my new (working) HP Mini

The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)

I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.

I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.

Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:

  • It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
  • It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
  • I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
  • From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
  • I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
  • The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
  • It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
  • I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)

Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.

I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.

And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.

DOA new PC

The new PC I ordered earlier this week arrived yesterday. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting to spend the three-day weekend getting it all set up. (Yes, I know, I’m a nerd.) But, alas, it arrived DOA.

When I hooked it up, it emitted a series of beeps that, according to this article, means that the computer could not detect its CPU. (Which is of course very bad…) I initially tried to contact tech support, but the support page wouldn’t recognize my serial number. I tried figuring out if there was a different way to get through to support, but there really isn’t.

So I eventually gave up and called order support and arranged to return it. I’ve got that all arranged now, but of course everything is closed today, so I can’t drop it off until tomorrow. And they won’t ship the replacement PC out until they get the broken one back, so it’ll be another week, I’d guess, before I can try this again.

One of the reasons I decided to buy a new PC direct from HP is that a lot of the other options I looked at seemed a bit iffy. (Third party sellers on Amazon and eBay, mostly.) I thought I’d be less likely to get a dud if I bought direct from one of the big PC makers. And I thought support would be smoother too. Oh well.

So now I guess I’m mostly going to be watching Wimbledon this weekend. And maybe doing some reading. So that’s not so bad.

I ordered a new PC

After going around in circles for a while (see yesterday’s post), I actually made a decision and ordered a new PC this morning. It’s an “HP Elite Mini 800 G9”, ordered direct from HP. Total cost was just under $1000.

The MSRP on it is nearly $3500, so it looks like I saved almost $2500. But of course $3500 is a pretty ridiculous price for a mini PC, even if it’s a pretty good one. I don’t really understand the pricing on any of this stuff anymore.

My initial thought was to get a refurbished PC, and spend around $500. But then I decided that I could afford to get a new one, if I could keep the cost around $1000. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep this one as long as I’ve kept my current PC (almost ten years). And if that’s the case, then it might be the last desktop PC I ever buy! It’s weird thinking about that, but it’s possible.

I also ordered a couple of accessories from Amazon: An HDMI to DVI cable, so I can use it with my old monitor, and an HDMI KVM, so I can have both my old and new PCs hooked up at the same time. I almost made a mistake on the KVM. I was going to buy a DVI KVM, thinking that I needed DVI input for my old desktop. In that case, I’d use the HDMI/DVI cable to connect the new PC to the KVM. But then I realized that my old desktop PC actually has an HDMI output port! So I can instead hook both the old and new PCs to the KVM via HDMI, then use the HDMI/DVI cable to go from the KVM to the monitor. Overall, that should be easier to manage (I think), and should leave me in a good place if I decide to replace my monitor. (The monitor, by the way, is even older than the PC; I think I bought it in 2010. So I probably should replace it.)

I’m hopeful that things will work out OK with the KVM. I knew a fair bit about KVMs back around, say, 2000-2010. But I haven’t used one in 15 years. My knowledge on a lot of this hardware stuff is out of date.

I’m hopeful that the new PC shows up before the end of the week. If it does, then I can set it up over the three-day July 4th weekend.

going down a mini PC rabbit hole

All the talk about the end of support for Windows 10 has got me looking at new PCs. My current PC is a Dell XPS 8900, bought from Costco in 2016.

I ruminated about this in a blog post from about a month ago, and I still haven’t quite decided what to do.

Part of me really doesn’t want to give up on my ten-year-old Dell. It still works! I replaced the hard drive with an SSD quite some time ago, so that’s not an issue. It’s got a CD/DVD drive, which I like. And I have no particular problems with Windows 10 that would be solved by upgrading to Windows 11.

I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of ideas:

  • Simple: replace my Windows 10 tower PC with a new Windows 11 tower PC.
  • Complex (and probably a bad idea): Keep using my current PC, but wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu on it. Move away from Windows, and become a “Linux person”.
  • Kicking the can down the road: Keep using my current PC, and keep using Windows 10. Pay for security updates from either MS or a third party.
  • Get a Mac Mini, and gradually transition to using that as my primary desktop PC. Eventually, wipe and recycle the Dell.
  • Get a new mini PC, running Windows 11. Move my stuff over to that. Wipe and recycle the Dell. Remain a “Windows person” but stop being a “tower PC” person.

So it’s that mini PC track I’ve been on this weekend. I’ve learned a few things. First: new PCs, even mini PCs, are often very expensive these days. I’m looking at stuff from Dell and HP, and it’s $2000 or $3000, if I want 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don’t know if that’s tariffs or what.

