My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

This weekend I wanted to create a new App in Azure so I could help a local nonprofit automate one of their donor relations processes via email through Office 365.

So I tried registering an app by visiting the App Registration Portal. I signed in to my personal Microsoft account, clicked 'New registration', then was greeted by this page:

Azure you do not have access

I thought that was a bit strange, since I shouldn't have any restrictions... but then I noticed it listed [redacted] School as the reason


Testing Raspberry Pi's new Debug Probe

Raspberry Pi Debug Probe Pi 4 model B and Pico W

Yesterday, in tandem with Raspberry Pi's announcement of their new $12 Debug Probe , I received one in the mail (pictured above).

The Debug Probe is powered by an RP2040, and lets you connect from USB to UART (serial) or SWD (Serial Wire Debug), perfect for debugging most embedded devices.

UART is useful to connect to a device's console when you don't have a display or other means of controlling it, and you can find UART


Moving my PC into my rack in a 2U case

This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:

2U Gaming and Linux PC in small studio rack

I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.

So after working with


Transcribing recorded audio and video to text using Whisper AI on a Mac

2024 Update : I have a short video outlining my end-to-end process for subtitling all my videos on YouTube using Whisper/MacWhisper:

Closed Captions for YouTube videos

Trying every combination to flash my ASUS motherboard's BIOS

tl;dr : Use an old-fashioned USB 2.0 flash drive , format it FAT32, download the firmware, make sure it's named correctly, and use the motherboard's 'BIOS Flashback' option after powering off the computer.

This past week, I devoted far too much time to the task of updating my brand new motherboard's BIOS.

It started with a combo deal from Micro Center: a ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming WiFi motherboard , a

Nvidia RTX 4090 on AMD 7900x platform

Fixing Rode Wireless Go II RF Interference or buzz

Recently I recorded an entire video for my YouTube channel using only a Rode Wireless GO II lavaliere mic.

I typically spend the time to set up a second mic source—usually my shotgun mic into a separate recorder—but this time I was feeling lazy. I had never had an issue with the wireless lavs in my basement, and the Rode system includes a built-in recorder in the bodypack transmitter so I have backup audio that has saved my bacon a few times when interference did cause cutouts

Rode Wireless Go II pad indicator RFI noise

Removing RF interference from a cell phone from audio recording

I made the mistake of putting my Wireless Go II mic transmitter in the same pocket as my iPhone for a recent video recording, and as a result, I had a lot of RF interference in the recorded track.

Thinking I could just use the nice feature of the Wireless Go II's built-in recording, I grabbed the track off the body pack itself—but found that it, too, had the RFI sound, meaning the iPhone's interference made it into the mic circuit itself,

Denoise in iZotope Audio Editor

The Rock 5 B is not a Raspberry Pi killer—yet

Rock 5 model B on desk with Raspberry Pi in background

Radxa's Rock 5 model B is an ARM single board computer that's 3x faster than a Raspberry Pi. And that's just the 8-core CPU—with PCI Express Gen 3 x4 (the Pi has Gen 2 x1), storage is 7x faster ! I got over 3 GB/sec with a KIOXIA XG6 NVMe SSD.

It's still half as slow as modern ARM desktops like Apple's M1 mini, or Microsoft's Dev Kit


Is AM Radio Dead?

...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience!

Radio transmission tower on mountain top

Using PiBenchmarks.com for SBC disk performance testing

For many years, I've maintained some scripts to do basic disk benchmarking for SBCs, to test 1M and 4K sequential and random access speeds, since those are the two most relevant tests for the Linux workloads I run on my Pis.

I've been using this script for years, and it uses fio and iozone to get the metrics I need.

And from time to time, I would test a number of microSD cards on the Pi , or run tests on NVMe SSDs on the Pi,

PiBenchmarks.com - geerlingguy results