Jeff Geerling

I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for?

You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop.

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value) is the most important attribute.

Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category.

My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose from a Framework 12 I bought to test, or the MacBook Neo I bought a couple months ago to use around the studio.

Tuning in FM Radio on a 3D Printer Heatbed

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question:

Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna?

A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like an antenna, if you squint the right way.

Really, anything (or anyone) can be an antenna, given enough power.

I patched iozone for better disk benchmarks on modern macOS

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:32:00 -0500

A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes).

It's been around since 1991, and is still updated today—in fact, the two latest updates (version 509 and 510) contain patches I sent in to get iozone to compile on Apple Silicon Macs running newer releases of macOS.

News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:15:00 -0500

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit.

Raspberry Pi 6

One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6.

Looking back at previous launches:

2012: Raspberry Pi
2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years)
2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year)
2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)
2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years)

Following that cycle, one would expect a Pi 6 3-4 years after the Pi 5, which would put it in 2026 or 2027.

Wi-Wi Is Wireless Time Sync at 1 nanosecond

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP, a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT.

Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone.

The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns. The next generation will have time down to 5ns in real-world use.

Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again.

I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default:

I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall
I stopped updating the firmware
I locked the printer into Developer mode
I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer

I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's.

HomePod mini feels like magic, but it's just good timing

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago, in 2020.

I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection.

I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work?

Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing the process is embedded below:

SBC Clusters are a terrible value, but they're fun anyway

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 01 May 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C.

I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads.

Raspberry Pi Connect may control Windows soon

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect, Raspberry Pi's free remote access service.

When they announced Pi Connect in 2024, I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid remote access solution after Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' was launched.

The service was helpful for those who had one or more Raspberry Pis to access, but the Pi Connect daemon didn't run on Windows or macOS at the time, so a true competitor to RealVNC (at least for basic use cases) it was not.

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0500

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

2.5G and even 5G USB adapters have been out for a while, but sometimes you need more bandwidth.

An Arm Mainboard for the Framework Laptop

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:49:00 -0500

Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard), the fastest RISC-V option (DC-ROMA II), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC, which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM.

My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of Theseus'.

Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs¹.

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.

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0500

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:

Bring back MiniDV with this Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

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 eBay¹.

Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0500

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.

The best laptop Apple ever made

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made, and tl;dw¹ 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:

Restoring an Xserve G5: When Apple built real servers

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

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 G4¹. 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.

Can the MacBook Neo replace my M4 Air?

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:50:00 -0500

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.

A PTP Wall Clock is impractical and a little too precise

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0600

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.