For a few years I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi) as a Pi-hole and Wireguard server on my home network. An RPi 4 is overpowered for that sort of thing, but I had it, so I figured I might as well use it.

Over the last few weeks I noticed increasing problems with it. The best I can tell is that the RPi Micro SD card reading/writing hardware was somehow broken. The Micro SD card I had in it originally proved bad when I tried imaging it with a fresh OS install. A different card could successfully be imaged, but when I booted the RPi from it, some programs wouldn't run because they were corrupt.

I thought about buying a replacement RPi, but because of the RAMpocalypse, prices have gone through the roof. An equivalent new RPi 4 would cost $55, when I'm sure I purchased the original one for much less than that. With shipping it was looking like a $70-80 purchase, which seemed ridiculous.

In the end, I decided to simply run the Pi-hole and Wireguard services as Docker containers on the Mac Mini M4 I use as a media center. I leave the Mac Mini running all the time anyway, it uses only 4 Watts at idle, and it's more than capable of running these services.

Looking at pricing of new RPis, including the newest RPi 5, it got me thinking about the value proposition of the RPi 5 at the moment. The RPi was developed to be a low-cost, versatile single-board computer with many applications. All RPis can be used for various general and specialty computing projects, see the wide variety of RPi HATs available. However, with the newest RPi 5, they are trying to make the argument that it's becoming a general purpose computer for everyday use. They even highlight that the RPi 5 can drive dual 4K monitors at 60 Hz, not something I would associate with cheap computing.

Let's look at this complete RPi 5 kit. It comes with all you need to get up and running, minus a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. A 256GB SSD kit with 8GB of RAM costs $320. The kit includes active cooling, which is required to achieve maximum performance. A base RPi 5 with 8Gb of RAM costs $175, which means the rest of the kit costs $145.

Let's compare this to a base Mac Mini M6. This comes with 256 GB of SSD storage and 16GB of RAM for $899. Like the RPi kit, it comes with everything you need save a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Using a $305 RPi 5 with 16GB of RAM to match the Mini (making the RPi kit $305 + $145 = $450), below I compare the speeds of these computers. I'm using this Mac Mini M6 benchmark and this RPi 5 benchmark.

We can see that the Mac Mini is over 5x faster in single core, and almost 10x faster in multicore, while the Mini costs only 2x more. That is a devastating price to performance ratio for the RPi. But wait!, you say, you can still buy two RPis for one Mini, which if you're on a limited budget (say, in a school), it really helps. But wait!, I respond, you still need to buy monitors, keyboards, and mice, which cost the same regardless if they're connected to a Mini or a RPi. The price savings with RPis isn't as big as you might think.

The true value proposition of an RPis are the GPIO pins which enables tons of fun and interesting computing projects. My solar water heater uses a RPi 3B+ and its GPIO pins to collect data and act as the thermostat. The tough spot that the RAMpocalypse has put RPi 5s is that this value proposition has been overtaken by component pricing, making the RPi 5 a poor choice for a general purpose computer. There might be situations where a faster RPi is needed when using the GPIO pins, but that's getting potentially niche. I would guess that most things you would need an RPi for could be done with one of the older and less expensive models.

Perhaps once the RAMpocalypse has passed the RPi 5 will again become an economical choice for hobby computing, but sadly, it isn't right now.

I try to keep personal and professional accounts separate on my computer. For example I typically use Safari for work related things and Vivaldi for personal stuff. I know that Safari supports profiles that would accomplish the same thing, but using entirely different browsers makes it easier to keep things straight. Similarly to web browsers, I split up my email by application. I used the macOS mail application for professional email, and accessed my personal email via a web browser (i.e. Vivaldi).

Recently, I decided to try out Thunderbird and bring all my email into one application. It can handle multiple accounts and does it with pretty good separation. Also, I wanted to set up PGP for my email, and Thunderbird seemed like the easiest and best way to do it. Almost no one uses PGP with their email, but that doesn't mean I can't. PGP can send fully encrypted emails, but this only works when the recipient has PGP set up, too. Since most people have not set up PGP, instead I send emails with plain text content and a digital signature file attached. This means that PGP uses my private key to generate a cryptographically signed bit of text that, when combined with my public key, can prove (or disprove) I sent the message. It can also be used to confirm (or deny) that the content of the email wasn't changed between sending and delivery. Almost nothing I send is super important, but the effort involved was small, so why not? I've pasted my personal email public key on my About Me page if you want to use it.

