Upgrading to Debian 13 (Trixie) on the Raspberry Pi

I’m pretty consistent with upgrading my Ubuntu Linux server twice a year, but found that I have not been as good about maintaining my Debian-based Raspberry Pis. I keep them updated, but not upgraded. So my first tech project of 2026 was to get everything current on Debian 13 Trixie.

I started with a mix of the last three releases of Raspberry Pi OS:

From what I had read, doing a clean install of Trixie (rather than a dist-upgrade) was the recommended path, so I made final full microSD card backups of each RasPi (with dd) then re-imaged each one with the current Lite build of RasPi OS using the Raspberry Pi Imager. Then, after booting up the new OS, I had to re-install, re-configure, and re-apply my software and customizations. This wasn’t a big effort for the “blinkenlights” RasPis, but Octoprint and Homeseer took some additional effort (see below). Finally, I did one more clean install of Trixie on a new Pi 5 that will be used for my PiDP-1 (once I find the time to build it!).

OctoPi

I used a nightly build image of OctoPi based on 64-bit Trixie and immediately had issues trying to SSH into the Pi. I had to hook up a monitor and keyboard so I could log in locally and then remove the IPQoS 0x00 line from /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Then I had to fix the syntax in /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg so that the reverse proxy would work for OctoPrint (I found both of these solutions in this post on the Octoprint forums).

Once I had Octoprint running I was able to restore my backup via the GUI, which also re-installed my plugins except for Octolapse. It seems like there’s an issue running this on versions of Python greater than 3.11 because distutils.msvccompiler was deprecated in 3.12 (and the Trixie image is using 3.13). I’ve posted on the issue in Github and hopefully there’ll be some sort of fix or workaround.

I also had a problem with my camera (an Arducam 5MP OV5647) not working. After a lot of research and experimentation I finally got it working by setting the resolution back to 1024 x 768 (instead of its native 2592 x 1944) via the camera_usb_options entry in /boot/firmware/octopi.txt. I’m not sure why the original resolution wouldn’t work (change in libraries?), but at least for now the camera shows video (although without Octolapse, it’s only good for a live view).

HomeSeer

For HS4, I didn’t just want to unzip my backup and hope it worked, so first I used zwolfpack’s Linux installer package (which installs HS, mono, and all the other necessary pre-requisites) to install a clean 4.2.22.86 beta release. I also took the opportunity to move the install from /usr/local/Homeseer to /opt/Homeseer). Then I unzipped my latest backup (from BLBackup) over that fresh install to re-install my plug-ins, devices, settings, events, and all the rest … and it worked (even the Z-Wave controller).

Then I had to re-install Homebridge (also under /opt) which got me a clean install with the latest v24 of node. After re-appling my fix for Z-Wave Plus and my garage door opener, I restored my backup from before the re-image and again, everything came back as expected.

 

So yeah, that’s six Raspberry Pis runing on Trixie now! Quite the project … and that should tide me over for a while until Forky is released in a few years. 😉

Tablo TV OTA DVR

I’ve had a hate-hate relationship with the regional sports networks (RSNs). Before cutting the cord on my Spectrum cable, I could watch the Rays and Lightning on Fox Sports Florida, and that continued for a while after I dropped Spectrum (and TiVo) for YouTube TV in 2020. Fox Sports then became Bally Sports in 2021 and then in 2023 YouTube TV dropped the RSNs completely (which made it hard to watch my local sports without cable). In 2024, Bally Sports became the FanDuel Sports Network and I ended up buying a separate streaming subscription so I could watch my local hockey and baseball teams for last season. Now in 2025, the Lightning announced a partnership with Scripps Sports that moved the hockey games off of FanDuel to local broadcast (on Channel 66 – The Spot) and streaming (which does not include YouTube TV, just DirectTV and Fubo). Argh! Since I still don’t want to go back to cable (although this was almost the straw that broke that particular camel’s back), my only option was, amazingly, trying OTA broadcast television.

