So...I was wondering. Is there any backup tape system that would be advisable to use for backing up some TBs? I guess I need it to be USB, as the server is a micro PC, one of those tiny ones you can hang from behind a monitor. It's an HP ProDesk.

Thanks!

Hi guys! I have a frequent issue on Jellyfin, that is, whenever there's a new TV show or movie, it quickly gets buried behind by new episodes of existing TV shows, and in the case of movies, even old releases being updated can push behind a brand new release. I was wondering if there was a better theming that might prioritize better brand new movies and TV shows over repeating ones?

Hi guys! Seems my KDE connect will stop being able to connect with my phone after my computer goes to sleep. After it wakes, it dectects no devices anymore. It seems to work again after a reboot. Any idea why might this happen?

I think this has started happening since KDE connect was decoupled from the Settings panel into its own app.

KDE Neon, based off of Ubuntu 24.04, kernel 7.0.0-28-generic.

Thanks!

Hi guys!

So, my gf has gotten me a birthday gift...a Chinese-made coin arcade! The build quality of this thing is pretty good. The joysticks and buttons look really solid and able to take plenty of abuse (she insists she chose an extra for japanese-made ones), the screen looks to be very good quality, and the speakers sound...meh, but can go pretty loud. This thing is heavy! Maybe 15-20Kg.

Anyway, onto the games! This thing seems to have embedded a bunch of emulators. It has a bazillion of MegaDrive/Famicom/SuperFamicom/GameBoy/GameBoy Advance games, which, given the form factor...I couldn't care any less for. I don't want to play a Gameboy game in an arcade screen with joysticks! It gets a bit more complicated, as it also has some games for PS1, PSP and Dreamcast. So this thing can move 3D decently! But the ones anyone would care, the good ole arcades, including Neo Geo and CPS1/CPS2 and the old ones (in a mame folder) seem to be all there.

Now...the issues. This is a Chinese system. She paid an extra to get it in "English". But...It's more Chinglish. What irks me the most is, the names of the games. They seem to be originally in Chinese, and then AI-translated to English. So...for example, Captain Commando is "Famous General", Warriors of Fate is here "Shagokushill"...and so on.

There's quite a lot of mistranslations like this (more than half, by my guesstimation), making the search useless. What's worst, I can't quite dinamically edit the ROM set. There's a microSD card with the ROMs, pictures and videos for the game list screen. But, the game DB is in some internal memory I can't quite locate. Adding games to the folders does nothing, and removing them doesn't make them disappear from the list, they just fail to load anymore when you click them. There's a method to individually remove games I don't want from the list, but involves tapping/confirming through 3 menus. For each individual entry. In a 3,000 items list.

So...I'm wondering. Is anyone familiar with this motherboard? Can I modify the software it's running? I'd love to be to add maybe Sega Model 1/2 cores, play things like Virtua Fighter! But not sure how hard/messy it would be.

Here you can see the main board. It has a VGA pinout to the white ribbon cable that goes to the monitor. There's a GPIO port partially used by the wiring for the two players joysticks. And finally, a little detail about the chip labeling.

Not sure if A9 refers to any specific ARM CPU. I have a guess that this is a heavily modified Android. I took the microSD card out and the typical /android/data, /android/obb and /LOST.DIR folders in it, but they were empty. All the games were in a /games folder, with subfolders for each core.

So...Any ideas if I can modify this to add cores/edit the games list easily? I can add a USB stick and it reads the games...but it's painfully slow to load from USB for some reason, about 30-40sec to boot a few MBs game. And the games list is super messy.

I'd be also open to consider replacing the motherboard for something...more flexible, if it wasn't extremely complicated/expensive.

What do you guys think? Any advice?

Hi guys! Most of my pages today are not working, as I'm stuck on a cloudflare loop. This seems to happen in Firefox and waterfox, so far. I've tested the 'troubleshooting mode', which opens with all defaults and no extensions, but still the same issues. Ungoogled chromium seems to work, but that's not a browser I'd like to use. What can i test?

So...this is very tangentially related to Self Hosting, but hear me out...

We travel frequently, either for work or leisure. As a self-hoster, I always bring an Nvidia shield player on my travel bag, to connect to my Jellyfin host from whichever hotel we might be staying at, to watch at night for example.

