own scripts, I invite you to check out the repository . If you’d only want the CLI tool to play around with your BUSY Bar you can find builds for every supported platform over on the release page on GitHub .

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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Hands-on with Raspberry Pi's CM5 Programming Jig

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 Imager, and trying to match up details like a hostname, MAC address, and the physical Pi itself, gets annoying.

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Kev Quirk 2 weeks ago

2026-08-16 14:22: Last November I replaced my oldest son's PC with an £88 iMac that was so...

Last November I replaced my oldest son's PC with an £88 iMac that was so successful that I'm now doing the same thing again for my youngest son! Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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マリウス 2 weeks ago

Recovering BIOS Firmware on the Star Labs StarBook

As I described in my latest quarterly update , a perfectly routine firmware update managed to turn my Star Labs StarBook Mk VI (AMD) into an expensive paperweight. I had simply copy-pasted the one-liner from Star Labs ' official documentation , the script did its thing for about half a minute, shut the device down, and from that point on the StarBook refused to boot. Black screen, keyboard backlight on, the power LED lit, and the speakers occasionally producing a clacking sound. Sadly no amount of the usual turn-it-off-and-on-again rituals or battery disconnects brought it back. The only way out of this situation is to re-flash the BIOS chip externally using an SPI programmer. Star Labs do document this , however their guide assumes you’re using their programming kit together with a dedicated debug board and an FPC cable. That kit is significantly more expensive than a generic programmer, doesn’t list any make or model information, and, at the time of writing, has been permanently out of stock on their web shop. Not exactly helpful when you’re stranded somewhere with a dead laptop that happens to be the only computer you have with you. The good news is that you don’t need any of that, at least for this specific model of the StarBook . As Star Labs ’ own Sean pointed out in the GitHub issue I opened while debugging this mess, this specific StarBook uses a SOIC-8 flash chip, which means you can recover it with a cheap, generic CH341A programmer and an ordinary SPI clip, as long as you respect its voltage. Warning: Flashing a BIOS chip externally can permanently destroy your device if you do it wrong. The flash chip on the AMD StarBook runs at 1.8V and you must use a 1.8V adapter. Driving it at the CH341A ’s default 3.3V risks damaging the chip, and won’t read it correctly anyway. Everything below is what worked for me, documented to the best of my knowledge, but you’re doing this entirely at your own risk. The flash chip on my StarBook Mk VI (AMD) , which I could read off the silicon once I had the backplate off, is a Winbond 25R128JWSQ , a SPI NOR flash in a SOIC-8 package. The suffix on Winbond parts apparently denotes the 1.8V variants. The ubiquitous, three-dollar CH341A “black” programmers that you’ll find on AliExpress , Amazon , and pretty much everywhere else operate their SPI lines at 3.3V (and the parallel header at 5V). Clamp one of those directly onto a 1.8V chip and, best case, reads garbage. Worst case, however, you cook the flash or something downstream of it. The fix is a small 1.8V adapter board (essentially a level shifter with a voltage regulator) that sits between the CH341A and your SOIC-8 clip. These are sold as kits, e.g. the KOOBOOK CH341A Programmer + 1.8V Adapter combo that Sean linked in the issue. Make sure whatever you buy explicitly mentions 1.8V. You will need a CH341A programmer with a 1.8V SOIC-8 adapter, a SOIC-8 test clip (the spring-loaded “Pomona-style” clips, or the cheaper ribbon-cable variety, both work), a second computer running Linux (can be via a live medium, e.g. a USB stick) to drive the programmer from, e.g. a department store laptop and a Fedora live USB will do, if you’re eloquent enough to explain to the staff that you’re definitely not building what almost certainly looks to them like a bomb. You will also need the correct firmware image for your model (more on that below), a small Phillips screwdriver and, ideally, a plastic spudger. Power everything off and unplug the charger before you start. Flip the laptop over and remove the backplate by undoing the two long Phillips screws in the top corners first, and then the eight shorter screws around the edges. Lift the plate off carefully. Then, remove the five screws holding the battery in place (one of the screw positions is intentionally left empty) and gently unplug the battery connector. Last but not least, locate the SOIC-8 flash chip on the mainboard. It’s the little eight-legged Winbond chip described above. Note: While I had the StarBook open, I noticed that my (barely two year old) battery had started to visibly bulge, so do take a moment to inspect yours. A swollen lithium battery is a fire hazard and should be replaced. SOIC-8 flash chips have a defined pin 1, and the clip’s pin 1 (usually the wire on the red edge of the ribbon) has to line up with it. Get the orientation wrong and the chip simply won’t show up. For reference, the pinout of the Winbond SOIC-8 flash is: You don’t have to wire any of this up by hand, though, as the clip and the 1.8V adapter carry all eight lines for you. The only thing you need to get right is aligning pin 1 of the clip with pin 1 of the chip. Note: On my chip there is a gray dot painted onto the package, on the corner opposite to pin 1. Pin 1 is instead marked by the small indented (etched) dot, on the exact opposite side from the painted one. I have no idea why the gray dot is there, but if you align to it you’ll have the clip on backwards. Look for the indentation, not for the gray spot if yours has one too. With the clip attached, plug the CH341A into your second machine. A quick look at should confirm it enumerated: Install if you haven’t already: Before writing anything, make sure can actually talk to the flash over your clip: If everything is seated correctly, will identify the Winbond chip (detected as something like ). If instead you get: …then don’t panic. In my experience this is almost always poor clip contact rather than a real problem. I had to wiggle and reseat the clamp a few times before the chip showed up reliably, because those cheap clips are fiddly. Only proceed once the chip is detected consistently across a couple of runs. Even if the firmware is bricked, it’s good practice to take a backup before you overwrite anything. Read the chip twice and compare the dumps to be sure your contact is solid: If the two reads differ, your clip contact is flaky and you should reseat it and try again. As for the firmware image, Star Labs publish their firmware in a public GitHub repository . For external programming you want a full SPI image, not the EFI/ updater files. For my StarBook Mk VI (AMD) (product SKU ) that’s the image. The full-image files also live under the model’s directory . Pick the one that matches your model and rename it to something convenient, e.g. . Note: Star Labs ’ firmware versioning is, to put it mildly, a mess. As of writing, the last AMI (the original “BIOS”) release for the AMD StarBook is , while onwards is Coreboot . Whichever you decide to flash, just make sure it’s a full image for your exact model. Last but not least, write the downloaded image using the command: By default will erase, write, and then verify the chip. Star Labs ' official command appends (i.e. and ) to skip those verification passes, but I’d recommend leaving them off so confirms the write actually stuck. Either way, do not disconnect or disturb the programmer while it’s working. Once it finishes successfully, remove the clip, reconnect the battery, screw the backplate back on, and try to boot. When I powered mine back on, the StarBook came to life again, only to stop at a screen complaining about a missing boot entry, since flashing a fresh image also wipes the EFI boot variables. That’s nothing dramatic and you just need to point the firmware back at your bootloader. You can either use the boot menu and pick your SSD, which usually re-adds the boot entry, or boot a recovery/live system and run (this is what I did), or drop into the EFI shell and launch your bootloader manually: Note: On newer Coreboot releases Star Labs are enabling Rom Armor and anti-rollback. On the AMD board external flashing and downgrading still worked for me on , but this is expected to be locked down from onwards. What frustrates me most about this whole ordeal isn’t that a firmware update can go wrong, because that’s always a risk when you flash something. It’s that Star Labs ’ documented recovery path depends on a proprietary kit that nobody can actually buy, when a generic CH341A with a 1.8V adapter seemingly does the job just fine. However, this info is nowhere to be found in Star Labs ’ official documentation, which is why I decided to publish this write-up to begin with. Hopefully it spares the next person the day (and the stress) it cost me.

