Brickfrog

Those who bought an Office license back in 2019 are very much likely to have upgraded their packages already

You’d be shocked how often that’s not the case. So, so many people and small businesses don’t feel like buying another new license of MS Office and instead just re-install an old licensed version on their new system when needed. Just in my own bubble of working at different small businesses or helping people with computers I’ve repeatedly encountered ancient versions of MS Office that people cling on to. People that do lots of IT support in the field must encounter this fairly regularly.

When I ask/question people on using their old outdated MS Office it’s some combination of “I don’t want to learn something new” or “I paid for it so I’ll keep using it”.

And nowadays, besides LibreOffice, people also have the option of using MS Office Online or Google Docs but that still falls into the category of needing to do things slightly differently vs what they’re used to.

Not sure if you already know, the Piefed software (and pifed.social site) does maintain a list of default domains they block. It’s mostly right leaning/far right type stuff but still, hosting a conservatism community on an instance that censors/blocks a lot of those related links… is certainly a choice.

See https://lemmy.ml/post/47022286/25574741 and rest of the post discussing it.

I’ve no interest in the community, just letting you know in case you’re wondering why certain news site links don’t show up there.

Offhand I’d suspect a finicky adapter. Does the adapter work with other disks? Does the disk work when plugged into a server/computer directly?

Assuming it’s the adapter being finicky - did you happen to try using other USB cables with the adapter?

When plugging into the system - Does the dmesg output display anything else useful, any warnings or anything? I would have thought it would give you the USB drive chipset vendor/model, I didn’t think Sabrent builds their own chipsets but could be wrong.

Also would try doing a smartctl --scan followed by a smartctl -a /dev/YOUR-EXTERNAL-DRIVE and see what comes up. (those are part of smartmontools)

tried it via tor

Doesn’t load in Tor for me either but I suspect their site is simply blocking Tor. The site does load fine outside Tor in the regular clearnet.

9 times out of 10 these sort of things turn out to be a DNS issue on your end, you might want to double-check you’re actually able to query their IP address via nslookup freedns.afraid.org or similar. (assuming you’ve already tried other web browsers to rule out issues with installed extensions or specific browser settings).

Adding onto the other comments, if you have admin access to your network router/firewall you can configure the incoming port forward itself to only allow specific IP addresses while dropping traffic from any other internet WAN IPs. It’s a bit like using the Jellyfin whitelist/blacklist but doing it at the network level. This drops all unwanted internet traffic to that port at the firewall before ever reaching the Jellyfin software. Downside is having to occasionally update the firewall whenever there are IP address changes.

This is probably only feasible if you only have some specific Jellyfin clients in mind to accept connections from, not any random person from any random WAN IP address.

You didn’t mention your laptop specs but I’d say if your laptop has USB 3.0+ ports then you should be okay with plugging in a multi-drive USB DAS (like the ones with 2-5 drive bays) or even a single drive USB enclosure if that’s your preference. I have a few that I use on and off without issue.

Slower USB speeds are also functional but the performance hit will be noticeable.

I’m not on that specific tracker but some of the others have similar sort of rules

They have something about changing IPs, it seems you can’t change IPs too often and you can’t have multiple accounts in the same IP. Why?

That’s generally for detecting ban evasion / duplicate accounts. But I think with most private trackers you’d just need to let staff know if you’re in a shared IP situation.

They absolutely not allow mobile client, which means, you need to let your PC on all the time, sum this up with the fact that they require 72h seed within the next 30 days, this is a t least 2.5h of seed daily and if you miss one day for any reason it’d be even more for the next days. But my question is about the mobile, why the hell can’t I use my phone to seed? I talked to a mod and they argue mobile isn’t reliable due to battery optimization and it might kill the client. What does this even mean?

The mod is sort of right about that one. Most mobile users aren’t even connectable (port forwarded) so that’s problem number 1. And problem 2, yes Android does pause apps for battery optimization - but technically you can configure your Android to not do that for specific apps, not sure if it works for all phones but in mine I just bring up the App Info, go to App Battery Usage, and make sure to enable “Allow Background Usage”… most people wouldn’t really want to do that and run down their phone battery constantly but I guess it’s an option. Maybe bring that up as a tracker suggestion/rule change though it does seem easier just to tell members not to use mobile clients.