But increasingly, this is becoming a pain in the butt. As most TVs aren't directly hooked anymore to just the antenna or the hotel's connection. No, they usually will be hooked to an Android box handling all sorts of crap, from the hotel welcoming screens to some info, to their pre-set channels. And the android remote works via HDMI-ARC to control the TV, of which they usually hide the damn OEM remote. So, if you unplug their android box to hook up your own player, you lose the TV controls. In some cases (Sony, mostly) you might be in luck finding the 3 physical buttons they include somewhere on the TV itself to navigate inputs and volume. But in some others, you might as well end up stuck in an Android app menu where you can't get out (I'm looking at you Phillips). So I think my next addition would be to get an universal remote to sort all these quirks when traveling. Anyone else went through these considerations? Any recommendations?

[...]

In the new blog post, Google’s Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

[...]

Google released its new developer console back in March, inviting external developers the opportunity to pay $25 and verify their identities early. Developers who don’t register will find that their apps cannot be sideloaded on Google-certified Android devices once verification has rolled out. Google says that almost every app in the Play Store is now ready for the change, and a “large majority” of apps outside Google Play have completed verification.

[...]

Google says it will verify the apps in the following stores when it begins enforcing the new restrictions.

Google (Google Play)
Honor (HONOR App Market)
OPlus (OPPO App Market)
Samsung (Galaxy Store)
Transsion (Palm Store)
vivo (V-Appstore)
Xiaomi (GetApps)

[...]

The next step toward verifying apps will come this month as Google deploys a new system service on most certified devices. The package (com.google.android.verifier) will appear on phones and tablets running Android 8 or higher, allowing Google to block the installation of unverified apps. It will remain dormant until verification is activated in your specific region.

In July, Google plans to roll out the new developer APIs and begin testing for “limited distribution” accounts. This is Google’s solution for hobbyists who want to make their own apps and share them with a small group. Limited accounts won’t require a fee or government ID verification, but you can install these apps on up to 20 devices.

In August, the advanced flow will become available globally ahead of verification becoming mandatory in the first markets. As detailed a few months ago, the advanced flow will allow users to bypass verification, but the process isn’t easy. You’ll have to navigate to a buried menu, confirm you understand the risks multiple times, and wait a whole day before completing the process.

And that brings us to September, when Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand will begin checking verification status before installing apps. However, things get murky after that. Google will undoubtedly monitor how verification works as millions of users are suddenly limited to verified apps, which could affect how it moves forward. Google says it intends to expand developer verification in 2027, eventually making it a global device policy.

Hi guys! I'm a bit tired that my system sometimes completely becomes unresponsive while running things that could fill up the memory. I have 32GB of RAM, a bit of a swap file in my SSD (I think something like 5GB swap), but this clearly isn't cutting it. I was having a few browser windows opened, a handbrake encoding that was paused and decided to open Death Stranding 2, which is optimized to take around 5-6GB of RAM. And the system became once more so unresponsive that I had to literally reset it, after 5mins of nothing. I'd like to implement in my Ubuntu-based distro what they have in CachyOS. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's a ZRAM-based swap partition? Something like 1 or 2GB commited to compressed virtual memory in RAM? Seems this works much better when things are close to getting dicey...how would I go about doing what they use in CachyOS? Is there any easy to follow guide?

So...yeah, I know about the ragebait. So...my gf is testing the waters with Linux, moving away from Mac. I have a cute Chuwi Minibook X laptop in which I installed KDE Neon for her, with a bit of a Mac theming. Could have chosen ElementaryOS, but ah well.

At any rate, her pain point is ADobe Acrobat, which she uses constantly to edit PDF files in all sort of ways, adding pictures, cutting/pasting parts on other PDFs, modifying paragraphs and changing the arrangements and so on... I'm having a bit of trouble making it run on Wine/Lutris/Bottles, and I'd like to know if there's any other alternative that could cover some PDF editing properly in Linux. Any suggestions?

Hi guys! I have a server on a rather reliable network, with 1Gbps connection upload verified by different connections over the same area. However, in some countries where the connection is very unreliable, the connection slowly dies, and stays dead halfway through the transfer. Is there any client which would be prepared to adapt or detect an unreliable connection, and retry/resume as soon as it happens without losing the transfer? I find filezilla sometimes tends to stall halfway through, and it stays...hung without doign much. And sometimes after restarting the connection, it just overwrites the file from the beginning without prompting. Is there a better system or client to transfer large files in a resumeable way over the internet?

Thanks!

So...with all this openclaw stuff, I was wondering, what's the FOSS status for something to run locally? Can I get my own locally run agent to which I can ask to perform simple tasks (go and find this, download that, summarize an article) or things like this? I'm just kinda curious about all of this.

Thanks!

