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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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 still ext4 instead of the newer (recommended) btrfs file system (because my previous NAS that the drives came from didn’t support it). That sent me down a research rabbit hole on how to “convert” the ext4 volume to btrfs. Short answer … well, there was no short answer.

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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 release there just weren’t that many changes for this upgrade cycle. Whatever the reason, I’m happy and upgraded.

Ok, can we get to the real reason for these bi-annual posts? Fall sports!

  • Behind continued strong performances from Baker Mayfield (not to mention Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and the rest), the Bucs are tied with the Falcons for 1st place in the NFC South at 4-2 (one of those losses an OT stunner in Atlanta on Thursday Night Football the other week).
  • Behind continued dismal performances from Deshaun Watson, the Browns sit last in the AFC North at 1-5 and are tied for last in the whole league with Carolina, Jacksonville, and New England (!!). The Browns also recently announced they are leaving downtown Cleveland for the suburbs and hope to build a new domed stadium facility for the 2029 season.
  • The Rays also want to build a new stadium (and it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Tropicana Field lost its roof during Hurricane Milton), but no post-season for them this year, the first time since 2018.
  • The 2024 NBA season starts next week, so no Cavs news right now. Of course the big NBA story is Bronny James joining his dad Lebron on the Lakers.
  • The Lightning are undeafeated (1 of just 3 unbeaten teams) at 3-0, but are in second place in the Atlantic division (and 7th overall) because of missed games due to Hurricane Milton. No Stamkos either. 🙁
  • But the real news was the Guardians beat the Tigers in 5 games of the ALDS and advanced to face the Yankees in the ALCS. After dropping the first two games in New York, the Guardians came roaring back in Game 3 to tie the game with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th with a 2-run homer from “Big Christmas” Jhonkensy Noel and then won it with a walk-off 2-run homer from David Fry in the bottom of the 10th. Unfortunately, the Cleveland bullpen could not solve the riddle of New York’s sluggers and the Guardians lost the next two games in Cleveland and the series, 4 games to 1. But as usual I’m already looking forward to Spring Training next March!

Oh, Linux? Yeah, yeah … come back in April for 25.04, the Plucky Puffin, blah blah blah. 😉

Hurricanes Helene and Milton recaps

Just over a week after Hurricane Helene brushed past the Tampa Bay area on its way up through the Florida panhandle, Hurricane Milton came across the Gulf from the east and made landfall just south of Tampa Bay, leaving a massive trail of destruction in its wake. We may have dodged this year’s “I”-named hurricane (Isaac) which has historically caused us issues (Idalia in 2023, Ian in 2022, Irma in 2017, and even Irene in 2011), but the one/two punch of Helene and Milton ended up being much worse.

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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 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.

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ViewSonic VX2718-2KPC-MHD 27″ curved monitors

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.

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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 in the AL Central (and 2nd in the league), sitting at 22-12, a nice hot start for the season that I hope they can keep up!
  • unlike last year, the Tampa Bay Rays have started a little slowly at 17-18, in the bottom half of the AL East
  • for the second year in a row the Cleveland Cavaliers are playing in the NBA playoffs: they just won their Round One series against the Orlando Magic in 7 games and move on to face the Boston Celtics. That’s the first playoff series win for the Cavs without Lebron James since 1993!
  • the NFL Draft happened the other week, but both the Browns and Bucs had decent seasons last year and didn’t have any high picks so I didn’t really pay any attention to it (but the Bucs did manage to sign Baker Mayfield to a new 3-year contract, so there’s that!)
  • and the Lightning? *sigh* After making it into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the 7th year in a row (and the 10th time in past 11 years), riding on Nikita Kucherov’s record-setting season with 100 assists and 144 points, they fell to the Florida Panthers in 5 games (the first time the Panthers have won a playoff series against the Lightning). I was at Game 4 here in Tampa when the Bolts won 6-3 … was I watching Steven Stamkos skate on home ice in a Lightning sweater for the last time? I hope not!! It’s going to be a tough off-season …

Anyway, Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) was released late last month. Per the usual, 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 average 30 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages and then another 20 minutes or so for me to re-apply my affected changes to various config files. I ran into two problems this cycle:

  • like with the 23.10 upgrade, PHP 8.2 was removed and replaced with PHP 8.3 and again the process removed the 8.2 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not re-install the corresponding 8.3 versions. This broke WordPress and my Piwigo photo gallery until I manually installed the two missing packages and restarted Apache. I take good notes during upgrades, though, so I was prepared to check on (and fix) this again.
  • fail2ban “failed2start” (heh) with a ERROR No module named 'asynchat' error, but a quick Google search found the reported bug which pointed me to manually installing the latest 1.1.0 release, and that fixed the problem.

The latest 6.8 Linux kernel also fixed a problem I had just recently run into. I thought the latest release of Piwigo 14.4 had broken my Physical Photo Move extension (it was causing the Apache processes to completely lock up), but after digging into it more I tracked it down to a problem with a CIFS-related kernel patch in 6.5.0-28. I had since been running the reverted/patched 6.5.0-27 kernel from the PPA to fix this, but the problem was also resolved (or never existed) in the 6.8 tree.

See you back here in October for … Oracular Oriole!

Spring Training 2024 (Grapefruit/Cactus Leagues, and Vegas hockey!)

My annual trip out west for Cleveland Guardians Spring Training wasn’t going to work out this year with my siblings. We were looking at the last weekend in March since it happened to coincide with my sister’s Seattle Kraken being in town at the same time to play the Arizona Coyotes (who will be moving to Utah next year!), but then our plans kinda fell apart due to other conflicts. I had resigned myself to just staying local and going to a few Rays games instead, but then a last-minute opportunity made it so that I attended spring games in Florida and Arizona!

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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), I decided to get my feet wet using that first. The firmware on the new board was based on v2.0.8.2 (from August 2022) but the latest release was v2.1.2.1 so I figured that would be a good first upgrade to attempt.

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