Is the Raspberry Pi 5 TOO expensive for what it is? Also, trying a new podcast format...

Pi 5 talk @ 8:55. I'm testing this new podcast format, so let's talk about the Raspberry Pi 5! https://www.geektherapyradio.com/

Episode Transcript

(00:12):
I'm trying out a new approach hereto 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 lifeis getting busy, work, two kids,
all that stuff. You know.I know a lot of y'all listening

(00:33):
to her late. I've got alot of dads actually who listen to the
show and reach out to me fromall over the world, all over Europe,
South America. I'm kind of thinkingabout renaming the podcast or creating another
podcast about being a busy geek dadthat I think that would be kind of
cool and kind of commiserates not theright word for most of us, because

(00:54):
we all love our children, mostof 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 timejob kind of makes it difficult to

(01:14):
pursue our geek things sometimes to devoteso much time into that, into that
effort into that kind of nourishment forthat 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'sno 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 ratherbe doing anything else but being a

(01:38):
father to my son. So,for instance, I'm sitting here recording right
now next to my giant thirty twoinch widescreen CRT HDTV, and it hooked
up to my Nintendo Wei with allthe jail broken Nintendo we with all the
emulators on and everything, and partof me just says, you know,
back in the day, I couldhave just said down there for hours and

(02:00):
played Super Mario Brothers three through anemulator 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 gamesor working with crafts or painting or whatever.
I don't. As much as Ilove all that stuff. The only

(02:20):
thing that can that can possibly makeme not miss tinkering, not miss my
geek thing is the time I spendwith my children. But in my family,
but it gets it so that justmeans it gets difficult to do kind
of other work. So Geek TherapyRadio has been on the air, has
been not only just a podcast,but has been on the air since two

(02:43):
thousand and seventeen. When was thefirst aired. I think it was Spring
twenty seventeen that I got the greenlight for geek Therapy Radio. Life has
changed a lot. When I startedGeek 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 buildingGeek Therapy Radio and recording episodes. I

(03:05):
had so much time at one pointthat if y'all remember, if you've been
with me long enough and all theseepisodes are still up. I used to
do a between broadcast show called likea Weekly Geek or geek weekly, whatever
date your daily Geek. I wouldrecord a show six days a week.
There were six five to six daysa week you had brand new content from

(03:27):
Geek Therapy Radio. That's how muchtime 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 feedsfive to six days a week now in
twenty twenty four, getting ready forbaby number two, married, wonderful life.
I'm so happy, so blessed,so privileged really to have what I

(03:51):
have and be able to do whatI do, But I can't. I
can barely. If I make twonew episodes a month, that is really
hooking for me. So if youlisten on the radio, you're gonna hear
some repeats. If you're an astuteradio listener, you'll hear, oh,
this episode was from twenty twenty one. I typically like to keep things as

(04:12):
evergreen as possible, but if youlisten close enough on the broadcast, you'll
say, oh, he's talking aboutStranger Things season three. When was that?
That was so long ago. SoI'm re airing older episodes so they're
still kind of fresh to new radiolisteners. But actually making new content,
new episodes is just it's becoming increasinglydifficult. If I can do two per

(04:35):
month, that's, like I said, that's really something for me right now.
So I just posed a question onX if y'all would be okay with
me uploading less produced content to fillthe gaps between the the big broadcasts.

(04:55):
You know, the podcast with foursegments that are ready for the for broadcast
on the radio, that are readyfor podcasting, everything like that, if
I can just crack the mic andjust talk to y'all about something that's on
my mind when I have the momentto do that, So you very if
y'all are cool with this, andI'm probably just gonna do it anyways,
because it's it's no sweat for meto do it. And if you don't

(05:15):
want to listen to it, that'stotally fine too. You don't have to
press play on it. You mightactually hear a lot more contents honestly from
the car. You know. Imight just have clip my DGI mic on
me and just start recording as I'mdriving to work or home from worker from
here to there, or maybe I'mat my house and I don't I don't

