2026-08-05 08:00:00
I recently repaired the Micro USB socket of an old Raspberry Pi; the one through which the Pi receives it's power. It was a bit of a fiddly soldering job because the connections for the USB port are tiny. Because of this, I briefly considered just sending the power straight into the 5V and GND pins on the Pi's pin header. I've seen projects where a Raspberry Pi was powered through it's GPIO pins, and even ones where the Pi itself wasn't connected to a power supply at all and instead to a powered USB hub through it's normal USB ports and then the USB hub was modified to send the power back through the USB cable into the Pi. These solutions work, but they're not necessarily a good idea, and here's why.
In order to understand how the Raspi is powered, it helps to take a look at the board's schematics. This is the power input section from the Raspberry Pi 1's schematics, which is what I was working on. Newer models have slightly different components, but the functionality is the same.
If you've never seen something like this, this might not mean much to you, so let's walk through it step by step, left to right.
The first component (1) is the Micro USB socket through which the Pi is powered. It has five pins, but only two are connected: GND and VBUS. VBUS is the 5V coming through the USB cable. This is labeled as VIN after the connector, but it's the same thing. It's the Pi's input voltage.
Next in line (2) is a fuse. This will blow if the current going into the board becomes too high, which can happen if a component on the board shorts out or if something is connected to the GPIO pins which draws too much current or shorts the power rails. If that happens the board will appear dead, but the only thing that's broken is the fuse which can easily be replaced.
Then we have a transient voltage suppressor (3), which is essentially just two diodes connected in opposite directions. In normal operation these diodes don't conduct, so this component does nothing. If there is a sudden spike in the input voltage however, which can happen during a lightning strike or from a faulty power supply, these diodes will conduct and short out the voltage spike before it can reach the more sensitive components on the board.
This might seem unneccessary because we already have a fuse, but fuses take some time before they blow open, and during this time the board would receive the high voltage spike which would probably damage the chips and other components. Diodes react much quicker than fuses, so these protect against sudden or very short spikes in the input voltage.
Lastly we have a series of capacitors (4), a big electrolytic capacitor and two small ones. They serve as filters for the input voltage. Low quality power supplies might not deliver a very steady 5V but have some noise or ripple on it, which might cause glitches in the chips. The capacitors smooth out these ripples so that the other components on the board receive a clean input voltage. They also act as buffers for sudden current spikes. If a component on the board or connected to the Pi suddenly draws a large amount of current, the power supply might be too slow to supply the current quickly enough, resulting in a voltage drop. The capacitors can react quicker than the power supply and supply the high current, keeping the voltage stable.
After this the now filtered voltage goes to the 5V power rail of the board (that's the +5V0 top right) which supplies the chips, the USB ports, the GIPO pins and a few voltage regulators which step it down to lower voltages that some components require.
So now back to the original question, why shouldn't the Pi be powered by sending 5V straight through the GPIO pins into the 5V power rail? After all, it does work. But it skips all this protective circuitry that we just looked at. And so if there's a low quality or faulty power supply connected to the GPIO pins, there's a chance that it will damage the components on the board if something goes wrong, killing the Pi in the process and not just blowing the fuse like it would if it were connected to the proper power input.
So in order to avoid risking damage, a Raspberry Pi and similiar boards should always be powered through their dedicated power input.
The exception to this rule of course is if the circuit that sends power into the GPIO pins has the same type of protective circuitry on it that the original power input stage has, in which case the Pi is protected through that and powering it this way is fine.
2026-08-04 08:00:00
Recently a person I'm following on Mastodon posted a picture of two cats. It was cute and kind of funny. I saw it, chuckled and forgot about it.
But then someone replied that they ran the picture through an AI checker and according to this the picture was very likely AI generated.
So the original poster apologised for not checking whether or not the picture was AI generated slop and to make up for their blunder, posted a different cat picture that wasn't AI generated (hopefully).
A similar thing happened with the announcement of Blaugust a few days ago. The official policy permits using AI generated images for blog posts, and some people were very vocal (read: angry and borderline abusive) about their disagreement with this decision.
And now I'm sitting here, after reading these interactions, and I'm wondering, are we maybe becoming a little too paranoid about AI generated content? Do we now have the obligation to check each and every picture, video, quote, text, post, etc. that we come across for whether it's human or AI generated? Do we have to apologise profusely if something slips through and we accidentally share slop? Do we have to police each other and check other people's posts and point out to them (with proof!) that they posted or shared or quoted slop? Is this the 2026 version of having fun on the internet?
I don't know. I don't like slop either, and I steer clear of channels, profiles, accounts etc. that consistently spit it out into the world, and I'm also not going to repost anything that I think falls into this category. And I reserve the right to make fun of companies that try to position themselves as a better alternative to all the modern nonsense, then happily use AI generated images and videos all over their marketing material.
