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 …

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Ring camera conversion, completed!

I 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 …

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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 …

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Building the PiDP-10

First 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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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), …

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