It’s not really a whole lot bigger than my 44mm Series 6 watch and it doesn’t feel heavier. At least not to me. I can use all of my old watch bands. I am not having any trouble with the Alpine Loop either. In fact, it feels like I can get my watch just a little bit tighter but not too tight. I’m always in between clothing sizes, so some adjustability in things is nice to have.

It’s fast. It’s responsive. It is easy to see in bright sunlight, and I really like the new dark mode too. We’ll be testing out the L1+L5 GPS on a hike this weekend.

So far it’s a win. It’s definitely not for everybody, and we’re not extreme athletes at all, so we’re barely in the target market. We do go snorkeling and paddle boarding and I do want to get dive certified, though. I am very much looking forward to using the Ultra. It may very well be the thing that inspires me to take more backpacking trips.

old 44mm s6 and the new Ultra together.

We all love speed tests, and I’m no different.

Speed test for Starlink showing 112Mbps down, 8Mbps up, 82ms ping.

These are better than what friends with Xfinity Cable internet around here are getting. (We have AT&T Fiber and love it.)

Looking forward to taking Starlink camping and seeing how it goes.

I have an HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283cdw printer that has been working great. I also use the “Scan to Network Folder” option to scan files to a linux share with samba. The Samba project removed smb1 by default a few years ago. Soon they will remove smb1 support entirely. HP has not updated this particular printer driver yet to include smb2 or smb3, and I have no idea why. Their support chat was completely worthless and unable to provide any assistance. If it won’t be a security issue for your network, you can re-enable smb1 by adding two lines in your /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

client min protocol = NT1 

server min protocol = NT1

Some other documents I’ve seen say to add “min protocol = smb1” but this did not work. Apparently it needs to be specified as “NT1” which I did not know. Adding those two lines and restarting the smbd service allowed this feature to function once again.

Also, to keep MacOS of any version from leaving .DS_Store files…. do this.

vfs objects = fruit streams_xattr  

fruit:metadata = stream

fruit:model = MacSamba

fruit:posix_rename = yes 

fruit:veto_appledouble = no

fruit:wipe_intentionally_left_blank_rfork = yes 

fruit:delete_empty_adfiles = yes 

🙂

Recently saw that Starlink has launched for RVs and we decided to go ahead and get it. One new feature (at least I think that it’s new) is that you can pause your account. You still end up paying the $135 for the full month of service but otherwise, no contracts or anything. Of course you still buy the hardware up front.

Ours took about a week to get here and mostly that was due to FedEx being a dumpster fire these days. I took it out in the backyard and set it up in about 10 minutes. We are not in a normal service area (being in the middle of a metro area) so we expect it to be a lower priority, which is fine. Everything plugged right in and it was so easy I won’t even bore you with photos.

What I did get a photo of later is exciting to me. I have a small Jackery power unit and wanted to see how the Starlink hardware would do. The solar panel is drawing in 51W, and the Starlink stuff using 45W. If I wanted to, I could sit outside all day and still have Starlink internet. Is this a likely scenario? No. Do I need to do this? Also no. Can I do it if I felt like it? Oh yes. iPhone next to a starlink router and plugged into a 200w Jackery power unit.

Speeds were about what others have posted – I got about 100mbps down and about 20mbps up. You really don’t need a ton of bandwidth for most of the internet, and things are even lighter when you block ads & garbage with ublock origin and/or pi-hole. It’s amazing how much faster things load. Yet another reason I try to keep AGT (average guy tries) as lightweight as possible. But I digress..
Starlink is a bit pricy but when we’re working at a special event and *really* need internet access, it’ll most certainly be better than the current nothing that we have. We’re often way out of effective cellular service range too, so this will be great.