If you haven't already, watch How I almost broke MrBeast's 1-100 video, which provides context for this blog post.

On March 1st, Network Chuck asked me if I had a couple weeks to help him build out a system to manage buttons and LEDs for a MrBeast video.

A few weeks later, we handed off our system to capable folks on the MrBeast team. In May, they published Ages 1 - 100 Fight For $500,000, and our handiwork was finally public—pictured is Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) demonstrating how contestants would vote:

Recently I upgraded my AMD-based PC on a livestream, and I installed an Innodisk EGPL-T101 10 Gbps M.2 NIC (link to Innodisk product page).

Under Linux, I could get through 9.4 Gbps using iperf3 between the PC and my Mac Studio. But under Windows, I could only get up to about 4.5 Gbps (tested around 1h 27m into the stream)!

I had downloaded the latest version of iperf3 for Windows from the iperf.fr website, which was listed as version 3.1.3 from June of 2016! I thought that was pretty old, and indeed, looking at all the downloads on that page... they are all very old. What gives?

I recently tried setting up an M.2 Coral TPU on a machine running Debian 12 'Bookworm', which ships with Python 3.11, making the installation of the pyCoral library very difficult (maybe impossible for now?).

Some of the devs responded 'just install an older Ubuntu or Debian release' in the GitHub issues, as that would give me a compatible Python version (3.9 or earlier)... but in this case I didn't want to do that.

On Debian 12 Bookworm, Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat, and macOS 14+ installs, when I try running pip3 install [something] (whether that's Ansible or some other Python tool), I get the following error message:

error: externally-managed-environment

× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.
    
    If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.
    
    If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
    it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
    virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.
    
    See /usr/share/doc/python3.11/README.venv for more information.

note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.

The error message says you can pass in the flag --break-system-packages but that sounds terrifying. I just want pip to stop nagging me, but let me manage my system dependencies like I have for many years.

After four decades in the broadcast radio industry, I finally convinced my Dad to join me in getting an amateur radio license this summer.

In the US, there's a huge community of amateur radio operators, or 'Hams' for short. There's a whole history to how they got that name, but to me, radio's a lot of black magic.

Throw on top of that the fact that Hams are always slinging around weird terms like QRT, using morse code—or as they call it, CW—and they call themselves weird things like NK7U!

In 2009, a company in South Africa proved a homing pigeon was faster than an ADSL connection, flying a 4 GB USB flash drive to prove it.

Besides IEEE's speculative work, nobody's actually re-run the 'bird vs. Internet' race in over a decade.

Now that I have gigabit fiber, I thought I'd give it a try.

Video

I published a video with all the details—and even more background on the graceful birds used in the experiment—over on my YouTube channel: