2026-03-13 22:00:00
Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1, which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era.
This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G41. And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting.
Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Capacitor Plague. The PSU tends to run hot, and some of the capacitors weren't even 105°C-rated, so they tend to wear out, especially if the Xserve was running high-end workloads.
2026-03-13 01:50:00
Many of us wonder if the MacBook Neo is 'the one'.
Because I have a faster desktop (currently a M4 Max Mac Studio), I've always used a lower-end Mac laptop, like the iBook or MacBook Air, for travel. I've used MacBook Pros in the past, but I like the portability of smaller, cheaper models.
In fact, my favorite Mac laptop ever was the 11" Air.
2026-03-06 23:00:00
After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It?, I wanted to replicate the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync:
I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock, a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ application to display PTP time (if available on the network) on a set of two LED matrix displays, using a Raspberry Pi.
2026-03-03 05:15:00
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico:
This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040).
The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse.
Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!
2026-03-02 06:00:00
After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted:
As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice import script, but I don't have the time for that now).
2026-02-27 23:00:00
In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required).
I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives1, and an AI accelerator.
