FITCAMX Dash Cam (EV6)

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. Since I didn’t want to use the adhesive mount on her windshield, I used a suction cup mount which meant the camera was mounted a little lower on the glass (below the mirror housing) and thus more in the line-of-sight of the driver. This setup was fine, it just didn’t have that “factory installed” look and occasionally the suction cup would become unstuck in the Florida heat so she’d come back to the car to find the dash cam dangling from its power cable, and putting up a sunshield was also a little problematic.

Well, recently over on the EV6 Forums I saw that the FITCAMX was now available for the EV6 so I immediately ordered one (direct, so it came from China).

Continue reading ‘FITCAMX Dash Cam (EV6)’ »

Spring Training 2023: Day 4 (Opening Day)

We purposely planned our Spring Training trip late in the season for one reason: the Guardians would be playing the Seattle Mariners on Opening Day and my sister lives in Seattle! We bought our tickets back in December as soon as they went on sale and then planned our trip around today … our first Opening Day (away) game!

Continue reading ‘Spring Training 2023: Day 4 (Opening Day)’ »

Spring Training 2023: Day 3

Our Arizona trips always involve hiking, and with another nighttime baseball game we had all day for outdoor activities. We got up early Monday morning and had breakfast at the house before heading over the zoo/botanical gardens area where we were on Saturday afternoon to “hike” up Hole in the Rock. It’s a short trail with only a 200ft elevation gain but it has a pretty unique view. Rather than go over to nearby Camelback Mountain or Piestewa Peak, both of which we’ve hiked before, we drove south of Phoenix to the South Mountain Preserve.

Continue reading ‘Spring Training 2023: Day 3’ »

Spring Training 2023: Day 2

We got up early (okay, 8:00am) after getting ready for the day we drove over to Goodyear and had breakfast at our traditional place: Black Bear Diner. Then we drove down the road to Goodyear Ballpark, the Spring Training home for the Cleveland Guardians and Cincinnati Reds. In years past we’ve watched the warm-ups and then shagged fly balls during batting practice. This year, however, none of that happened. We waited around for a while, along with a few other fans (but nothing like the crowds we usually experience). No one ever came to open the outer gate and all that really happened was a few of the pitchers came out to warm-up on one of the back fields. We could only guess that since it was Sunday morning and the last game at the park that maybe the players had the morning off.

Continue reading ‘Spring Training 2023: Day 2’ »

Spring Training 2023: Day 1

After two years of no Spring Training baseball trips (2021 was cancelled due to COVID-19, and then 2022 was cancelled due to the MLB lockout), it’s finally time to get back out to the Cactus League! Last time we went out early at the beginning of the season but this year we’re going at the very end … and going to Opening Day in Seattle! Should be a blast …

Continue reading ‘Spring Training 2023: Day 1’ »

Canon MF455dw

Canon MF455dw

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: the ADF has been squeaking and jamming regardless of my attempts to clean it, replace the rollers, etc.; one of the flatbed cover hinges broke back in 2020 and while I was able to replace it, last year the plastic slot that holds the hinge in place cracked so now the cover won’t stay open on it’s own (and the hinge pops out when I open it); and finally despite replacing the toner cartridge and cleaning, it’s been printing black lines down the left side of each page. That was enough to push me over the edge to look for a replacement.

I didn’t do a ton of research this time … I have been really happy with my Canon printers so I just looked for the latest revision of what I already had. Canon’s MF450 series has a few models that are all very similar, the primary differences being the inclusion of a fax, and print speed. There wasn’t much of a price difference for the top-of-the-line model (and it was readily available) which is why after reading a few online reviews, I selected the Canon imageCLASS MF455dw.

Continue reading ‘Canon MF455dw’ »

Chatting with ChatGPT

Seems like everyone is playing around with ChatGPT from Open AI. Earlier this month when I was working on my NAS re-org I actually tried using it to help me write some firewall rules and this is what I got:

CHatGPT "discussion" about firewall rules

CHatGPT “discussion” about firewall rules

Not too shabby. It’s been in the news lately because all sorts of people (students, bloggers, even lawyers) are using it to write stuff for them. So I figured, why not turn my blogging activities over to the AI? Well, here’s what I got.

Continue reading ‘Chatting with ChatGPT’ »

Seattle Sports Weekend

When my daughter first went off to college in Ohio I told her we’d do a daddy/daughter hockey trip at some point and go see the Lightning play the Columbus Blue Jackets. Then the pandemic happened and the NHL schedule never seemed to align with travel plans. When the 2022-2023 schedule was released last summer it looked like an Ohio away game just wasn’t in the cards so we decided to go a little farther: Seattle. My sister is still a Kraken season ticket holder so she came here to Tampa to see the Kraken play the Lightnig back in December (we won 6-2), and then my daughter and I flew out to Seattle last weekend to catch the Bolts in the Emerald City.

Continue reading ‘Seattle Sports Weekend’ »

Synology DiskStation DS720+

Synology DS720+

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 with two 3TB drives, which I then upgraded to 6TB in 2018 and then 8TB in 2020 (after one of the 6TB drives started exhibiting bad sectors). I didn’t need a capacity increase again, just a hardware upgrade so I started looking at the newer 2-bay DiskStations. The end result was my purchasing the DiskStation DS720+.

Continue reading ‘Synology DiskStation DS720+’ »

Goodbye LastPass, hello Vault(Bit)warden

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 vault backups from a cloud service. But don’t worry, they said! As long as you’ve got a strong master password, you should be fine. But not everything in your LastPass vault is encrypted, specifically URLs and now that this unknown threat actor has a list of LastPass customers, their vaults, and the URLs in those vaults, let the phishing attempts begin! Not to mention they have time to brute force the encryption on those vaults with poor master passwords. Even worse, since the initial announcement, there has been zero further details provided by LastPass, even on their own support forums (which are now full of message threads with other angry customers also leaving) and no mention of the breach at all on their homepage!

So yeah, after 12 years as a LastPass Premium/Families customer, I’ve switched.

Continue reading ‘Goodbye LastPass, hello Vault(Bit)warden’ »