My newer-model Panasonic microwave oven stopped working. To get it working I needed to get past anti-tamper screws and “special” fuses. I suspect Panasonic wants us to buy another microwave instead. Not this time!

For the cluster computing project I’m working on, I need 28 microSD cards. There was an AliExpress sale with good reviews, so I ordered a batch of 30 microSD cards, and at a great price point at the time. As long as the cards are Class 10 and work then we should be good, right? Results: Half are fake or defective. The rest are painfully slow. No refunds.

Let’s build a 112-core 1.2GHz A53 cluster with 56GB of DDR3 RAM and 292GB of high-availability distributed file storage, running at most 200W. The goal is to use cluster computing to perform faster MapReduce operations on Big Data with Apache Spark, and all at home for a fraction of what cloud computing costs.