WKUK - Iran

Hi guys! I'm considering some tool to edit the texts and images within a PDF. What would be some decent recommendations? So far I think the only with a semblance of working has been Libreoffice Draw, but it messed the formatting quite a lot (the arrangement is very much off in many pages, the text splits incorrectly, some images pop up duplicated and so on). But so far it's the only one I've seen actually allowing me to play with the PDF contents. Are there any other/better options?

Thanks!

So...I'm installing KDE for my gf. She needs to be able to use Acrobat Pro in order to edit PDFs which is something she commonly does. So...I managed to install it. In Lutris. It does open, and from the 'open file' menu, I can actually open PDFs to edit them.

However...when I click on a random PDF file on my desktop...it completely ignores it, and just open to the welcome screen. Is there a way I can pass the file URL to Lutris/Adobe?

For better details, let's see, the KDE shortcut looks as follows:

Name: Adobe Acrobat Generic Name: Comments: Environment Variables: LUTRIS_SKIP_INIT=1 Program: flatpak command-line arguments: run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/1

So...I tried to pass the %U at the end of the arguments, so it would look as:

run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/1 %U

But this doesn't look too successful, as it seems to completely ignore the last part. So...how can I pass the file URL to flatpak Lutris/Adobe?

Hi guys! I have a rather beefy machine. AMD Ryzen 7700, 32GB DDR5, GPU 7800XT 16GB, several NVME drives for OS, general data, games. And yet...after a while it becomes completely unresponsive. Mouse freezes, keyboard doesn't key anything, and the screen gets completely frozen. Meanwhile the disk led gets full activity, almost constantly red. So...While this might be crazy pagination turning the system to a crawl (I have an 8GB swapfile), I want to be able to determine what's going on. Is there a way I can check any log, or enable any kind of logging that would tell me what happened on the seconds before it became completely unresponsive? Who takes all my memory??

Normal situations where this happens:

Firefox open, multiple windows, lots of tabs. Maybe ~5-8GB of RAM.

Virtmanager running a Windows VM, running a work remote desktop...4GB of RAM

Steam...1GB of RAM

Thunderbird, Deluge, Telegram, Whatsapp...Not much more really.

This shouldn't even come close to the RAM capacity of this machine. And yet...it really looks like it suffocates without memory. How can I check for issues?

Hi guys!

So...Yeah. I have your average Deluge/Sonarr/Radarr combo. What I'm finding increasingly annoying is, these days some release groups are putting their names more frequently BEFORE the filename. This makes it rather hard to find even the folders of the files being downloaded. Is there an easy way to address this? I'd like to keep the rest of the things in the filename there, and maybe even the release group name...but at the end of the file. The most important thing, the filename should come first. How to best do this?

Thanks!

Hi! So I have a backblaze account, and I would like to make a restic backup of my servers, but I'd like to be able to handle the paths, schedules and other options via GUI. What would be a good/easy GUI to set it up?

Thanks!

Hi guys! So...yeah. I have a Chuwi Minibook X N150 laptop that I'm testing around. Seems so far, so good regarding hardware support, with even the camera working on apps like the zoom flatpak. There's one thing that keeps irking me though, and that's the GRUB boot menu. It's all rotated to the left (90º counter-clockwise). This is probably because they're using some sort of tablet 1080p LCD screen. Once logged in, the acceleration sensors (took a couple of boots to get them working) take over, and determine what is up and down. At the SDDM login screen, I can handle it with a quick xrandr --output mydisplay --rotate right. But...GRUB? Seems grub ignores me.

I have tried by now things such as: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=efifb fbcon=rotate:3", or GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.fastboot=1 fbcon=rotate:3" or even: GRUB_FB_ROTATION=270

But so far, nothing sticks, and the screen remains locked at a 90 degree angle. Any ideas of what could I do to sort it out?

I have KDE Neon installed, which is an Ubuntu 24.04 so far.

Thanks!

Hi guys! I'd like to consider a small portable camera to carry around whenever traveling, that takes about as little space and weight as possible. The idea is replacing the mobile phone on a stick, as a lot can go wrong when attempting a silly picture near a lake or waterfall (you get the idea).

So I guess no additional lenses or similar, just a portable camera that takes good pictures. As it might be also for my gf's use, one of the features I'd like it to have probably would be a reversible screen so it can be used to take selfies. And perhaps another one might be an optical zoom, but this might not be mandatory. I am lucky to be in a country where a lot of the models might be available, and even second hand, but I'd need some direction about what would be recommended.

Thanks!