Jeff Geerling

Definitely! I think it comes down to a few things: 1. You need the same username/handle on all platforms (e.g., your domain name, your twitter name, your github name, etc...). This is easier if you have a weird name. 2. You need to consistently update your content on these platforms (e.g., no one will care if you have a blog with a single post from 10 years ago) 3. You need to identify a reason for the blog (e.g., is it for work, or is it for fun?) and know your audience. 4. Your "brand" lets you control what people see when they Google you. However, if you're trying for a more professional appearance, don't blog about politics, religion, etc... because you'll be bound to upset someone at some point. Also, don't write controversial Twitter posts. I've been blogging for almost 10 years now [1]. I only write a few articles per year, but they're always about things I'm working on. I work in IT and try to apply things I learn at work to my "homelab", and then write about it. This actually landed me a DevOps job because they saw that I used Ansible, Terraform, Docker, etc... and was proficient enough to write about those tools. When I asked in the interview, they mentioned my blog and github content as reasons why I was chosen over other candidates. I personally use Jeff Geerling [2] as my inspiration. His "brand" has blown up recently, and while I'm not trying to get YouTube famous, I think he has great posts, creates great public code (ansible playbooks and docker…

Not only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life. And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled). (The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.) I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-efficiency/

Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk. I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply. [0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drones-and-see-…

For me this feature is worth upgrading over: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/you-can-finally-manage-macs-fil…

hello, as always: imho (!) tar is great, and well kown - but not particularly for "incremental backups over the net" ... this is what rsync is/was for. idk ... whatever the problem is with rsync, but apparently thats none of my business ;)) you could use, and which usage is very similar to rsync: rclone * https://rclone.org/ intro * https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-file-sync-rcl… and additionally its also faster than rsync ... just my 0.02€

After his first #1 HN post on Nov 11, 2024, Sean Goedecke went on a ridiculous posting run in 2025. Over 130 published and 2nd only to Simon Willison. 1. http://simonwillison.net — 21,015 points 2. http://seangoedecke.com — 11,243 points 3. http://jeffgeerling.com — 11,106 points 4. http://neal.fun — 8,998 points (374.92 point per post!)

For what it is worth, M.2 NAS devices with 4-6 slots can be had for ~$210 USD / ~$290 CAD or less: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme-intels-ef…

Of course, something like the mini-NAS that Geerling describes in the following article IS a great fit for an N1x0 machine. These are really all just a spectrum of tools we have available, many of which are better fit than others for particular niches. A NAS seems like a perfect fit for N1x0. So, yeah, my initial response was dumb, but so is dismissing the RPi simply because you're trying to apply it to the wrong kinds of use cases. <https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme-intels-ef…

the author has a previous blog post about his monitoring setup: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-i-monitor-and-control-all-m… I can recommend those Third Reality outlets as well, I have about a dozen now and they Just Work with my Zigbee dongle (Sonoff ZBDongle-P) and zigbee2mqtt / Home Assistant setup. I use Home Assistant's Prometheus integration to get the data into VictoriaMetrics, which lets me build Grafana dashboards showing the usage of each plug over time.

While looking at the site I noticed https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own-media-con… Youtube is amazing! It hosts billions of videos to all kind of bad content, but still make true content creators feel it's long arm of their laws! It is just pathetic. Just like other anti-social networks like Fakebook and Twitter.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-problem-capac… Capacity issues are a common problem for wireless internet users, because the bandwidth provided by a base station / cell / satellite is divided among its users. Corporations have trouble resisting the temptation to over-sell their capacity, as adding subscribers on the same equipment is pure profit.

Nice, I'll link that later as well - the gsettings trick would have been great the first time I installed (trying to rotate the screen via tab and arrow keys was painful!) I saw Jeff Geerling had a neat RISC-V machine with exactly the same form factor too: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/sipeeds-new-handheld-risc-v-cyb… I like your point about the anchoring effect of the GPD price. I think that influenced me exactly as you say. It's a shame about the few rough edges; this is so nearly a very compelling gadget! Do you use yours much having had it a while?

Bit more relevant link directly to Jeff Gs blog https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/raspberry-pi-5-can-overclock-31… His stuff is fantastic!

