Late last year, I published a blog post with comprehensive benchmarks of various microSD cards used with the internal Raspberry Pi 2 reader, based on the comprehensive (and always-up-to-date Raspberry Pi microSD card benchmark page I maintain for the Pi Dramble project). After publishing the blog post, a few different readers pointed me to some overclocking tweaks that could help boost the speeds further for UHS microSD cards, allowing large file I/O speed to double, and random I/O to get a solid

I think today was my most Pi-full π day, ever! Let's see:

Early in the morning, I finished upgrading all the Ansible playbooks used by the Raspberry Pi Dramble so my cluster of five Raspberry Pis would run faster and better on the latest version of official Raspberry Pi OS, Raspbian Jessie.

Later, opensource.com published an article I wrote about using Raspberry Pis placed throughout my house to help my kids sleep better :

Raspberry Pi project to regulate room temperature and sleep better https:

I've been supporting Drupal VM (a local Drupal CMS development environment) for Windows, Mac, and Linux for the past couple years, and have been using Vagrant and virtual machines for almost all my development (mostly PHP, but also some Python and Node.js at the moment) for the past four years. One theme that comes up quite frequently when dealing with VMs, open source software stacks (especially Drupal/LAMP), and development, is how much extra effort there is to make things work

In the midst of my work upgrading the Raspberry Pi Dramble to Raspbian Jessie Lite, I noticed one of the basic components of the architecture—static IP addresses for all the Raspberry Pis—was not working correctly anymore. My Ansible playbooks configured the /etc/network/interfaces file correctly, so it would define a static IP address for the eth0 interface (the built-in Ethernet port on the Pi):

auto loiface lo inet loopbackiface eth0 inet static  address 10.

Last night I presented the following slides at the Ansible St. Louis meetup at Riot Games. In the presentation, I mention the motivation behind Ansible and Galaxy 2, and run through most of the major changes and new features:

I've incorporated many of the new features in Ansible 2.0 in my book, Ansible for DevOps , and will be rewriting a few of the examples in the book to take advantage of new features in Ansible 2 soon!

tl;dr : The Orange Pi Plus offers much better specs, and much better performance, than a similarly-priced Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately—and this is the case with most RPi competitors at this time—setup, hardware support, and the smaller repository of documentation and community knowledge narrow this board's appeal to enthusiasts willing to debug annoying setup and configuration issues on their own.

To use eMMC modules on the Orange Pi, Radxa, Milk-V, etc. as a writable volume in Linux, you need to delete the existing partitions (on my old Orange Pi, it was formatted as FAT/WIN32), create a new partition, format the partition, then mount it:

1. Delete the existing partitions, and create a new partition:1. sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1 2. p to list all partitions, then d and a number, once for each of

Between projects at work, I decided to take a week's vacation and attempt a rather ambitious DIY project at the house. After working through some plans for the main rooms in our house, my wife and I decided we wanted to convert what was originally the formal dining room at our home, complete with a low-hanging chandelier and wall of floor-to-ceiling tinted mirrors, into a functional schoolroom with tons of storage and a teacher desk area.

So we started with this:

And ended up with

I'm going to bring the Raspberry Pi Dramble with me to php[tek] on May 25 in St. Louis this year, and I'm hoping to also bring it with me to DrupalCon New Orleans in early May (I submitted the session Highly-available Drupal 8 on a Raspberry Pi Cluster , hopefully it's approved!).

After this morning's official announcement of the Raspberry Pi model 3 B , I placed two orders with separate vendors as quickly as possible; I'm