TabloTVI haven’t watched TV over an antenna since I was a kid in the 80s … my parents never got cable, we were strictly a local channels household. In this modern age of multiple TVs, wireless streaming/casting, and mobile devices, I couldn’t imagine hooking up an antenna to a single television, so I started looking at options and came across the Tablo TV DVR for OTA (which ironically is also owned by Scripps, the same company now broadcasting my Lightning games). After doing some more research, reading some reviews (like this one), and planning the setup, I purchased a 4th generation, 2-tuner/128gb model on Amazon for $70, along with the Channel Master Omni+ 50 antenna for another $70.

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Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka)

The high temps here in Florida are finally down in the mid-80s so it must be fall! Time for Linux and sports updates …

Baseball

The Rays missed out on the post-season for the second year in a row due to a slump in the second half of the season that left them finishing under .500 at 77-85. The team was also sold to a new group of owners so we’ll have to see what happens with that. Tropicana Field’s roof is under repair so the Rays can play there again for the 2026 season. I did get to one game this season outside at Steinbrenner Field and it rained … so while I love outdoor baseball I understand why a park with a roof is a necessity around here.

The Guardians staged a historic comeback in September: after being 15.5 games out of first place in the AL Central on July 18 after the All-Star break and still 10 games back on September 1, the team surged and ended up winning the AL Central Division outright after the Detroit Tigers had a similarly historic meltdown. Unfortunately, in a Wild Card re-match between those two teams, Detroit ended up winning to advance to the ALDS. So now I look forward once again to Spring Training.

Football

The Bucs have started the season 5-2 behind 2025 MVP-candidate quarterback Baker Mayfield. He’s been fantastic for Tampa since leaving my Browns and I’m glad I still get to root for him. Meanwhile the QB revolving door in Cleveland continues to spin: Watson is still out injured, Flacco was re-signed, started the season and then traded to Cincinnati, so now rookie from Oregon Dillon Gabriel is leading the team (and had a fantastic win against the struggling Dolphins last weekend) and Shedeur Sanders is the backup. Just crazy.

A new entry this time around just to mention that the Penn State Nittany Lions, who were ranked #2 at the start of the season, have lost four games in a row (3-4 on the season), lost their quarterback, fired their coach, and are nowhere on the Top 25 for the first time in three years. On the flip side, my USF Bulls are already bowl eligible (for the third year in a row) and at 6-1 are ranked #18 on the Top 25. Go Bulls!

Hockey

It’ll be an interesting season: the Lightning and the Panthers have established a new in-state rivalry and really don’t like each other. I went to a pre-season game earlier this month and there was a combined 186 penalty minutes. At one point the Bolts had six players in the penalty box and only four on the bench. Now that the season has started, things have settled down but the Lightning are off to a slow start at 1-3-2. It’s a long road the playoffs, though!

Basketball

The NBA season just kicked off tonight and the Cavs lost to the Knicks in Madison Square Garden 119-111. I guess there won’t be a repeat of their 15-game win streak like last year.

And Linux …

Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) was also released earlier this month. 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 just under 25 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages and then another 20 minutes or so for me to re-configure my various settings and files affected by the upgrade.

I ran into two minor problems this cycle:

It’s been a few days, no issues to report!

Check back here again in April for the Resolute Raccoon, spring baseball, and (hopefully) playoff hockey!

Tempur-Pedic Ergo Smartbase

Tempurpedic Ergo SmartbaseAfter almost 30 years of having a queen bed (and 10 years of owning our current queen mattress from Casper), we finally upgraded to a king-sized bed with a new Tempur-Pedic TEMPUR-ProAdapt mattress and an adjustable power base. The TEMPUR-Ergo Smart Base might not be the typical kind of tech gadget I write about here, but it has USB-A and USB-C ports, WiFi, and is controllable via an app, so it qualifies! 🙂

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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 this is now included as of January 2026), 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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