Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board - temper your expectations
When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6 , it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims:
- World's First Open Source Arm V9 Motherboard
- Higher Performance, Lower Power Consumption , Better Security
- The following performance graph:
How is Deepseek R1 on a Raspberry Pi?
OpenAI, which is only really open about consuming all the world's energy and half a trillion of our taxpayer dollars , just got rattled to its core.
Deepseek, a new AI startup run by a Chinese hedge fund, allegedly created a new open weights model called R1 that beats OpenAI's best model in every metric.
And they did it for $6 million , with GPUs that run at half the memory bandwidth of OpenAI's.
Besides the embarassment of a Chinese startup beating OpenAI using one percent
Don't pay $800 for Apple's 2TB SSD upgrade
Apple charges $800 to upgrade from the base model M4 Mac mini's 256 GB of internal storage to a more capacious 2 TB.
Pictured above is a photo of a standard 2230-size M.2 NVMe SSD (one made by Raspberry Pi, in this case), and Apple's proprietary not-M.2 drive, which has NAND flash chips on it, but no NVM Express controller , the 'brains' in a little chip that lets NVMe
CaribouLite SDR HAT for SDR on a Raspberry Pi
A couple years ago, after I heard about the CaribouLite on CrowdSupply , I pre-ordered one.
I've dabbled in SDR with an RTL-SDR v3 for a few years, even using one with nrsc5 to listen to baseball games OTA because of silly MLB blackout restrictions.
But low-cost SDRs like the RTL-SDR v3 are receive-only, and have a limited frequency range, and lower quality RF filtering, so it can be frustrating if you're trying to work with
Project Mini Rack - compact and portable homelabs
Today I'm announcing Project MINI RACK , an open source project to help those building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, and other electronics projects into mini 10" racks.
Top 10 ways to monitor Linux in the console
top (pictured below ... above is btop ) is the first utility everyone recommends to monitor Linux (or any form of UNIX, including macOS) resource usage. It's efficient, available almost everywhere... but it's also a bit basic. It shows essential metrics, but looks like it's from the 80s. There are ways to brighten it up, like highlighting active processes or changing color schemes, but it's not the only game in town!
Who would buy a Raspberry Pi for $120?
That is indeed a puzzling question, brought about by Raspberry Pi's introduction of the newest Raspberry Pi 5 model, with 16 GB of RAM.
I spent a couple weeks testing the new Pi model, and found it does have its virtues . But being only $20 away from a complete GMKTec N100 Mini PC with 8GB of RAM , it's probably a step too far for most people .
System76 built the fastest Windows Arm PC
System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra , and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development .
But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months ) testing the latest Ampere-based computer to come to market.
I initially ran my gauntlet of tests under Ubuntu 24.04 (the OS this workstation ships with), but
Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them!
Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as the weather and timing of an antenna inspection lined up perfectly with his schedule.
Video
I'll summarize a bit of what we talked about in today's Geerling Engineering video, but if you
Getting beyond ProcessExecutionErrors when installing Ubuntu on arm64
Currently there are precious few SystemReady Arm computersâcomputers like the System76 Thelio Astra I was sent recently to test.
The level or 'band' of SystemReady SR used by modern Ampere-based arm64 workstations and servers means you can install any out-of-the-box Linux distributions, as long as they provide an arm64-compatible installer.
Ubuntu has some of the most complete support for arm64, so I went to download a Live CD ISO I could flash