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

To Begin, Begin

About a month ago, we could no longer ignore the occasional drip, drip, drip that sounded like it was coming from beyond the bathroom wall. Up until then, we “fixed” the problem with the occasional shrug. At one point I almost made the logical connection between flushing the toilet and hearing it more often or less often, but then the shrug came and I moved on. I hate doing these stupid DIY tasks so of course, this was put on the back burner. The drip, drip, drip back burner that drip, drip, drip made drip, drip things drip, drip, drip a lot worse. Hey, what’s causing those drops of water on the ceiling in the kitchen? Wait, isn’t this exactly above the toilet in the bathroom? Uh oh. Hey, what’s that pool below the toilet doing there, that wasn’t there two days ago? Uh oh. The best part of this worst part is that we weren’t the ones to discover it: we were on a short vacation and my mother in law came to check up on the dog and cats. I yet again failed to make the connection of not flushing the toilet that clearly accelerated the dripping. When we got back home, we called a befriended neighbour who’s a DIY wizard as I had literally no idea where to start: the inner workings of the toilet are neatly tucked away behind the wall as this is one of those hanging models. How do you even open that thing? It turns out that the plastic cover representing the push buttons can be squeezed and removed to reveal more screws and more plastic to be removed to reveal even more screws and more plastic to… you know the drill. Eventually, the inner workings will be revealed. The revealed inner workings of the toilet system. Pssshhhhhh . No more drip, drip —now a straight-up hose sound. It looks like we found the culprit: the flexible part connecting the water feed (on the photo: in the top centre) with the floater valve (or flutter tap? I don’t even know how to translate vlotterkraan to English) showed clear signs of bursting due to the continuous pressure over the years. Flushing the toilet changed the pressure, “resetting” the build-up: since we go to the toilet every day, the drips kept on dripping but not spraying like mad once we were away. Changing that cable fixed the problem. But then a second problem arose: the befriended neighbour helped us open up this thing and point out the problem, but I was the one who had to replace the part and correctly reassemble everything. I forgot to take a few pictures but did manage without any help. Two weeks later, we finally got the courage to take on another bathroom DIY project, this time without waiting for the proverbial drip : replacing the sink taps that were damaged thanks to twenty years of “hard” or calcareous water. I did replace the sink tap of the guest toilet downstairs but that was very easy. This one, not so much: I again didn’t even know where to start. As the famous Buddhist saying goes: To Begin, Begin. After two minutes, I stopped. I couldn’t access the screws because the previous owner of the house found it necessary to have the bathroom furniture installed in such a way that it was just impossible without sawing a hole on the back under the sinks. Ah, dang it. Get me that neighbour on the phone, will you? Ten minutes of extremely annoying whining of the neighbour’s multitool with dull saw attachment later, we could in fact access the screws. Progress! I took my daughter to the local Home Depot to fetch new taps matching the hole(s). But I didn’t install them: they came with a “waste trap” system you install inside the sink itself to stop the water from flowing away. The problem (yes, another one) was: we already had really old traps screwed in that also were in dire need of replacing. Great coincidence, I hear you think. Except that the old ones refused to let go, whatever I tried. I even ended up damaging and bending one of the holes inside the thing and wasn’t sure whether I would still need the old ones so I stopped. Again. I don’t know how those Buddhists did it, but I seem to have a track record of quitting DIY projects faster than I manage to start them. Anyway, it took four hands to screw out the old metal ones that were rusted up and hopelessly stuck. But then another problem (oh yes) arose. We had to temporarily dismantle the plumbing system below the sink to install the waste trap. Oh, and where did that rubber ring go that was supposed to stop the whole thing from leaking? Evaporated during the years. Dismantling is easy, but putting it all back together is a sure way to get stuff leaking precisely because of that: wear & tear. Oh, and did I know I had to tape in that screw thread over there with Teflon to make sure it’s waterproof? No I did not. But I do now! I’m ashamed to admit that I had to rely on that too kind neighbour far too often when it came to the bathroom projects. These used to be jobs for my father-in-law & me but since he no longer roams this planet and my own father, although also very good at DIY, isn’t a great teacher, I’m usually left to my own devices. Scrambling around. Postponing things. Drip, drip, drip. To begin, begin. Related topics: / DIY / By Wouter Groeneveld on 9 August 2026.  Reply via email .

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Unsung 3 weeks ago

iPod’s circular apps

iPhone’s home button and then the swipe up home gesture are so important and well done that they probably need to be covered as Unsung Heroes , but I wanted to mention something else today as we’re revisiting the whole “app icons in squircles” story ( my most recent post + Louie Mantia’s post ). The first iPhone in 2007 put apps as squircles on the home screen, and it also put a matching shape on the home button: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The shape on the button didn’t survive very long. It was removed starting with iPhone 5S in 2013, which introduced Touch ID – I guess it wasn’t possible to print the icon atop the button without sacrificing the finger detection quality. Then, in 2017, the button itself disappeared with the iPhone X. The iPod Touch was the iPhone without the cellular radio – it was made from 2007 to 2019, supported all the same apps as the iPhone, and sported a home button with a squircle up until the end. (Ironically, despite its name, it never got a Touch ID.) = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> But there was another iPod that entered the app fray. It was the iPod Nano, whose last edition from 2012 had a home button – except it looked slightly different: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> What was the reason? I don’t know if Apple ever explained it, but I believe the idea was that this iPod did not have downloadable apps, nor the App Store, nor even iOS. Those were all built-in apps, and I imagine Apple wanted to indicate visually that they’re different. Because it wasn’t just home button. The apps – eight of them, across 2 pages, although you could rearrange them! – all sported circular icons: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/ipods-circular-apps/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I don’t know if this approach was in any way effective, but I found it a funny little footnote. #apple #iconography

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Unsung 3 weeks ago

The first notch is magical

Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Collections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check it out if you’re interested how sometimes weird physics considerations influence design in the real world: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> In the video, the host also talks about the more natural order that typically looked like this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/6.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-first-notch-is-magical/6.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I wonder if you recognize this kind of an interface. I have a distinct memory of it from radios (where “zero volume” would mean “off”) and from TVs/early computer displays (where “zero brightness” meant “off,” too). There was something special about these controls that stuck in my memory, motor and otherwise: this tangible, heavy click when you ventured outside or back into “off,” almost as if you had to break the interface itself. I thought this, too, was a convention from an old analog time. Yet, I keep occasionally finding the “the first notch is special” interfaces on screen. Sometimes, they are pretty literal translations of the concept, like when you adjust the key repeat rate in macOS: Or, similarly, when you choose the dock magnification: But sometimes they are a bit more conceptual. Here, Nova treats the first notch of the zoom scale as a “list” option: Or: The new horizontal tabs in Chrome allow you to resize to whatever width you want. Below 125px, however, they snap directly to the minimum 55px width, a one-off “column view” with streamlined and purely iconographic controls: These all have pros and cons, too. On the con side, just like the fan or volume controls, they miss any memory since turning them off physically moves the knob away from any “value”; if on/off was a separate button, you could just leave the radio at your preferred volume and never touch it again. They also won’t be as discoverable as a separate onscreen toggle would be. (Here’s an example of a more classic treatment from the Nothing Phone.) Pros? They are compact. They allow you to change from “off” to a value in one quick gesture, skipping an explicit “on” step. You could even argue they are simpler also in a visual sense. But also, they are a bit… magical. I don’t know. That’s what to me unifies those old physical controls and their newer digital equivalents – they’re a little extra, a little different, a little special. They break the monotony of a predictable interface built out of boring, identical components. (Although, sadly, not a single onscreen example above uses haptics!) And I think that’s kind of nice. Not just in the very functional sense of breaking up the UI through shape coding etc., but also in a sense of making UIs more interesting. Speaking of volume, macOS used to show it as a sort of a HUD, using a treatment that borrowed from both the “first notch is special” radio knobs, and from early onscreen interfaces in TVs: But after 20+ years, macOS Tahoe changed it so it now looks this way: I can understand the argument that this is more consistent, and that it even teaches you – by proximity – that Control Center is what these controls call home. Yet I can’t help but think (and it seems I am not alone ) that this is so boring and exactly how Windows would approach things – and that this change, just like the squared icons , is how macOS lost one more bit of magic. #apple #craft #hardware #interface design #real world #youtube

design Design hardware Hardware
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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At 3 weeks ago

Premium: The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA (Part 2)

