2026-10-14 21:00:00
Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer.
Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable.
I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all my experience until now is with FDM, or Fused Deposition Modeling1, printers). But I can convey my first-time experience using this printer and with the entire SLA experience.
2026-10-10 04:00:00
There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot.
On paper, the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023.
2026-09-25 23:16:00
I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel.
Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do.
There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted software, keeping old hardware useful, or cable management and rackmounting on a budget.
2026-09-22 01:00:00
Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips, sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards.
Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s.
Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a huge problem. Especially with how profitable can be in the current AI bubble.
2026-09-18 22:00:00
I'm back from VCF Midwest 21, arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet.
After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server).
Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of my 'time tokens'), and in some ways worse (I only got to see about 10% of the exhibits—if that).
2026-09-09 00:00:00
UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly.
To do both of those things well, you need a smart interface. And at least with APC, there are tons of older UPSes that use Network Management Cards. The one pictured below is the NMC 2, and I pulled out of my old APC Smart-UPS 2200 XL (pictured above).
