The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer:
Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a number of other neat little features.
I also have a video review of this board here:
Last week, I posted about the Pi NAS hardware build, and compared setting up an off-the-shelf ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 to the same thing, but with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 an IO Board.
Some people wondered why not just use a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with USB hard drives, and there are a few reasons:
A few months ago, an ASUSTOR representative emailed me with an offer I couldn't refuse. He saw my blog post and video about building the fastest Raspberry Pi NAS, and asked if I wanted to put up my best Pi-based NAS against an Asustor NAS.
We settled on the Asustor Lockerstor 4, with dual-2.5 Gbps networking, 4 GB of RAM, and a quad-core Intel CPU. To make things even, he convinced Seagate to send four 8TB IronWolf NAS drives. I don't fancy he thought it would be a good show if I kept on using my four used WD GreenPower drives from 2010!
I posted a video of the hardware build process for both NASes on my YouTube channel:
Just posting to the blog for reference; I posted this video on YouTube recently, in which I built (what I believe to be) the world's tiniest NVMe SSD RAID array, using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and three diminutive WD SN520 NVMe drives (which are M.2 2230 size, which makes them each about the size of a quarter):
I ran some benchmarks in RAID 5 and RAID 0, as well as one drive by itself, and found one surprising thing: the Pi's overall IO bandwidth is already saturated by just one drive, so putting NVMe disks in RAID doesn't really help with performance, like it does with slower spinning hard drives.
I recently shot some footage with a GoPro, and realized after the fact the GoPro 'chapters' the footage around 4 GB, so I ended up with a number of 4 GB files, instead of one larger file. There are various reasons for this, but in the end, I really wanted one long file, so it would be easier to synchronize with footage from another camera and my audio recorder.
2023 Update: The following one-liner works a bit faster, and doesn't require creating all the intermediate files as the original method below did:
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i <(for f in *.MP4; do echo "file '$PWD/$f'"; done) -c copy output.mp4This command assumes you're running the command within the same directory as all your GoPro
.MP4files, and there are no other.MP4files in that directory.
So I found this answer on StackOverflow, which had exactly the commands I needed:
Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects.
You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but... well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling mess and lose bandwidth and latency to a USB-to-SATA or USB-to-NVMe adapter.
The Pi 4 actually has an x1 PCI Express gen 2.0 lane, but the USB 3.0 controller chip populates that bus on the model B. The Compute Module 4, however doesn't presume anything—it exposes the PCIe lane directly to any card it plugs into.
And in the case of Oratek's TOFU, it's exposed through an M.2 slot, making this board the first one I've used that can accept native NVMe storage, directly under the Pi:
A couple weeks ago, I noticed when running apt-get upgrade on one of my Pi projects that a new repository was added.
It was a little odd, because Linux distributions don't typically 'inject' new repositories like this. And it was even stranger because this particular repository was for VSCode, from Microsoft.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation just posted an article to their blog about Visual Studio Code coming to the Raspberry Pi—but that post didn't address any of the controversy surrounding this change.
There's also a video that goes along with this post: Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
In late 2020, Microsoft released a version of VSCode compatible with the Raspberry Pi.
Early this year, I passed a major milestone on my YouTube channel—100,000 subscribers!
I've had a channel since 2006, but never really devoted time to it until last year, and I'm blown away by the positive response I've gotten publishing videos on Raspberry Pi, Kubernetes, Ansible and more.
To celebrate the milestone, I created a 'how it's made' video where I go behind the scenes and show how I made—from start to finish—my Argon One M.2 Raspberry Pi Case review video.
Early in 2020, I kicked off the Ansible 101 live streaming series. I wrote an Ansible 101 retrospective post and decided to give it another go, this time covering Kubernetes.
Starting late in 2020 and wrapping things up today, I streamed a new 10-episode series, Kubernetes 101 (the first episode is embedded below).
I recently received an email from someone asking me how I got the voice recording in my videos to sound so clear and strong. The answer to that question is much more complex than I'll deal with here, but that person asked me mostly about the microphone I used, and if that could make a big difference in getting better recordings. Here's what I replied:
I currently use an EV RE320 in a shock mount.
