Switching from SpiderOak to IDrive

I’ve been using SpiderOak ONE for my online cloud backups since 2012 … almost 12 years. I was grandfathered into an unlimited plan for $125/yr and had just under 5TB backed up to the service. On April 24, the service went down for “scheduled maintenance” to move to a new data center … and was down for two weeks! Worse, there was near-zero communication about the outage, no response to support tickets, affected a lot of people (see here and here for examples), and in fact is still causing problems for customers today (over a month later)!

My annual renewal was coming up at the end of May and this was now the second big service outage so far this year (a total of 20 days of downtime!). It became clear to me that SpiderOak no longer considers their ONE backup service important (in fact, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks they did this on purpose to get rid of ONE customers), so I started looking at alternatives.

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ViewSonic VX2718-2KPC-MHD 27″ curved monitors

The last time I got new monitors was 2015 when I purchased two 22-inch ViewSonic LED displays for my new (at the time) standing desk setup. Fast forward almost 10 years and those monitors are still chugging along, but now that I’m staring at these screens for over 8 hours a day, every day (for the past four years since the pandemic) for work, and needing to wear my glasses more, I decided that it might be time for some new larger displays.

I had just a few criteria to start my shopping/research:

  • preferably $150 or less (since I need to get two)
  • larger than 22 inches
  • multiple inputs (so I can switch back and forth between my work and personal laptops)
  • easily reachable controls (to switch those inputs)

Nothing crazy there, right? But you’d be surprised how hard it is to find monitors with easily accessible controls. I guess a lot of manufacturers think their displays are going to be used singly, because a lot of the controls are little jog dials or buttons on the back of the screen, typically the right side (as you’re facing the screen). But in a dual monitor situation, I wouldn’t be able to reach that little dial on the left monitor because the right monitor would be right up against the bezel, blocking access to that switch. My current ViewSonics had buttons on the bottom right-hand side of the frame, and luckily I found some new ViewSonic models that had the same configuration (just moving the buttons to the center of the bottom frame instead, which was fine with me).

Once I had ViewSonic pegged as the manufacturer and I had a short list of displays to evaluate, I had to decide: 24-inch or 27-inch? flat or curved? FHD or QHD? After weighing and researching the options, I went slightly above my budget and selected the VX2718-2KPC-MHD.

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Nurturing the Noble Numbat

Did everyone enjoy the solar eclipse last month? We didn’t get totality here but my family up in Cleveland sent some amazing pictures. The daily temps are creeping above 80 which means spring in Florida and that of course leads to my annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

  • the Cleveland Guardians are currently 1st in the AL Central (and 2nd in the league), sitting at 22-12, a nice hot start for the season that I hope they can keep up!
  • unlike last year, the Tampa Bay Rays have started a little slowly at 17-18, in the bottom half of the AL East
  • for the second year in a row the Cleveland Cavaliers are playing in the NBA playoffs: they just won their Round One series against the Orlando Magic in 7 games and move on to face the Boston Celtics. That’s the first playoff series win for the Cavs without Lebron James since 1993!
  • the NFL Draft happened the other week, but both the Browns and Bucs had decent seasons last year and didn’t have any high picks so I didn’t really pay any attention to it (but the Bucs did manage to sign Baker Mayfield to a new 3-year contract, so there’s that!)
  • and the Lightning? *sigh* After making it into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the 7th year in a row (and the 10th time in past 11 years), riding on Nikita Kucherov’s record-setting season with 100 assists and 144 points, they fell to the Florida Panthers in 5 games (the first time the Panthers have won a playoff series against the Lightning). I was at Game 4 here in Tampa when the Bolts won 6-3 … was I watching Steven Stamkos skate on home ice in a Lightning sweater for the last time? I hope not!! It’s going to be a tough off-season …

Anyway, Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) was released late last month. Per the usual, I ran my pre-upgrade backup scripts and then sudo do-release-upgrade -d (once again needing the -d parameter otherwise no upgrade was found). It took the average 30 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages and then another 20 minutes or so for me to re-apply my affected changes to various config files. I ran into two problems this cycle:

  • like with the 23.10 upgrade, PHP 8.2 was removed and replaced with PHP 8.3 and again the process removed the 8.2 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not re-install the corresponding 8.3 versions. This broke WordPress and my Piwigo photo gallery until I manually installed the two missing packages and restarted Apache. I take good notes during upgrades, though, so I was prepared to check on (and fix) this again.
  • fail2ban “failed2start” (heh) with a ERROR No module named 'asynchat' error, but a quick Google search found the reported bug which pointed me to manually installing the latest 1.1.0 release, and that fixed the problem.

The latest 6.8 Linux kernel also fixed a problem I had just recently run into. I thought the latest release of Piwigo 14.4 had broken my Physical Photo Move extension (it was causing the Apache processes to completely lock up), but after digging into it more I tracked it down to a problem with a CIFS-related kernel patch in 6.5.0-28. I had since been running the reverted/patched 6.5.0-27 kernel from the PPA to fix this, but the problem was also resolved (or never existed) in the 6.8 tree.

See you back here in October for … Oracular Oriole!

Spring Training 2024 (Grapefruit/Cactus Leagues, and Vegas hockey!)

