Jeff GeerlingModify

Almost 15 years ago, I wrote Grab a Single Frame from a Video in QuickTime X. And for many years since, I slightly modified that workflow. Instead of using Preview, I would use pngpaste, and paste the copied frame from QuickTime player into a file.

For example:

1. Open a video in QuickTime and scrub to the frame you would like to save as an image.
2. Press Command-C
3. Switch to Terminal
4. Run pngpaste image-name-here.jpg
5. Profit!

However, there are two problems with that workflow:

For a great many tech YouTube channels, views have been markedly down from desktop ("computer") users since August 10th (or so).

This month-long event has kicked up some dust—enough that two British YouTubers, Spiffing Brit and Josh Strife Hayes are having a very British argument¹ over who's right about the root cause.

Spiffing Brit argued it's a mix of YouTube's seasonality (it's back to school season) and channels falling off, or as TechLinked puts it, "git gud", while Josh Strife Hayes points out the massive number of channels which identified a historic shift down in desktop views (compared to mobile, tablet, and TV) starting after August 10. This data was corroborated by this Moist Critical video as well.

These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller.

September 15 update: @YouTubeInsider confirmed that the issue is related to viewers who have adblockers enabled—YouTube's been in an arms race with ad blocking tools, and the fallout is a substantial cut in counted views for creators who have a large audience watching from desktop.

Many YouTube content creators, myself included, noticed something in early to mid-August: views were down.

After being on the platform since 2006 (though for me, not being a 'professional' YouTuber until about 5 years ago), I'm used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes.

But this was substantial.

I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf in 2025, my first 'new' car in 15 years. The above photo was taken by the dealership; apparently their social media team likes to post photos of all purchasers.

I test drove a Tesla in 2012, and quickly realized my mistake. No gasoline-powered car (outside of supercars, maybe? Never drove one of those) could match the feel of pressing the throttle on an electric.

I started out with a used minivan, which I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Olds that I drove into the ground. Then I bought a used Camry that I bought before we had kids, when I had a 16 mile commute.

Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi.

I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My configuration for these Arm NASes is up on GitHub.