Because Thunderbird is open source and is heavily based on Firefox, you can add extensions to it, just like Firefox. I decided I wanted an extension that adds random quotes to the bottom of my new messages. Some quick searching showed this didn't exist, so I decided to write one. And by "write one," I mean I asked an AI to write one for me. I don't know JavaScript, I don't know how to write Firefox extensions, and I didn't want to learn. The AI did a good enough job and only had one bug that needed fixing (which it fixed after being asked to). I've published the code on github, and it is simple enough to use if you're interested. The plugin has a few built-in quotes, and I have made a library of cycling quotes that will be added to my emails going forward.

Finally, I can endorse Choosy. This is a simple utility that allows you to choose which browser opens up a link. For example, I have it set to send all web links I get in Slack (which I use for work) to Safari. If there is no predefined behavior, it gives you the option to pick which browser to send the link to. It's $10, so it's not free, but if you're like me and want this kind of separation, it's worth it.

When I started this blog I used Wordpress. Wordpress is web-based content management system that uses PHP and one of MySQL or MariaDB to store the post data. I used Wordpress for years moving between a few different hosts finally settling on Linode.

Wordpress is a great product and has a healthy, vibrant user community. There are thousands of plugins and themes. There's phone apps for making blog posts on-the-go. However, being a dynamic web tool it is vulnerable to security issues. It is a constant game of whack-a-mole keeping things updated. Plugins add new bugs, and sometimes plugins are written with purposeful backdoors.

Over three years ago I decided to move away from Wordpress to something non-dynamic. Something with fewer vulnerabilities. I initially tried Hugo and found a tool that exports posts from Wordpress to Hugo. However, I found I didn't really like Hugo, and I just kinda... didn't do anything about it for a long time. Years a long time.

A few weeks ago I decided to revisit things. I found Pelican, a Python-based static website builder. It is very similar to Hugo in form and function, but being written in Python it jibes with my knowledge and skills much better than Hugo. Posts and pages are written in reStructuredText or Markdown, or even HTML. I mostly use Markdown, and in a few cases, HTML is the correct choice (e.g. photo galleries). Each document has fields of metadata that Pelican parses to build out a full static website. There are a number of themes and I'm presently using the bootcamp2 theme. Pelican also has dozens of plugins that add plenty of capabilities but zero vulnerabilities.

It took a few weeks to slowly fix up all the posts that previously had been exported from Wordpress into Hugo-flavored Markdown into something Pelican could read. I uploaded a fair number of videos to YouTube, and had to adjust various other media here and there.

At the same time I'm moving my website to a new Linode server. This new server will not run any PHP or other dynamic web content which should keep things much simpler.

I'm going to try to post here more often and more consistently. Let's see if I succeed!

A few days ago Bitbucket announced that they were ending support for Mercurial and will only support Git starting in about a year. I am a happy Mercurial user. It was the first DVCS system I learned, and have had no reason to switch away from it. Git is more popular than Mercurial, yes, but with useful plugins like hg-git, I never need to use Git even when I am working on a Git repository. Ultimately, the difference between Git and Mercurial is kind of like the difference between Windows and Mac (in that order). One is more popular than the other, but when it comes down to featureset and capabilities, it's very close. Like Windows vs. Mac, the main difference is the experience of using them, and I feel Mercurial is the clear winner.

I only use Bitbucket for their Mercurial support, so I decided to waste no time and abandon them entirely and immediately. In their place I am self-hosting an install of the community (open source) edition of Rhodecode. There are a couple of my repositories publicly viewable here. So far it seems like it has more than enough features to replace Bitbucket.

Update: As of this writing, I turned my self-hosted code server off because I'm lazy.

I feel I should point out that this serves as a reminder to me (and to you, dear reader) that cloud services cannot be relied upon. Companies, even if you are paying them, can stop serving you. This is at least the second time I have had to replace a cloud service with a self-hosted solution. A few years ago I replaced Google Reader with tt-rss. Like I wrote previously, because my new Mercurial hosting service is self-hosted, no one will be taking it away from me. And that is good.

Finally, I don't know why anyone would choose Bitbucket now to host their code repositories. Without Mercurial, all it has it Git, and Github (which has obviously been Git-only from the start) has already won:

Github

Bitbucket