Reading a 5.25-inch floppy in 2026: the workflow we wish someone had given us
You have a stack of 5.25-inch floppies. The drives have not been manufactured in decades. Here is the workflow we use to recover what is on them.
— Tag
#Field Notes
All posts tagged Field Notes.
Preservation
Preservation
Drone imaging for surveyors: when it earns the trip and when it does not
Drone imaging is not a universal upgrade to a survey. It is a tool with a specific shape. Here is when it earns the trip and when it does not.
Public Sector
Working with local government IT: lessons from five states
Things we have learned supporting city, town, and county IT shops across Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona.
Engineering
Why we standardized our entire MSP stack on Laravel
From ticketing to quoting to client portals, every piece of internal tooling now runs on one framework. What worked, what did not, and why we will not regret it.
Managed IT
The case for documenting the obvious
The most expensive knowledge in an organization is the kind nobody wrote down because everyone knew it. Until they did not.
Networking
Wireless that works: ten lessons from a hundred deployments
Wireless is the most-used and least-understood part of most networks. Lessons from a hundred deployments across offices, warehouses, and government facilities.
Public Sector
IT for cities under 10,000 residents: doing more with less
Small-town government IT departments often run on a single person, no budget, and infrastructure older than the smartphone. Here is what works.
Engineering
Migrating off legacy line-of-business apps without a forklift
The 1998 line-of-business app still works. The vendor is gone. The hardware is dying. How to migrate without a high-risk forklift project.
Security
Rolling out passkeys: lessons from the first year
A year of passkey rollouts across customer environments. The technology is excellent. The user experience varies dramatically by platform.