I don't know about you, but personally, I like getting a lot of bang for my
buck. That's why I'm such a big fan of mini PCs like this. They're of course
small, as the name implies, but more importantly, they pack a ton of
performance in that small form factor, usually for not a lot of money. But
there is kind of a problem with them. At least for me, it seems like a perfect
home lab or a server for your small business. Look, they've even got dual 10
GB networking right there. That's SFP. That's enterprise, baby. But you know
what's not enterprise? If you have any problem with these dang machines and
your operating system crashes or what have you, you just you can't access it
anymore. There's no remote management like you would get in a server that
allows you to to fix stuff remotely even if the computer is broky. And that's
where this comes into play. And thanks to a sponsorship from GLet, we're going
to be checking out their Comet. It aims to solve that problem. You can take
pretty much any computer you have, whether it be a a beefy minis forum or
your desktop or hell, a computer in a factory if you want an embedded machine,
and allows you to add remote management. So, if you have a problem with the
machine, you can still access it. And this one in particular is pretty cool
cuz it doesn't rely on you having to, you know, configure some fancy schmancy
VPN or whatever through their software. They already have the remote management
functionality built in. At least that's what they've told me. So, you should be
able to just take this Bag Girl, we'll go over the ports in a second, plug it
into your computer and um be off to the races, ready to control it from anywhere
without having to do any network wizardry, which sounds pretty sweet from
the get- go. Oh, this is nice. I like these flat Ethernet cables. How long you
think this is? It's an 80 cm cable. That's an oddly specific length. And
then we've got a USB A to C cable, which
I assume is to power the thing, but we'll find out in a sec. And that one is
100 centimetersish. I'm measuring this properly. Look how scientific this is.
It's like even. But enough of cables. Let's take a look at the actual star of
the show, the Comet itself. It's a nice like anodized aluminum housing. I like
that because I honestly I feel like I could just toss this in my backpack and
not be worried about damaging it. We've got a USB 2.0 0 type A port HDMI. Like
to be clear, it's a KVM. It can do 4K, which is cool. We'll get into that a
little bit more later, but don't expect to be doing 4K, you know, 144 hertz or
something like that. It's not for gaming. It's for remote management. Uh
we've got the USB type-C port, and if we look really closely, you can actually
see uh a keyboard and a mouse icon. So, I suspect that that's what you'll use to
take this thing and plug it into a computer and actually send your keyboard
and mouse commands remotely to that computer. Uh, maybe also provide power,
but we'll see in a sec. There's another port. Okay, wait, that says 5V 2 amps.
Do I need two? Yes. Okay, we'll get to that in a sec. And then we have Ethernet
because of course you need to network this thing to be able to talk to it
remotely. And on the back, what's this? A reset button. What does that do? I
don't know. I guess we'll find out. Let's plug it in. And since it is so
perfect for this, I am quite literally just going to use this minis forum as
our remote computer. We've got our A to C cable for HID or the human interface
device, otherwise known as a keyboard and mouse. So, we'll plug that into our minis forum here. And then we have a
USBC power cable. So, there is two separate cables. You need 5V 2 amp. Uh
it does actually come with the USB power cable. It's just that our unit is like a
really early sample. Uh, so it didn't come with it, but if you buy one, it will come with both the USB cables you
need and an HDMI and of course the Ethernet we talked about before. All
right, we've got the GLKBM app installed. I'm logged in. Let's add the
device. Hey, look at that right there. It's immediately caught it. Add device.
We'll name this Minis Forum Guardian.
Yeah, binding device successfully bound.
Oh, GLKVM would like to add VPN configurations. Interesting. Wow,
there's a lot of stuff in here. However, we don't have an output right now
because our computer is off. Oh, hey,
look. Look at that. Minis form LT. Let's
go. Immediately, it's it's up and running. Let's dive into GLKVM. We've
got two-actor authentication, dark mode. Oh, thank God. Yes. Virtual keyboard.
We've got audio. Did you hear that? I just got the
Windows like boot sound through my MacBook. Let's go to lossless quality
mode. I want that. I want that full full quality. This does have a quadcore ARM
processor in it. So, it can do 4K30 hardware accelerated encoding, which
means the like lossless quality mode should still perform really good.
Obviously, if you're remote, like you're on the other side of the country, you're
going to have the inherent latency of your connection, right? Uh, but this
seems like obviously on the same internet
connection really good. There's obviously some input delay, but it's
it's not much. Now, if you're planning to use the Comet with a like actual ATX
desktop computer, they do sell or you can buy it in a bundle. This accessory,
uh, it's like a little PCIe card that doesn't actually connect. Uh, it just
sits in the slot. Um, you connect that to the Comet with a USBC cable and then
you plug this guy, which if you look really closely, actually has labels for
power button and stuff into the headers of your computer. And then I think you
can actually even pass it through with these extra set of ports. So your power
button still works. But then since it's actually physically connected, the Comet
can send a like physical button press of
the power button, the reset button, all of those sort of things. So that if your
operating system does crash, you still have that physical control. That would
mean you could also get into the BIOS, for instance, if the operating system
was like fully crashed, which is really the main selling feature here. So for an
ATX computer, this is perfect. It doesn't work with our minis forum. So,
they actually came up with a solution for that, too. Um, which I guess would
work with like a if you had a Mac or something like that, which is this. It's
called a fingerbot. Look, there's a button in there. I press the button and
I'm sure you can see where this is going, right?