I discovered EDN as a printed magazine at the university library many years ago. These days I read it on: https://www.edn.com/ I also find Jeff Geerling's writings to be informative: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/

Woof $1200! But for a very neat application, certainly, that certainly vendors would have been charging a lot more for in the past. And it includes the $100 LEA-M8F GPS module... And the $150 SiTIME SiT5721 oxco over controlled oscillator. Excellent parts. I was going to ask if the Pi had decent ptp support to actually be useful speaking ethernet, but you've already answered that (yes), https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/ptp-and-ieee-1588-hardware-time… I do kind of wish it had a PCIe ethernet controller onboard for the host too, also with ptp tied to the host. Sending that fine timing data across serial & PCIe bused to the host & to the hosts card feels unideal, like a source of some jitter, but maybe it's not really an issue.

it will throttle under load if you don't buy a case https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/best-way-keep-your-cool-running…

Buying a CO2 meter for the office - especially a closed-door small room one - is something almost all indoor workers should invest in. As you noted, it gets over 1000ppm quite easily. My office is an interior one without a window to the outdoors, so I have to flap the door open here or there along with the exterior door about 100 feet away. HVAC doesn't do much to help. If I am in the office with the door closed for 2 hours (I share it with one other person), 1000ppm happens regularly. Some good reading for any passersby on the topic: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/co2

Jeff previously reviewed our all-SSD NAS, which is far more budget, if anyone is interested: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/kubesails-pibox-mini-2-16-tb-ss… Love seeing these projects from him, but this is a rare miss in my opinion. This is the strange middle ground where it's closer to professional than "budget", by quite a bit. At some point, only a tiny tiny fraction of users need 40TB of space. I guess what I'm saying is, this isn't so much a NAS as a specialized youtuber video recording appliance. We have a number of home-hosting users on our platform that run entire racks filled to the brim - and while that's awesome - it's just not what "budget" or "NAS" implies, and it's an extremely limited audience.

I’ve been thinking about doing a Raspberry Pi CM4 with OpenWrt. Jeff Geerling recently did a post about two of the IO boards for it: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/two-tiny-dual-gigabit-raspberry… Would anybody recommend that sort of setup over a Mikrotik Hex or Ubiquiti Edgerouter X?

I think you underestimate community support. Other SBCs have no where near as much community support as pi has. There are so many things you can do with the pi, thx to community efforts, that it is not worth (in many cases) to switch to a less supported but more powerful SBC. And there are an ever increasing number of pi hats, that allows you extend pis possibilities for your use-case. To get some inspiration I can recommend https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog

Jeff Geerling has some great and very detailed write ups on this. To quote directly from his post: "The results really speak for themselves. For sequential operations, using a USB SSD is 3-4x faster than using a microSD card."[0] [0] - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspberry-pi-4-us… [1] - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/fastest-usb-storage-options-ras…

Great work on the book, and thank you for writing about the self-publishing process [1]. I'm in the process of writing a book, and your writing has addressed several things that have been on my mind. [1] Especially https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/self-publish-dont-write-publish…

Thanks for reading! >Would a Pi Zero W work for this, or do you need a full-size Pi 4? I tested Key Mime Pi (the keyboard-only version) on the Pi Zero W and it worked great. I haven't tested TinyPilot on the Pi Zero W, but I think it will work. The video encoding is happening in the HDMI dongle, so it doesn't hammer resources much. I don't have a USB to microUSB adaptor on hand, but I'll order one now and see if it works. >be able to package everything into a tiny 3D printed case. Yeah, that would be neat! One of the biggest issues I have with TinyPilot's setup right now is that it looks kind of like a bunch of random hobbyist parts stuck together. A 3D printed case would be good and wouldn't have the heat issues that Pi 4 has.[0] [0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/best-way-keep-your-cool-running…

As always, the best solution is probably in-between the two extremes, i.e. keep issues open because they are useful for discussions and non-technical people bug reports, but don't be afraid to close PR and issues [1] to avoid the problems like burnout. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/why-i-close-prs-oss-project-mai… (edit: I know the link talks about PR, but for me it applies to issues asking for features or weird bugs as well)

Best all-round ARM SBC (in terms of bang for your buck) is probably the Odroid-C2: http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/review-odroid-c2-compared-raspbe… Don't know if it has mainline kernel support, but it's a good option otherwise.

I tried searching, and his words seem to be the opposite of what you've said: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2006/wives-submit-your-husbands > Is he telling us that wives should do what they're told and that husbands can lord it over their wives? On the contrary! He speaks here about a special kind of love (married love) in which there is mutual subjection, meaning that both the husband and the wife should treat each other as equals https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2009/catholic-action-network-holy-f > Is discrimination and hatred against homosexuals wrong? Of course—these people are human beings with the gift of God's love, just like you and me! However, endorsing their lifestyle is something the Church will never be able to do, for their actions (which can be judged) are opposed to the Church's fundamental teachings about human sexuality and complementarity. Where exactly is he saying to hate gay people and that women are owned by their husbands? Were those the posts you were referencing? Note that elsewhere he also says that natural family planning is not endorsed by the church if done for frivolous reasons: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/articles/religion/nfp-and-contraception > The Church allows the use of Natural Family Planning for couples wishing to space out births, but only for serious reasons. A precondition to a couple using NFP is that they act not out of a selfish desire (i.e. the couple wants to have a lot of fun together, and a child would 'put a…

