Surface Laptop 6 for Business

Surface Laptop 6 for BusinessI’ve used a lot of Microsoft Surface devices going all the way back to the original Surface RT and Surface Pro in 2012; then the Surface Pro 3 (2015) and Surface Pro 4 (2016); and finally the Surface Laptop (2018) and Surface Laptop 2 (2019).

I was given a Surface Pro 6 when I started my (then) new job in December 2019 and it had been my day-to-day primary machine for work ever since. There was nothing really wrong with it (other than the occasional Defender full virus scan that would cause high CPU usage), but it was time (from the asset and device management perspectives) to get it replaced so my new daily work driver is now the Surface Laptop 6 for Business.

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Perfecting the Plucky Puffin

It’s Easter Sunday (4/20!) and time for my spring sports and ubuntu upgrade updates!

Football

We’ll start with the off-season sport. Back in February it looked like the Cleveland Browns were going to lose Myles Garrett due to his “desire to win” but then a few weks later the team gave him 122 million reasons to stay for another four years. Not that it matters since the Deshaun Watson/quarterback problems continue to curse us.

After losing to the Washington Commanders in the NFC Wild Card game at the end of last season, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be playing their 50th season in the NFL starting in the fall with Baker Mayfield at the helm again, so that’s promising at least.

Baseball

Now the early-in-the-season sport. Due to a heavy load at work and an upcoming project go-live that conflicted with my typical trip to AZ, I had to skip Spring Training out in the Cactus League this year. To keep my streak alive though (I don’t think I’ve missed going to at least one spring game going back to 1999, except for the pandemic and lockout years), I got down to Sarasota to see the Rays beat the Orioles 6-3 on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in March (and got to visit a new park too!).

Speaking of the Rays, you probably saw that Tropicana Field was severely damaged by Hurricane Milton back in October. With the roof unable to be repaired in time (and ongoing talks for a new stadium still at a stand-still), my Tampa team will be playing the 2025 season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, the spring home of the New York Yankees. Yes, outdoor baseball in Florida (but there’s been a few schedule changes to avoid the hotter and rainer parts of the summer here)! It’ll be weird for the Yankees when they come to town and have to use the visitor dugout and locker room. 🙂 Needing to adjust to a new home stadium has its disadvantages though, and the Rays are sitting at the bottom of the AL East at 9-12. I can’t wait to see the Guardians here in September, though! Cleveland is sitting in 2nd place in the AL Central at 11-9, just 1.5 games behind the Tigers.

Basketball

On to the playoff sports. My Cleveland Cavaliers finished the regular season at 64-18, winning the Central Division and clinching 1st place in the East (both for the first time without Lebron James). They started out the season with a franchise record 15-0, broke that win streak record with a 16-0 run later in the season, and were in 1st place pretty much the entire time. They face the Miami Heat in the first round of the NBA Playoffs starting tonight. Go Cavs!

Hockey

The Lightning had a pretty good season (their first one without Steven Stamkos), finishing with 102 points which put them in 2nd place in the Atlantic Division and 3rd place in the Eastern Conference. Yanni Gourde came back from the Seattle Kraken (which he joined during that team’s expansion draft), Nikita Kucherov won his second consecutive Art Ross Trophy with 121 points, Jake Guentzal filled the Stamkos hole by scoring 41 goals, and the team had four players with 30+ goals (Point, Guentzal, Kucherov, and Hagel). It’ll be another Battle of Florida when the Bolts take on the Florida Panthers in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs when they start on Tuesday. Go Bolts!

Ubuntu

That’s it for the sports, now on to Linux-related news. Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) was released this past week. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, I kicked off the  sudo do-release-upgrade (no need for -d this time!) which as usual took about half an hour to download and apply all the updated packages and then another half hour or so for me to re-apply my changes to the affected config files.

I only had one problem this time and as usual it was with my good friend PHP. Just like Noble, the upgrade replaced PHP 8.3 with PHP 8.4, removing the 8.3 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but not re-installing the corresponding 8.4 versions (which broke WordPress (this blog) and my Piwigo photo gallery). Simply installing the two missing packages with apt-get install and restarting Apache resolved the problem but it’s still annoying that this doesn’t happen automatically.

One other thing I noticed was that my Pulseway monitoring app (which I was using for reboot notifications and some basic monitoring along side of my Nagios setup) was no longer working. It turned out that Pulseway discontinued their free accounts back in October! I’d been using Pulseway since Marius started it as Mobile PC Monitor back in 2011, but really didn’t need it (and wasn’t going to pay for the service) so I removed the agent from my Linux machines and then deleted the app on my iPhone.

Have a great summer! See you back here in the fall for the Questing Quokka (and hopefully some October baseball!).

Ring camera conversion, completed!

side yard (left) - nightI started my switchover from Google Nest cameras to Ring back in May 2023, replacing my indoor Dropcams with battery-powered Ring Stick-Up Cams. At the time, I kept my Nest Outdoor cameras because Ring did not have a constant recording option, but fast forward to 2025 and Ring has finally added 24/7 recording to certain plugged-in and hardwired cameras as part of their new Ring Premium plan (for $200/year). I was losing my grandfathered $10/month Ring Protect plan in March and last year Google raised the annual price of Nest Aware Plus to $150, so it was time to upgrade some hardware and consolidate. I didn’t end up saving money (professional monitoring is now an additional $10/month on top of Premium), but I did gain some convenience of finally being able to ditch Nest and manage all of my cameras in a single place (plus additional automation capabilities, but more on that later).

