What does Nvidia buying ARM mean for Raspberry Pi?

Over the weekend, Nvidia confirmed it would purchase ARM from Softbank for $40 billion.

Now, what is ARM, why is Nvidia buying it, and what does any of this have to do with the Raspberry Pi?

Well, let's start with ARM.

This blog post also has a video version to go along with it .

What is ARM?

ARM can refer to a number of things, but let's start by talking about the company, Arm Holdings . They have lineage dating back to

BBC Micro Minicomputer - Source: Wikipedia

Testing how long it takes Chromium to open, load a web page, and quit on Debian

Something I've long been meaning to benchmark, but never really got around to, is benchmarking the amount of time it takes on a Raspberry Pi to open a browser, load a page, and quit.

This is a relatively decent thing to benchmark, compared to other raw performance metrics, because it's something that probably 99% of Raspberry Pi users who use it with a GUI will do, with some frequency (well, probably loading more than one page before quitting, but still...

Puppeteer loading a site in Chromium and exiting

Enabling TRIM on an external SSD on a Raspberry Pi

I've been doing a lot of benchmarking and testing with the Raspberry Pi 4 and SSDs connected via USB. I explored UASP Support , which USB SSDs are the fastest , and I'm now booting my Pis from USB SSDs .

Anyways, one thing that I have wondered about—and some people have asked me about—is TRIM support.

I'm working on a new video for my YouTube channel that will go into some more detail on which of the drives I tested support TRIM


Using a Nikon D750 as a webcam or for live streaming

You can use a Nikon D750 as a webcam or for live streaming, assuming you have a mini HDMI to HDMI cable and an HDMI interface for your computer.

While it's forte is stills photography, the D750 isn't bad at video; it can output up to 1080p at 60 frames per second, and has full-time autofocus, but the live view autofocus isn't that great, so I recommend manual focus if you don't

D750 as webcam comparison to FaceTime camera on MacBook Pro

Why I haven't sold my $166 MRR SaaS product

Earlier today, I saw a post on Hacker News titled "I sold my side-project for $30k" .

Besides the point that the sale price was $10k plus up to $20k dependent on the growth of the sold entity, some in the comments worried that the sale would result in users becoming unhappy with the way the service was managed by its new owners.

That's a valid concern, as most acquisitions change the direction of a product, sometimes making radical departures


Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera - YouTube Video Series

Today I posted the first episode of a new series on the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera .

Raspberry Pi HQ Camera with Tamron 8mm C-mount lens

I plan on releasing a number of videos in the series covering how to use the HQ camera in various settings, like for astrophotography, nature photography and video, as a webcam or for streaming, for time-lapse photography, and for general photography.

I'll be updating this post with all the videos as I publish them:

Episode 1 - Intro to Raspberry Pi HQ Camera


Did breaking backwards compatibility kill Drupal?

First of all, Drupal is not dead. But I would argue it's not in healthy place relative to competing projects as it was in its heyday, in the early 2010s.

In this blog post, I will explore the problem the Drupal community finds itself in five years after a major release that broke backwards compatibility in almost every subsystem, forcing a laborious upgrade process and process shift that left many users in the dust.

I've written about this in the past, most famously in

Usage Statistics for Drupal Core from 2013 to 2020

Setting up a Mac mini from MacStadium for headless CI

I recently got an offer from MacStadium to use one of their dedicated Mac minis to perform CI and testing tasks for my Mac-based open source projects (for example, my Mac Dev Ansible Playbook , which I use to configure my own Macs).

Apple logo on glowy laptop background

So I thought I'd document a little bit in this blog post about how I configured the Mac mini for more secure remote administration, since Macs tend to be a little more 'open' out of the box than comparable Linux machines that I'm used


Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps

Five years, 834 commits, and 24 major revisions later, I've just published the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps , a book which has now sold over 60,000 copies and spawned a popular free Ansible 101 video series on YouTube.

Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition - Cover

Making good on my promise to make the ebook updates free, forever, I've published a new revision of the book at least once a quarter since I published the first revision (version 0.42 ) on


The fastest USB storage options for Raspberry Pi

For years, I've been maintaining benchmarks for microSD cards on the Raspberry Pi , but I only spent a little time testing external USB storage, due to historic limitations with the Pi's USB 2.0 bus.

But the Pi 4 cleared away the limitations with a full-speed USB 3.0 bus offering much better performance, so I've done a lot of testing with USB boot, and with all the USB SSDs I had at my disposal. You can see some of those results in

Flash drives and USB SSD and NVMe from Arcanite Corsair TDBT XPG and Kingston with Raspberry Pi 4