We recently completed a (year long!) construction project in the front room of our house replacing three individual double-hung impact windows with a large picture window surrounded by two casement windows (all impact, of course). This isn’t a post about the construction though (well, maybe a little) but about the cool tech we’re using on our new giant window.
windows
general Windows stuff
Surface Laptop 6 for Business
I’ve used a lot of Microsoft Surface devices going all the way back to the original Surface RT and Surface Pro in 2012; then the Surface Pro 3 (2015) and Surface Pro 4 (2016); and finally the Surface Laptop (2018) and Surface Laptop 2 (2019).
I was given a Surface Pro 6 when I started my (then) new job in December 2019 and it had been my day-to-day primary machine for work ever since. There was nothing really wrong with it (other than the occasional Defender full virus scan that would cause high CPU usage), but it was time (from the asset and device management perspectives) to get it replaced so my new daily work driver is now the Surface Laptop 6 for Business.
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.
hp Spectre x360 16 laptop
I thought I tended to upgrade my home PC roughly every 5 years but looking back I got my Dell mini-tower in 2008, then built my current desktop, the Intel NUC in 2015, a gap of 7 years. And now in 2022, another 7 years later my new desktop is … a laptop.
I don’t know why it took me so long to decide to make my daily driver a laptop. I got the NUC primarily because I had just gotten a standing desk and wanted something small to sit on top. And when I was away from home, I usually had my work laptop/Surface with me. But as I was considering my next “desktop” PC I realized a big laptop as a desktop replacement made sense. I’m not a gamer so I don’t need an extreme graphics card (which are hard to come by now anyway), I have a good multi-monitor setup since I work from home so I wouldn’t need to stare at a laptop screen all the time, and a docking station could easily make up for the extra ports I use.
After performing my usual research, I decided to go with the hp Spectre x360 16 2-in-1 convertible laptop.
Windows 11
Today Microsoft announced the next version of Windows, Windows 11.
I’ve been a member of the Insider Program since 2015, so recently I started seeing the new Sun Valley UI changes showing up in the 21H2 preview builds flighted to my home PC. New, flatter, more colorful icons, mostly:
An early build of Windows 11 was leaked last week, and while in the past I’ve installed early preview releases (like Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10) on spare hardware, I didn’t have any lying around this time so I spun it up in a virtual machine instead.
I haven’t had a lot of time to mess around with it, though. But at today’s event they also announced a formal release for Insiders should be coming out on June 30. Unfortunately, the PC Health Check app says my 5-year old Intel NUC can’t run Windows 11 … presumably due to the TPM 2.0 requirement.
That didn’t seem to stop it from running in the VM, but it looks like unless that changes before the final release later this year, I might be looking to build a new desktop. Until then, it looks like I might have just keep it virtualized.
Is it Edge? or Chrome?
It’s both.
This week Microsoft released the first preview build of their Chromium-based Edge browser as part of the Edge Insider Program. Can you see a difference between Edge and Chrome?
Visually similar, you can currently tell, based on the iconography, that the new Edge is on top and current Chrome is on the bottom. I can say this is the best Edge browser I’ve every used … because right now it’s basically Chrome. I was able to install all of my extensions from the Chrome Store, import all my bookmarks, settings, etc. and have it work exactly like Chrome. The only difference is I logged in with my Microsoft account instead of my Google account.
It’s worth checking out …
hp Pavilion 24-r014 All-in-One PC
For the past few months our family PC (the Dell XPS 18 all-in-one) had been giving my daughter fits. It was time for a change.
I looked at the latest Dell all-in-ones but wasn’t able to find one that acted like a tablet like the XPS 18. It was pretty convenient for my daughter to be able to unplug the PC in the family room and take it back to her room without the need to shut down or move a bulky AC adapter. But apparently most all-in-ones now-a-days don’t have batteries anymore. Considering the reason I was replacing the XPS 18 was because of battery issues, I decided that wasn’t a big deal. After my usual research, I decided on the hp Pavilion 24-r014.
Surface Laptop
After using three generations of Microsoft’s Surface tablet line (the original Surface Pro, the Surface Pro 3, and the Surface Pro 4) at work, this past week I got a new Surface Laptop.
A Farewell to Trillian
I’ve been a Trillian Pro user since 2004 but the time has come to drop my favorite cross-platform instant messaging client. Apparently Yahoo is shutting down the legacy servers that run the old Windows/Mac client versions of Yahoo Messenger (in favor of the web and mobile versions) on August 5 so Trillian will no longer work with that service. Couple that with a security breach on July 4 that resulted in the permanent shutdown of the Trillian user support forums and blog and I found it hard rationalize keeping the software installed. Now I’m glad I hadn’t yet paid to renew my Pro subscription for the new 6.0 version of the client.
Linux on Windows 10
The latest Fast Ring Insider Preview build of Windows 10 (14316) includes the new Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that Microsoft announced at their Build conference last week. I have to admit, I kind of enjoy being able to open a bash prompt on my PC and using Linux commands to interact with the file system, use vi to edit files (yes, I use vi!), and running shell scripts. I haven’t had a lot of time to use it in-depth but it will be interesting to see what kind of cool stuff can be done with this.
