Month: June 2024

Switching from SpiderOak to IDrive

by

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.

Read more

ViewSonic VX2718-2KPC-MHD 27″ curved monitors

by

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.

Read more