I'm trying out a new approach here to how I serve contents to you.
As many of my listeners know, I have baby number two on the way
as of recording any minute now. Literally, my wife can call me and
say she's in labor. So life is getting busy, work, two kids,
all that stuff. You know. I know a lot of y'all listening
to her late. I've got a lot of dads actually who listen to the
show and reach out to me from all over the world, all over Europe,
South America. I'm kind of thinking about renaming the podcast or creating another
podcast about being a busy geek dad that I think that would be kind of
cool and kind of commiserates not the right word for most of us, because
we all love our children, most of us very deeply love our children,
I included. But life gets busy, and dads who were geeks and gamers
and tinkerers like me and always, you know, we have a touch of
the add I like to say, always into different things, having a family,
having kids, having a full time job kind of makes it difficult to
pursue our geek things sometimes to devote so much time into that, into that
effort into that kind of nourishment for that part of our lives. Now,
I will say that my children, Riker and the new one on the way,
I have not missed. Like there's no time that I've been playing with
my son, interacting with my son, loving my son, kissing my son,
hugging my son, that I'd rather be doing anything else but being a
father to my son. So, for instance, I'm sitting here recording right
now next to my giant thirty two inch widescreen CRT HDTV, and it hooked
up to my Nintendo Wei with all the jail broken Nintendo we with all the
emulators on and everything, and part of me just says, you know,
back in the day, I could have just said down there for hours and
played Super Mario Brothers three through an emulator on my old CRT and whatever.
But now that I have kids, that's not really I can't spend five hours
a day or whatever playing video games or working with crafts or painting or whatever.
I don't. As much as I love all that stuff. The only
thing that can that can possibly make me not miss tinkering, not miss my
geek thing is the time I spend with my children. But in my family,
but it gets it so that just means it gets difficult to do kind
of other work. So Geek Therapy Radio has been on the air, has
been not only just a podcast, but has been on the air since two
thousand and seventeen. When was the first aired. I think it was Spring
twenty seventeen that I got the green light for geek Therapy Radio. Life has
changed a lot. When I started Geek Therapy Radio, I had just been
divorced, and I was single, and I had all the time I'm in
the known universe to devote to building Geek Therapy Radio and recording episodes. I
had so much time at one point that if y'all remember, if you've been
with me long enough and all these episodes are still up. I used to
do a between broadcast show called like a Weekly Geek or geek weekly, whatever
date your daily Geek. I would record a show six days a week.
There were six five to six days a week you had brand new content from
Geek Therapy Radio. That's how much time I had, That's how much freedom
I had to to make these episodes. That I could just constantly put new
material, new content in your feeds five to six days a week now in
twenty twenty four, getting ready for baby number two, married, wonderful life.
I'm so happy, so blessed, so privileged really to have what I
have and be able to do what I do, But I can't. I
can barely. If I make two new episodes a month, that is really
hooking for me. So if you listen on the radio, you're gonna hear
some repeats. If you're an astute radio listener, you'll hear, oh,
this episode was from twenty twenty one. I typically like to keep things as
evergreen as possible, but if you listen close enough on the broadcast, you'll
say, oh, he's talking about Stranger Things season three. When was that?
That was so long ago. So I'm re airing older episodes so they're
still kind of fresh to new radio listeners. But actually making new content,
new episodes is just it's becoming increasingly difficult. If I can do two per
month, that's, like I said, that's really something for me right now.
So I just posed a question on X if y'all would be okay with
me uploading less produced content to fill the gaps between the the big broadcasts.
You know, the podcast with four segments that are ready for the for broadcast
on the radio, that are ready for podcasting, everything like that, if
I can just crack the mic and just talk to y'all about something that's on
my mind when I have the moment to do that, So you very if
y'all are cool with this, and I'm probably just gonna do it anyways,
because it's it's no sweat for me to do it. And if you don't
want to listen to it, that's totally fine too. You don't have to
press play on it. You might actually hear a lot more contents honestly from
the car. You know. I might just have clip my DGI mic on
me and just start recording as I'm driving to work or home from worker from
here to there, or maybe I'm at my house and I don't I don't
have time to kind of like set up the whole studio to record a podcast.
