I’ve cleared out every thing in my YouTube/Unwatched bookmarks folder under 40 minutes in length. This folder mostly consists of recent uploads from YouTubers I’ve been following(via bookmarking their /videos page, not faffing about with YouTube’s reportedly unreliable subscription/notification system) and random videos the algorithm recommends me from YouTubers I’m not following. it is mostly separate from the mass downloading of back catalogs I do when discovering new creators I want to follow(though the /YouTube/Misc folder on my main data drive and the SD card I user for my portable media player includes downloaded copies of most of the 40 minutes and longer items(though the misc folder also includes a handful of videos from creators I’ve already binged that only have a handful of long videos). That said, I haven’t done my daily open all in tabs on all the channels I have bookmarked, so this evening could see a new medium length backlog form if a dozen plus creators upload something today.
Good news: After being out with a battery issue, I finally got my laptop back. Bad news: They wiped my hard drive when I never asked them to, and installed windows 11. Years of custom TADS code, gone! Notes on current projects, gone. I thought everything was on OneDrive, but apparently I took up too much space on Microsoft’s servers, so instead of waiting for me to move it to the machine when I got it back, they just deleted it!
Oh dang. I’m really sorry. That’s so hard.
Sad to hear such news. Not so long ago I retrieved all the data from a damaged hard disk drive thanks to a nice IT service. I had many important data on this drive, including my thesis and programs, which were not backed up (except thesis, that was backed up on Overleaf), and all were retrieved. The disk was 2TB capacity (from which about 200GB space were taken), so of course there is no such amount of space on OneDrive, or DropBox, at least on free accounts. I hope you will easily restore all the work and notes even that it can take some time.
I don’t know about positive, but at least neutral: I’ve been sick in bed for the last week and a half, but it didn’t hit until I was back from vacation, so I was able to enjoy some time in Door County with my family first.
I don’t know who “they” are in this context, but I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs at them!
jesus fucking fuck what the fuck?! I hope they get fired for that.
I was suffering way too much eye strain at my back pain station, so I took some measurements, figured out the DPI, dove into the low-level display settings, installed a better font, and now everything is crystal-clear.
What a difference!
I don’t know of a written language that could entirely articulate how unimaginably furious I would be in your position. I’d have a microwave gaze and spitting blood with every scream.
I am wishing you all the resolve while you grieve the lost data and rebuild. Feel free to send me a message, if you need to vent some more.
Sounds like a computer repair shop deserves a chapter 7 bankrupcy.
My backup game isn’t as good as it should be(I haven’t updated my two external drives to match the internal drive since originally populating those drives, the external drive that isn’t sitting atop my desktop is in the household safe instead of a safety deposit box, and 4 TB of cloud storage is almost certainly out of budget), but I am so glad my primary data drive is separate from my system drive, that I have those two external drives, one in a location more secure than atop my desktop, the home partition on my system drive has a back up of the most important half terabyte, and my main microSD card has that most important half terabyte along with the most volatile half terabyte. giving me a total of 5 copies of the most important half terabyte, 3 copies of most of my data, and two copies of the most volatile… though, hearing this makes me think I should remove the data drive if I ever need to put my machine in the shop.
Also, I’m probably in the minority, but I’d also be grossed out by them putting Windows 11 on my machine and I would be annoyed by the time it would take me to reinstall Debian and tweak it to my liking.
An unfortunate number of repair shops are like that. When I took my laptop (a Lenovo Thinkpad running Ubuntu) to one of them for a battery issue—the internal battery had died completely and had to be replaced—they were very insistent that my battery issues came from running Linux, and that the best solution would be to wipe the hard drive and install Windows.
My good thing that happened today: I finally finished the prologue on a rewrite of my very first game. I actually didn’t think I’d ever return to it, but finally taking it from just notes to a playable game has been so rewarding!
Published the first 2 installments of my Neo-Twiny Jam entries and had a little time to catch up on writing + drawing for myself. Namely, I finally got around to finishing a Cyberpunk 2077 fanfiction for my wife + sketch out some art for what will hopefully be an art book. A little frustrated with AI art accusations which is coloring my view of the things I’m making with my very human hands and brain but I’ll recover in time and be happy with it again in time. I’ve got some anticipated appointments coming up and updated documents to update elsewhere and family visiting some time this summer so the real world will keep me much busier than anything else online.
My house is full of worms.
