...and yet I just bought a 2nd one!

Overall, I enjoy using Sony's current top-end APS-C model for my video work and occasional photography. But there are a few things that feel boneheaded and out of place that you should be aware of:

1. It has some sort of AGC (Automatic Gain Control) applied to external microphones that cannot be disabled or adjusted. So you have to record external audio no matter what if you want the highest quality. (Recording internal on the camera can be convenient, but is hard to recommend on this camera.)
2. The SD card formatting takes a long time, because it writes over all the data on the card. It would be nice to have this as a special 'secure erase' option, but it's also annoying because (a) it takes a really long time compared to a quick erase, and (b) it makes any potential file recovery impossible—most other cameras do a quick erase that can still be recovered from using data rescue tools.
3. The menus are terrible. I'm not sure why... coming from years of Nikon, it just feels like I can never get a good mental map of the menus. At least I can throw the most common items in a custom menu.
4. Sony's 'smart hotshoe' accessories are obscenely expensive (I'd really just love a little hotshoe XLR input adapter that bypasses AGC, but the XLR-K3M is over $600).
5. The Record button location is awkward and requires the use of a thumbnail to press (at least for me... I don't think my hands are that big, either).

Despite these flaws, this camera takes great quality video and stills (for APS-C, at least), I don't run into overheating issues like I did on my a6000, and the larger battery both provides a lot more battery life than smaller APS-C bodies, and necessitates a deeper hand grip—which makes this camera a thousand times easier to hold, especially for photography.

It's been a busy start to the year on my Raspberry Pi PCIe Devices website. Not only have we finally made some significant progress learning about the BCM2711's PCIe bus (both good and bad), I've also added a few dozen new Raspberry Pi CM4-based boards to the site.

In my YouTube video today, I go through four of them in depth, showing how they're built and what they're used for.

The four projects I cover in depth are:

2026 Update: I still use the same process below, but skip the file metadata, since naming a movie like "Top Gun Maverick (2024)", and placing it in a folder of the same name allows Jellyfin to grab the correct metadata.

To process discs more quickly, there are also two great tools I recommend: Automatic Ripping Machine for bulk ripping, and HandyMKV to automate MakeMKV and Handbrake.

It's been more than a decade since I wrote Ripping Movies from Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and DVD, Getting them onto Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, etc.. Heck, back then I didn't write everything as a 'blog post'—that was labeled as an 'article' :P

Recently I wanted to see whether I could get glmark2 (an OpenGL 2.0 and ES 2.0 benchmark tool) to run on a Raspberry Pi with an external graphics card (see this thread).

But glmark2 isn't available in any Pi repositories, so you have to build it from source:

sudo apt install -y meson libjpeg-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libudev-dev
git clone https://github.com/glmark2/glmark2.git
cd glmark2
meson setup build -Dflavors=drm-gl,drm-glesv2
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

I built this for drm only, so it can run fullscreen without any X/Wayland environment. To run the full suite:

For years, Mac users have dealt with slow filesystem performance for Docker volumes when using Docker for Mac. This is because the virtualized filesystem, which used osxfs for a while and will soon be upgraded to use VirtioFS.

But if you need to do large operations on huge codebases inside a shared directory, even using NFS to share from the Mac into Docker is a lot slower than running a native Docker volume or just using files inside the container's own filesystem.

For the past year, I've slowly upgraded parts of my network to 10 Gigabit. But 10 Gigabit switches, NICs, and even cabling is a bit more expensive and sometimes annoying to deal with than the very-cheap 1 Gbps equipment most homelabbers are used to.

I dipped my toes into the 2.5 Gbps waters once I got a NAS with 2.5G ports—you can use standard USB NICs that cost less than $50, or PCIe cards for even less. And cabling is easier, since 2.5G works fine over Cat5e (which I already have run to most of my house).