I may just start recording on my phone and then right there in the
my podcast back end just upload it right to my two speakers. My back
end just literally hit record on the phone. And I've given this advice to
people who've asked me for podcast advice. I say, you've got the phone
in your hand has an excellent microphone, and there's nothing stopping you from just
hitting record and then uploading it right with your phone straight to the world for
podcast listeners to enjoy. And so I think I'm gonna heed a little bit
of my own advice in that regard. You might just hear, you may
hear different quality of audio. Obviously, if I'm recording in the car,
it's not gonna sound as clean and as crisp as the way you're hearing it
right now. I'm in my studio, I'm recording into my MXLB sixty seven
G, going through thousands of dollars worth of signal processing and software to make
it sound as good as it currently does as you're listening to. I'm just
saying, can I strip it down bear bones for you? Would y'all be
offended or would I lose any of you if I just hit record on my
phone and then uploaded it straight from my phone straight to your phones. I
don't think anyone would be offended by that. Perhaps somebody, you know,
some people might be turned off by the varying kind of audio quality. Now,
I am an audio engineer. That is my background before anything else,
Before videography before anything. My whole background is audio engineering, so I'm going
to be reasonably aware of how i can make the audio sound the best for
my current recording situations. So, for instance, if I'm recording in my
car, I may wait till I get back home a little bit and do
some aid noising to kind of maybe take away some of the background drone of
the automobile, although I don't want to take away too much because that might
be a little bit of ASMR to kind of hear me going down the road
as long as you can still hear my voice clearly. And I'm telling you
again, because I'm an audio engineer by my background, You're going to hear
my voice clearly, no matter what. You're gonna hear my voice clearly.
You just may hear some other things clearly as well. But I'm gonna do
my best in this content to kind of that fills the gaps between highly produced
content to make it sound as good as it possibly can. Where I came
to this kind of conclusion, this idea is really today, you know,
I have to leave this house and maybe I don't know twenty minutes maximum at
the latest to go work on the sound system at church and hook up new
media PCs and rearranging things and installing projectors and dah dah da da, I
gotta go. I gotta go in a few minutes. And that's because kind
of how life is right now is I'm always I gotta go somewhere, I
gotta do something, I have work to do, everything like that. So
what's spurred on this idea is I've got, you know, twenty minutes currently
as I'm recording more or less before I have to leave to go do my
next obligation. But I've really wanted to talk to y'all, and I'm gonna
timestamp this as best I can. Also put chapters in here, maybe in
the title. I really wanted to talk to y'all about something, something specific
I recently purchased and even put together. You can't see it because I'm just
recording audio, but I'll tap on the case. This is a Raspberry Pie
five case. I have finally been able to procure at MSRP a Raspberry Pie
five eight gigabyte model from Microcenter. What did it cost? Seven sixty now?
What that's just the case. I think it was actually eighty dollars for
the raspberry Pie five and a lot of you listening. This is why I
want to talk about this. Eighty dollars for a Raspberry Pie five. Has
the Raspberry Pie Foundation lost its way? They used to be the company that
puts cheap computers into the hands of people all over the world. The first
Raspberry Pie ones and twos and threes, they were round twenty bucks. You
know, you can get a raspberry pie. You could get a Raspberry Pie
zero for five dollars. At one time. Raspberry Pie zero, the first
generation, could still run Raspian as it was known back then, but it
can still run Raspberry pi os very slowly. I would not recommend it as
a daily computer if you had other computers, but for the purpose it served
five dollars computer that can be implemented and deployed all around the world. Anybody
can afford it and have access to computing in STEM and research and programming.
That was great. But where does this eighty dollar Raspberry Pie five fit into
that? Has Raspberry Pie lost its way? And if I had more time
to do this, I would try. I would try to get Ebbin Upton,
the CEO of Raspberry Pie Foundation, back on the show. I had
him on the show several years ago where I was trying to pick his brain
at the time, is a Raspberry Pie two coming a Raspberry Pie zero two
coming out as a second generation? Sure we would sure love quad core processing
and a little bit more ram is there any way, And I remember at
the time I've been Upton was telling, well, it's really hard. You
got a stack memory and the components have to kind of fit on the board,
and you can only stack so much on top of each other, and
the supply issues with quad core processors that can be at cost and still sell
sell a Raspberry Pie zero W two, zero W whatever for five to ten
dollars, fifteen dollars. It's a challenge that was a few years ago,
but I wanted to have them back on the show. I can't get them
on, like certainly not in this episode to ask about the Raspberry Pi five
that costs this model that I'm using right now eighty dollars MSRP eighty dollars is
eighty dollars, eighty dollars, is not the ten dollars computer. That fifteen
dollars computer, cheap computer that the Raspberry Pie Foundation has pretty much built its
entire ethos around, But I can comment on that just my opinion. These
are just my opinions on the matter. And there are some facts I would
still like to point out in this regard because I see, you know,
you read as much things around the Internet as I do. Things come across
your feed or whatever. There's some people have some hot takes about the eighty
dollars Raspberry five at Raspberry Pie five that you know, Raspberry Pie Foundation has
lost its weight. Not as many people around the world can afford an eighty
dollars arm based Raspberry Pie computer. So what's the deal, Raspberry Are you
just getting greedy? Are you just are you losing your your way a little
bit here, I would like to remind anybody listening right now that Raspberry Pie
and this is something I believe Evan Upton even would say if you were on
the show right now, he would remind us that they still support and produce
those old, older, cheap models. You can still get a reasonably cheap
Raspberry Pie zero two, but you can still get a Raspberry Pie zero.