For a little under a year, everyone — myself included — has compared NVIDIA to Enron, largely because NVIDIA insisted, in detail, that it was nothing like Enron, WorldCom, or Lucent , a potent example of the Streisand Effect that would be much funnier if NVIDIA wasn’t holding up more than 7% of the value of the NASDAQ.  And as I covered in the first part of the Hater’s Guide To NVIDIA last year, there are material concerns about how the company makes money today and will continue to do so in the future. I will concede that NVIDIA isn’t exactly like Enron in the sense that it isn’t, to my knowledge, doing anything outright fraudulent, like attempting to hide massive amounts of debt inside SPVs as Enron did with its “Raptors,” which I must be clear are distinct from the SPVs used in AI data center debt , though I’ll add that something being legal doesn’t make it a good idea or ethical. That being said, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has employed many of the same tactics used by Lucent, Nortel, and many of the big dot-com busts, but has been smart enough to make everybody else carry the risk. Instead of doing direct vendor financing like Lucent did with Winstar (where it effectively loaned its customers money to pay it with), NVIDIA funded neoclouds like CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN, operating as an early stage investor , IPO anchor , post-IPO investor , $6.3 billion customer and data center lease backstop , allowing them to raise tens of billions of dollars’ worth of debt from overly-eager asset managers and banks, allowing it to do basically the same thing as vendor financing without having to take on any of that messy risk.  These deeply-unprofitable, cash-intensive, debt-riddled companies exist for one purpose — to raise debt to buy NVIDIA GPUs — and would have fallen apart without the AI hype cycle and NVIDIA’s continued backing. Per Kakashii : In other words, NVIDIA has managed to find a way to do vendor financing without ever having to provide any, finding willing supplicants in the various backers of CoreWeave and other neoclouds that would be willing to front the money, all under the mistaken belief that they were funding the next industrial revolution. To explain exactly how it works, I’ll return to my imaginary scenario from the Big Short 2 : It’s a win-win-win for NVIDIA, its customers, and the bankers involved. CoreWeave gets to raise more debt and keep its investors strung along on the still-theoretical, ever-expanding timeline of a return on invested capital, bankers get a slew of fees for pulling together the deal, and NVIDIA guarantees itself billions of dollars of business. And this approach is something where any investment by NVIDIA has a habit of being amplified by others — like Australian startup Firmus, which just raised $2bn from a bevy of investors (including NVIDIA, which had also backed an earlier round), Jane Street, and Blackrock , with a significant chunk of that money guaranteed to go towards NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA also participated in Firmus’s previous $300m round, although was not listed as a “cornerstone investor.” Earlier this year, Firmus secured a $10bn debt facility, led by Blackstone. NVIDIA will be a net beneficiary of that debt raise, and I would argue that its participation in the company’s fundraising — as well as the various announcements of partnerships between the two — has been instrumental in both the company’s fundraising and its ability to secure debt.   You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned “AI” or “LLMs” up until this point, and that’s because technology has, for the most part, very little to do with these transactions. As I discussed in this week’s free newsletter , 70% or more of hyperscaler revenues are from OpenAI and Anthropic, and CoreWeave’s largest customers are Microsoft (for OpenAI), Google ( for OpenAI ), Anthropic, NVIDIA itself, and Meta. Customers are not coming to it for any particular technological moat or unique offering outside of its ability to sling more NVIDIA GPUs to the same customers that everybody else has.  While GPUs technically are used for AI training and inference, their relationship to NVIDIA is only as good as their ability to create more hype. As I discussed a few weeks ago , it has promised somewhere between 10x and 25x “operating cost savings” with every successive generation of GPUs, though it’s never really clear how that manifests or what it actually means, or whether any of that even matters to OpenAI and Anthropic, its largest customers by proxy.  Nevertheless, it’s pretty difficult to work out what each generation really changes. SemiAnalysis claims it “delivers 5.4x performance per MW and 5x performance per dollar against [the previous generation] GB200 NVL72,” but that’s for DeepSeek R1, a year-and-a-half old open source model that’s vastly smaller and less-powerful. But that’s not really a problem, because all NVIDIA needs to do is keep up the appearance of innovation in as precise or imprecise a way to justify increasing prices with each new generation, and to convince people that they’re building “ AI factories ” as they fund data centers for customers that don’t really exist outside of the big AI labs . While NVIDIA has thousands of talented engineers building its GPUs and the associated software, the only real purpose is to create a vague sense of “more” and “bigger” and “more powerful” to justify racks of 72 GPUs that are more than twice the price of their predecessors .  That’s because NVIDIA is no longer a technology company so much as it is an asset management and marketing firm that happens to sell semiconductors. To that point, I believe that the comparisons to Enron, Lucent, and other dot-com flameouts are on the right path , but misses one very, very obvious comparison: GE Capital, the financial services of General Electric, specifically in the Jack Welch years that I covered two years ago in the Shareholder Supremacy . Welch’s GE did whatever it needed to to survive, buying and selling companies to help boost GE’s earnings every quarter, and eventually grew into what David Gelles would call a “large, unregulated bank,” to the point that GE Capital was bringing in $425 billion in revenue in 2001 (about 50% of GE’s revenue), providing everything from direct leases of equipment to assuming its customers debts to investing directly in its customers, all to make sure that, well, said customers continued being able to buy GE gear.  Unlike GE Capital, NVIDIA has the advantage of a much, much simpler business model and far fewer products to sell, but said advantage is a problem for two brutal reasons: its customers are driven by desperation and a fear of missing out, and its remarkable revenue growth means that it must in turn grow by ridiculous amounts every single quarter from here to eternity.  Yet this problem is driving it to take increasingly-Welchian measures to make sure that demand keeps up with investor expectations. It (per the FT) just signed leases worth as much as $50 billion for a Texas-based data center built by Hut 8, which makes it likely that this capacity is being built for Anthropic, with which it already has multiple deals . In the same piece, the FT mentions that NVIDIA is in talks to backstop $250 billion in compute costs for a still-theoretical 10GW data center in Ohio. And again , much like GE, NVIDIA uses its stellar credit rating (AA- - two rungs lower than GE at its height) to secure these deals, per the FT: In the end, GE’s greater collapse led to lawsuits, SEC fines and revenue revisions, all as a result of its “aggressive” accounting practices. For example, it was forced to restate its 2016 and 2017 earnings as a result of “new accounting standards” it instituted as a result of an SEC investigation into its insurance and power divisions that eventually cost it a $200 million fine , cutting a remarkable $4.24 billion off of earnings in the period .  While I’m not accusing NVIDIA of anything untoward, it’s impossible to ignore the sheer aggression of its circular financing and willingness to do whatever it takes to keep selling further GPUs. NVIDIA is now a semiconductor manufacturer, a venture capitalist, a lender of last resort,  Today’s premium newsletter is the story of NVIDIA’s descent into circular madness, and how Jensen Huang is increasingly becoming the Jack Welch of AI. This is Part 2 of The Hater’s Guide To NVIDIA, or WUDA CUDA SHUDA

