Small-town midwesterner here.

There's some truth to what you're saying. Even the smallest apartment I've ever had was big enough to dedicate space to some serious hobbies, and it was (at that time) very inexpensive to rent compared a much smaller place in a more-dense area.

My lifestyle isn't very compact because it has never needed to be compact. Compactness isn't a common expectation 'round these parts. I have space to keep collections of stuff that I find interesting, and to make use of it.

There's tradeoffs to this lifestyle, though. The corner store is only a short walk away, but it mostly just sells beer, soda, and smokes. There's no walking to get something like groceries, or a new shirt (or a used shirt, for that matter). There isn't much for local entertainment. It's 15 miles to the next-largest city, and there's zero public transportation aside from the buses that get kids to/from school.

(It's hard to imagine that there aren't areas of the UK that are of similar form, though, with roomy housing, space for things, and with very limited services and/or options for commerce nearby.)

As an EU resident with a modestly large flat who's dedicated 1/3 of it to a large living room because we prioritized room to relax and spend time together, I pine for the chance to have more than a pair of IKEA KALLAX to store (and pile upon) all my electronics stuff and 3D printer(s).

You know, I realized the same thing after seeing a guy in one of our 3D print communities consistently printing life-sized models scaled with LuBan for his students. He had a garage full of Bambus, a bunch of photos of his models in an apparently high-trust community elementary school, and it just clicked when he said "rural Kansas".

We operate one of the largest print farms in the nation, and I can count the number of human-scale or larger sculptures we've put out in the past decade on one hand.

It's all true, when I moved to the west coast from the midwest I was struck by the way everyone just piled their possessions into a heap in the middle of their workspace rather than placing them in labeled containers. At times the heaps reach the ceiling.

Not just the Midwest, but most of the US outside the East Coast cities tend to have pretty large homes and apartments compared to most of the rest of the world in terms of home sizes. The US is pretty huge, with much of it livable and relatively less total density than other nations.

Of course, the US has also done a lot more than many places to preserve natural wilderness with national and ngo parks/reserves.

My house in Phoenix, AZ, USA is relatively typical 3br/3ba and just over 2K sqft (around 192 M^2), and I know a lot of people with larger homes than this.

Yeah, I've seen some youtube recommendations pop up for videos about "tiny homes" that would be fairly standard sized homes here.

I mean, yes, housing and land is cheaper in the midwest US, but you mostly have to get at least an hour away from a major city before it becomes what I consider "cheap." (Otherwise you're still looking at more desirable suburban or bedroom community housing prices.)

But to defend Jeff, the pictures in the article show like a 4x4 corner of a room, even if we extrapolate to say, 8x8x8, that amount of space can usually be found in even a 1-bedroom apartment. I have seen many pictures of amazingly complete electronics/hacking workbenches from around the world that easily fit into much smaller spaces.

Label makers aren't all that expensive, even for relatively high volume and fancy options. It's been relatively useful IMO to have bins and labels available. That said, my own office space is a bit cluttered right now with a handful of half-completed projects that I've been too lazy to finish.

A label maker is about $20. I’m not sure that speaks to intense dedication all by itself.

Shame a 5v "fake" PPS voltage couldn't somehow be obtained or patched in. Loads of chargers would work then.

My pocket PD can request 5v5a from quite a few chargers in PPS mode.

> negotiates 5V5A

Even the voltage is not matching spec (Pi power supply has 5.1 volts, not 5.0 volts!). That is because historically Pi had shitty cables, with high resistance and voltage drops. 5V5A is not even in spec, limit for 5 volts is 3 amps!

> fire hazard than 20V5A

That would be 100 watts! Many people just grab any usbc cable, and solder it directly to GPIO power pins. But good luck with that!

Initial batches of Pi4 did not even had a resistor, to request 3.0 amps!

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you.

Write combined on cpu will batch a few bytes here and there but you’ll never hit full 4k transactions without dma. I brought up a few new gpus on pcie cards and spent many moons staring at interposer dumps.

It’s ok for small things but even once you get into the command buffer range it’s slow slow slow without dma.