Notices by Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy@mastodon.social)

I'd love to see what mini racks *you* come up with! And special shout-out to the Reddit r/minilab community :)

For months, I've been working on Project MINI RACK, a resource for mini homelabs, portable RF rigs, and more!

I hinted at it yesterday, but today I published a video, a blog post, and a full GitHub repo to help others build compact, efficient equipment racks! 🧵

First, kicking things off with a video—I introduce the project, show off three mini rack builds of my own (including a portable solar-powered rack!), and four builds from the community! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1GCIwLm3is

And for those less visually-inclined, of *course* I always post the same thing, with even more detail, on my blog: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/project-mini-rack-compact-and-portable-homelabs

Then there's the open source project itself, which is here: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com

@alatartheblue @bitsplusatoms @W6KME it is indeed a massive set of rabbit holes. I have spent far too much on SDR stuff and antennas lately heh.

People often ask me about this fancy-looking Linux monitoring tool when they see me using it in my videos—it's called 'btop' and it's available via the package manager of almost every modern Linux distro (e.g. `sudo apt install btop`)

I posted a video on my 2nd channel with my 'top' 10 list of Linux (and macOS, and sometimes even Windows!) monitoring tools you can run in the console—for CPU, power, network, disk, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4isEhE2rvmA

The number of people comparing a 16 GB Pi 5 at $120 to an 8 GB N100 at $150 is too damn high!

Not judging the choice of a mini PC vs a Pi, but compare apples to apples: Pi 5 8 GB is $80 (Board only), and N100 16 GB is $200 (full kit).

Raspberry Pi just launched a new 16 GB Pi 5. Who's it for? Is it worth $120? Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWi16EROKc

System76's Thelio Astra is a quiet monster—it's by far the world's fastest Arm PC, and it starts at half the price of the Mac Pro.

Check out my video on the beastly machine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AshDjtlV6go

Latest AI pet peeve:

'Influencer ad companies' now send emails with flowery language about how amazing [insert my last three videos here] were, generating quotes that make it sound like they watched them.

Then they're like "and we have this spatula we'd like you to review"!

JetKVM's source code is now public! https://github.com/jetkvm — shipping has started, I can't wait to receive the extra unit I ordered. I have something special in mind for it :) #homelab

Okay, I take it back, if AI can flatter people this much, and accurately predict my next project...

Happy #familysysadmin day. I debugged a voicemail problem and replaced a glass screen protector. Brother in law replaced a TV antenna and 'smart' TV dark-pattern-avoidance training.

"I was told Rockchip no longer considers RK3588 to be an “open source” chip. In practice, that means Rockchip no longer contributes RK3588 code to open-source projects and they also decided not to sell RK3588 directly to SBC vendors." https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/21/rockchip-rk3588-mainline-linux-support-current-status-and-future-work-for-2025/

This, paired with Joshua Riek stepping away from ubuntu-rockchip, doesn't bode well for RK3588's SBC futures.

Maybe why Radxa is going with a different vendor for their next flagship board, the Orion 6?

@dch Chips And Cheese has a good architecture overview: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/ampereone-at-hot-chips-2024-maximizing-density

You know it's serious business when btop needs to fullscreen just to display all cores...

AMD 7000-series graphics cards now work on Raspberry Pi. 4K Doom Eternal. 4K Crysis. OBS hardware video transcoding. It all works!!!

It's not perfect, but what graphics card driver is? Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qx_bdFSSuc (more details on my blog).

M4 efficiency is stunning. First machine I've tested getting over 5 Gflops/W with HPL, and in fact it goes beyond 6 Gflops/W... with fan only spinning up to a quiet 2500 rpm.

Maybe this is why Qualcomm abandoned their marquee Dev Kit—it is thoroughly trounced by M4.

Welp there goes my record!

@skatterbencher just pulled out ALL the stops overclocking a @raspberry_pi 5 to 3.6 GHz! https://youtu.be/qzy24LkL_4Q

A private self-hosted VPN is a superpower #homelab

Product announcements need a 'Skip AI section' button like the 'Skip Intro' button on streaming platforms.