(05:39):
have time to kind of like setup the whole studio to record a podcast.
I may just start recording on myphone and then right there in the
my podcast back end just upload itright to my two speakers. My back
end just literally hit record on thephone. And I've given this advice to
people who've asked me for podcast advice. I say, you've got the phone

(06:00):
in your hand has an excellent microphone, and there's nothing stopping you from just
hitting record and then uploading it rightwith your phone straight to the world for
podcast listeners to enjoy. And soI 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,

(06:24):
it's not gonna sound as clean andas 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 dollarsworth of signal processing and software to make
it sound as good as it currentlydoes as you're listening to. I'm just
saying, can I strip it downbear bones for you? Would y'all be
offended or would I lose any ofyou if I just hit record on my

(06:47):
phone and then uploaded it straight frommy phone straight to your phones. I
don't think anyone would be offended bythat. Perhaps somebody, you know,
some people might be turned off bythe varying kind of audio quality. Now,
I am an audio engineer. Thatis my background before anything else,
Before videography before anything. My wholebackground is audio engineering, so I'm going

(07:11):
to be reasonably aware of how ican 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 Iget back home a little bit and do
some aid noising to kind of maybetake away some of the background drone of
the automobile, although I don't wantto take away too much because that might

(07:33):
be a little bit of ASMR tokind of hear me going down the road
as long as you can still hearmy voice clearly. And I'm telling you
again, because I'm an audio engineerby 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 thingsclearly as well. But I'm gonna do

(07:54):
my best in this content to kindof that fills the gaps between highly produced
content to make it sound as goodas it possibly can. Where I came
to this kind of conclusion, thisidea is really today, you know,
I have to leave this house andmaybe I don't know twenty minutes maximum at

(08:15):
the latest to go work on thesound system at church and hook up new
media PCs and rearranging things and installingprojectors and dah dah da da, I
gotta go. I gotta go ina few minutes. And that's because kind
of how life is right now isI'm always I gotta go somewhere, I
gotta do something, I have workto do, everything like that. So
what's spurred on this idea is I'vegot, you know, twenty minutes currently

(08:41):
as I'm recording more or less beforeI have to leave to go do my
next obligation. But I've really wantedto 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 totalk to y'all about something, something specific
I recently purchased and even put together. You can't see it because I'm just

(09:05):
recording audio, but I'll tap onthe case. This is a Raspberry Pie
five case. I have finally beenable 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. Ithink it was actually eighty dollars for

(09:30):
the raspberry Pie five and a lotof you listening. This is why I
want to talk about this. Eightydollars 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 ofpeople all over the world. The first
Raspberry Pie ones and twos and threes, they were round twenty bucks. You

(09:52):
know, you can get a raspberrypie. You could get a Raspberry Pie
zero for five dollars. At onetime. Raspberry Pie zero, the first
generation, could still run Raspian asit was known back then, but it
can still run Raspberry pi os veryslowly. I would not recommend it as
a daily computer if you had othercomputers, but for the purpose it served

(10:18):
five dollars computer that can be implementedand deployed all around the world. Anybody
can afford it and have access tocomputing in STEM and research and programming.
That was great. But where doesthis eighty dollar Raspberry Pie five fit into

(10:39):
that? Has Raspberry Pie lost itsway? 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 agowhere I was trying to pick his brain
at the time, is a RaspberryPie two coming a Raspberry Pie zero two

(11:00):
coming out as a second generation?Sure we would sure love quad core processing
and a little bit more ram isthere 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 componentshave to kind of fit on the board,
and you can only stack so muchon top of each other, and
the supply issues with quad core processorsthat can be at cost and still sell
sell a Raspberry Pie zero W two, zero W whatever for five to ten

(11:24):
dollars, fifteen dollars. It's achallenge that was a few years ago,
but I wanted to have them backon the show. I can't get them
on, like certainly not in thisepisode to ask about the Raspberry Pi five
that costs this model that I'm usingright now eighty dollars MSRP eighty dollars is
eighty dollars, eighty dollars, isnot the ten dollars computer. That fifteen

