2025-11-11 00:01:10
Minisforum stuffs an entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year. But everything else about this thing is different.
What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got... is something different.
Hate reading? I also published a video on the MS-R1 on my YouTube channel. Watch it here, or scroll on past.
2025-11-08 00:15:39
Converting hot dog plasma video to sound with OpenCV
When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma.
While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation, where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the plasma arc from the hot dog turns that modulation into audible sound.
2025-11-05 06:55:37
It's not that hard to stop a Trane
Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 19951.
The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?
Well, apparently the engineering:
2025-10-31 22:01:28
The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino.
It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that.
Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.
2025-10-24 22:00:54
Why do some radio towers blink?
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
Joe: Well, blinking I would call like the way you described it, "flashing", "white light", or "strobe". All these lights are to aid pilots and air traffic. helicopters, fighter planes, regular jets. So that's the purpose of it.
Jeff: Well that one tower that I saw had red lights that faded in and out, but I even think there's a freestanding tower just north of here that has red and white on top.
2025-10-24 01:30:41
Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted
My normal process for transferring video footage from my Sony cameras to my computer is as follows:
