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After a decade, Raspberry Pi finally upgraded their official Touch Display from 480p to 720p, while keeping the price and overall aesthetic the same.

I've had early access to the Touch Display 2, and have been testing it in a variety of scenarios. Generally, Linux touchscreen support isn't wonderful. And Pi OS, being a fairly customized UI focused on simple use cases, is not quite to a usable state if you go touchscreen-only, considering I had trouble getting the onscreen keyboard to work in Chromium half the time, and it would overlay things I was typing even in fully-supported apps like Terminal.

Two years ago, Linus Sebastian released a general purpose ratcheting screwdriver tailored towards PC building and IT needs. I reviewed the LTT Screwdriver, and found it to be a good tool that did improve a couple things where it counted: the ratchet mechanism was useful for a broad range of lighter tasks, and the in-handle bit storage was a creative improvement over the patented MegaPro Automotive design the LTT Screwdriver was based on.

The price of the LTT Screwdriver was about $15-20 more than I think it's worth, but it's still a good enough driver you can justify paying extra. I bought three LTT Screwdrivers and have one on each of my workbenches at home and at the studio!

Despite what it looks like, this isn't a hot-rod Apple Watch. This is an IP KVM. What does that mean? It's basically a remote control rocket pack for any computer, from a giant tower PC, to a little mini PC you might run in your homelab.

It's called JetKVM, and the team behind it sent me two to test out.

BIG SCARY DISCLAIMER: The JetKVM is currently on Kickstarter. If you decide to back it, and they don't deliver, that's... actually pretty common. I did back their Kickstarter, and I think they'll deliver, but there are no guarantees.

BuildJet did not pay for this post, and I am not sharing in any profit, or even using an affiliate link. I just saw this tiny KVM come across my feed, thought it looked amazing, and asked if I could test it out.

Update - October 17: Today Qualcomm cancelled all remaining orders, and will no longer support the Dev Kit.

I have mixed feelings publishing this post: many developers who are actively trying to port their Windows software to Arm are still awaiting shipment of their own Snapdragon Dev Kits, and I seem to be one of the first few people to receive one.

Everyone I've been in contact with also ordered the Dev Kit on July 16, but we've all been waiting for it to ship—for months.

UPDATE 9/23: The CEO of Elecrow responded. I've posted a follow-up blog post with my reaction to the response and some other thoughts on AI voice cloning.

Listen to this clip:

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty familiar. I mean I would like you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. But that's the Jeff Geerling channel, not Elecrow, where the clip above is from. I never said the words that are in that video.

This is the Sipeed NanoKVM. You stick it on your computer, plug in HDMI, USB, and the power button, and you get full remote control over the network—even if your computer locks up.

How did Sipeed make it so small, and so cheap? The 'full' kit above is about $50, while the cheapest competitors running PiKVM are closer to $200 and up!

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of the following video on my YouTube channel:

A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome.

There's a video and some pictures in my hot dog radio blog post from back in March.

Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip.

This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said:

The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.

Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences. I wanted to see exactly what happens when I push one of these new chips to the limits.

First, I wanted a performance baseline, so I ran Geekbench with the latest Pi OS and all the defaults.

I've been getting into 3D printing lately. I have an older Ender 3 V2 at home I bought during COVID. And in the past year I've acquired an Ender 3 S1, Bambu Labs P1S, and Prusa MK4.

I also dove head-first into 3D CAD, and designed a number of small SBC cases or parts to help with things around the house.

But I'd never built my own 3D printer from a kit—all the printers I've had were pre-built and at most, required assembling the prebuilt gantry or toolhead. That finally changed with the Positron V3.2:

At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC:

But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC: definitely not Arm inside, this thing's an Intel N100:

I have all my benchmarks and notes bringing up this board stored in my sbc-reviews GitHub repository: Radxa X4 - geerlingguy's sbc-reviews, and I also summarized everything in a video on YouTube, which you can watch inline (or skip past and read this blog post instead):