Why the torrent clients are so limited even the version you can use? What it has to do with anything at all? Again, is not seeding just enough?

Maybe specific to that tracker, not sure. But usually torrent client lists exist because the tracker staff tested those clients against the private tracker software to verify that stats are being tracked correctly. And sometimes they do ban clients due to being buggy, being used for ratio cheating, that sort of thing.

Should I use PFsense or OpenWRT?

I wouldn’t recommend pfSense unless you’re already invested in it (e.g. already have a pfSense setup and want to transfer your config files and settings over). Netgate (parent company) has been moving towards their paid versions (pfSense Plus and TNSR), the Plus version is free if you buy their router otherwise will cost you some money for a subscription. And meanwhile they stopped providing current downloads of full installs/builds of the free community pfSense so actually getting the current 2.8.1 is a hassle now - you’re expected to download their Netgate installer that needs internet access to download the full install while installing the router software, or you need to download/install an older version of pfSense (2.7.0 I think) and then get online to update it to 2.8.1.

Just went through all that doing a re-install, it’s crazy that I need to have internet access to install the router that will provide internet access LOL.

OPNsense is a well known alternative. OpenWRT could work too but I haven’t used it personally.

https://github.com/ddhhhkj/tetris-android last updated a year ago

That’s interesting, not sure that I trust an AI coded game enough to load onto my phone. But it is amusing seeing an AI project using the copyright “Tetris” name, most human coders aren’t brave enough to re-use the name itself. But AI is gonna AI I guess.

Ah you just reminded me, I remember Tttris / Titris being one of the better free open source Tetris clones on Android way back. No ads, no need to be online, just a good standalone Tetris clone for Android. I still have the old .apk, might be the same as the last one published to F-Droid https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.seavenois.tetris/ but like you said eventually stopped being updated & isn’t compatible with current Android phones nowadays.

Now you got me thinking about this again, wish I had a good suggestion. Will be following this post, maybe other people know about some other good ones.

On Debian the older Nvidia GPU would still work fine with the default Nouveau driver (open source non-Nvidia), I think(?) it’d be the same on Kubuntu/Ubuntu. Since it was an upgrade maybe you just need to re-enable Nouveau on your system? It’s not something I’ve ever done but doing a quick online search came up with some instructions here https://gist.github.com/vredchenko/42381e9cff3f1e162cb47cfd6479c459 , it looks more or less correct I’d just double-check before rebooting that Nouveau is not being blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d

You could try that & see how it goes before doing anything more drastic. You’re not going to do any heavy gaming with Nouveau but it should handle day-to-day tasks fine.

Like the other comment mentioned I’d try https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec first.

Just a heads up with proper data recovery it’s usually a good idea to dump an image of the media card to your drive and do any data recovery attempts against that image, not the media card itself. I would usually use ddrescue for that but you’ll probably be okay with standard dd too if the card itself is fine (as you said the deleted files were user error, not a failing card).

PS - You should definitely not use the media card in the camera until you’re done with recovery attempts, the more you use it the less likely you’ll recover anything off it.

Not an expert but I think originally I2Pd came about due to performance reasons as well as for people that don’t want to run Java. The idea being that it would run faster and more memory efficiently vs the Java app. Nowadays I’m not so sure there’s a huge difference but I can’t say that I’ve done any intensive testing on both.

There is a minor difference between the two if you plan to use bittorrent over I2P and want to use the I2PSnark torrent client. The I2P java app is the the only one that supports bittorrent DHT over I2P with the I2PSnark torrent client. From https://i2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent/#general-guidance-for-developers

DHT support requires SAM v3.3 PRIMARY and SUBSESSIONS for TCP and UDP over the same session. This will require substantial development effort on the client side, unless the client is written in Java. i2pd does not currently support SAM v3.3. libtorrent does not currently support SAM v3.3.

In practice that’s not a huge deal, people who wish to torrent usually add open I2P trackers onto torrents to work around the lack of DHT but it would be nice if DHT support were more universal within the I2P ecosystem.

I’m on Debian but have been using GNOME with its built-in RDP server since it’s Wayland compatible… But before I did that I had also set up XRDP so here’s a few ideas :)

I just installed Debian with XFCE. I installed XRDP but for the life of me I cannot get it working.

