Latest Posts (20 found)
Jeff Geerling Yesterday

Restoring an Xserve G5: When Apple built real servers

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1 , which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era. This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G4 1 . And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting. Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Capacitor Plague . The PSU tends to run hot, and some of the capacitors weren't even 105°C-rated, so they tend to wear out, especially if the Xserve was running high-end workloads.

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 2 days ago

Can the MacBook Neo replace my M4 Air?

Many of us wonder if the MacBook Neo is 'the one'. Because I have a faster desktop (currently a M4 Max Mac Studio), I've always used a lower-end Mac laptop, like the iBook or MacBook Air, for travel. I've used MacBook Pros in the past, but I like the portability of smaller, cheaper models. In fact, my favorite Mac laptop ever was the 11" Air.

hardware Hardware gaming Gaming Electronics
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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

A PTP Wall Clock is impractical and a little too precise

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It? , I wanted to replicate the PTP ( Precision Time Protocol ) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock , a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ application to display PTP time (if available on the network) on a set of two LED matrix displays, using a Raspberry Pi.

c++ C++ open-source Open Source hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

I built a pint-sized Macintosh

To kick off MARCHintosh , I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Expert Beginners and Lone Wolves will dominate this early LLM era

After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009 , I noted: As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice import script, but I don't have the time for that now).

programming Programming web-development Web Development career Career
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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

Upgrading my Open Source Pi Surveillance Server with Frigate

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case , and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required). I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives 1 , and an AI accelerator.

ai AI
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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

How to Securely Erase an old Hard Drive on macOS Tahoe

Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore. I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'. Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been since—I believe—the very first version of Disk Utility in Mac OS X!

tutorial Tutorial hardware Hardware security Security rust Rust
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

Frigate with Hailo for object detection on a Raspberry Pi

I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB. Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors can be used with other SBCs and computers too, if you buy an M.2 version .

ai AI hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging it's AI slop code. It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone." You'll have to forgive me if I'm not enthusastic about that.

programming Programming open-source Open Source ai AI
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Jeff Geerling 4 weeks ago

Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robot

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES , I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion. HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate that setup in the keynote, it's not, as Jensen put it, "utterly trivial now."

ai AI
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck With My Dad

In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio and live broadcast for decades, so he enjoyed the experience as the engineer not on duty!

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

The first good Raspberry Pi Laptop

Ever since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 was introduced, I wondered why nobody built a decent laptop chassis around it. You could swap out a low spec CM5 for a higher spec, and get an instant computer upgrade. Or, assuming a CM6 comes out someday in the same form factor, the laptop chassis could get an entirely new life with that upgrade.

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Ode to the AA Battery

Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Recapping My 5 Year Old Studio Monitors

A few weeks ago, I started hearing a slight crackle at the loudest parts of whenever sound was playing through my PreSonus Eris E3.5 speakers . It was very faint, but quite annoying, especially when editing my YouTube videos. For a few days I thought it could be a hearing problem (at this point in my life, every year brings a new health adventure...), but after testing my wired headphones and another small computer speaker on the same output, I determined the problem was, indeed, coming from the PreSonus speakers.

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago. What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog , a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!). The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments . I wanted my blog to have the same level of interactivity I had pre-Thingamablog, when I was (briefly) on Xanga.com.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Raspberry Pi's new AI HAT adds 8GB of RAM for local LLMs

Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM . With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in addition to the equivalent 26 TOPS INT4 machine vision performance on the earlier AI HAT with Hailo 8.

ai AI
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Raspberry Pi Pico Mini Rack GPS Clock

I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this: This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired. For full details on designing and building this clock, see: When you turn on the Pico, the display reads Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid When the 3D fix is regained, the colon starts blinking again

Electronics hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Local Email Debugging with Mailpit

For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog. I built an Ansible role for Mailhog , and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM , a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago. Unfortunately, barring any future updates from the maintainers, it seems like Mailhog has not been maintained for four years now. It still works , but something as complex as an email debugging environment needs ongoing maintenance to stay relevant.

web-development Web Development devops DevOps
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Raspberry Pi is cheaper than a Mini PC again (that's not good)

Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5 . So comparing systems with: Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208. Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95: Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages 1 , the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5. 16GB of RAM 512GB NVMe SSD Including case, cooler, and power adapter

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points

Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio cluster I've also been testing. But many of the same caveats of the DGX Spark (namely, price to performance is not great if you just want to run LLMs on a small desktop) apply to Dell's GB10 box as well.

ai AI hardware Hardware
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