Just to adjust the numbers a little, the Pi idles at 2-4W (for similar RAM spec), and the N100/150 are only about 2-4x more performant (with a slight bit less efficiency), for most tasks, in real-world benchmarks.
(Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
I was able to see the (under construction) launch stand for Starship at KSC last week; it sounds like they built it and are rebuilding it constantly in response to pad learnings in Texas. It'd be amazing to get at least the first stage to a reliable state so the launch site could be complete in Florida without major concerns about the Falcon 9 launch tower situated close nearby!
The main thing I took away from visiting KSC the first time (alas missed out on any launches) was how incredibly huge all things orbital-launch-related are, even for smaller rockets. Also didn't realize how large the Blue Origin facilities are there. It's one thing to see glimpses in a spaceflight YouTube channel video, it's another to drive alongside them.
One of my favorite parts of living in Central Florida is watching the rockets take off every few days. Sadly a lot of the launches lately have been daytime or in the middle of the night, but seeing Falcon Heavy split off during the holidays one year remains a highlight.
Crumbs for anyone interested that parking at Chain of Lakes Park (in Titusville), then hiking out along E Jay Jay Rd, crossing the train tracks and walking south (hide from any train company trucks driving down), and watching across the lagoon is super chill.
Avoids all the tourists, insane parking, and/or Playalinda capacity uncertainty. Also skips the viewing platforms in the park that semi-professional photographers are huge dicks about.
Most SATA PCIe adapters will work out of the box now, but powering the drives is a little annoying. There are a few HATs or CM boards that have SATA ports that also distribute power, like the Penta SATA HAT.
Do you know if running 5 drives on a Pi5 is reliable/stable with a Penta HAT? I think the biggest issue is that drives could potentially go online/offline either by bus disconnection or power (which could be the reason for bus disconnection).
Infinite Mac (https://infinitemac.org) is honestly incredible and gets you 99% of the way there for running old software for the nostalgia.
But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.
And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!
Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.
The (lack of) latency is probably the most difficult part to reproduce not just emulation, but with a modern hardware+software stack period. It’s not necessary to go back as far as the Mac Classic to get that though, anything that can boot Mac OS 9 (including a few that can hacked to run it, like the G4 Mini) will get you that too. When I boot up my PowerBook G3 the sheer responsiveness when typing immediately stands out.
The easiest way would be to buy a PoE adapter that takes in PoE and splits to Ethernet + USB-C power plug. I use those with many boards (even Pis from time to time, if a HAT won't fit), and they work as long as you only need a few watts.
Oh those exist, true. I have a PoE switch where I am not using any of the PoE ports so I have a fantasy of having multiple RPi's or other single board computers being powered by PoE running various stuff for my home.
Also I had to spit take when I noticed the username. Absolutely love your YouTube channels, thank you for taking so much time creating high quality videos.
reply