Are you using XFCE with Wayland or X11? XRDP currently only works with X11. Make sure the user you are using to RDP with is able to log in normally with XFCE + X11 before attempting RDP.

Also RDP logins only work with Linux users that are not currently logged in at the desktop so make sure you’re logged out before testing.

Also double-check that the xrdp.ini file looks right, particularly the incoming port it is configured to use. (on Debian it is in /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini). When I initially configured XRDP the port setting was strangely configured, it was set with port=vsock if I remember correctly and that wasn’t working… I had to change it to a regular port number. Also consider changing the port number if necessary, I had to change mine but only because Gnome’s own RDP server was already using the default port 3389. (if you change xrdp.ini settings make sure to restart the xrdp service)

Also double-check that the XRDP service is active and running (sudo systemctl status xrdp) - on my end the service would stop running when the port number config was wrong which meant it was no longer listening to incoming connections.

You don’t need to but #1 could be a bit easier if you prefer multiple torrent clients/instances for organization. qBittorrent / Deluge can run multiple instances so you could have like qBittorrent “A” instance pointing to your internal SSD and qBittorrent “B” instance pointing to your external HDD. That’s just a quick example but I’m sure Transmission and other torrent clients can do the same.

The only tricky bit with multiple torrent clients is that they’d each need their own incoming connection port if you intend to be fully connectable (port forwarded). That may not be feasible if you’re using a VPN that only gives you 1 port forward but otherwise it’s doable, depends on your setup.

In qBittorrent what is the Status of DHT, PeX, LSD when you click on the torrent and click its Trackers tab?

I’m on CGNAT

Your own torrent peer is not and cannot be connectable (port forwarded), unfortunately.

Not sure if you’ll be able to get much improvement, it’ll always be slow or impossible depending on the amount of connectable peers in the torrent swarm. But you should be seeing okay-ish speeds if the torrent you’re trying to download has tons of connectable peers. Does the torrent you’re downloading have a lot of seeds/leeches on it?

PS - If you’re saying everything usually works fine then something changed, could try restarting your internet router just to rule that out.

Right now using a pfSense router, it’s been working well but I’ll eventually replace it with hardware to run OPNsense (pfSense fork) when the time comes.

If you’re mainly just worried about wireless I’d just look into something to run OpenWrt or maybe FreshTomato if you’re sticking to older hardware. I have an older Linksys wireless router that is compatible with FreshTomato firmware so it’s been running on that and works well for my own usage, nothing fancy.

I was reading into this recently too. My understanding is that Debian + LibreOffice install the Liberation Fonts by default so usually you don’t need to worry about documents using Ariel and Helvetica (Liberation are metrically compatible replacements).

After further reading I ended up also installing the Crosextra fonts, the advantage of those two is that they are metrically compatible with Microsoft’s Calibri and Cambria. Once installed in theory LibreOffice should be able to open documents that had those Microsoft fonts and auto replace them with the open versions. (there’s a setting in LibreOffice to force font replacements but it didn’t seem like I needed to do that in my case)

Some more info on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts#Crosextra_fonts

The Crosextra font packages in Debian

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-carlito

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-caladea

Also interestingly - if you do really, really want some of Microsoft’s fonts they are free to install but I don’t think you actually get a license to distribute/publish with them. I didn’t bother installing these but could be useful for someone with tons of old MS Office documents with lots of random MS fonts.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ttf-mscorefonts-installer (need to enable contrib in your apt settings to be able to apt install those)

but a friend told me that to get one I either need a VPS with a public ip (which just takes all the fun out of selfhosting) or purchase a static ip

Neither of those are requirements. Just buy a domain at a registrar that allows you to dynamically update an IP address with a domain you have there. Look into DDNS update scripts and/or your own internet router, many routers have that feature built-in already.

Bazzite definitely doesn’t want you to use Windows NTFS formatted drive partitions and it isn’t supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Hardware_compatibility_for_gaming/#ntfs

You could try to see if the drives at least show up in whichever disks application Bazzite uses (GNOME uses the “Disks” application so maybe it’s the same for you), if it’s in there you can click the partition and see what options you get for mounting it, if at all possible.

But I think in general if you were planning to use Windows NTFS drive partitions then Bazzite may not be the best distro to use.