So I’m looking at refurbished stuff. There seems to be a pretty big ecosystem around selling and buying refurbished Mini PCs. I guess they’re mostly units that were used by large companies, and were dumped at end of lease. And it seems like a lot of the ones being sold on Amazon and eBay are not just refurbished, but have also had the original parts (SSD and RAM) replaced. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that looks pretty good, on paper, but might be a little iffy, and it’s hard to compare one guy’s mini PC to another guy’s, even if they appear to be the same model. I guess I should just “spin the wheel” and pick one. For my purposes, anything with enough RAM and a 1 TB SSD should be fine.

Since my current PC and monitor are so old, I’m thinking a bit about the extra complications I’m going to have when I switch to a new PC.

  • My monitor has one DVI port and one old analog VGA port. Any new PC is going to have either DisplayPort or HDMI out, so I’m going to need a DP/HDMI to DVI cable.
  • These mini PCs generally only have headphone ports for audio output. Audio is yet another rabbit hole here. I think the default setup now is to route the audio through the HDMI output, with the video, then have a soundbar under your monitor. But of course that won’t work for me. I may need to buy USB speakers.
  • If I want to keep using a CD/DVD drive, I’m going to need to buy an external USB one.
  • I actually have two 1 TB drives in my current PC: the SSD that I use as the main boot drive, and the original hard drive, which I now use for File History backups. I also have a 2 TB external USB drive that I use for backups (via Bvckup Pro). I’ll keep using the 2TB external, but I’ll need to think about whether or not I want to set up a second external drive for the File History backups.
  • And, if I’m going to keep both PCs going for awhile, I might want to get a KVM, so I can switch between them. The “M” part of that gets a little complicated. Do I want to get a DVI KVM? Am I going to keep the old DVI monitor for long, or should I punt and just get a new HDMI monitor?

As usual, I’m really spinning my wheels on all this stuff. I’m also starting to consider that maybe my end-state will be a mini PC running Windows 11, and a Mac Mini, stacked on top of each other, both connected to a KVM.

passed the AZ-204 exam

I’ve posted a few times recently about my efforts to study for the AZ-204 exam. TL;DR: I passed the exam today!

I’d scheduled it for today, back in May, using a free voucher that expires on June 30. So I had to schedule it before then.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be ready for it, so the plan was to take the test today, fail it, and then use the score report to figure out where my strengths and weaknesses were, then come back and take it again in a month or two, after doing some targeted studying.

But I managed to eke out a passing score: 707 (where 700 is passing). So, just barely, but good enough.

These tests always take a lot out of me. I’m not sure why. I’ve always been like this. I used to get physically sick before big tests, back in high school. I managed to figure out how not to do that, or I never would have made it through college. But even, oh… 40 years later, I still get stressed before a big test. These days, of course, I don’t need to take very many tests.

I’m not really sure where I’m going to go next, in terms of learning and certifications. I was really assuming I’d need to keep working on the AZ-204 material for the next couple of months. Maybe I’ll just take a break and watch a lot of TV and read a lot of comics over the summer. Then get serious again in September!

rough weekend

I’m supposed to be taking the AZ-204 test next Friday, so I had planned to do some studying this weekend. I had Friday off (for Juneteenth), and no other specific plans, so I figured I could do a bit of studying and maybe catch up with the Cloud Academy videos I’ve been watching.

Instead, I woke up with a cold on Thursday, and had to call in sick. I was pretty useless that day, not even having enough energy to read anything challenging, so I found myself reading The Flintstones at the New York World’s Fair, a comic published in 1964 or 65 to promote the NY World’s Fair. It was dumb, but a good thing to read when you barely have enough energy to stay awake.

I then read Keif Llama: Mindset, a self-published comic from Matt Howarth. That was a bit more of a challenge than the Flintstones comic, but was still a very light read. (Side note: I couldn’t find that in Goodreads, since it’s self-published, and since it doesn’t have an ISBN number, I couldn’t add it to Goodreads either. You used to be able to add pretty much anything to Goodreads, which is probably why that random Flintstones comic was in there, but not any more. This bothered me a lot, but I got over it, I guess. End side note.)

I felt a little better on Friday, and did manage to leave the apartment, albeit only to go to the optician a few doors down from my apartment and get the lenses in my glasses replaced. (They got scratched up after my fall on June 1.) Just replacing the lenses (no new frames) cost me $900. So, yeah, I’ve got bad eyesight.

I felt, again, a bit better on Saturday, but still not enough for anything challenging. So, again, I mostly just watched TV and read comics.

Today, I felt a lot better, and even got out for a 25 minute walk this morning. I got through one module in the Cloud Academy series I’m working on, and did the compatibility test on my laptop for the exam, so I can say I did at least a little prep work. But I’m nowhere near ready for the exam, to be honest.

I finished reading Maggie the Mechanic on Friday, read Project Superpowers on Saturday, and then Legenderry today, so I got through some pretty weird and random comics this weekend. So that’s something. And I binge watched Dept. Q and AARO on Netflix, so I got through some pretty weird and random TV too.

