Did your keyboard have a stroke? Haha, I more or less get you though.

You do have a point, but most phones have one edge that doesn’t have any buttons, and most people have their phone in a case, which assuming it’s a proper fitting case, usually cancels out that camera bump issue and makes it sit properly flat on a table.

That’s actually a pretty good question.

With no exact answer, I do think this will at least in part depend on relative comparison to how exactly level your floor/ceiling/counter/table or other frame of reference is, which itself might not be perfect.

Side note, basically every smart phone out there has orientation sensors, so it should be just as easy as downloading a Bubble Level app from the app store.

Well shit, I figured out what the real issue was.

I’m on a laptop with only 3 USB ports, and I’m running a physical laptop hard drive on an adapter on one USB port, and a laptop CD/DVD drive on another adapter on another port.

Obviously that’s probably pushing the power limits of the USB power, but it’s worked before, so I didn’t see why it wasn’t quite working right now.

But this time I was trying a different DVD drive, an HP TS-T633P slot loader drive. Apparently that drive is extra power hungry compared to a conventional laptop drive, so I dug out my old tray loader drive.

Apparently the slot loader drive was competing with the hard drive for power, and they were apparently taking turns robbing power from each other. The system is perfectly happy with the tray loader drive though, no reconfiguration necessary!

🤦‍♂️😂🤣👍

Ah, thank you very much in advance! It’s a bit late here and I’m soon to head to bed, but I have used hdparm before, thanks for the reminder!

I’m saving your comment and will look into it more tomorrow, or soon at least. Thanks! 👍

At age 7, I got in trouble for ‘acting out’ when they gave all the students a basic eye chart test. When it was my turn, they put me on the measured out line and asked me to read the chart.

I asked “What chart?” The teacher pointed at the door. Apparently the chart was on the door, but all I could see was a large white/greyish rectangle from that distance.

Yeah, my vision was that bad. You know that big capital E on the top of the chart? Yep, nothing, I literally couldn’t see the chart. So I didn’t know what else to do but keep asking “What chart?”

They called my dad in and between him, the teacher, and the principal, I got scolded for ‘acting out’.

The next year, age 8, they assigned seats in order based off the first letter of our last names, which happened to put me in the back of the class. I couldn’t see a damn thing on the chalkboard…

So my parents finally had to take me to a proper eye doctor. They found out my vision was like -4.5, which is extremely nearsighted.

So I finally got glasses, and about 2 weeks of apologies from my mom. Every time she apologized, I reminded her that she had absolutely nothing to apologize for, I was just thankful I could finally see!

I never got an apology from my dad, the teacher or the principal though. It’s a bit fucked up that they could have caught it earlier on when the whole reason they gave students the basic eye test was literally to catch obvious vision problems early on…

Sure, some of the effects are basically useless eye candy, but the 3D Cube thing is a non-intrusive, yet very intuitive way of switching desktops. The 3D Cube doesn’t even activate until you use a hotkey combination plus the mouse. It’s almost like having a virtual KVM switch if you’re running virtual machines.

To each their own, but you might actually like the 3D Cube and possibly some other Compiz features once you see how they work and what they offer…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W8UKuDidNQg

I can’t even function without the Compiz 3D cube anymore, it makes it super easy and visually intuitive to switch desktops. Very handy for someone running 4 virtual machines simultaneously…

I’ve been running Linux since 2011, starting with our data recovery and antivirus scanning system at the computer repair shop I was working for at the time.

Even my boss didn’t understand why I wanted to install Linux. Keep in mind, this is back when the TDSS/Alureon rootkit was going around on Windows systems.

I explained it like it was, that if our main backup/antivirus system was running the same OS as the infected computers coming in, then it was only a matter of time before our main system got infected.

So, he accepted my advice and let me set everything up. More or less just the bare basics really, smartmontools, gparted, firefox, google earth (just because), and a few other relevant programs to help with our daily tasks.

Then, one day when I was off work, a new employee decided to install some plugin into Firefox to share bookmarks and stuff across different devices…

Somehow, he borked the main tech user account, it wouldn’t even login to the user interface anymore :(

I had to spend a few hours, with the skeptical boss over my shoulder, waiting to see if I could get the system back running right again.

And so I did, while learning lots of new things at the same time. When I learned the hotkeys to switch to other terminal sessions, then I figured out how to create a new account, erase the old account, and get logged back in and running.

The customer data backup drive was separate and detached through all that, so customer data was safe the whole time.

The boss almost said fuckit, reinstall Windows, but I was persistent. And that system helped salvage over 200 systems with the TDSS rootkit, which would have almost certainly doomed our backup system if it was running Windows.

I told that new guy to never fuck with my operating system setup or configuration again, at least not before consulting me and getting approval or even assistance first.

When you got a bare minimum of the past 100 customers’ data backed up and virus checked, you don’t dick around with the main backup system.

So, honestly, I can’t think of a single truly costly mistake that Linux has cost me…

As far as that other employee that messed it up for a bit, well I dunno, it wasn’t too long after that the boss fired him…

You’d remember shit like being a plankton, a slug, a housefly, a dung beetle, a rat, a squirrel, a raccoon, a double headed snake (fuck Larry life), a cat, a sloth, and finally a human.

Good luck with that.

That’s just it, there is no setup, except Linux Mint as the main system. It’s literally a physical bucket of discs and drives in all sorts of various formats…

Please do explain then.

I have multiple drives with various differing directory trees.

‘An’ drive? I mean like 10+ drives, looking to do a master backup.

Not my code, I didn’t even have internet access when I started programming.

I don’t even want this data encrypted. Quite the opposite actually.

This is mostly the category of files getting deleted from the Internet Archive every day. I want to preserve what I got before it gets erased…

Not everything is an individual file though, a lot of the stuff needs to be stored and maintained as bulk folders.

I mod operating systems and occasionally games, plus write software. I can’t just dump off all text files into a single folder, that’ll just dump off all readme.txt files off into a single TXT folder, losing association with the project folders from which they came.

Joy oh joy, I got like 75+ optical discs and like 10+ hard drives (whatever still works) to back up.

This is already gonna take months I know, just my free time at the end of the day.

This is gonna be fun. /s

Thank you and everyone for the advice though.

Side note, I think one of my drives has almost all the SNES game ROMS…

Of course.

Goal #1 is to migrate what data I can (which is a fucking lot) all over to the 4TB, in separate folders for each drive. Only after that will I worry with scanning for dupes and organizing things.

I’m just looking for advice on what software is recommend for helping deal with such large tasks in advance.

I’ve actually got 2X 4TB drives plus a single 2TB drive. But yeah, I know the best and easiest way is to consolidate it all on one drive first.

I found Timeshift to be a disappointment. I tested it as I was setting my system up.

• Install Linux Mint, obviously.
• Install most main software I want.
• Do a Timeshift backup.
• Install more software I might want to try eventually.
• Restore the Timeshift backup.

Result: The system still thought all the extra software packages were installed, but none of them actually worked. Like, if Timeshift is gonna uninstall packages that weren’t present in the last backup, shouldn’t it also unregister those packages as well?

To fix all that crap, I had to force reinstall all packages, which takes about as long as a full OS reinstall, but I was already happy with the rest of the configuration, so I ran…

sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'

Also, 1474560 / 1024 = 1440

If anyone could keep up with binary numbers back in the day, floppy disks were literally measured in binary megabytes.