Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs.

The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500:

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For years, I've had a couple Macs running at home and at my studio, which I use to remotely manage my video projects or some coding project.

It's nice to have a workstation set up that you can access anywhere via Screen Sharing to check on progress, jot down a note, etc.—and not be tied to a web app or some cloud service.

I run a Wireguard VPN at home and at my studio, so I can remotely log into any of my infrastructure through the VPN—Macs included.

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I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago. In that time Raspberry Pi upgraded the CM4 to a CM5, so I ordered a set of 10 16GB CM5 Lite modules for my blade cluster. That should give me 160 GB of total RAM to play with.

This was the biggest Pi cluster I've built, and it set me back around $3,000, shipping included:

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Almost 15 years ago, I wrote Grab a Single Frame from a Video in QuickTime X. And for many years since, I slightly modified that workflow. Instead of using Preview, I would use pngpaste, and paste the copied frame from QuickTime player into a file.

For example:

1. Open a video in QuickTime and scrub to the frame you would like to save as an image.
2. Press Command-C
3. Switch to Terminal
4. Run pngpaste image-name-here.jpg
5. Profit!

However, there are two problems with that workflow:

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For a great many tech YouTube channels, views have been markedly down from desktop ("computer") users since August 10th (or so).

This month-long event has kicked up some dust—enough that two British YouTubers, Spiffing Brit and Josh Strife Hayes are having a very British argument¹ over who's right about the root cause.

Spiffing Brit argued it's a mix of YouTube's seasonality (it's back to school season) and channels falling off, or as TechLinked puts it, "git gud", while Josh Strife Hayes points out the massive number of channels which identified a historic shift down in desktop views (compared to mobile, tablet, and TV) starting after August 10. This data was corroborated by this Moist Critical video as well.

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These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller.

There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space station. Another Pi is going up this weekend, which is why I'm posting this today. I'll get to that one, but I wanted to spend some time talking about two things that fascinate me: Raspberry Pis, and putting them space!

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