I feel a little bad about not getting much useful work done, but I know my own limitations. When I’m sick, I can push myself if I really need to, but then I have to pay for it later. Better to take it easy for a few days, then start the next week fresh.

I guess I’m ready to start a regular work week tomorrow. I hope I can hold myself together. It’s going to be very hot, and I’m not really equipped for 100° weather. I may need to look into rescheduling my exam. I’m pretty sure I need to do that at least 24 hours before the scheduled time, so I should decide on that by Wednesday night. The main reason I scheduled it for June 27 is that the voucher I had expires at the end of June. I’m pretty sure that the voucher expiration date doesn’t prevent me from rescheduling the exam for July. I don’t know. I might just take the exam for the experience, and consider it a kind of “live fire” practice run.

status update

I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”

First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.

The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.

I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.

Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.

I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.

Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.

Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

mixed feelings about Microsoft

I’ve been having a lot of mixed feelings about Microsoft lately, and I feel like I need to blog about this, so I can get some stuff straight in my head.

Overall, my feelings about Microsoft have gone back and forth, over the years. At one point, I thought of Bill Gates as being pretty darn evil. After his retirement, and his reinvention as a philanthropist, I softened up on him a bit. I never liked Steve Ballmer. And I liked Satya Nadella quite a lot, in the beginning, and even read his book, but I’m starting to have mixed feelings about him. So that’s the CEOs.

As for operating systems, I tolerated MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and knew I had to learn and use them, but never much liked them. When Windows 95 came out, I was actually kind of excited about it, enrolled in the preview program, and installed it on my home machine, from floppy disks. My enthusiasm for later Windows versions has varied. I do mostly like Windows 10, which is what I’m running on my home desktop PC right now.

And as a programmer, I’ve also gone back and forth. I liked classic ASP when that was released. And I liked ASP.NET, and .NET in general, when that came out. I’ve been an enthusiastic .NET developer since 2002.

Microsoft Build was this week, and I (as usual) registered for the online component of the conference, and tried to watch some of the content. Honestly, I couldn’t find much of interest to me. They’re really pushing AI, and, while I’m not entirely against it, I’m also just not as enthusiastic about it as they’d probably want me to be.

Watching this week’s Windows Weekly reminded me of some of the issues I have with Microsoft right now. First, MS is having issues with employees protesting during events, mostly around Israel/Palestine, and I don’t think they’re handing that well. (And here’s something from Brian Eno about the issue.) Second, I don’t think the layoffs they did recently were necessary, or handled well. Third, they had Elon Musk on stage during the Build keynote. (I don’t think I need to say why that’s bad…) Overall, they’re doing what I guess I should expect a giant tech company to do, but, well, I was hoping for better.

So, where does that leave me? Well, I still need to use Microsoft products for work, and a big part of my job is supporting our relationship with Microsoft, so I still need to be invested in the ecosystem. I registered for the AZ-204 exam today, for the end of June. (I blogged about that recently here.) I still have a lot of studying to do, to prepare for that. So, in general, I’m still going to keep learning and trying to keep up with this stuff. I can’t give it up and switch to Linux.

On the home front, I’ve been thinking about what I should do about my ten-year old Windows 10 desktop PC. It’s still my main machine, and it still works fine. With Windows 10 reaching end of support in October, I need to do something, but I can’t decide what to do. I might decide to subscribe to a third-party update service for Windows 10. That’s probably a little risky, but might be my best choice.

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of switching the machine over to Linux. That’s probably a horrible idea, but I kind of want to do it. There’s a campaign going on to encourage switching from Win 10 to Linux, and that’s what put the idea into my head. I would really still need to run Windows, though, so I’d have to figure out if I could make do with using my Lenovo ThinkPad for all my Windows stuff, or if I could dual-boot the desktop machine, or run Windows in a VM, or something. Regardless, I would just be complicating things and making life harder for myself. (Which doesn’t usually stop me from doing something stupid, but…)

My other thought was getting a Mac Mini and trying to gradually move my home stuff off Windows and onto Mac. That’s a lot more doable. (I already have a MacBook and use it for a lot of stuff.)

Well, this post has been a mess, and I don’t think I’ve decided on anything. But maybe I’ve moved forward a bit with my thinking. I going to leave it there, and try not to worry about it too much right now.

Roland-Garros, YouTube TV, and other stuff

I’ve finally talked myself into cancelling YouTube TV. I had signed up for it about a year ago, after (finally) cancelling my cable TV service. So I’m slowly finding my way into the 21st century, at least with regard to video entertainment.