Lmao Apple R&D. Don't know what they're spending it on since they almost always adopt technologies that have already been developed + proven in the market. So Apple Spends 29bn R&D every year, over many years and ends up developing...a really good version of (if not currently the best, sure) version of an ARM chip, a pre-existing architecture with which they are already intensely familiar? Wow, they're sure being real efficient with those funds. I believe a lot of their performance gains pretty much just come down to larger die size than most ARM CPUs, making an SoC and colocating memory etc all on the same die, wrangling some of TMSC's newest most transistor dense and power efficient nodes. M1 Ultra=114b, 64 core graviton3=55b, hell people are even building stuff like https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/everything-ive-learned-building… Apple went for a bunch of easy wins tbh. Why doesn't every other computer manufacturer do it? Well Apple is a $1T company; they control so many aspects of their products, OS, software etc so very easy for them to offer this. It would require a concerted effort on the part of so many companies involved in the ecosystems of non-Apple products to make a transition the same way Apple did.

I am loving usb-c and it's great to see it's increasing in power delivery capability. 240W in a tiny, cheap connector is amazing. As a hobby I am currently upgrading all my old/favorite electronics to usb-c: - Upgrading a 2009 Apple wireless keyboard to li-ion plus usb-c charging. A 14500 li-ion cell is 3.7C, and exactly the same size as a AA cell. You can get charging/protection circuits[1] and voltage regulators[2] for nothing online. - Upgrading mice, headphones, etc from micro-usb to usb-c. Usually I solder in a usb-c connector upside down in place of micro-usb, add the correct resistors (there are CC or charge configuration pins). If you don't need data, you want these connectors with only the required pins and not more[3] or breakout connectors if you have space[4]. If anyone knows a breakout connector that has CC resistors installed I'd love to buy it. Or for gluing in place instead of soldering, this connector[5] is the only one I have found of any type with the correct CC resistors already installed. - Using usb-c for powering small prototype things instead of using a benchtop power supply. You can get power modules configured to one voltage[6], or adjustable ones[7] - Fixing janky usb-c powered electronics that only work with a usb a-c cable. Usually they are missing charge configuration resistors to get 5V. For 5V up to 3.0A, you can use simply using these resistors instead of usb PD. Usually you have to replace the connector with one that exposes the CC…

Yes, you can start with that. There is a k8s distro called k3s that runs fine even on 1GB Raspberry Pi 3. I have been running it on those for a while, but also on other SBCs. You can grow the single master by attaching one or more workers to it. The "pain" is mainly that you can't expand the single-master to a multi-master setup, so once you want to go beyond a single master, you have to re-install it all. On the other hand, with k8s you have all deployments, etc. in yaml files and you simply redeploy these on the new cluster. My remaining pain-point is persistent storage - it's simple to run complex setups with stateless containers or that can retrieve there data at initialization (i.e. a secondary name server that populates itself from the master at startup), but for classic databases I currently still have a manual step to import the DB dump once the service got (re)started/migrated. Sources: - https://k3s.io/ - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/installing-k3s-kubernetes-on-tu…

RPi power consumption and power supply is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface. A large problem is that even “3A rated" supplies suffer large voltage droop under load. This can be seen pretty easily using a cheap USB DC load [0]. As load goes up, voltage tends to drop slowly at first, then heavily at a certain point. Several I’ve bought drop as low as 4.1V at just 2A load which will almost definitely make any Pi very unhappy. I haven’t found an authoritative source but generally the Pi’s power management system starts complaining (flipping the “undervolt since boot” bitflag [1] in “vcgencmd get_throttled”) around 4.6-4.7V [2] To monitor the throttled bitflags, which also report thermal throttling, I wrote a basic shell script that just converts the hex to bin then returns a Grok-ready string with the flags as booleans. I've already got Telegraf on the RPis sending basic host metrics to an InfluxDB instance so that script just gets called by an exec input to generate and persist the data for monitoring or analysis. Eventually I'd love to write (or contribute to) a proper Golang Telegraf plug-in that just reads from the VC mailbox directly but that's still on the back burner. As far as actual power consumption during use, I’ve recently started running tests using a decent USB power meter (WITRN/Qway U2 [3] and X models, in particular) to monitor load over time while running various workloads on a Pi Zero W, a Pi 3B+ and a 4GB Pi 4. Power usage at idle is…