My Dad and I just posted a new video on the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel where we explored the tallest radio tower in the St. Louis metro area, the so-called 'Supertower' that has a 10-station combined dual FM antenna system (dual 4-bay FMVee by Dielectric) at the top:
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'.
I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box contents and teardown, or view it below:
The blog post Streaming services lost the plot detailed how streaming services have become the thing they were made to destroy.
Like cable networks and satellite companies before, they're raising rates (at a rate higher than inflation), stuffing their content libraries with filler that's not even worth the bandwidth to stream it, and shoving ads in paying users' faces.
And in my first video of this two-part series, I showed how I rip Blu-Rays and DVDs into my computer.
Do you remember when Netflix first started their movie streaming service, back in 2007?
Physical media was still the preferred way to consume media. Besides sports content, and some TV shows that were cable-exclusive for a time, most people would run by Blockbuster and pick up a movie.
Netflix started with mail-order DVDs, then switched to streaming. The absence of ads (which were rampant on cable channels) and the convenience of not having to drive to a physical store (Blockbuster et all) made Netflix a no-brainer, especially considering the depth of their initial library.
AnsibleFest is fast approaching, and this year it'll finally be back in person, in Chicago. Since that's a short jaunt from St. Louis, I'll be headed up to talk about my Homelab this year!
More specifically, I'll be giving a talk titled Ansible for the Homelab, and I'll walk through how I have at least part of my sprawling homelab environment automated using Ansible.
I watched TheOdd1sOut's How to Find Inspiration1 and remembered the most important lesson I learned from my high school English teacher:
Short is good. Short is hard.
The teacher2 didn't exactly put it like that. But he harped on something nobody else did: writing concisely.
Every week we would read a work of American literature. And every Friday we'd turn in a one-pager encapsulating our knowledge of the book. I was an odd duck for how much I enjoyed the game: no playing with margins or font sizes. I had to cram an entire book into one page, double-spaced, with 1" margins, a title line, and a byline.
I remember spending Thursday nights honing my text, usually down to around 500 words. We would get a slight bonus for conveying more with fewer words.
That's surprisingly difficult for teenagers conditioned to churn out a specific word count. TheOdd1sOut commiserates:
Linus Media Group, the media production agency behind giant YouTube tech channels like Linus Tech Tips and Techquickie, just launched the LTT Screwdriver, a $69.99 ratcheting screwdriver geared for building PCs and general use.
And Linus Sebastian, the man behind it all, didn't hold any punches. In the Screwdriver launch video, he said:
I use yt-dlp to download videos off YouTube quite frequently. I'll use the videos as reference, and I often use it to grab the VOD for one of my livestreams, since there's no simpler way (I'm not going to dig through the bowel's of YouTube's UI to try to download one of my own videos...).
But I also can't handle the default .webm videos in all my video editing tools natively, and transcoding is annoying. So I've settled on the following yt-dlp command to first try to pull a native MP4 version off YouTube, and failing that, transcode to MP4 immediately after downloading:
yt-dlp -S res,ext:mp4:m4a --recode mp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
And if you weren't aware, yt-dlp does an excellent job pulling video files from other sites as well, should the need arise.
An ode to the homelabber:
As a software developer, I never was a true sysadmin. I never pulled a server to replace a failed drive at 3 a.m. I never got to roll my little maintenance cart through a cold aisle, with hearing protection to keep my fragile eardrums from rupturing amidst a sea of 100+ dB screaming server fans...
That is, until I built my homelab. Now I can act like a sysadmin as I make sure my kids never have a moment of downtime while they're streaming their favorite episode of Odd Squad.
A few months ago someone told me about a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 cluster board, the DeskPi Super6c.
You may have heard of another Pi CM4 cluster board, the Turing Pi 2, but that board is not yet shipping. It had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, but production has been delayed due to parts shortages.