But... I also don't want to live in a world where I have to double and triple check every single damn thing I come across before I share it or quote it or even just be amused by it, and where, should I fail to do so, someone will come along and yell at me because I *gasp* shared slop!! That doesn't sound like fun to me.
There's not really a conclusion or a moral to this story. Just a few thoughts that have been running through my head. You might disagree, and that's fine.
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2026-08-02 08:00:00
A list of all Blaugust participants was posted yesterday on Nerd Girl Thoughts. I thought it would be nice to have a list of all RSS feeds of these blogs, so I cobbled together a quick and dirty solution.
Here's the OPML file. I probably missed a few feeds, so if your blog isn't in there, I didn't leave you out on purpose, my script just failed to pick up your feed. Feel free to send me the URL of your feed so I can add it.
Here's how I put this together:
sed -n 's/.*\(http[^"]*\)".*/\1/p' urls_source.txt > urls.txt
Oh, I also noticed that my website wasn't advertising the RSS feeds properly, so I fixed that by adding these two lines to the html code while I was at it:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://82mhz.net/index.xml" title="82MHz RSS Feed">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://82mhz.net/linkdumps.xml" title="82MHz Linkdumps RSS Feed">
And that's it. Took me a bit of time to work out the sed call and expand the python script, and like I said, it's quickly cobbled together, but it works and it was a fun little exercise.
2026-08-01 08:00:00
Sam from TheTangentSpace published a post a few days ago about his participation in the Blaugust Festival Of Blogging. I remember this from seeing the #blaugust hashtag in previous years, but I never participated, so I thought this year is a good time to change that!
Sadly the founder of the challenge, Belghast, passed away just a few weeks ago, but the challenge lives on in his memory, which is really nice to see.
What exactly is the challenge about? From the introductory post:
For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. Above all the goal of Blaugust has always been to prove to folks that they can in fact sit down every day and create something fresh and then share it with the world. Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past. Our hope is to create a nurturing environment where Veteran bloggers can help those just getting started and the cross-pollination of ideas can create something truly spectacular. Your blog gives you a permanent foothold on the Internet that you own and have complete control of, and that is a really good feeling in the midst of shifting trends.
Sounds good, I'm in!
Ideally one would write 31 posts in 31 days of August, but I'm not entirely confident that I have that much to say, so I'm going for the Silver Award, which is 15 posts in August. I think that's a nice goal.
So if you feel like participating, consider yourself invited. There should also be a list of participants available online somewhere on Nerd Girl Thoughts, but I haven't seen it yet. Here it is. It's huge! Thanks to Krikket for getting in touch! The community chat is on Discord which I find disappointing. I'd really prefer an open platform where I can at least read along without having to sign up with my birth date and phone number and who knows what else, but that's not happening here. And I'm not going to sign up for Discord any more than I would for Facebook or X or Truth Social, so sadly I'm going to miss out on this aspect of the challenge. At least the blog posts will be visible for everyone.
Ok, that's it. First post done already! Easy peasy.
If you're participating, send me the link to your blog, I'd love to read your post!
Talk to you soon :)
2026-07-31 08:00:00
Only the good die young
All the Evil seem to live forever
That's taken from the Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young from the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album. I've been thinking of this lyric a lot recently as I keep seeing good musicians and actors, people who spent their lives bringing joy to others, die relatively young, while all the horrible people in the world seem to thrive and live forever. It's kind of depressing to watch and think about. So maybe let's not think about it too much and listen to some music instead, because while the world might not be so great right now, one thing I'm sure of is that fifty or a hundred years from now art will still be there and still bring us joy and happiness, while the monsters and the wannabe dictators of our time will be nothing but footnotes in the history books.
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2026-07-24 08:00:00
The Amiga turns 40 this week. I had an Amiga 500 as a kid, some time in the early 90s. And I remember being made fun of for having an Amiga, because PCs were supposedly so much cooler and better and whatnot. But the first time I visited a friend who had one of those amazing PCs and he proudly showed me his games with their EGA graphics colour palette and the PC speaker sounds I thought, are you kidding me? This is the thing you're going on and on about? Have you even seen an Amiga? I was truly underwhelmed by that. At the time it was released, and into the early 90s the Amiga was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in terms of sound and graphics, and the more I learn about the history of Commodore the more disappointed I am that the company went the way it did. They were far ahead of the competition at the time, and had things gone differently they could be where Apple is today.
Unfortunately it wasn't meant to be, and Commodore turned into one of those companies that flourished for a while and then slowly withered away. It is what it is, but one can dream about what could have been. Maybe it's time to play some Amiga games this weekend.
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