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MNT Reform - a hackable laptop, not for everyone

MNT Reform bottom with purple battery cells

The MNT Reform's design, the components, everything—is open source. If iFixIt did a teardown, they'd probably give it an 11 out of 10.

You can replace individual battery cells! Some people with these laptops hacked in their own speakers, added more internal Ethernet, or even swapped out the CPU itself.

Does that mean I think you should buy it? No, probably not. It's expensive (starting at €1199), and it's built for a certain type of person. It's not gonna replace a MacBook or a cheap Chromebook.

But why does this exist, and why am I excited about it?

Disclaimer: The reform used in this review was sent to me for testing; it's already been shipped back to MNT Research. They haven't paid me anything, and they have no input into the content of this blog post.

Minivans are better than trucks

...at least if you have a family, and need to transport datacenter racks.

Consider this:

  • You can fit full 4' x 8' plywood sheets in the back (assuming you fold down/remove the seats)
  • You can fit up to 12' long dimensional lumber (1x2, 2x4, etc.) inside (passing it through the gap between front seats)
  • You can seat 7 or even 8 people inside, somewhat comfortably, with at least 2-3 cupholders per person (still preserving 20-30 ft3 ((0.8m3) of storage space in the back!)
  • You can fit a full 42" deep 42U datacenter rack in the back, with space left over for one or two 2U 1500VA UPSes

Datacenter Rack in the Back Minivan Toyota Sienna

From: Look at my HUGE RACK! (moving vlog 11).

All that, and all 140ft3 (4.2m3) of interior storage is fully enclosed and climate-controlled.

A Pigeon is still faster than the Internet

Jeff Geerling holding a homing pigeon

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:

Soundproofing my studio: what's in a wall?

Jeff with resilient channel

Soundproofing is... kind of an art. It's not as simple as buying something and slapping on your walls. And the word 'soundproofing' is a bit of a loaded term.

You could mean deadening sound, so you can record podcasts with that signature radio sound. Or you could mean isolating a room from outside noise, which is an entirely different process. Or you could work on reducing resonance, echo, or just certain frequencies.

In my case, I wanted to build kind of a 'sound cocoon' in the middle of this space, so I could record any time, day or night, even if my AC is running.

Time Card mini adds Pi, GPS, and OCXO to your PC

For LTX 2023, I built this:

CM4 Timecard mini GPS locked

This build centers around the Time Card mini. Typically you'd install this PCI Express card inside another computer, but in my case, I just wanted to power the board in a semi-portable way, and so I plugged it into a CM4 IO Board.

The Time Card mini is a PCIe-based carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and by itself, it allows you to install a CM4 into a PC, and access the CM4's serial console via PCIe.

But the real power comes in 'sandwich' boards:

Ampere Altra Max - Windows, GPUs, and Gaming

Ampere Altra Developer Platform Workstation

I'm testing Adlink's Ampere Altra Developer Platform. This machine has a 96-core Arm CPU, but now they sell a 128-core version. Apple also recently released the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, so the model I'm testing isn't the "fastest in the world" like I could boast a couple months ago... but it's close, and I actually doubled my performance from last time—I'll show how later.

I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

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Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux kernel contributors, and software devs who used CentOS for testing and building their software. Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own.

Testing a 96-core Ampere Altra Developer Platform

If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing:

Ampere Altra Developer Platform in Jeff Geerling's workshop

I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine: