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This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Macintosh PowerBook 3400c I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD.

The fastest laptop period

It's 1997. Apple just re-acquired Steve Jobs, but he hasn't been around long enough to materially impact the next few months of product launches.

Gil Amelio, seeing a gap in Apple's laptop offerings, decides to throw the kitchen sink at the market, in the form of the PowerBook 3400c. It works.

This laptop was the platform for the first G3 laptop, the short-lived 'Kanga', which used almost an identical design as a stopgap for Apple to later introduce the iconic Wallstreet G3.

...and it's not just for Pi Day.

After posting my deep-dive into the Pi 5's new BCM2712 and RP1 silicon this morning, someone linked me to this GitHub issue: Raspberry Pi 5 cannot overclock beyond 3.0GHz due to firmware limit(?).

For the past few weeks, a few blog readers (most notably, tkaiser—thanks!) commented on PLLs, OPP tables, and DVFS and how something seemed a little off with the 3.0 GHz CPU limit—which was apparently recommended by Broadcom, according to that GitHub issue.

But today, @popcornmix generated a test firmware revision without the 3.0 GHz limit, and zealous overclockers can get to pushing the clocks higher.

Ever since I X-rayed the Raspberry Pi 5 to see inside the BCM2712 and RP1 chip packages, I've wanted die shots of both chips. Why? Mostly out of curiosity, since I'm not a silicon expert by any means.

I also ran into some weird overclocking issues after writing about my experience overclocking and underclocking the Raspberry Pi 5, and probably spent an unhealthy amount of time (and money) to learn about the clocks, PLLs, and chips on the latest version of everyone's favorite Single Board Computer.

(Some Raspberry Pi 5s were harmed in the making of this blog post.)

Silicon lottery.

Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s.

Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8 GHz, and some Pi 5s can hit 3.0 GHz (but no higher—more on why tomorrow well... this limit may be able to be lifted).

After some testing, I found the default 2.4 GHz clock on the Pi 5 is pretty much the efficiency sweet spot, and after a lot more testing recently, I can confirm that's still the case, testing a number of Pi 5 samples.

I install a lot of Drupal sites day to day, especially when I'm doing dev work.

In the course of doing that, sometimes I'll be working on infrastructure—whether that's an Ansible playbook to configure a Docker container, or testing something on a fresh server or VM.

In any case, I run into the following error every so often in my Nginx error.log:

"php-fpm" nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY

The funny thing is, I don't have that error when I'm running CLI commands, like vendor/bin/drush, and can even install and manage the Drupal site and database on the CLI.

The problem, in my case, was that I had applied php-fpm configs using Ansible, but in my playbook I hadn't restarted php-fpm (in my case, on Ubuntu 22.04, php8.3-fpm) after doing so. So FPM was running with outdated config and didn't know that the MySQL/MariaDB drivers were even present on the system.

Old advice for setting a Raspberry Pi IP address to a static IP on the Pi itself said to edit the /etc/dhcpcd.conf file, and add it there.

But on Raspberry Pi OS 12 and later, dhcpcd is no longer used, everything goes through Network Manager, which is configured via nmcli or nmtui. If you're booting into the Pi OS desktop environment, editing the IP settings there is pretty easy.

But setting a static IP via the command line is a little different.

First, get the interface information—you can get a list of all interfaces with nmcli device status:

$ nmcli device status
DEVICE         TYPE      STATE                   CONNECTION         
eth0           ethernet  connected               Wired connection 1 
lo             loopback  connected (externally)  lo                 
wlan0          wifi      disconnected            --                 

In my case, I want to set an IP on eth0, the built-in Ethernet.