(11:46):
dollars computer, cheap computer that theRaspberry Pie Foundation has pretty much built its
entire ethos around, But I cancomment 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 thisregard because I see, you know,

(12:09):
you read as much things around theInternet as I do. Things come across
your feed or whatever. There's somepeople have some hot takes about the eighty
dollars Raspberry five at Raspberry Pie fivethat you know, Raspberry Pie Foundation has
lost its weight. Not as manypeople around the world can afford an eighty
dollars arm based Raspberry Pie computer.So what's the deal, Raspberry Are you

(12:31):
just getting greedy? Are you justare you losing your your way a little
bit here, I would like toremind anybody listening right now that Raspberry Pie
and this is something I believe EvanUpton even would say if you were on
the show right now, he wouldremind us that they still support and produce
those old, older, cheap models. You can still get a reasonably cheap

(12:56):
Raspberry Pie zero two, but youcan still get a Raspberry Pie zero.
You can still get a Raspberry Pieone, two, three, four that
they still manufacture, and they stillsupport those, and they still sell those.
So Raspberry Pie Foundation, yes,does have their eighty dollars Raspberry Pie
five eight gigabyte model, but theystill have the ten dollars if you're lucky,

(13:22):
lower powered versions, older versions ofRaspberry Pies. They still make them,
they still produce them, they stillsell them, and they still support
them. So it's not that Ithink a lot of people, you know,
they see an eighty dollar Raspberry Piefive and they for whatever reason kind
of think, oh, that's theonly thing they're selling right now. This
is It's kind of like if Sonywas still selling PlayStation fours, which they

(13:45):
do for a time. Every timea 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, butthey also have the forty five dollar Raspberry
Pie four, and the thirty dollarsPI threes and the twenty dollars PI twos
and what they have it all.They're basically filling every segment. So if

(14:09):
you want an eighty dollar Raspberry Pifive, you can have a eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five. If you wanta ten dollars Raspberry Pie zero, you
still have that too, and it'sstill 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,

(14:31):
fully produced, fully purchasable, tencheap computers that Raspberry Pie is known
for. Now, as I lookat 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 whichI've complained about in the past or had
my concerns with in the past.But it has through, you know,

(14:52):
as as you'd expect through firm moreupdate than software updates, has just gotten
better and better. I'm looking atmy clock here that I got a leaf.
So and here's the issue I wantedto bring up with an eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five. Here's like anew conundrum I found myself in. And
I know that there's probably a lotof other people looking at an eighty dollar
Raspberry Pie five in the same conundrum. At eighty dollars, you can go

(15:16):
on to Amazon, certainly onto eBayand get a fully fledged you can get
a quad core PC. Maybe it'sa few years old. Maybe it's like
a an I five that's a fewyears old, maybe an off lease Office
Dell I five or I seven orI three for eighty bucks. For under
eighty dollars, you can get afull fledged PC for the same price of

(15:41):
a Raspberry Pi five. That's thekind 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 boughtthe five or ten dollars? How much
was this case? Ten dollars formicrocenter, the case for it that includes

(16:02):
an active fan and cooler. I'vepurchased the Raspberry Pi five, purchased the
case. I even purchased this aheavier 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'san eighty dollar Raspberry Pie five, and

(16:26):
I and I and I kind oflike, what am I? What am
I setting this up for? AmI setting this up for to try to
do a lot of my daily drivertasks that I already do on my Windows
eleven PC and my Mac m onepro or whatever it is, the answer
is no. So if I'm ateighty dollars, if you're trying to do

(16:48):
real day to day daily driver,and of course Jack is here. Yep,
this is part of recording Live onthe Flies. You're gonna hear my
stupid cat in the background. Ifyou're looking at an a eighty dollar Raspberry
Pie five. If you're looking fora computer, a daily use computer,
day in, day out, yourmain PC, and you have eighty dollars