Finance hardware Hardware business Business
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

I'm excited for Intel after testing the XPS 13

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 13 through my gauntlet of benchmarks , and published a review on my YouTube channel:

testing Testing hardware Hardware
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マリウス 3 weeks ago

GL.iNet Mudi 7

tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 ( GL-E5800 ), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is close to what I measure, and the LTE reception alone is a clear upgrade over the M2 . Sadly the Tri-band on the box means two bands at a time, there is no MLO at all, both SIM trays are underneath the battery, the touchscreen still can’t get you through a captive portal, and firmware 4.8.5 has a cellular defect that leaves the device on Connecting… after a carrier deactivates an idle data session. If you came to the Mudi line for blue-merle and IMEI randomization, you might be disappointed to learn that this sadly seems to have ended with the GL-E750 . Earlier this year I reviewed the GL.iNet Slate 7 ( GL-BE3600 ), the Wi-Fi 7 travel router that replaced my long-running Linksys WRT3200 ACM as the router in my travel setup . I mentioned in that post that I was also in the process of replacing my even older Netgear Nighthawk M2 , the LTE-A Cat. 20 hotspot that has handled my mobile data for almost seven years now. The M2 has been a reliable piece of equipment, however, it has started misbehaving so badly that I no longer trust on the road. Random reboots, increasingly nonsensical battery percentages, and touch buttons that no longer register most presses make it a tedious device to use, and with it well past any expectation of longevity, I figured it was time to give its successor a proper, multi-month trial before the M2 gives up entirely in the middle of some airport lounge. The device I settled on is the GL.iNet Mudi 7 ( GL-E5800 ), a 5G NR Sub-6 Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 travel router that GL.iNet unveiled at CES 2026 and started shipping back in April. On paper the device is an upgrade over both the Netgear M2 and the Mudi V2 aka GL-E750V2 , which was still a 4G/LTE Cat. 6 device with a 0.96" OLED. The Mudi 7 packs Qualcomm ’s Dragonwing MBB Gen 3 platform, a Wi-Fi 7 PHY with a 6 GHz radio, two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, two USB-C ports, a 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, a 2.8" color touchscreen, and a removable 5380 mAh battery, all in a 157x75x22.8mm, 300g enclosure that runs OpenWrt with GL.iNet ’s firmware layer on top. At $419.99, or roughly €425, it is also the most expensive device GL.iNet sells. Just like the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 is above most consumer travel routers. It comes with a 5G NR Sub-6 Rel-17 NSA/SA modem with LTE Cat. 20 (DL) / Cat. 18 (UL) fallback, and the exact specifications of the hardware are as follows: Apart from having a modem, the second difference from the Slate 7 is the 6 GHz radio, which the Slate 7 lacks entirely. However, the Tri-band on the box is a bit misleading. The Mudi 7 has radios for all three bands, but the chipset cannot drive 5 GHz and 6 GHz simultaneously, so you configure the device as either 2.4 + 5 GHz or 2.4 + 6 GHz. This also means the Mudi 7 has no Multi-Link Operation at all. On the Slate 7 I complained that GL.iNet ’s MLO documentation advertises a 6 GHz band that the hardware doesn’t have. On the Mudi 7 the 6 GHz band is present and MLO is gone, which is an odd trade for a device that costs nearly three times as much. There are two regional variants, GL-E5800NA for North America and GL-E5800EU for Europe, with different 5G NR and LTE band coverage, which is important to travelers like myself. Both variants cover n5, n7, n26, n38, n41, n77 and n78. Beyond that they diverge, as the EU model adds n1, n3, n8, n20, n28, n40 and n75, while the NA model adds n2, n12, n14, n25, n30, n48, n66 and n71, plus n13, n29 and n70 in SA mode only. LTE splits the same way, with the EU model on FDD B1, B3, B5, B7, B8, B20, B28 and B32 and TDD B38, B40, B41, B42 and B43, and the NA model on FDD B2, B4, B5, B7, B12, B13, B14, B17, B25, B26, B29, B30, B66 and B71 and TDD B38, B41, B42, B43 and B48. For my use case (almost exclusively APAC/LATAM) the EU variant turned out to be the more sensible choice, but anyone moving frequently between North America and the rest of the world should read both band lists carefully before ordering. To be fair, though, the Nighthawk M2 splits even harder. Netgear ships that device as at least five separate SKUs, and the band list for each one is quite short. The box itself contains the Mudi 7 , the battery pack, a relatively big travel pouch, a USB-C cable, and the paper manual. No external antennas and no power adapter, which I appreciate, given the chargers I already lug around. The headline feature is the modem, which uses the Dragonwing platform, Qualcomm ’s rebranded enterprise and mobile-broadband lineup. In practice the 4.67 Gbps peak figure is, as with virtually all hyped peak numbers, marketing material. Real-world throughput depends primarily on the carrier’s network, the SIM plan, the spectrum allocation, the band combination, and the signal conditions at your specific location. In my own testing I have seen sustained downlink figures in the 600–900 Mbps range on a properly-provisioned 5G network, and significantly less (in the 100–250 Mbps range) on a more typical mixed NSA deployment. What’s more important, though, is the LTE fallback. The modem falls back to LTE Cat. 20 (DL) / Cat. 18 (UL) and is significantly more sensitive than the M2 ’s aging Qualcomm baseband. In the same hotel rooms where my M2 used to show a single LTE bar at best, the Mudi 7 can consistently show two or three, often pulling more usable bandwidth on the same SIM and the same carrier. Lastly, the Mudi 7 has two TS-9 external antenna ports for those of us who care to bolt on a pair of paddle or directional antennas in RV/cabin/dead-zone scenarios. I haven’t bothered to test these, as my use case doesn’t involve any of that. However, these days most people might have almost exclusively converted to Starlink anyway, so the external antennas might not be as much of a selling point as they were ten years ago. The Mudi 7 has two Nano-SIM slots and one onboard eSIM. Both Nano-SIMs and the eSIM are managed via the touchscreen and the web UI. However, it’s important to note that the Dual SIM Dual Standby in this context means dual standby with an asterisk. The onboard eSIM and SIM slot 2 are mutually exclusive and cannot be active at the same time. The eSIM is disabled by default, and the moment you enable it, SIM 2 stops functioning. SIM 1 remains operational either way, and the modem can auto-switch (i.e. fail over) between SIM 1 and whichever of SIM 2 / eSIM is currently active, but you do not get to keep three simultaneously hot profiles. For anyone hoping to keep a local SIM, a regional roaming eSIM, and a home-country SIM in standby together, this is a bit of a