Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network.
Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM , alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99 . Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB models in the current generation), which I'll embed below: But if you'd like the tl;dr :
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used MRU like Sony's HVR-MRC1 , which runs around $300 on eBay 1 .
After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe , I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even a modern Mac running macOS < 26, with some dongles —and transfer digital video footage between the camera and an application like Final Cut Pro.
Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made , and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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!
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 .
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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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