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...I'm just glad it was on the outside of the building, attached to non-flammable material :)

As part of my new studio/office buildout, I needed a 'smart' doorbell, so I could accept deliveries or see who rang, even if I was far from the door or recording.

I bought a SimpliSafe system for my location, and tied it into Home Assistant. It was easy to set up, the monthly cost was a fraction of what ADT wanted to charge, and yes, I know it's wireless-only communication can be tampered with. It's like a lock—it helps keep people honest, and is only one small part of a balanced security diet.

But I installed their Video Doorbell Pro a couple weeks ago, and setup was a breeze. Just get 24v doorbell wire to it, and bingo! You have a smart doorbell.

A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?"

They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least.

But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're genuinely fun to listen to, for everyone in the car.

Well, that fine day, the kids chose Ladybug Music. And let me tell you, besides a few duds, Ladybug Music slaps. And the songs incorporate diverse styles, too, it's not just the same nursery rhymes regurgitated in a bubbly voice.

So I found the album on my phone and noticed the songs were all greyed out.

I tapped one, and nothing. Just this notice:

Not available in my region? Well, that's weird. I pay for Apple Music. And I know the artist is in the US, and I'm in the US...

Following up on my X-ray scans of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W two years ago, I had the opportunity to scan the Raspberry Pi 5, working with an electronics inspection lab:

I posted a video detailing everything I imaged on the board, but in this blog post, I'll hit on the highlights—the new chips at the heart of the Pi 5: the BCM2712 SoC and the RP1 'southbridge'.

...and the video I just posted on the Mars 400 explores the topic a bit more.

But every time I've posted a video, blog post, tweet (xeet?), or anything else on the topic of Pi clusters, a common sentiment is "you can do that faster and cheaper with a set of VMs."

Or, during the Pi shortage (which is basically over), when you could only buy Pis from scalpers for insane markups, the sentiment was "you can do that faster and for the same price with a bunch of used mini PCs."

Luckily, with Compute Modules coming back into general availability at MSRP, and Pi 4s being available at most local retailers as well (at least here in the US?), building hobby clusters of 3, 4, or 6 Raspberry Pis is achievable again, for a few hundred bucks, all-in.

My journey testing various graphics cards on the Raspberry Pi began soon after the Compute Module 4 was launched in 2020. Since then I've tested almost 20 graphics cards—with a little success.

But there were two roadblocks to getting drivers for even older AMD radeon drivers working well:

This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'll show you how I completely initialize a hard drive so I can re-use it somewhere else (like Ceph) that doesn't like drives with partition information!

First, a warning: this blog post does not show how to zero a hard drive, or secure erase. That's a slightly different process.

But as someone with way too many storage devices (from testing, mostly), I find myself in the position of trying to use a spare drive in some place where it expects a brand new drive, but winds up failing because the drive had a partition, or had valid boot files from an SBC or something.

I wanted to document the easiest way in Linux to completely reset a hard drive—at least from Linux's perspective.

The impetus was when I was trying to get some hard drives added to a Ceph OSD, and the process that tried adding them ran into an error stating RuntimeError: Device /dev/sda has partitions.