You can still get a Raspberry Pie one, two, three, four that
they still manufacture, and they still support those, and they still sell those.
So Raspberry Pie Foundation, yes, does have their eighty dollars Raspberry Pie
five eight gigabyte model, but they still have the ten dollars if you're lucky,
lower powered versions, older versions of Raspberry Pies. They still make them,
they still produce them, they still sell them, and they still support
them. So it's not that I think a lot of people, you know,
they see an eighty dollar Raspberry Pie five and they for whatever reason kind
of think, oh, that's the only thing they're selling right now. This
is It's kind of like if Sony was still selling PlayStation fours, which they
do for a time. Every time a new generation of console comes out,
you still sell the old generation, possibly even generations for a couple more years.
Raspberry Pie basically does the same thing. Yes, they have an eighty
eighty dollars Raspberry Pie five, but they also have the forty five dollar Raspberry
Pie four, and the thirty dollars PI threes and the twenty dollars PI twos
and what they have it all. They're basically filling every segment. So if
you want an eighty dollar Raspberry Pi five, you can have a eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five. If you want a ten dollars Raspberry Pie zero, you
still have that too, and it's still supported, and it's still very active
in the community. So it's both. It's both, and yes, you
have an eighty dollars Raspberry Pie five, but you still have the fully supported,
fully produced, fully purchasable, ten cheap computers that Raspberry Pie is known
for. Now, as I look at the clock in the bottom right hand
of my Windows eleven PC right here, I am currently using my ars,
my gigabyte A or seventeen h which I've complained about in the past or had
my concerns with in the past. But it has through, you know,
as as you'd expect through firm more update than software updates, has just gotten
better and better. I'm looking at my clock here that I got a leaf.
So and here's the issue I wanted to bring up with an eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five. Here's like a new conundrum I found myself in. And
I know that there's probably a lot of other people looking at an eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five in the same conundrum. At eighty dollars, you can go
on to Amazon, certainly onto eBay and get a fully fledged you can get
a quad core PC. Maybe it's a few years old. Maybe it's like
a an I five that's a few years old, maybe an off lease Office
Dell I five or I seven or I three for eighty bucks. For under
eighty dollars, you can get a full fledged PC for the same price of
a Raspberry Pi five. That's the kind of the conundrum I found myself in.
And it's manifested in this way. It's manifested itself in that I've bought
the Raspberry Pie five. I bought the five or ten dollars? How much
was this case? Ten dollars for microcenter, the case for it that includes
an active fan and cooler. I've purchased the Raspberry Pi five, purchased the
case. I even purchased this a heavier duty USB type C wall wart for
it. I have not used it. I've put it all together, but
I have not used it because it's an eighty dollar Raspberry Pie five, and
I and I and I kind of like, what am I? What am
I setting this up for? Am I setting this up for to try to
do a lot of my daily driver tasks that I already do on my Windows
eleven PC and my Mac m one pro or whatever it is, the answer
is no. So if I'm at eighty dollars, if you're trying to do
real day to day daily driver, and of course Jack is here. Yep,
this is part of recording Live on the Flies. You're gonna hear my
stupid cat in the background. If you're looking at an a eighty dollar Raspberry
Pie five. If you're looking for a computer, a daily use computer,
day in, day out, your main PC, and you have eighty dollars
to spend, don't get a Raspberry Pi five at the eighty dollars price point.
