I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short):
This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it.
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:
The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!
The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.
For the past few years, my workflow for editing videos for my YouTube channel was the following:
Step 3 is where the vast majority of editing time is spent, especially when I need to add in charts, motion graphics, etc.
After battling IBD complications through the summer and fall, I've come to a point where surgery is necessary. You can learn more about my health issues in my lighthearted book about Crohn's Disease, You Only Have Crohn's Once!.
The surgery (an ostomy revision) will take place tomorrow, December 2, and it'll be a pretty rough recovery, so I'm not planning on doing any substantial work until at least 2023.
It's ironic I had just given a presentation titled Just Say No: Staying sane while you maintain weeks before learning the surgery was necessary. I was planning a video on the topic (burnout, protecting your time, and open source maintainership) this year, but I guess the blog post will have to do.
I have plenty of fun tech and software I want to highlight here and on YouTube (some of it detailed in my video embedded below), but for now it's all on the shelf waiting until my strength returns:
Saying yes is easy—at first.
It makes you feel better. And it makes you feel like you can do anything! And the person you're saying yes to also gets a happy feeling because you're going to do something for them.
Saying no is hard. It's an admission you can't do something. And worse still, you're disappointing someone else who wants you to say yes.
But here's the thing: none of us is a god. We're people. We have a certain amount of mental resources.
Some people are kind of crazy and can do a lot more than you or I can, but nobody can do it all. And sometimes you can burn the midnight candle for a little while, but you're just building up debt. Every 'Yes' is a loan you have to pay off.
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy.
Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth to stream it, and shoving ads in paying users' faces.
And in my first video of this two-part series, I showed how I rip Blu-Rays and DVDs into my computer.
According to AI, this is me.
Or at least, what I look like if I deliver the prompt Jeff Geerling, realistic, photograph, sharp focus to Stable Diffusion, a machine learning, text-to-image model. But if you take that same prompt and paste it into the Stable Diffusion Demo, you'll get a different result.
I use yt-dlp to download videos off YouTube quite frequently. I'll use the videos as reference, and I often use it to grab the VOD for one of my livestreams, since there's no simpler way (I'm not going to dig through the bowel's of YouTube's UI to try to download one of my own videos...).
But I also can't handle the default .webm videos in all my video editing tools natively, and transcoding is annoying. So I've settled on the following yt-dlp command to first try to pull a native MP4 version off YouTube, and failing that, transcode to MP4 immediately after downloading:
yt-dlp -S res,ext:mp4:m4a --recode mp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
And if you weren't aware, yt-dlp does an excellent job pulling video files from other sites as well, should the need arise.
After upgrading my main workstation to a Mac Studio, I decided to break tradition.
Usually, I sell off my old workstation to offset the cost of the new one. But just last week, Asahi Linux announced their first alpha release.
If you haven't heard of Asahi, it's a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that aims to bring a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs (all the current M1 Macs, and any new Apple Silicon Macs that come in the future).
Or: Why can't you just merge my ten-line PR already?
I maintain over 200 open source projects. Apparently (this is news to me) I am ranked in the top 200 GitHub users by followers, and there are 18,000 forks and 42,000 stars across my repos.
On an average day, I see between 50-100 emails across my repositories for issues and pull requests, and I filter those down to about 5-10 that I deem worthy of a personal follow-up.
I merge between 5-10 Pull Requests per month, and commit new code or fixes around 166 times per month.
I'm one maintainer, in a tiny corner of the Internet, maintaining a small but broad set of projects from Ansible roles for infrastructure automation to a few small but still-used PHP and Node.js libraries.
There have been a few times I've burned out. That's typical for many maintainers. You either learn coping strategies or burn out completely, and in the best case end up a woodworker or farmer. At least that's what I see most of the time.