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Is it time for a new DMS? (three months later)

It’s been three months since I switched from my Paperport-based electronic scanning/filing system to a combination of NAPS2, PDFgear, and paperless. So how’s it going? It took me a little while to get used to using three separate applications instead of one, but now I actually like that I’ve decoupled all the various functions into separate pieces of software that I can swap out and replace easily (if needed).

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Building the PiDP-10

PiDP-10First post of 2025, time for a new build! The PiDP-10 kit is the latest classic computing offering from Oscar Vermeulen at Obsolescence Guaranteed and the follow-up to his PiDP-8 and PiDP11 kits. I purchased and received the kit back in August last year, but then with the Florida hurricanes, getting super busy at work in the fall, and then the holidays and year-end, I finally just found some free time this past weekend to actually build it!

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Is it time for a new DMS?

I’ve been using PaperPort Professional as my document management system (DMS) since I first started scanning documents (instead of keeping a file cabinet full of paper) back in 1999. Over those past 25 (!!) years I’ve used multiple versions, gone through multiple ownership changes, and dealt with technical issues, but I’ve stuck with it. The “current” version, 14.7, was released in 2019, but that was really just a minor facelift to add the Kofax branding to v14.5 which was released in 2015 (and since then Kofax has been renamed to Tungsten Automation). That’s right, the latest major release of this software is almost 10 years old.

It’s odd that a technophile like myself wouldn’t have looked for something newer and shiny by now but PaperPort still works and I’ve built my document storage and archive folder organization around it for (it’s weird saying it this way) a quarter of a century. But the end of 2024 is approaching and traditionally over the holiday break I’ve done some sort of tech project (this past year was switching registrars, the year before that was leaving LastPass for Vaultwarden). Doing a little planning ahead, I’m thinking maybe it’s time for a DMS switch.

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Synology NAS btrfs file system update

When I upgraded my Synology NAS back in 2023, I just swapped the existing 8TB drives into the new enclosure. After my recent network outage during Hurricane Milton, I found a warning on the storage pool indicating there were file system errors and while running some file system checks I realized that the volume was still ext4 instead of the newer (recommended) btrfs file system (because my previous NAS that the drives came from didn’t support it). That sent me down a research rabbit hole on how to “convert” the ext4 volume to btrfs. Short answer … well, there was no short answer.

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Operating the Oracular Oriole

I had zero issues upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole). That is all. 🙂

Seriously, this is the first upgrade since 18.10 (Cosmic) that I haven’t had a single post-upgrade issue (although 23.04 (Lunar) was close). The biggest change was the jump from the 6.8 kernel to 6.11. Maybe since 24.04 (Noble) was an LTS release there just weren’t that many changes for this upgrade cycle. Whatever the reason, I’m happy and upgraded.

Ok, can we get to the real reason for these bi-annual posts? Fall sports!

  • Behind continued strong performances from Baker Mayfield (not to mention Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and the rest), the Bucs are tied with the Falcons for 1st place in the NFC South at 4-2 (one of those losses an OT stunner in Atlanta on Thursday Night Football the other week).
  • Behind continued dismal performances from Deshaun Watson, the Browns sit last in the AFC North at 1-5 and are tied for last in the whole league with Carolina, Jacksonville, and New England (!!). The Browns also recently announced they are leaving downtown Cleveland for the suburbs and hope to build a new domed stadium facility for the 2029 season.
  • The Rays also want to build a new stadium (and it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Tropicana Field lost its roof during Hurricane Milton), but no post-season for them this year, the first time since 2018.
  • The 2024 NBA season starts next week, so no Cavs news right now. Of course the big NBA story is Bronny James joining his dad Lebron on the Lakers.
  • The Lightning are undeafeated (1 of just 3 unbeaten teams) at 3-0, but are in second place in the Atlantic division (and 7th overall) because of missed games due to Hurricane Milton. No Stamkos either. 🙁
  • But the real news was the Guardians beat the Tigers in 5 games of the ALDS and advanced to face the Yankees in the ALCS. After dropping the first two games in New York, the Guardians came roaring back in Game 3 to tie the game with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th with a 2-run homer from “Big Christmas” Jhonkensy Noel and then won it with a walk-off 2-run homer from David Fry in the bottom of the 10th. Unfortunately, the Cleveland bullpen could not solve the riddle of New York’s sluggers and the Guardians lost the next two games in Cleveland and the series, 4 games to 1. But as usual I’m already looking forward to Spring Training next March!

Oh, Linux? Yeah, yeah … come back in April for 25.04, the Plucky Puffin, blah blah blah. 😉

Hurricanes Helene and Milton recaps

Just over a week after Hurricane Helene brushed past the Tampa Bay area on its way up through the Florida panhandle, Hurricane Milton came across the Gulf from the east and made landfall just south of Tampa Bay, leaving a massive trail of destruction in its wake. We may have dodged this year’s “I”-named hurricane (Isaac) which has historically caused us issues (Idalia in 2023, Ian in 2022, Irma in 2017, and even Irene in 2011), but the one/two punch of Helene and Milton ended up being much worse.

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