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:

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

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 rackâit's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:

I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years agoâbut he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much spaceâjust 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:

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

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 sourceâusually my shotgun mic into a separate recorderâbut 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

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 itselfâbut found that it, too, had the RFI sound, meaning the iPhone's interference made it into the mic circuit itself,

The Rock 5 B is not a Raspberry Pi killerâyet

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 CPUâwith 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 areâsome YouTube commenters argueâits primary audience!

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,
