September 15 update: @YouTubeInsider confirmed that the issue is related to viewers who have adblockers enabled—YouTube's been in an arms race with ad blocking tools, and the fallout is a substantial cut in counted views for creators who have a large audience watching from desktop.

Many YouTube content creators, myself included, noticed something in early to mid-August: views were down.

After being on the platform since 2006 (though for me, not being a 'professional' YouTuber until about 5 years ago), I'm used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes.

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I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf in 2025, my first 'new' car in 15 years. The above photo was taken by the dealership; apparently their social media team likes to post photos of all purchasers.

I test drove a Tesla in 2012, and quickly realized my mistake. No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never drove one of those) could match the feel of pressing the throttle on an electric.

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Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi.

I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My configuration for these Arm NASes is up on GitHub.

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Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5.

Both are graciously sharing their schematics and process on GitHub:

• jonny12375/rp3a0 for the Zero 2 W / RP3A0
• schlae/cm5-reveng for the CM5 / RP2712

Raspberry Pi shares limited board schematics, but sometimes—especially when digging into some esoteric edge case for a carrier board, or in Jonathan's case, desoldering all the chips and building a Pi Zero 2W into a Pico form factor PCB—you need more.

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A few years ago, I admit it was rare to find someone running Arm hardware more powerful than a Raspberry Pi in a homelab (or more serious) setting, outside of cloud providers running Ampere or custom Arm CPUs.

But as Pis and Rockchip boards have become more powerful (and efficient), and Apple's M-series silicon has become more interesting (the M4 mini being an excellent value proposition for a quiet, tiny server), and even Ampere Altra pricing coming down a bit since it's an 'old' server CPU now, still offering 64 or 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4... I don't think I'm weird in suggesting Arm is a viable platform for reliable, even powerful servers.

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Continuing the retro computer series, I've recently completed the first part of a restoration of my Aunt's old Macintosh Classic.

This Classic was handed to me alongside my Uncle Mark's Apple II, which I'll probably cover later (we've played a game of whack-a-mole with issues on that machine! Well worth it but I haven't hit a point where enough things are working to cover it well, heh).

The Classic is a strange Mac—it was introduced in 1990 as a budget version of the 1986 Macintosh Plus, with a 68000 CPU in an era when the 68030 was the new hotness.

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