disappointment. Failover itself has also been more rigid than I expected. The web UI exposes the auto-switch feature, including data-usage thresholds and signal-loss triggers, but the failover decision-making has been slow in practice. A complete loss of signal usually does cause a switchover within a reasonable amount of time, but more nuanced situations (such as one SIM throttling without any indication, or losing data while still showing connected ) often require a manual nudge. GL.iNet ’s documentation describes far more sophisticated multi-WAN coordination than the SIM-side auto-switch logic delivers. Then again, to be fair, Mwan3 on the Linksys has had similar issues and I guess down detection is just a complicated thing to get right. One caveat is that both Nano-SIM trays are underneath the battery , so putting a card in or taking one out means having the device powered down, prying off the back cover, and pulling the battery out. On a product aimed at people who buy a local SIM on arrival, that is a weird design. Then again, in many cases the device is probably already powered off because you arrived by airplane anyway. Switching between profiles that are already provisioned (either physical-to-physical or physical-to-eSIM) is one of the things the touchscreen handles well, and it doesn’t normally require any detours into the admin UI. Speaking of which, just like the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 comes with a built-in touch display, though here it is a 2.8" color LCD rather than the much smaller panel on the Slate 7 . The screen shows the usual variety of things, like signal strength and current network type, connected client count, real-time data usage, battery percentage, Wi-Fi details with a QR code for quick joining, and the ability to toggle the VPN, the Wi-Fi, and a couple of other features without opening the admin UI. Firmware upgrades also display a progress bar on the screen, which (as I had complained about with the Linksys ) is a small but welcome quality-of-life feature. The notable thing missing from the touchscreen is captive portal handling. The moment the upstream WAN is a hotel or airport Wi-Fi network with a captive portal in the middle, the touchscreen is useless and you have to reach for a phone, tablet, or laptop, attach to the Mudi 7 , open a browser, and go through the portal manually before the router (and everything behind it) can reach the internet. But to be fair, a 2.8" panel is probably a poor place to render an HTML login form and a keyboard to begin with. The lockscreen with a 4-digit PIN that was introduced on the Slate 7 is also present on the Mudi 7 , which I once again appreciate, given the kind of sensitive information (carrier and SIM details, VPN state, hostnames) that this screen displays. One annoying quirk is the battery percentage reporting. Both the LCD and the web UI will, after a full charge, stay at 100% for the first 1–3 hours of unplugged operation before catching up to reality and dropping rapidly to whatever the actual state of charge is. The underlying kernel fuel-gauge driver does report accurate values (you can confirm this via SSH and ), but from what I can see the MCU layer that drives the LCD and the admin UI applies some smoothing to avoid the device displaying 98–99% immediately after charging. I would much rather see the truth on the screen than a smoothed consumer-friendly approximation, especially on a device whose entire purpose is to be unplugged for long stretches. The Mudi 7 shipped with OpenWrt 23.05.4 ( , Kernel ), with GL.iNet ’s firmware layer on top. The device runs Qualcomm ’s proprietary SDK and binary blobs. The same software-openness caveats that apply to the Slate 7 apply here as well. You get full root SSH access, the configuration tree, and the ability to side-load the LuCI UI if you want, but you’re stuck with GL.iNet ’s firmware for anything that touches the cellular or Wi-Fi 7 silicon. The original Mudi ( GL-E750 ) is the device that blue-merle was written for, the SRLabs package that changes the IMEI via AT commands on the device’s modem, wipes the stored client MAC addresses, and randomizes the BSSID and the WAN MAC address across reboots, and it is a large part of why the Mudi line got its reputation as the privacy-focused travel router in the first place. However, blue-merle supports the GL-E750 and nothing else, and with the 5G modem, the firmware base, and the entire platform having changed underneath it, there is no indication that this is going to change. If IMEI randomization is the reason you were looking at a Mudi specifically, the Mudi 7 does not give you that, at least today. To be fair, the firmware layer is also what makes the device usable out of the box. The Multi-WAN , WireGuard , OpenVPN , Tailscale , AdGuard Home , DNScrypt-proxy2 , Tor , and the modem management features are all preinstalled and reachable via a friendly web UI, which (as I had mentioned in the Slate 7 review) is a substantial step up over the bare vanilla OpenWrt experience on an older router like my WRT3200 ACM . The Mudi 7 supports WireGuard with up to 600 Mbps. I have been running my own WireGuard tunnel on the device, routing the entire LAN through it, and it has kept up with whatever the upstream 5G or LTE connection could deliver. As with the Slate 7 , Tailscale is available, with the same caveats. Basic connectivity works, but anything beyond the default configuration (exit nodes with advanced flags, subnet routing, tagged ACLs, etc.) is going to require manual intervention via SSH. The Mudi 7 can, like the Slate 7 , run a Tor node and route LAN traffic over it. The moment Tor is enabled, VPNs , DNS , AdGuard Home and IPv6 will not work properly anymore, because the firmware doesn’t (yet) compose these services the way a hand-rolled OpenWrt setup can. Note: As I had explained in the Slate 7 review , these limitations are 100% a GL.iNet issue and not caused by OpenWrt . The same combinations work fine if you wire them up by hand on top of a vanilla OpenWrt installation, including DNS lookups via Tor through DNScrypt-proxy2 . The UI just isn’t there yet on the GL.iNet side. AdGuard Home is, as on the Slate 7 , part of the default installation and just as plug-’n-play. I still don’t use it personally, but the web UI is identical to the one on the Slate 7 and works fine in the configurations I have tested. The Mudi 7 differentiates itself from most travel routers in the number of uplinks it can hold at once, as the device supports up to five concurrent WAN inputs: The cellular modem, the 2.5 GbE Ethernet port (when configured as WAN), Wi-Fi-as-WAN (i.e. repeater mode), USB-C tethering from a phone or a secondary modem, and USB-C-attached USB Ethernet adapters. The firmware uses Multi-WAN underneath, with a friendly UI on top. Router, access point and extender modes are all supported, WDS is not. The device features dual USB-C, with one of the USB-C ports being power-only. The other USB-C port is a fully-featured 10 Gbps port with USB tethering, and USB OTG support. It’s possible to charge the Mudi 7 on one port while simultaneously tethering on the other. USB