My annual trip out west for Cleveland Guardians Spring Training wasn’t going to work out this year with my siblings. We were looking at the last weekend in March since it happened to coincide with my sister’s Seattle Kraken being in town at the same time to play the Arizona Coyotes (who will be moving to Utah next year!), but then our plans kinda fell apart due to other conflicts. I had resigned myself to just staying local and going to a few Rays games instead, but then a last-minute opportunity made it so that I attended spring games in Florida and Arizona!

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Upgrading Marlin firmware on the Ender 3 Pro

Part 4 of my New Years’ 2024 upgrade posts series …

Upgrading my Ender 3 Pro with the newer 32-bit mainboard means I can now more easily upgrade the firmware. I considered trying out Klipper, but since Marlin is what I’m used to (the original 8-bit board was running Creality’s version based on Marlin v1.1.9), I decided to get my feet wet using that first. The firmware on the new board was based on v2.0.8.2 (from August 2022) but the latest release was v2.1.2.1 so I figured that would be a good first upgrade to attempt.

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Upgrading some Ender 3 Pro hardware

For Part 3 of my latest round of upgrades to kick off 2024, I also made some hardware changes to my Ender 3 Pro 3D printer for the first time since getting it back in 2021:

Yeah, just a few things. 🙂 I completed these changes around the same time as the upgrades to my HomeTroller and Debian Bullseye, but wanted to wait a bit before posting so I had more time to play around with the results and I’m pretty pleased!

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Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4

My two Raspberry Pi 4 Bs (in my HomeTroller Pi and OctoPi) were both running Debian 10 (Buster). I like to be current (as evidenced by my bi-annual Ubuntu upgrades) and realized I’d been lax on the RasPis, both of which were two releases behind. Debian 12 (Bookworm) seemed a little too new, so based on some research on the HomeSeer and OctoPrint forums, I decided to just upgrade them both to Debian 11 (Bullseye).

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Upgrading the HomeSeer/HomeTroller hardware

My 1st gen HomeSeer HomeTroller Pi was built on a Raspberry Pi 3 B with 1gb of RAM. While this was fine back when I bought it and was just starting my home security and automation re-design and foray into using HS4, recently I’d been having issues with performance and out-of-memory conditions. In 2021 when I bought the HomeTroller, the HS4 software was only permitted to run 5 plug-ins but that limitation was removed in later releases and I upgraded the microSD card to allow for unlimited plug-ins. Unfortunately, 1gb of RAM is not “unlimited” so now that I’m running more plug-ins (10 at last count) I suspected that the cause of the crashes was due to lack of free RAM. Thus, I decided to try and upgrade the Raspberry Pi in the HomeTroller to a beefier model.

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Changing registrars: goodbye Google (Squarespace), hello, Cloudflare!

Last summer, Google announced that it would be shutting down its Google Domains service and selling it to Squarespace. I had a few domains (like this one) registered through Google that I had transferred from DynDNS (which is now owned by Oracle!) back in 2016 and was just going to let the transfer happen and see how things went. But then the other week I got an e-mail from Squarespace informing me that a dynamic DNS service would not be provided by Squarespace:

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Manipulating the Mantic Minotaur

Overnight temps here in Florida are dipping into the upper 60s which must mean it’s late October and fall is here! 🙂 Let’s check in with my bi-annual sports and Linux updates!

  • After starting out the 2023 season red hot with a 13-game win streak (tying the record in the modern era), the Rays’ October baseball run only lasted until 10/4 when they were swept out of the AL Wild Card in 2 games by the Texas Rangers (who went on to win the ALCS and will be facing the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2023 World Series). The Guardians finished a disappointing 3rd in the AL Central.
  • Just one season after leaving the Browns, Baker Mayfield ended up in Tampa so I’m getting to watch him play again. The Bucs are currently 3-3 and are in 2nd place in the NFC South after the Falcons beat them last Sunday with a game-ending field goal. The Browns continue to be an enigma: they have one of the best defenses in the league and the Deshaun Watson “experiment” seems to be a failure. Despite that, our new third-string-to-starter QB PJ Walker, adding another name to the list of 36 starting Browns QBs since 1999, has the Browns at 4-2 (better than the Bucs!) but 4th place in the ever-tough AFC North. Love the alternate white uniforms though!
  • The NBA season just starts today so the Cavs are tied with everyone else at 0-0. 🙂
  • And finally the Lightning. After losing a bunch of good players in the off-season, it was announced, right before the season started, that goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy had back surgery in September and is expected to miss the first two months of the season! That means I won’t get to see him play when I go the Bolts/Kraken game next week here in Tampa, but maybe he’ll be back when I’m in Seattle for the Kraken/Bolts game in December. Backup goalie Jonas Johansson has taken the team on his shoulders though, and the Lightning sit at 7-3 with 8 points and 4th in the Atlantic division.

Let’s see … what else? Oh, right, a new version of Ubuntu, the Mantic Minotaur (23.10) was released earlier this month. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, the sudo do-release-upgrade -d command took about 20 minutes to download and install the new packages. Notice I had to use the -d parameter this time for some reason, otherwise it said there was no upgrade available.

The only problem I had this cycle was again due to a PHP upgrade. The process removed PHP 8.1 and upgraded to PHP 8.2 but for some inexplicable reason it removed the 8.1 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not install the corresponding 8.2 versions. This broke WordPress, my Piwigo photo gallery, etc. until I manually installed the two missing packages. At least I’m prepared for stuff like this now so it didn’t take long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

Until April then, when Noble Numbat (the next LTS release) comes out …