My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute.

Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category.

My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off

Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question:

Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna?

A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like an antenna, if you squint the right way.

Really, anything (or anyone) can be an antenna, given enough power.

But to

A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes).

It's been around since 1991 , and is still updated today

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit .

Raspberry Pi 6

One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6.

Looking back at previous launches:

• 2012: Raspberry Pi
• 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years)
• 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year)
• 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)
• 2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years)

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT .

Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone.

The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns.

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again .

I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default:

• I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall
• I stopped updating the firmware
• I locked the printer into Developer mode
• I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer

I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's.

But I'm weird—I acknowledge

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago , in 2020.

I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection.

I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work?

Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C .

I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000,

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect , Raspberry Pi's free remote access service.

When they announced Pi Connect in 2024 , I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid remote access solution after Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' was launched.

The service was helpful for those who had one or more Raspberry Pis to access, but the Pi Connect daemon didn't run on Windows or