tethering itself, just like on the Slate 7 , is a matter of a few clicks in the UI. Plug a phone in, enable tethering on the phone, and the Mudi 7 picks it up as a USB Ethernet WAN. The same applies to a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, should you ever need to add a second wired WAN or to bridge into a hotel’s wired LAN where Wi-Fi is unreliable. I have had the Mudi 7 for roughly three months now, and the tl;dr is that the device is pretty solid overall, with a handful of caveats around firmware quirks and the chunkier footprint. Battery life is a bit of a mixed bag here, because it depends a lot on what features/services are running on the Mudi 7 , on the amount of WiFi clients and how cellular coverage is. Let me therefore put it this way: For the amount of features you get with the Mudi , especially compared to my older M2 , the battery life is decent. Having that said, however, I do believe that the Nighthawk , at least in its earlier days, was able to survive longer on a single charge than the Mudi is able to right now. Obviously I don’t have scientific benchmarks to prove it, but I remember vividly being out and about with the M2 for a full day and going to bed with the device only around halfway drained. This is something that I don’t think is possible with the GL.iNet . While the device easily gets through a regular workday, I probably wouldn’t trust it to survive a full day road trip with four friends through a mountainous region. Ultimately, its battery life can be extended using an external powerbank, but that’s clearly not ideal with a device that already weighs 300g on its own. If we’re being honest here, 300g equals about two Google Pixel 5 or two Motorola Edge 30 phones, which can both provide you with a 5G hotspot and which will probably (combined) outlast the Mudi by at least a few hours. So if the pure 5G hotspotting capability is all you care about, the GL.iNet is definitely not a good option with regard to battery life. If, however, you’re looking at it as the centerpiece of your mobile LAN, that will allow you to leave your Slate 7 at home because it supports pretty much every important feature and offers integrated 5G connectivity on top of that, then its battery life isn’t too bad after all. The chassis warms up noticeably under sustained 5G load (especially with a VPN), but never to the point where I’d be concerned about throttling or comfort. The back gets warm to the touch, but no warmer than a mid-range phone under similar load, and certainly not as warm as my old M2 would get at times. Unlike with the Netgear , I haven’t experienced any heat warnings with the Mudi so far. The build quality is solid. The chassis has a reassuring density to it, the touchscreen is responsive, and the front button doesn’t feel flimsy. The back panel is a bit of a weak point, because it is a plastic snap-fit cover protecting the battery and it creaks under pressure. Given that this cover has to be pried off to swap the battery or a SIM, I’m half-expecting it to wear out relatively quickly. Weight and footprint, as I had anticipated in the travel desk write-up , are clearly worse than the M2 ’s. The Mudi 7 is heavier (300g vs the M2 ’s 240g) and noticeably chunkier in both length and width. In absolute terms this is still a small device, but on a packed desk and in a packed bag, the difference is noticeable. The included travel pouch is also larger than the router needs, because most of the extra volume is set aside for accessories. Most people probably won’t use the travel pouch for travel, but rather for storage at home. Charging behavior has been predictable. The 24W PD fast-charging input gets the 5380 mAh battery from 0% to ~80% in roughly an hour, and to full in about an hour and 45 minutes. The device accepts whatever USB-C PD source there is around, including my UGREEN 100W and the Sharge Pouch Mini P2 power bank. If you’re considering this device as a permanent member (or even a centerpiece) of your LAN, I have some good news for you: The Mudi 7 can be operated via USB-C, without its battery plugged in. I don’t know whether this is officially supported by GL.iNet , because when you connect a charger the display will show a battery icon with an exclamation mark inside of it, but long-pressing the front button will turn the device on nevertheless. I haven’t experienced any peaks in power-consumption that would lead to arbitrary restarts without the battery plugged-in, but your mileage may vary. Reliability has been pretty good, and I haven’t experienced any crashes, random reboots, or other issues. The only firmware-level oddities I have encountered are the battery reporting discussed above and the cellular issue in firmware 4.8.5 mentioned in the tl;dr : After a carrier deactivates an idle data session, the router can remain on Connecting… until I intervene. The Mudi 7 is probably one of the most capable travel-friendly mobile routers I have ever owned, and it has a permanent place in my travel setup . The 5G modem, the dual-SIM-plus-eSIM configuration, the dual USB-C ports, the 2.5 GbE port, the removable 5380 mAh battery, and the Wi-Fi 7 PHY can replace the M2 + Slate 7 combo for me, while also covering scenarios (5G, multi-SIM, multi-WAN, USB-C-tethered secondary modems) that the combo never could. While the 300g weight and the bulkier footprint are a step back compared to the M2 , if I account for the added size and weight of the Slate 7 that I had to lug around alongside the M2 to make the LAN work for me, then it doesn’t look as bad anymore. Then again, with the M2 + Slate 7 combo I had the flexibility to only bring what’s really needed, which, for e.g. a day trip, would end up being only the M2 . Apart from that, there is the Tri-band situation, with the chipset only driving two bands at once and offering no MLO at all, the SIM-failover logic, which doesn’t work as smoothly as one would expect, the SIM 2 vs eSIM mutual-exclusion, that is mildly annoying, and the battery percentage smoothing, that makes me distrust everything else the device reports. However, none of these are deal-breakers but more like minor inconveniences. The proprietary Qualcomm blob situation is the more concerning part for me, and as with the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 is OpenWrt only in spirit , and its long-term wireless and cellular stack support depends entirely on GL.iNet and Qualcomm continuing to cooperate. If your priority is true software freedom, this device, like virtually every other 5G-capable router on the market today, is not for you. Neither is it for you if you bought into the Mudi name for blue-merle and IMEI randomization. If your priority is a modern, travel-ready, multi-WAN, multi-SIM 5G router with a solid (if proprietary) firmware on top, the Mudi 7 is, at the time of writing, the best option I’m aware of. I will be sticking with the Mudi 7 as my mobile-data device for the foreseeable future, and the Nighthawk M2 has been retired to the bottom of a drawer after seven years of service. PS: Make sure to check future updates if you’re interested in the long-term experience with the Mudi 7 .

