> Is it the authors celebrity?
Kinda, yes. The author is Jeff Atwood, founder of StackOverflow (you probably don't need a link) and Discourse ([1], ruby-based modern open forum software). He's also a hardware "enthusiast", to say the least, such posts where he's all excited about his new shiny shiny thingie are not uncommon on his blog. As such (and because he's probably already full of $$$), I wouldn't say the affiliate money is his primary motivation to blog this, I think he writes a geek post then puts Amazon affiliated links because he can, but maybe I'm naive.