It's a little finger bot. Uh, which I guess we can stick to the front of our
minis form and use it to turn it on. Is that what this USBA is for? Because
there's there's a little like wireless dongle. Looks like a like a a mouse
dongle. Okay, that must be what this is for.
It turned it on. Now, the fingerbot isn't something that they include by
default. It is an accessory, but if you need it, this could be a pretty useful
little add-on here. Now, if you were going to buy this yourself, you probably
want to let this adhesive cure for like 24 hours before you try it. But for me,
I really just need it to work like once or twice. And then actually I do want it
to come off. So I'm just going to full send it right now. And hopefully that
doesn't fall off on the very first try. Oh, accessories. Fingerpot strength.
Lightly press. Oh. Oh. Oh, wait. I see
what the thingies are for now. It like clips into the end. It's like an
extender and they're like a little pusher things. Obviously with something
that's like physical like this, you know, there's going to be a little bit of trial and error to get it how it
should be. But once you got this dialed in, it is a mildly hilarious but also
totally practical way to deal with something like this. You also could take
the ATX board and like solder it to the power button on the minis form, I'm
sure, if you really wanted to. But this way, no modifications required. You
could also hooked this fingerbot up to like a power switch or like a a reset
button on a power bar or something like that maybe. So that if something was
really dead and really not responsive even to the power button, you could shut
the power off with that. That would be pretty smart. Let's try this again.
Did it press? It works. And you can even change the
time to be like 8 seconds or something like that. So you can you can like hard
shut it down. You know, it's not responsive. Hold the power button until it's off. Off. So, we're doing 2560
x440. Can I change the resolution to 4K?
Okay. I tried to set the thing to 4K and I couldn't figure it out. And then I realized there's a software update.
There's a bunch of settings that are missing because we haven't done the software update. Oopsie. Here we go.
Now, we can change it to 4K. So, the highest resolution you can do at 60 FPS
is 1440p, which is great. But if we want to do 4K, we got to drop it down to 30.
This is changing the EDID, which is basically like uh the information your
monitor sends to your computer to tell it what resolution and refresh rate it
can do. Or in this case, our monitor, which is the GLET comment. It's
basically just telling the computer, yeah, now I can do 4K. There we go.
Beautiful. 3840 by 2160. Uh you can also
make custom EDID. It's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to figure out
how to do custom EDID if you haven't ever done it before, but there's some
online tools for it if you really need it for whatever reason. I mean, even at
30 FPS, the latency is still pretty good. We can rotate the monitor. We've
got dark mode. We've got a virtual keyboard. That's a nice touch. Oo, I
like the way that comes up from the bottom. We've got audio support. What if
I play a YouTube video or something?
We've got clipboard. That's huge. If you're like remoting into a machine,
you're trying to like boot into a recovery environment for instance, uh
having to like type out commands, which sometimes can be really long is a huge
pain in the butt, especially if you have like a disaster uh response plan and you
already know what commands you need to do. This way, you can just paste something in here like Jake likes small
computers. Haha, cool. And then if we
open up a text box and click paste. Boom. We've got a wake on land feature
which is pretty cool if you got that configured. Virtual media. Oh, can I
mount a Yo, how about this Blender image? Okay,
now I can mount this file sharing wise, which I guess should give me just like a
folder. Yeah, there we go. There's a folder. We've got our Blender file. We can copy it over. Sweet. 30 megabytes a
second. Wow. Okay. But really what's the more important version of this
functionality is image mounting. So say you need to reinstall your operating
system remotely. You could upload like an Ubuntu ISO or Proxmox or Trunass or
whatever it is and then you can mount it like an ISO, reboot the machine, which
in our case would be with the SwitchBot and then you can install an operating
system again without having to go anywhere near the computer fully remote.
We've got tail scale in the app center. Then I guess I can access this over tail
scale rather than the built-in VPN, which is nice if you uh if you want to
be able to have control over over the remote connection and and tunnel it
through your own stuff. All right, last thing I want to try here. We've got a 8K
YouTube video playing. I just want to like use this to get an a vibe for how
the compression looks. And in the full quality mode, it looks great. It's
responsive. definitely responsive enough to do the stuff you'd need to do,
especially if it was just a terminal. We got our fingerbot that works. We've got
tail scale. It's basically got all of the features um that you could want in a
KVM. It doesn't have a web page level
kind of access yet. You need to use the app. So, that's something to keep in
mind. But, if you're looking to pick up a GLET Comet KVM like this one right
here, um also keep in mind that they're coming out with a PoE version. And if
you're not familiar, that basically just means instead of needing USBC power,
you'll power this thing over the Ethernet cable that plugs into it. So if
you had this in a server room or maybe in an industrial application where you
already have Ethernet, you don't need to somehow figure out USB power, just PoE.
And overall, seems like a pretty great KVM. It doesn't make any noise. It does
what it says it does. The quality and latency is great. It's got lots of customization. And you can check it out
down at the link in the description where you can also check out maybe
another video you could watch. Like how about the time that I unboxed this
particular minis forum at CES. That was
fun. I'm going to unbox it again because it's a new version. Cool, right?