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Kev Quirk 3 weeks ago

📝 2026-08-04 15:43: Thinking about selling the 64GB RAM from my laptop and paying off my mortgage...

Thinking about selling the 64GB RAM from my laptop and paying off my mortgage... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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alikhil 4 weeks ago

How to control RGB on RAM sticks, motherboards, coolers, graphics cards programmatically with OpenRGB.

When I was building my gaming PC a few years ago, I bought a second-hand pair of RAM sticks with RGB lights. It was entertaining to see them glowing and changing colors. I did not bother myself to control them. Some time later, I got sick of gaming and made a decision to rebuild it into a self-hosting server. The PC moved from my table to an under-TV shelf in the living room. And here, glowing lights became distracting during watching TV or when we have guests sleeping in the living room. Therefore, I started searching for ways to control/disable RGB lights. After some search, I encountered OpenRGB . It’s open-source RGB control software that is independent from manufacturer software. It supports color syncing across several devices and has a community-managed effects library . It has a long list of more than 2,500 supported devices and, hopefully for me, my Corsair Vengeance was there! What a great piece of software, right? It’s a shame that I needed this software only to disable RGB . OpenRGB runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. You can download the package for your operating system from the releases page . On my Debian-based server, I downloaded the package and installed it with: The package includes the required udev rules. If you use an AppImage, Flatpak, or a build from source, install the udev rules too. Without them, OpenRGB may not be able to access the RGB hardware without running as root. Before creating the service, check that OpenRGB can detect your devices: Make a note of the device numbers you want to control. Mine were and . I needed the RGB to turn off every time the system starts. So I ended up with the following systemd service. First, test the command manually. is black, which turns the LEDs off. The mode is supported by my devices; use the output of to check which modes yours support. When that worked, I created the service below. Now the RAM lights turn off automatically on every boot. No proprietary RGB application, no running desktop session, and no bright lights in the living room. If you have devices with RGB lights, check whether they are supported by OpenRGB . You might find a more creative use for it than I did and build some nice RGB animations.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio

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.

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Kev Quirk 1 months ago

Left-Handed People Can’t Use a Fountain Pen

Apparently left-handed people can't use a fountain pen as the left hand smudges the ink as they write. I call bullshit on that. I'm left-handed, and I use a fountain pen just fine - even with an "overhand" grip. I read this post from Neal Stephenson a few days ago (thanks to Sal for sharing it), where Neal - a professional, left-handed writer who writes his books with a pen and paper - shares some of his experience and advice on writing with a fountain pen. I've been back using fountain pens for a few months now and it's going great, but as Neal says - it's all about the paper. I use a decent quality notepad for writing my notes, with either a £30 Lamy Safari fountain pen, or a ~£100 Kaweco AL Sport. Both work great and I'm yet to find myself with pen on my hand. Here's an example of me writing in my notebook, using both my Lamy and Kaweco. As you can see, I have an overhand grip where my hand swipes across the ink as I write, but the ink is dry by the time my hand gets there. Both these pens have a medium nib too. So if you're left-handed and think you can't use a fountain pen, you can! You just need some decent paper. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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