(17:10):
to spend, don't get a RaspberryPi five at the eighty dollars price point.
You can get old am d modelsall in one PCs, you can
get off lease office dells. Youcan get a PC for eighty dollars that
is almost infinitely more powerful and morecapable than a Raspberry Pi five at daily

(17:32):
computing needs. The reason why youwould by someone would be determined and very
specifically say I have eighty dollars andI'm going to specifically spend it on a
Raspberry Pi five is they have aRaspberry based project, like a programming project.
They need the Gpi opens. Theyneed to do their robotics, they
need to set up their weather stations, they need to set up there their

(17:56):
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 specificproject 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 computerlike tower in your bathroom behind your to

(18:22):
use with your smart mirror, butyou 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 usecases. That is where when you have
eighty dollars and you very specifically wanta Raspberry Pi five for those kind of
embedded computing applications or programming applications orsoftware to like whatever you're you're doing that

(18:49):
is catered specifically to Raspberry five five, Raspberry Pi five a Raspberry project.
If you need a more powerful Raspberryfor Raspberry Pie for your very specific Raspberry
Pie tinkering, then you're not gonnaspend the eighty dollars on a Windows eleven
PC. You're gonna spend the eightydollars on that Raspberry Pie five. But

(19:10):
like I said, if you wanta daily driver computer and you have eighty
dollars, the Raspberry Pi five isnot 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 LumixS five, Panasonic Lumix S five.

(19:36):
It's a full frame four K rawsix K out the htmiport whatever.
I have the first generation Lumix Sfive. I just now before recording ordered
the Lumix S five mark two Xthe 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 amountof improvements over the the S five,

(20:03):
the first gen OGS five. Asfar as video work is concerned, you
can do stream You can stream IPvideo straight out of the camera. Just
plug in a USB Ethernet dongole onthat and you can do video IP streaming.
You can record straight to an SSDand six K and Apple Pro Res
four two too. Like there's somany I can't even begin I can't even
begin to go over all the newfeatures that I have wound up needing realizing

(20:29):
that I do need theras that theLUMIXS five to two Mark two X provide.
So I just ordered it. It'sgonna be here tomorrow. I've got
a baby on the way, SoI'll get into why I ordered it in
a minute. Why my use casescenario has has revealed itself that I need
more than my current LUMIXS five cancan offer. I'll get into that possibly

(20:52):
in a little bit, maybe ina different kind of one of these uploads.
But I do a lot of videowork, so I can't do that
on a Raspberry Pie five. Icannot import the raw mov files. Is
certainly not pro res into Aiden Live. Is that? What's what? I

(21:12):
think? That's the video editor thatyou can use on Raspberry Pi five.
It's awesome. I mean for seventwenty P ten ADP kind of projects,
light projects. Aiden Live is agreat video editor on the Raspberry Pie five.
It ain't gonna cut it for whatI do daily. So it's just
I need the powerful I need thepowerful PC to do my video editing work.

(21:33):
The laptop. I don't want togive you the price that I paid
for this laptop. It was iswhat you can expect. Go look at
the price of a gigaby A orseventeen h that's what I paid for it
probably paid a couple hundred dollars morebecause I bought it right out of the
gate RTX a laptop RTX forty eightyand that Core this is a Core I
seven what I said, fourteen sevenhundred whatever, it's a it's beef and

(21:56):
I need that beef. Eighty dollars. Raspberry Pi five is gonna replace that
beef, replace the beef. Sothat's the conundrum I just kind of wanted
to That's the real meat and potatoesof this content that I'm uploading right now
off the cuff, is that Ireally wanted to talk to you all about
what my thoughts on the Raspberry Piefive. The conundrum I find myself in

(22:19):
that a lot of people are probablygonna find themselves in eighty dollars, Do
I get a Raspberry Pie five ordo I get a PC for eighty bucks?
Because now eighty bucks you're talking aboutgetting a quite capable, used personal
computer for that price. You canput Linux on it if you want,
You could do whatever you want withit. But it's just a more capable
machine I really have to leave init. So I don't really want to

