This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube solvers:

Sprawling over the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center, I met people of all ages who were building all sorts of zany contraptions. Sometimes practical, sometimes wildly impractical (like a hot dog race track that tazes the winning weiner).

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Meshtastic is still a bit touch-and-go sometimes, but the St. Louis area Mesh has grown quite a bit, to the point I can regularly mesh with 10-30 other nodes. So far we can't quite get the entire metro covered wirelessly, but there are a few gaps MQTT is connecting currently.

One thing I hadn't really thought about—but can be useful, especially for visualizing the mesh—is GPS positioning on the mesh node itself.

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A few months ago, I upgraded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of internal storage, using a then-$269 DIY upgrade kit from ExpandMacMini.

At the time, there was no option for upgrading the M4 Pro Mac mini, despite it also using a user-replaceable, socketed storage drive.

But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if I'd be willing to test out one of their new M4 Pro upgrades, in this case, upgrading the mini I use at the studio for editing from a stock 512 GB SSD to 4 TB.

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I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack.

One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80 TB usable) I currently have.

It turns out, when you stop running an entire YouTube channel in your home (I'm in a studio now), you don't need more than a few terabytes, so my new conservative estimate is 6 terabytes of usable space. That's within the realm of NVMe SSD storage for a few hundred bucks, so that's my new target.

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tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition.

A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected.

Luckily, I have enough reach I was able to get a second chance. Most content creators aren't so lucky, and content about tools like Jellyfin and LibreELEC get buried over time.

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I've had a Pi and SDR earmarked for 'getting weather data from my weather station' for a long time now. I don't know why I waited so long, because it was shockingly easy.

I have a Acurite 5-in-1 weather station (with separate lightning detector) mounted about 15' in the air in my back yard. It comes with a fancy little LCD display to show all the stats it transmits over the 433 MHz wireless frequency.

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