With all due respect, RTFM. Mount and umount are two sides of the same operational coin. You mount the drive to use it and unmount it when you’re done. fstab is just a file system table used to remember and consistently apply the options used whether you’re mounting the drives manually or telling the system to do it at boot.

Deleting a line from fstab is not the same as unmounting, it is just a shortcut to tell the system how you want that drive mounted when you or the system run the mount command. Mount directories (usually the folders in /media/ or /mnt/ ) also do not get automatically deleted just because you “yanked the drive”. Again, those directories are just where your system is expecting to mount the drive. When the drive is mounted they will be the root path to its contents, when the drive is unmounted they will be empty but they still exist. If your planning on mounting the drive again leave them there. If you’re not planning on mounting them again, delete them.

If you’re not planning on regularly mounting a particular drive, it probably shouldn’t be listed in fstab and you should just run the mount command with the appropriate options (again fstab is just a table for remembering those options for the mount command).

Many desktop Linux distros are also capable of automatically mounting new removable drives in such a way that the user can access them and doesn’t have to worry about touching fstab or the mount directories.

I did say fancy.

Aren’t sqilte files themselves (like most other things) just fancy text files?

Any breakfast at home is almost always better than breakfast out, if you’ve got the time and ingredients. I can, with the right ingredients and tools and while half asleep, hungover, or still drunk, make a full breakfast for a family of four better than 90% of the breakfasts I’ve ever had out. Sure it took some practice, but breakfast isn’t rocket science or usually particularly complex recipe wise.

The only thing I haven’t been able to do better at home breakfast wise so far is making my own fresh bagels or donuts. I don’t like making poached eggs either, and hollandaise sauce is a pain in the ass, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an eggs Benedict out at a restaurant that didn’t make me immediately regret my choice. Same with biscuits and gravy (why do restaurants think that gravy comes out of a box and should be bright white?) , bacon (just bacon flavored bacon please), eggs (sunny side up does not mean I want the whites to be clear and runny too), etc. All things I really like, but can’t tolerate having someone else fuck up and charge me for it.

I’ve only ever watched the show in passing, as in literally just passing through the room. And it is painfully obvious in an instant that her character is the ONLY one that is pleasant, eloquent, intelligent, and kind in any appreciable degree. That’s what’s fucking sexy about her character.

Moreover, those other waifs don’t even know what sex is, but that girl FUCKS with nerdy literary passion and will let you cry like a baby into that cleavage afterwards.

That view of the driver, looking out from the front passenger side out the driver’s window always makes me anxious for this reason. It’s like Chekhov’s gun. Why would they pick that angle unless the characters were about to get T-boned?

That one actually has some basis in reality though. My terminal still dings at me, it’s just that having it ding too much is annoying and out of fashion now. Does no one else remember PCs piezoelectric beeping, even before you upgraded to an actual soundcard?

No, I don’t use the podcast feature on the Plex. But I do use Plex for listening to audiobooks. Just be aware that MP4/m4b cannot be in the same library as mp3s.

The other podcast thing is a solution totally outside of Plex. It is running on the same machine though and accessing the same files. dir2cast + webserver like Nginx or apache reads a directory of mp3 files and builds an RSS feed out of them. In some ways it works better than Plex because it’s simpler on the user side to listen offline as long as you sync the feed at home. I tend to do a separate feed for each series or author. It’s a bit fiddly to get setup and adding a new feed requires a bash one liner and editing some HTML after the files are sorted and named perfectly because podcast apps have some funny limitations when it comes to actually grouping, sorting, and displaying metadata.

I use podcast addict in much the same way. I can control it using my WearOS watch or even just via the Bluetooth controls of my headphones. I use podcast addict mostly for podcasts (obviously), but I also have (a very manual and kludgey) RSS server at home to feed me and the rest of the home audiobooks via podcast addict. I’ve started to move that listening more to Plex via PlexAmp on my phone, which is also controllable from my watch. The Plex audiobook experience isn’t perfect, but it is a lot easier to manage.

I haven’t found a need or advantage to an external player yet. But, I have found some codecs that the Plex app has struggled with, which might benefit from an external app. I haven’t had the issue in a while though and didn’t think of using the external player then, so no guarantees.

Blocklists are ineffective by design. Each and every member of the swarm can collect all the data necessary to flag you to your ISP. Obviously any professional collecting this kind of data can avoid a blocklist. There is no such thing as a better blocklist.

Teach us then 😭

I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.

A decade ago we figured out blacklists were ineffective. What’s changed?

Most of the more or less authentic Mexican food I’ve had doesn’t actually have much, if any, cheese. That shit ain’t cotija either.

Hot take: to Most windows users (not you) probably shouldn’t be able to access power shell or cmd.exe at all.

Most papers are made in TEX or LaTEX. These formats separate display from data in such a way that they can be quickly formatted to a variety of page size, margins, text size, et al with minimal effort. It’s basically an open standard typesetting format. You can create and edit TEX in any text editor and run it through a program to prepare it for print or viewing. Nothing else can handle math formulas, tables, charts, etc with the same elegance. If you’ve ever struggled to write a math paper in Microsoft word, seriously question why your professor hasn’t already forced you to learn about LaTEX.

Like why would someone pay for a drink at Quark’s when every residence on DS9 has a replicator?

Because the scarce resource at Quark’s isn’t the food or drinks, it’s the atmosphere and the experience, i.e things the replicator cannot provide. Quark controls the holodecks too, but even if he didn’t the scarce resource would be authentic (not replicated) food and experiences. It’s been shown pretty regularly on the shows that some people prefer non-replicated food, non-synthohol drinks, and real people. It doesn’t really matter in that context if those are technically indistinguishable from the real thing (but even in canon there is a measureable difference between them and some things the replicators can’t do).

I don’t really believe there could ever be a post-scarcity world in which we don’t create new scarcities to demand.

Hot take: The Expanse (mostly referring to the books here) handled a post-scarcity technocracy much more believably.

It’s a science fiction situational comedy. How could it possibly avoid being contrived? All sitcoms are contrived. All scifi is contrived.

CUPS is probably the print server you’re thinking of.

My head cannon is that TIE fighters don’t make sound exactly as they zip around, but they do something to the electromagnetic fields or some other techno babble thing that causes other things, like droids, space ships, rocks, or skulls to scream with a Doppler effect like that as they zip by.

Did you ever hear the tragedy of MythTV? I thought not. It’s not a story the Youtubes would tell you. It’s a Pirate legend. MythTV was a Dark Lord of the Pitates, so powerful and so wise he could use the PCs to influence the airwaves to create watchable TV… He had such a knowledge of the PCs that he could even keep the shows he cared about from dying. The dark side of the PC is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice XBMC everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.