(22:42):
get in the weeds with this.But one of the reasons, one of
like the big reasons why the RaspberryPi five isn't a perfect daily computer for
me. It's not just the videowedding 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 myfor my work. One of the biggest

(23:04):
roadblocks, and I think a lotof Raspberry Pie users eventually get to this
point of you know, you usea 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 usinga Linux PC, or certainly a Raspberry
five. When you're using a Raspberryfive. One of the walls that I
personally ran up against as to whyI couldn't use it as a daily driver

(23:27):
is access to cloud storage. Liketraditional cloud storage, I can you know,
link it up to my network,attack storage, network attached storage and
all that stuff. But the implementationof say drop Box something very very you
know, millions of people use dropboxit's not You can't just download drop Box

(23:49):
and use it the same way,have it just running in the background like
you have on your PC. Youcan certainly use drop Box in one drive
and other cloud services on a roundRaspberry Pie. Don't think that I don't
know about that, because I dothis. What I'm about to tell you
is what I do on the RaspberryPie five. It's just more steps to

(24:10):
use drop Box or cloud service cloudstorage on your Raspberry Pi five. There's
more hoops to jump through. Ihaven't fired up my Raspberry Pie in a
minute, my Raspberry Pie four andmy 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 ora Raspberry pios is depositor. You can

(24:36):
access this. But I think it'scalled cloud Buddy. And basically you have
to do a lot of kind ofmanual setup of your Dropbox account on your
Raspberry Pi five, and I'm sureyou can pro you can edit your config
text to kind of set this allup every time you launch a Raspberry Pie
five I personally have not done that. So every time I open up my

(24:56):
Raspberry Pie, I have to manlygo in and open cloud Buddy and point
it to my Dropbox account and thenpoint 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,

(25:17):
but still it's still it's still extra. You know, you're you're working in
Linux, and people who like Linuxlike extra. It's Linux is the operating
system for tinkerers. There's probably nobodylistening this, so one of my I
can call him a coworker, Iguess, even though we're not on the
same payroll because I don't actually getany money from iHeartMedia anymore. But Chris

(25:37):
Little produces the Jesse Kelly Show.He's a Linux dude. He loves tinkering
with Linux. I bet you ifI 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 youusing? Well, I've been on Windows
eleven since it came out there.You know, maybe not, maybe not

(25:59):
since it's came out. But I'monly forced over the Windows eleven. I'm
using Windows, And point is you'reusing Windows like you're using whatever Microsoft current
version of Windows is ad nauseam usingit every single day. A Linux user
is probably tinkering around different distros everyfew days. If I ask Chris,
I bet you he hasn't been onthe same distro of Linux for the past
year. Maybe he has, Maybehe has an Linux Linux people like to

(26:23):
play with things, tinker around.They the fact that you have to jump
through extra hoops to get drop boxwork and you know, for instance,
is that's part of the charm ofLinux. 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 pseudosand apps and I got to do my
go into the command line a lotmore and the oh gosh or the terminal

(26:45):
a lot more, and do alot of stuff. Kind of back feel
like a hacker a little bit whenyou use Linux, fine and dandy,
but that's not for my day today use cases. For my work,
I can't have an op system thatI'm constantly tinkering with. But anyways,
I've talked long enough. This isgoing on twenty seven minutes. This is
not a very highly produced episode.This particular upload is going to have intro

(27:08):
and outro music. Not every uploadI 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 toy'all. Well, I'm driving down the
road. I'm not going to drivewhile 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

(27:33):
of that new paradigm where I'm doingthese off the cuff uploads in between these
polished broadcasts. So I hope youall 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 toGeek Therapy Radio. You are worthy
of love, You're worthy of givinglove, receiving love, and you're worthy
of your own self respect. Leaninto your gi thing, embrace your g

(27:57):
thing, and i'll talk to younext time. Take care, yes,