It’s going to be weird giving up the system I grew up with, with all the “OTA” TV channels I’m used to. But I’ll figure it out. My post-work weekday routine used to include watching a combination of live and DVR’d stuff from YouTube TV, generally the previous night’s Colbert from DVR, and the NJ PBS news either live or from DVR. This past week, I’ve been watching Colbert from Paramount+, which is arguably better than watching it via YTTV, since I don’t have to fast-forward through commercials. (I have ad-free Paramount+.) Watching the NJ PBS news is a little more difficult. It airs live at 5:30 PM, so I can watch it streaming via the PBS app, but if I miss it, the on-demand version isn’t available until a bit later in the evening. So I’ve been missing the NJ PBS news most nights. I may need to figure out a better way to watch news, overall.

Of course, right after I cancelled YTTV, I saw an article about the TV broadcast arrangements for this year’s Roland-Garros, which starts soon. Last year, it was on NBC and Peacock. This year, it’s moved to Max, and other WB/Discovery networks. It looks like they’ll be carrying matches on TNT and TruTV, so I’d be able to watch those if I still had YTTV. But I don’t, and Max is the one major streaming platform that I don’t subscribe to. So maybe I need to subscribe to Max if I want to watch Roland-Garros this year.

Maybe I should cancel my Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle and replace it with the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle. Why did we let this stuff get so convoluted and expensive? Maybe I should just read more books and watch less TV!

Programming for Dynamics AX 2012 in 2025

Yes, it’s 2025 and I’m still writing X++ code for Dynamics AX 2012. Sometimes, there are hurdles when you have to write code in an almost dead language for an almost dead product, and you’re trying to get information from the internet. I thought I would take a quick break and write a blog post about that.

First, the state of internet search, in general, is kind of rotten right now. That’s well-documented. And when you’re searching for information about an almost-dead product, it gets harder.

In terms of search engines: at work, I can generally use Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo. None of those is blocked, though I can only log in to a Microsoft account, not a Google account. So whatever advantage there is to having your search history saved, I can only get that with Bing.

(At home, I’ve been experimenting with Kagi. That’s blocked at work, so I can’t use it there. I may be writing up a blog post on Kagi soon, but that’s for another day.)

I haven’t seen any advantage to using one search engine over another when searching for Dynamics AX content. I think Google is probably the best, to be honest.

A few general observations:

    • Microsoft documentation for AX and X++ is usually still out there, somewhere, on Microsoft’s site, but it doesn’t always surface near the top of any given search. A good starting point for that might be here.
    • AX lives on as “Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations”, or… something like that. Some of the documentation for FinOps also applies to AX 2012. A good starting point for that is here.
    • Axaptapedia used to be a good resource for AX info, but it seems to be gone. It does occasionally still show up in search results. You may be able to find it on archive.org. (Though that’s another thing that’s blocked at work. Sigh.)
    • There are a lot of AX-related blogs out there. Most of them are dead at this point, but still up on the web. And many of them were never really much good. Some were just cash grabs, scraping info from other blogs and sticking Google ads on them and hoping to make some money (presumably). Some were well-intentioned, but provided questionable advice. You can still find some useful blog posts out there, but you need to sift through some dross to get to the useful stuff.

Aside from using search engines, you can also try to get useful information about AX and X++ from LLMs, like ChatGPT and Copilot. I’ve had some success with that, but I’ve found that LLMs are prone to a lot of hallucination when it comes to X++ code. (Again, there are limits to the LLMs I’m allowed to use at work. I’m basically limited to Copilot and our internal LLM chatbot.)

I’ve recently been working on a problem, trying to optimize some fairly complex X++ code. I got some fairly useful advice and assistance out of our chatbot, but also some entirely wrong information. For instance, I needed to review some stuff about X++ collection classes. Our LLM hallucinated a few functions which would be great, if they existed, but they don’t. One was “Global::conSort()” which was supposed to sort a container, and “Set::toContainer()” which was supposed to convert a set to a container. Alas, neither of those exists!

It also gave me some incorrect information about sets. It told me that using a SetEnumerator does not necessarily guarantee that the set will be returned in a sorted, or even predictable, order. But I’m pretty sure that it does always return the set in sorted order. I haven’t found a definitive answer for that anywhere, but here’s a blog post that indicates that sets are returned sorted. And Axaptapedia seems to agree. (And all my testing supports that.)

And here’s one more blog post that has what I think is a pretty good answer:

No matter what order elements are added to a set or keys are added to a map, when using an enumerator to traverse the set or map, the elements are in a sorted order (for string and numeric types). However, the MSDN documentation for the set class states that elements are stored in a set “in a way that facilitates efficient lookup of the elements.” It might not be safe, therefore, to rely on this sorting behavior as it might possibly change in the future.

Good enough for me, for now. So maybe the LLM wasn’t entirely wrong on this, but for my purposes, I’m fine assuming that the output of a SetEnumerator is sorted.