Archive of posts tagged network

Lightspeed internet: making the switch to Frontier Fiber

I’ve been a RoadRunner/Brighthouse/Spectrum cable internet customer since I moved to Florida back in 2001. In 2004, I commented about Verizon FIOS possibly coming into my area but in 2013 I was still waiting. Thirteen years later, Frontier finally laid fiber in my neighborhood late last year and started offering internet service starting at $30/mo for 500Mbps. My Spectrum …

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Escaping the Pi-Hole for NextDNS

I’ve been running a Pi-Hole ad blocker on my home network (and a remote family network) in one way or another (local install on a RasPi, Docker container on a NAS, etc.) for over 10 years! Of course it only worked when we were at home, so my family had started noticing how cluttered their …

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Upgrading to Debian 13 (Trixie) on the Raspberry Pi

I’m pretty consistent with upgrading my Ubuntu Linux server twice a year, but found that I have not been as good about maintaining my Debian-based Raspberry Pis. I keep them updated, but not upgraded. So my first tech project of 2026 was to get everything current on Debian 13 Trixie. I started with a mix of the …

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Tempur-Pedic Ergo Smartbase

After almost 30 years of having a queen bed (and 10 years of owning our current queen mattress from Casper), we finally upgraded to a king-sized bed with a new Tempur-Pedic TEMPUR-ProAdapt mattress and an adjustable power base. The TEMPUR-Ergo Smart Base might not be the typical kind of tech gadget I write about here, …

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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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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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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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Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4

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 …

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