You can get old am d models all in one PCs, you can
get off lease office dells. You can get a PC for eighty dollars that
is almost infinitely more powerful and more capable than a Raspberry Pi five at daily
computing needs. The reason why you would by someone would be determined and very
specifically say I have eighty dollars and I'm going to specifically spend it on a
Raspberry Pi five is they have a Raspberry based project, like a programming project.
They need the Gpi opens. They need to do their robotics, they
need to set up their weather stations, they need to set up there their
info mirrors or whatever, you know, those mirrors that kind of like display
information through the glass back at you, the weather and the stocks and things
like that. They have very specific project that a more powerful Raspberry Pi five
would be more more apt for. Like you're not gonna put You're not gonna
put an off a Dell office computer like tower in your bathroom behind your to
use with your smart mirror, but you will embed. That's another good word
to use for Raspberry Pie applications. You are gonna embed Raspberry Pie five and
embedded applications for those very specific use cases. That is where when you have
eighty dollars and you very specifically want a Raspberry Pi five for those kind of
embedded computing applications or programming applications or software to like whatever you're you're doing that
is catered specifically to Raspberry five five, Raspberry Pi five a Raspberry project.
If you need a more powerful Raspberry for Raspberry Pie for your very specific Raspberry
Pie tinkering, then you're not gonna spend the eighty dollars on a Windows eleven
PC. You're gonna spend the eighty dollars on that Raspberry Pie five. But
like I said, if you want a daily driver computer and you have eighty
dollars, the Raspberry Pi five is not gonna be your best bet in that
regard, depending who you are. I cannot I do a lot. My
job is video editing four K projects. I just right now as of recording,
ordered the Sam's I have a Lumix S five, Panasonic Lumix S five.
It's a full frame four K raw six K out the htmiport whatever.
I have the first generation Lumix S five. I just now before recording ordered
the Lumix S five mark two X the best S five with a with a
tracking auto focus and oh gosh, what am I blanking out on the phase
detect auto focus and almost infinite amount of improvements over the the S five,
the first gen OGS five. As far as video work is concerned, you
can do stream You can stream IP video straight out of the camera. Just
plug in a USB Ethernet dongole on that and you can do video IP streaming.
You can record straight to an SSD and six K and Apple Pro Res
four two too. Like there's so many I can't even begin I can't even
begin to go over all the new features that I have wound up needing realizing
that I do need theras that the LUMIXS five to two Mark two X provide.
So I just ordered it. It's gonna be here tomorrow. I've got
a baby on the way, So I'll get into why I ordered it in
a minute. Why my use case scenario has has revealed itself that I need
more than my current LUMIXS five can can offer. I'll get into that possibly
in a little bit, maybe in a different kind of one of these uploads.
But I do a lot of video work, so I can't do that
on a Raspberry Pie five. I cannot import the raw mov files. Is
certainly not pro res into Aiden Live. Is that? What's what? I
think? That's the video editor that you can use on Raspberry Pi five.
It's awesome. I mean for seven twenty P ten ADP kind of projects,
light projects. Aiden Live is a great video editor on the Raspberry Pie five.
It ain't gonna cut it for what I do daily. So it's just
I need the powerful I need the powerful PC to do my video editing work.
The laptop. I don't want to give you the price that I paid
for this laptop. It was is what you can expect. Go look at
the price of a gigaby A or seventeen h that's what I paid for it
probably paid a couple hundred dollars more because I bought it right out of the
gate RTX a laptop RTX forty eighty and that Core this is a Core I
seven what I said, fourteen seven hundred whatever, it's a it's beef and
I need that beef. Eighty dollars. Raspberry Pi five is gonna replace that
beef, replace the beef. So that's the conundrum I just kind of wanted
to That's the real meat and potatoes of this content that I'm uploading right now
off the cuff, is that I really wanted to talk to you all about
what my thoughts on the Raspberry Pie five. The conundrum I find myself in
that a lot of people are probably gonna find themselves in eighty dollars, Do
I get a Raspberry Pie five or do I get a PC for eighty bucks?
