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. …
It’s been 9 years since I bought a new laser printer. I typically don’t replace my equipment until it’s either broken or having too many problems to deal with. My Canon imageCLASS MF4890dw has been chugging along faithfully since I bought it back in 2014 but it recently fell into that “too many problems” category: …
During my recent switch from LastPass to Vaultwarden I was planning on using Docker but then discovered my old (2014) Synology NAS didn’t have the CPU architecture to support it. I was already in the middle of one big winter break project, why not add another? Time for a NAS upgrade! My DS214 started out …
Unless you’re not interested in tech news or have been under a rock for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard about the latest LastPass breach debacle. Two days before Christmas, every LastPass customer like myself received an e-mail informing us that, in a nutshell, back in August 2022 an unauthorized third-party had acquired LastPass …
Continue reading ‘Goodbye LastPass, hello Vault(Bit)warden’ »
[ I’ve been slowly (hardly?) working on this post for the past few weeks, but now that we’re stuck at home waiting for Hurricane Ian to arrive I figured I should finally get it done. ] I’m a long-time user of fitness tracker tech: I got my first Fitbit in 2014 (after cancelling my original …