On the positive side, they’re very cute worms. They don’t stop moving forward; they’ve got places the be, apparently.
On the neutral side, nobody knows how they’re getting in. They appear at complete random, as if they’re magically being dropped into the middle of randomly-selected rooms, multiple times a day.
On the negative side, my parents really don’t like them, despite their wonderful wormy cuteness. Mom has been tolerating my insistence on bringing them outside, preferably alive and intact.
On the difficult-to-classify side, Samantha–the cellar spider in my room, who I’ve arbitrarily considered to be my roommate–is a bit too small to tackle one of these worms, and I don’t think her webs could withstand their pure shmoovin’ power, so…Samantha is just an observer, at best.
So, yeah. Welcome to my house of worms.
Try talking to the worms in German :)))
While reading a Cotton Malone novel, I ran across a kobold. It will be perfect for a 2nd in series WIP that I haven’t touched in almost a year. 
PS. I am not sure a tech in a computer repair shop that didn’t appreciate Linux would be worth his salt.
Instant proof of incompetence on their part.
Yeah, I’m kind of useless for any hardware thing more involved than installing an internal SATA HDD or Optical drive(I did once manage to repair an optical drive that the tray had been ripped out of, but the only reason I even tried is because not trying meant buying a new drive anyways, there was nothing to lose if I made things worse), and I would be lost trying to troubleshoot a software issue with Windows, OSX, iOS, or Android, but any repair shop where the staff aren’t like, “Cool, you use Linux?” isn’t worth existing. Knowing one’s way around Linux isn’t proof of competence at fixing hardware issues or software issues with other OSes but being totally ignorant of Linux or outright hostile to it suggests either a rather limited amount of technical know how or being a shill for one of the corporate OSes.
Also, an entire fish market to the side of the head to whoever is responsible for laptops losing their easy to replace brick batteries. Honestly, I’ve never been that big on laptops, but the loss of once common convenience features is even more infuriating with laptops than it is with cell phones since small size isn’t as much of a terminal design goal in that realm… though sadly, even desktops have been impacted(The two biggest disappointments about my current desktop when I bought it were there only being one bay for a 3.5" HDd and not only no included optical drive, but the only bay for an optical drive is the kind of bay you would find on laptops 20 years ago, making it hard to find a drive that will fit, both huge downgrades from my old desktop having 3 internal 3.5" drive bays and 3 full-sized bays for optical drives. Granted, I never used the spare outward facing bays and don’t make regular use of an optical drive, but I miss having a system drive and dual internal data drives, and as much as an SDD system drive speeds things up, SSDs are too expensive for the capacity I need from a data drive, and having the optical drive built-in for when I need it is so much more convenient than plugging in an external drive.
Grumblings of a tech savvy young Gen Xer/Old Millenial(which I am depends on where you put the border, most living social generations don’t have some huge event to mark their beginning and end like the Boomers have the end of WWII to mark their beginning, so boundaries are blurry at best) who’s turning into a modern version of the “stay off my lawn” guy aside, on a more positive note, I finished making a beaded bag last night. Made of about 1147 black pony beads strong with some medium weight yarn in a bright purple. It’s a rectangular bag about 8 inches wide and 9 inches deep, perhaps a good size for holding a tablet(though I don’t own a tablet to test). I have some super bulky yarn in a duller purple I’m thinking of fashioning some rope style handles out of. Next on my crafing agenda, I’m planning to make a rainbow bead mat using a tritone mix for each color stripe with a random distribution of shades/tints/tones(any particular pattern would require serious sighted assistance to at the bare minimum sort the beads and even then, likely constant confirmation that I haven’t gotten things mixed up. Plan to use fishing line for the mat since one problem I ran into with the bag is that the yarn gave too much friction to pull things tight, so I ended up with a lot of loops I had to knot, tuck, and snip and had to err on the side of too much excess to ensure I could fit the darning needle through the last few beads on each row. the fishing line should hopefully be able to slide freely even through many beads in a row and be threadable without the needle and virtually invisble on the final product.
Got a few more functions written in my efforts to get a more accurate prose-only word-count for a sugarcube project. Pretty soon, though, I’ll have to write more story passages so I’ll have twinescript fodder to test with…
Ohhh post 5100; nice increment! 
More progress on IF-Octane. Recently had a big think about reorganizing the project, and I’m glad I did. It seems a lot more feasible for me to accomplish now.