More from Jeff Geerling
In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool. I found a way to drop in a Pi 5 and GNSS HAT, display the time and GPS status on the built-in 16x2 LCD, show the status on the bicolor LED, and make this box useful again.
Proxmox today announced their Proxmox Virtual Environment is now available for 64-bit ARM. I tested it on my Ampere Altra Dev Platform—the same machine on which I've booted Windows on Arm the first time, messed with multiple GPUs, and most recently tested Houdini's native arm64 support. Install was easy, as the Ampere Altra uses UEFI / ACPI for its hardware, meaning Proxmox didn't have to tailor it's ISO to specific platforms, like you have to do with Raspberry Pis and most SBCs using a Device Tree setup.
Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop.
Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads.
More in technology
The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner.
If everything worked as well as the product called Evapo-Rust, the world would be a much better place. That’s just one of the many lessons learned during my recent — successful! — project to transform my old, nonfunctioning gasoline-powered generator into something much better.
When I created OpenDithering back in June, the feature I was proudest of was the Auto-tune button. It did the slider work for me: it compared the dithered result to the original image, nudged the settings, and repeated until the image stopped improving. Over the summer it grew into a three-step process (Auto Expose, Color-tune, […] The post I deleted my favorite feature, and the image got better: Direct Binary Search (DBS) in OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.