MNT Reform - a hackable laptop, not for everyone

MNT Reform bottom with purple battery cells

The MNT Reform 's design, the components, everything —is open source. If iFixIt did a teardown, they'd probably give it an 11 out of 10.

You can replace individual battery cells! Some people with these laptops hacked in their own speakers, added more internal Ethernet, or even swapped out the CPU itself.

Does that mean I think you should buy it? No, probably not. It's expensive ( starting at €1199 ),


Minivans are better than trucks

...at least if you have a family, and need to transport datacenter racks.

Consider this:

  • You can fit full 4' x 8' plywood sheets in the back (assuming you fold down/remove the seats)
  • You can fit up to 12' long dimensional lumber (1x2, 2x4, etc.) inside (passing it through the gap between front seats)
  • You can seat 7 or even 8 people inside, somewhat comfortably, with at least 2-3 cupholders per
Datacenter Rack in the Back Minivan Toyota Sienna

Keeping one Game Gear out of the landfill

Game Gear and scratchy blue

I was sent a Zega Mame Gear kit by John Maddison, of Zarcade, in April this year. I bought a Game Gear shell off eBay for $15, some extra buttons, switches, screws, and a new glass screen cover from Handheld Legend , and I could finally find a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for sale last month.

So I put all that together into a modern RetroPie handheld emulation build, and now I can play through games I only wish I could've played in my childhood.


My SimpliSafe doorbell lit its own fire this winter

...I'm just glad it was on the outside of the building, attached to non-flammable material :)

As part of my new studio/office buildout , I needed a 'smart' doorbell, so I could accept deliveries or see who rang, even if I was far from the door or recording.

I bought a SimpliSafe system for my location, and tied it into Home Assistant. It was easy to set up, the monthly cost was a fraction of what ADT wanted to charge,

SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro

Forget spaceships; I just want my music

A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?"

They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least.

But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're genuinely fun to listen to, for everyone in the car.

Well, that fine day, the kids chose Ladybug Music.

Song not available Apple Music on iPhone

Raspberry Pi 5 and RP1 X-ray scans

Following up on my X-ray scans of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W two years ago, I had the opportunity to scan the Raspberry Pi 5, working with an electronics inspection lab:

Raspberry Pi 5 Transition to X-ray

I posted a video detailing everything I imaged on the board , but in this blog post, I'll hit on the highlights—the new chips at the heart of the Pi 5: the BCM2712 SoC and the RP1 'southbridge'.

Aside : If you are Casetify , then yes


Pi clusters aren't dumb

...and the video I just posted on the Mars 400 explores the topic a bit more.

Mars 400 DeskPi Super6c and Turing Pi 2 CM4 Raspberry Pi clusters

But every time I've posted a video, blog post, tweet ( xeet? ), or anything else on the topic of Pi clusters, a common sentiment is "you can do that faster and cheaper with a set of VMs."

Or, during the Pi shortage (which is basically over ), when you could only buy Pis from scalpers for insane markups, the sentiment was "you


External GPUs working on the Raspberry Pi 5

My journey testing various graphics cards on the Raspberry Pi began soon after the Compute Module 4 was launched in 2020. Since then I've tested almost 20 graphics cards—with a little success.

But there were two roadblocks to getting drivers for even older AMD radeon drivers working well:

  1. The maximum PCIe Gen 2.0 bandwidth meant use cases were limited to 'processing on GPU' tasks like GPU-assisted compute. Even in the base case, external cards couldn't necessarily pipe
Raspberry Pi 5 with AMD XFX RX 460 graphics card

HTGWA: How to completely erase a hard drive in Linux

This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'll show you how I completely initialize a hard drive so I can re-use it somewhere else (like Ceph) that doesn't like drives with partition information!

First, a warning: this blog post does not show how to zero a hard drive, or secure erase . That's a slightly different process.

But as someone with way too many storage devices


So you want to make a Raspberry Pi killer...

Raspberry Pi CM4 Clones stacked up

I'm in the unique position of owning a collection of Raspberry Pi Compute Modules 4 (CM4).

I also own at least one of every production CM4 clone in existence.

This sets up a quandary: if I have the real thing , what motivation do I have to care about the clones?

There are hundreds of CM4 carrier boards that do everything from restoring retro game consoles to monitoring remote oil rigs in highly-explosive environments.

Since launch, the CM4 has been difficult—