Because now eighty bucks you're talking about getting a quite capable, used personal
computer for that price. You can put Linux on it if you want,
You could do whatever you want with it. But it's just a more capable
machine I really have to leave in it. So I don't really want to
get in the weeds with this. But one of the reasons, one of
like the big reasons why the Raspberry Pi five isn't a perfect daily computer for
me. It's not just the video wedding and it's not just that I'm ingesting
and importing six k you know, raw pro res files into the computer into
my powerful video editing computer for my for my work. One of the biggest
roadblocks, and I think a lot of Raspberry Pie users eventually get to this
point of you know, you use a you use a PC. Maybe it's
kind of off track. You know, it's not a Windows PC, it's
not a Mac. You're you're using a Linux PC, or certainly a Raspberry
five. When you're using a Raspberry five. One of the walls that I
personally ran up against as to why I couldn't use it as a daily driver
is access to cloud storage. Like traditional cloud storage, I can you know,
link it up to my network, attack storage, network attached storage and
all that stuff. But the implementation of say drop Box something very very you
know, millions of people use dropbox it's not You can't just download drop Box
and use it the same way, have it just running in the background like
you have on your PC. You can certainly use drop Box in one drive
and other cloud services on a round Raspberry Pie. Don't think that I don't
know about that, because I do this. What I'm about to tell you
is what I do on the Raspberry Pie five. It's just more steps to
use drop Box or cloud service cloud storage on your Raspberry Pi five. There's
more hoops to jump through. I haven't fired up my Raspberry Pie in a
minute, my Raspberry Pie four and my Pi four hundred and in a minute.
I think it's called cloud Buddy. There's an I almost call that an
APK. It's not an APK, but it's a package that you can download
straight through Raspberry Pi PI five's or a Raspberry pios is depositor. You can
access this. But I think it's called cloud Buddy. And basically you have
to do a lot of kind of manual setup of your Dropbox account on your
Raspberry Pi five, and I'm sure you can pro you can edit your config
text to kind of set this all up every time you launch a Raspberry Pie
five I personally have not done that. So every time I open up my
Raspberry Pie, I have to manly go in and open cloud Buddy and point
it to my Dropbox account and then point it to the same file back on
my file system to sync to. And it's just it's extra steps. And
I know you can probably automate that, for sure. There's probably people listening
right now. Is like, dude, you can easily automate that stuff,
but still it's still it's still extra. You know, you're you're working in
Linux, and people who like Linux like extra. It's Linux is the operating
system for tinkerers. There's probably nobody listening this, so one of my I
can call him a coworker, I guess, even though we're not on the
same payroll because I don't actually get any money from iHeartMedia anymore. But Chris
Little produces the Jesse Kelly Show. He's a Linux dude. He loves tinkering
with Linux. I bet you if I asked Chris each week what operating system,
what flavor of Linux he's using, it's probably different. Whereas you ask
a Windows user, what are you using? Well, I've been on Windows
eleven since it came out there. You know, maybe not, maybe not
since it's came out. But I'm only forced over the Windows eleven. I'm
using Windows, And point is you're using Windows like you're using whatever Microsoft current
version of Windows is ad nauseam using it every single day. A Linux user
is probably tinkering around different distros every few days. If I ask Chris,
I bet you he hasn't been on the same distro of Linux for the past
year. Maybe he has, Maybe he has an Linux Linux people like to
play with things, tinker around. They the fact that you have to jump
through extra hoops to get drop box work and you know, for instance,
is that's part of the charm of Linux. That's part of the desired it's
part of the fun of it. Is. Yeah, I gotta I gotta
do. I gotta do more pseudos and apps and I got to do my
go into the command line a lot more and the oh gosh or the terminal
a lot more, and do a lot of stuff. Kind of back feel
like a hacker a little bit when you use Linux, fine and dandy,
but that's not for my day to day use cases. For my work,
I can't have an op system that I'm constantly tinkering with. But anyways,
I've talked long enough. This is going on twenty seven minutes. This is
not a very highly produced episode. This particular upload is going to have intro
and outro music. Not every upload I make like this is even going to
have music. Like I said, I'm just gonna crack open my phone once
in a while and just talk to y'all. Well, I'm driving down the
road. I'm not going to drive while holding the phone, but I might
be wearing a lapel mic or something. The quality the production value of each
of these uploads is going to vary, but I'm going to make sure you
can at least hear my voice clearly. So this is the first test run
of that new paradigm where I'm doing these off the cuff uploads in between these
polished broadcasts. So I hope you all are okay with that. Who knows
what I'll talk about next time. I've been your mental curator, Johnny Hamburger,
thank you so much for listening to Geek Therapy Radio. You are worthy
of love, You're worthy of giving love, receiving love, and you're worthy
of your own self respect. Lean into your gi thing, embrace your g
thing, and i'll talk to you next time. Take care, yes,