Latest posts
- Upgrading my Open Source Pi Surveillance Server with FrigateFeb 27, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
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.
- How to Securely Erase an old Hard Drive on macOS TahoeFeb 26, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore. I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'. Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been sinc
- Frigate with Hailo for object detection on a Raspberry PiFeb 18, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB. Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors
- AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yetFeb 16, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code. It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenCl
- Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robotFeb 13, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES, I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion. HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate
- Exploring a Modern SMPTE 2110 Broadcast Truck With My DadFeb 07, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio and live broadcast for decades, so he enjoyed the experience as the engineer n
- The first good Raspberry Pi LaptopFeb 06, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Ever since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 was introduced, I wondered why nobody built a decent laptop chassis around it. You could swap out a low spec CM5 for a higher spec, and get an instant computer upgrade. Or, assuming a CM6 comes out someday in the same form factor, the laptop chassis could get an entirely new life with that upgrade.
- Ode to the AA BatteryJan 29, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take
- Recapping My 5 Year Old Studio MonitorsJan 26, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
A few weeks ago, I started hearing a slight crackle at the loudest parts of whenever sound was playing through my PreSonus Eris E3.5 speakers. It was very faint, but quite annoying, especially when editing my YouTube videos. For a few days I thought it could be a hearing problem (at this point in my life, every year brings a new health adventure...), but after testing my wired headphones and an
- Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to HugoJan 21, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago. What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!). The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments. I wanted my blog to have
- Raspberry Pi's new AI HAT adds 8GB of RAM for local LLMsJan 15, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in addition to the equivalent 26 TOPS INT4 machine vision performance on the earlier AI
- Raspberry Pi Pico Mini Rack GPS ClockJan 12, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this: This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired. When you turn on the Pico, the display reads ---- Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the cl
- Local Email Debugging with MailpitJan 09, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog. I built an Ansible role for Mailhog, and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM, a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago. Unfortunately, barring any future
- Raspberry Pi is cheaper than a Mini PC again (that's not good)Jan 05, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5. So comparing systems with: 16GB of RAM 512GB NVMe SSD Including case, cooler, and power adapter Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208. Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95: Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages1, t
- JeffGeerling.com has been Migrated to HugoJan 03, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Since 2009, this website has run on Drupal. Starting with Drupal 6, and progressing through major site upgrades and migrations to 7, 8, 9, and 10, I used the site as a way to dogfood the same CMS (Content Management System) I used in my day job for over a decade. But as time progressed—especially after completing a grueling upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8—my enthusiasm for maintaining what's now a m
- Testing the Mono Gateway, a custom-built 10 Gbps RouterJan 02, 2026jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ. In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf: .embed-container { position: relati
- Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain pointsDec 26, 2025jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio cluster I've also been testing. But many of the same caveats of the DGX Spark (n
- NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cutDec 22, 2025jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by more than 5 microseconds. 5 μs might seem insignificant. But it is significant f
- Big GPUs don't need big PCsDec 20, 2025jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 bandwidth. That's 8 GT/s versus 512 GT/s. Not a fair fight.
- 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5Dec 18, 2025jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling)
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of Macs I tested, with 1.5 TB of unified memory, costs just shy of $40,000, and if