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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘ViewSonic VX2718-2KPC-MHD 27″ curved monitors’ »
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), …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading Marlin firmware on the Ender 3 Pro’ »
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: installed a new mainboard installed the CR Touch automatic bed levelling sensor installed a new metal extruder assembly replaced …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Upgrading the HomeSeer/HomeTroller hardware’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Changing registrars: goodbye Google (Squarespace), hello, Cloudflare!’ »
I wasn’t really having any problems with my iPhone 12 Pro Max, but when checking the pre-order price for a Apple’s newest phone from AT&T it turned out that I could get an iPhone 15 Plus for just $100 after trading in my current device. I have never really been happy with the camera in …
I bought my first Dropcams back in 2014, right around the time Nest (which had acquired Dropcam) was acquired by Google. Then I added the Nest Thermostat in 2016 (which was later replaced in 2021 with a Z-Wave one during an HVAC system upgrade), the Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors in 2018, and finally a bunch …
I’ve been really happy with the FITCAMX dash cam in my RAV4. When my wife got her EV6 last year there wasn’t a similar model available so I ended up getting her the Garmin Mini 2 (which apparently I never wrote about here), wired into her rearview mirror housing with a Dongar USB power adapter. …