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I've long been a fan of Pi clusters. It may be an irrational hobby, building tiny underpowered SBC clusters I can fit in my backpack, but it is a fun hobby.

And a couple years ago, the 'cluster on a board' concept reached its pinnacle with the Turing Pi 2, which I tested using four Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4's.

Because Pi availability was nonexistent for a few years, many hardware companies started building their own substitutes—and Turing Pi was no exception. They started designing a new SoM (System on Module) compatible with their Turing Pi 2 board (which uses an Nvidia Jetson-compatible pinout), and the result is the RK1:

IBM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.

That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.'

As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently:

IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a fruit

skywhopper replied:

HashiCorp has done a good job of pre-draining any flavor it once had.

Some people wonder if HashiCorp's decision to drop open source was because they wanted to juice the books for a higher price. I mean, six billion dollars? And they're not even a pointless AI company!

In today's video, I walked through setting up Axzez's Interceptor 1U case with a Raspberry Pi as a Frigate NVR, or Network Video Recorder.

Doing so allows me to plug multiple PoE security cameras straight into the back of the device, and record their IP video streams to disk (the case has space for up to 3 hard drives or SSDs). And by adding on a USB Coral TPU, I can also run inference on frames where motion is detected, and identify people, cars, bikes, and more using built-in object recognition models.

This guide isn't definitive, but it is a good reference point as I am wiping out some Hikvision IP cameras I inherited in my new office space. They were all paired with an annoying proprietary Hikvision NVR, and I wanted to wipe them and use them on a new isolated VLAN with my new Raspberry Pi Frigate-based NVR setup.

The cameras I have are Hikvision model number DS-2CD2122FWD-IS, but this guide should apply to many of the cameras from that era.

Today on Geerling Engineering, my Dad and I toured the tower site for WSDZ-AM, located in Belleville, IL. It's a 20kW AM radio station broadcasting with an array of eight individual towers:

How does one get a single coherent signal out of an eight-tower array? Enter the phasor:

That's phasor with an o, not phaser with an e, so Trekkies need not fret about a misspelling.

The path of totality for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse ran right through my backyard, and it was my first experience photographing totality. Total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers the sun, are rare. After this year's eclipse, the lower 48 United States will see a brief bit of totality up around Montana in 2044, and a major event across the US in 2045—and I'll be near retirement!

See the full-size image of the eclipse composite on Flickr.

The above photograph is a composite image of all the stages of the 2024 eclipse. I took the pictures in the midst of a few thousand people scattered Fruitland, Missouri, during the April 8, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse.