#Linux file transfer

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than a spell

Responding to this ask from my NEW COMPUTER!! It only took 24 hours to get it working! It's running Linux so there's numerous annoyances but apparently there's ways to get Windows programs working on Linux, one of which is built into Steam, and Ultrakill loads so fast and looks so good and runs so well!

... And I haven't even put the graphics card in yet

[javen-tiger]

this computer business is making me want to fucking kill myself lol

[errorid-mt7lt7k7unfr9ttfua5]

me when companies try to force you to use their proprietary software

anyway

Layperson resources:

firefox is an open source browser by Mozilla that makes privacy and software independence much easier. it is very easy to transfer all your chrome data to Firefox

ublock origin is The highest quality adblock atm. it is a free browser extension, and though last i checked it is available on Chrome google is trying very hard to crack down on its use

Thunderbird mail is an open source email client also by mozilla and shares many of the same advantages as firefox (it has some other cool features as well)

libreOffice is an open source office suite similar to microsoft office or Google Suite, simple enough

Risky:

VPNs (virtual private networks) essentially do a number of things, but most commonly they are used to prevent people from tracking your IP address. i would suggest doing more research. i use proton vpn, as it has a decent free version, and the paid version is powerful

note: some applications, websites, and other entities do not tolerate the use of VPNs. you may not be able to access certain secure sites while using a VPN, and logging into your personal account with some services while using a vpn *may* get you PERMANENTLY BLACKLISTED from the service on that account, ymmv

IF YOU HAVE A DECENT VPN, ANTIVIRUS, AND ADBLOCK, you can start learning about piracy, though i will not be providing any resources, as Loose Lips Sink Ships. if you want to be very safe, start with streaming sites and never download any files, though you Can learn how to discern between safe, unsafe, and risky content.

note: DO NOT SHARE LINKS TO OR NAMES OF PIRACY SITES IN PUBLIC PLACES, ESPECIALLY SOCAL MEDIA

the only time you should share these things are either in person or in (preferably peer-to-peer encrypted) PRIVATE messages

when pirated media becomes well-known and circulated on the wider, public internet, it gets taken down, because it is illegal to distribute pirated media and software

if you need an antivirus i like bitdefender. it has a free version, and is very good, though if youre using windows, windows defender is also very good and it comes with the OS

Advanced:

linux is great if you REALLY know what you're doing. you have to know a decent amount of computer science and be comfortable using the Terminal/Command Prompt to get/use linux. "Linux" refers to a large array of related open source Operating Systems. do research and pick one that suits your needs. im still experimenting with various dispos, but im leaning towards either Ubuntu Cinnamon or Debian.

[paradoxinabottle]

I just had a really interesting idea.

So i have this USB stick that i hang in my keys and keep with me all the time. It's completely empty and i really don't use it too often. But as a follow up to my linux craze, i came up with a really fun use for it!

I wanna split the USB into 2 partitions, one EXT4 and one exFAT, and have a very light linux distro installed on the EXT4 partition, giving me a backup OS that i can carry around everywhere. the exFAT drive will be for general storage (so it can be detected by windows).

I think this is a really neat idea because i often find myself having to fix stuff. It's also an effective way to transfer files if the OS doesn't start.

I'll look up how to do this and have some fun with it :D

[geneeste]

Creating a personal fanfic archive using Calibre, various Calibre plugins, Firefox Reader View, and an e-Reader / BookFusion / Calibre-Web

A few years ago I started getting serious about saving my favorite fic (or just any fic I enjoyed), since the Internet is sadly not actually always forever when it comes to fanfiction. Plus, I wanted a way to access fanfic offline when wifi wasn't available. Enter a personal fanfic archive!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I thought I'd share my particular workflow in case it helps others get started. Often it's easier to build off someone else's workflow than to create your own!

Please note that this is for building an archive for private use -- always remember that it's bad form to publicly archive someone else's work without their explicit permission.

This is going to be long, so let's add a read more!

How to Build Your Own Personal Fanfic Archive

Step One: Install Calibre

Calibre is an incredibly powerful ebook management software that allows you to do a whole lot of stuff having to do with ebooks, such as convert almost any text-based file into an ebook and (often) vice-versa. It also allows you to easily side-load ebooks onto your personal e-reader of choice and manage the collection of ebooks on the device.

And because it's open source, developers have created a bunch of incredibly useful plugins to use with Calibre (including several we're going to talk about in the next step), which make saving and reading fanfiction super easy and fun.

But before we can do that, you need to download and install it. It's available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and in a portable version.

Step Two: Download These Plugins

This guide would be about 100 pages long if I went into all of the plugins I love and use with Calibre, so we're just going to focus on the ones I use for saving and reading fanfiction. And since I'm trying to keep this from becoming a novel (lolsob), I'll just link to the documentation for most of these plugins, but if you run into trouble using them, just tag me in the notes or a comment and I'll be happy to write up some steps for using them.

Anyway, now that you've downloaded and installed Calibre, it's time to get some plugins! To do that, go to Preferences > Get plugins to enhance Calibre.

You'll see a pop-up with a table of a huge number of plugins. You can use the Filter by name: field in the upper right to search for the plugins below, one at a time.

Click on each plugin, then click Install. You'll be asked which toolbars to add the plugins to; for these, I keep the suggested locations (in the main toolbar & when a device is connected).

FanFicFare (here's also a great tutorial for using this plugin) EpubMerge (for creating anthologies from fic series) EbubSplit (for if you ever need to break up fic anthologies) Generate Cover (for creating simple artwork for downloaded fic) Manage Series (for managing fic series)

You'll have to restart Calibre for the plugins to run, so I usually wait to restart until I've installed the last plugin I want.

Take some time here to configure these plugins, especially FanFicFare. In the next step, I'll demonstrate a few of its features, but you might be confused if you haven't set it up yet! (Again, highly recommend that linked tutorial!)

Step Three: Get to Know FanFicFare (and to a lesser extent, Generate Cover)

FanFicFare is a free Calibre plugin that allows you to download fic in bulk, including all stories in a series as one work, adding them directly to Calibre so that that you can convert them to other formats or transfer them to your e-reader.

As with Calibre, FanFicFare has a lot of really cool features, but we're just going to focus on a few, since the docs above will show you most of them.

The features I use most often are: Download from URLs, Get Story URLs from Email, and Get Story URLs from Web Page.

Download from URLs let's you add a running list of URLs that you'd like FanFicFare to download and turn into ebooks for you. So, say, you have a bunch of fic from fanfic.net that you want to download. You can do that!

Now, in this case, I've already downloaded these (which FanFicFare detected), so I didn't update my library with the fic.

But I do have some updates to do from email, so let's try getting story URLs from email!

Woohoo, new fic! Calibre will detect when cover art is included in the downloaded file and use that, but at least one of these fic doesn't have cover art (which is the case for most of the fic I download). This is where Generate Cover comes in.

With Generate Cover, I can set the art, font, dimensions, and info content of the covers so that when I'm looking at the fic on my Kindle, I know right away what fic it is, what fandom it's from, and whether or not it's part of a series.

Okay, last thing from FanFicFare -- say I want to download all of the fic on a page, like in an author's profile on fanfic.net or all of the stories in a series. I can do that too with Get Story URLs from Web Page:

The thing I want to call out here is that I can specify whether the fic at this link are individual works or all part of an anthology, meaning if they're all works in the same series, I can download all stories as a single ebook by choosing For Anthology Epub.

Step Four: Using FireFox Reader View to Download Fic Outside of Archives

This is less common now thanks to AO3, but the elders among us may want to save fanfic that exists outside of archives on personal websites that either still exist or that exist only on the Internet Wayback Machine. FanFicFare is awesome and powerful, but it's not able to download fic from these kinds of sources, so we have to get creative.

I've done this in a couple of ways, none of which are entirely perfect, but the easiest way I've found thus far is by using Firefox's Reader View. Also, I don't think I discovered this -- I think I read about this on Tumblr, actually, although I can longer find the source (if you know it, please tell me so I can credit them!).

At any rate, open the fic in Firefox and then toggle on Reader View:

Toggling on Reader View strips all the HTML formatting from the page and presents the fic in the clean way you see in the preview below, which is more ideal for ebook formats.

To save this, go to the hamburger menu in the upper right of the browser and select Print, then switch to Print to PDF. You'll see the URL and some other stuff at the top and bottom of the pages; to remove that, scroll down until you see something like More settings... and uncheck Print headers and footers.

Click Save to download the resulting PDF, which you can then add to Calibre and convert to whichever format works best for your e-reader or archive method.

Step Five: Archiving (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Here's the really fun part: now that you know how to download your fave fanfics in bulk and hopefully have a nice little cache going, it's time to choose how you want to (privately) archive them!

I'm going to go through each option I've used in order of how easy it is to implement (and whether it costs additional money to use). I won't go too in depth about any of them, but I'm happy to do so in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Option 1: On Your Computer

If you're using Calibre to convert fanfic, then you're basically using your computer as your primary archive. This is a great option, because it carries no additional costs outside the original cost of acquiring your computer. It's also the simplest option, as it really doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge, just a willingness to tinker with Calibre and its plugins or to read how-to docs.

Calibre comes with a built-in e-book viewer that you can use to read the saved fic on your computer (just double-click on the fic in Calibre). You can also import it into your ebook app of choice (in most cases; this can get a little complicated just depending on how many fic you're working with and what OS you're on/app you're using).

If you choose this option, you may want to consider backing the fic up to a secondary location like an external hard drive or cloud storage. This may incur additional expense, but is likely still one of the more affordable options, since storage space is cheap and only getting cheaper, and text files tend to not be that big to begin with, even when there are a lot of them.

Option 2: On Your e-Reader

This is another great option, since this is what Calibre was built for! There are some really great, afforable e-readers out there nowadays, and Calibre supports most of them. Of course, this is a more expensive option because you have to acquire an e-reader in addition to a computer to run Calibre on, but if you already have an e-reader and haven't considered using it to read fanfic, boy are you in for a treat!

Option 3: In BookFusion

This is a really cool option that I discovered while tinkering with Calibre and used for about a year before I moved to a self-hosted option (see Option 4).

BookFusion is a web platform and an app (available on iOS and Android) that allows you to build your own ebook library and access it from anywhere, even when you're offline (it's the offline bit that really sold me). It has a Calibre plugin through which you can manage your ebook library very easily, including sorting your fanfic into easy-to-access bookshelves. You may or may not be able to share ebooks depending on your subscription, but only with family members.

Here's what the iOS app looks like:

The downside to BookFusion is that you'll need a subscription if you want to upload more than 10 ebooks. It's affordable(ish), ranging from $1.99 per month for a decent 5GB storage all the way to $9.99 for 100GB for power users. Yearly subs range from $18.99 to $95.99. (They say this is temporary, early bird pricing, but subscribing now locks you into this pricing forever.)

I would recommend this option if you have some cash to spare and you're really comfortable using Calibre or you're a nerd for making apps like BookFusion work. It works really well and is incredibly convenient once you get it set up (especially when you want to read on your phone or tablet offline), but even I, someone who works in tech support for a living, had some trouble with the initial sync and ended up duplicating every ebook in my BookFusion library, making for a very tedious cleanup session.

Option 4: On a Self-Hosted Server Using Calibre-Web

Do you enjoy unending confusion and frustration? Are you okay with throwing fistfuls of money down a well? Do you like putting in an incredible amount of work for something only you and maybe a few other people will ever actually use? If so, self-hosting Calibre-Web on your own personal server might be a good fit for you!

To be fair, this is likely an experience unique to me, because I am just technical enough to be a danger to myself. I can give a brief summary of how I did this, but I don't know nearly enough to explain to you how to do it.

Calibre-Web is a web app that works on top of Calibre, offering "a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks."

I have a network-attached storage (NAS) server on which I run an instance of Calibre and Calibre-Web (through the miracle that is Docker). After the initial work of downloading all the fic I wanted to save and transferring it to the server, I'm now able to download all new fic pretty much via email thanks to FanFicFare, so updating my fic archive is mostly automated at this point.

If you're curious, this is what it looks like:

Pros: The interface is clean and intuitive, the ebook reader is fantastic. The Discover feature, in which you are given random books / fic to read, has turned out to be one feature worth all the irritation of setting up Calibre-Web. I can access, read, and download ebooks on any device, and I can even convert ebooks into another format using this interface. As I mentioned above, updating it with fic (and keeping the Docker container itself up to date) is relatively automated and easy now.

Cons: The server, in whichever form you choose, costs money. It is not cheap. If you're not extremely careful (and sometimes even if you are, like me) and a hard drive goes bad, you could lose data (and then you have to spend more money to replace said hard drive and time replacing said data). It is not easy to set up. You may, at various points in this journey, wish you could launch the server into the sun, Calibre-Web into the sun, or yourself into the sun.

Step Six: Profit!

That's it! I hope this was enough to get you moving towards archiving your favorite fanfic. Again, if there's anything here you'd like me to expand on, let me know! Obviously I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and love talking about it.

[acesandwords]

Offline Library

In light of all the Ao3 issues lately I'm gonna throw this up as something people should consider doing. Make your own library of your favorite fics and any you might like to read in the future/are currently reading.

How do you do this? To start: Calibre & ReadEra app

Calibre is a free ebook management software, available on windows, mac, and linux - but also comes in a portable version you can put on a flash drive. Ebooks are very small files, 100s of fics can easily take less than 1GB of space. You can create categories for everything and all the tags on the fics will stay attached to them. You can download directly through ao3, or you can use the browser extension Ficlab which can make the process a little quicker, plus give you a book cover(or you can add your own cover). Epub or Mobi format is best.

ReadEra, is a free reading app with no ads that you can tell to only access a single file where you keep your ebooks. It's open source and the Privacy Statement and Terms & Conditions are very short and easy to read. You can transfer files from Calibre to your phone, but this is also a good option if you don't have a PC to use Calibre. You can make folders to organize all your fics.

Quality of life plugins for Calibre: Preferences > Plugins > Get New Plugins

Look up: EpubMerge, EpubSplit, FanFicFare, Generate Cover (restart calibre once you've added them all) Fun fact, with FanFicFare, you can download new chapters to update fics that are currently in progress directly in Calibre instead of having to open up ao3.

Also, to be clear - back them up for yourself only, don't you fucking dare repost them anywhere.

You can also backup Kindle books (and you should) with Calibre, though that's a bit more complicated; instructions under the read more

Firstly what is DRM? TLDR: digital rights management (DRM) is meant to prevent piracy, however, this also means you never really own your ebooks. If Amazon decides to take down a book you bought? That's it, it's gone and it doesn't matter that you paid for it.

Removing DRM If you're on PC and don't have a kindle device, you'll want kindle version 2.4.0 or it won't work in Calibre.

In Calibre, navigate to Preferences > Plugins > Load Plugin From File - DeDRM - Use the latest Beta or Alpha release, follow instructions on the github page

Preferences > Plugins > Get New Plugins

Look up: KFX Input

You'll have to restart Calibre once you install so just add them all at once before you restart it.

If you need some troubleshooting help setting anything up just ask and I'll try to help!

[kitkatt0430]

Free software recommendations for various things:

LibreOffice - A full home office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Easy to use and you can choose the UI layout from several types; it can handle docx and other Microsoft Office document formats; it still does not include AI unless you specifically add that extension on purpose, so unlike other office suites it's not shoving AI down your throat.

Calibre - Ebook manager bundled with an ebook editor and ereader software. It can follow news feeds, downloading them into epub format. Convert ebooks from one format into (many) others. Run a server to make access your books from different computers/phones/tablets easier. And so much more... without even touching on the additional functionality that plugins can add. With plugins it can be used for DRM stripping (which can still remove DRM from even Kindle ebooks, if you have a kindle that you can download the ebook to and use to transfer to your computer). It can also handle downloading fanfics and their metadata using the FanFicFare plugin. (Which I've written tutorials about.) There are officially supported plugins (like FanFicFare) that are easy to install and unofficial plugins (like the DRM stripper) that take more work, so it's extremely customizable.

Syncthing - Want to host your own local file backup system? Have an old laptop that you can reformat with a linux distro? And maybe a spare hard drive? Perfect, you have what you need to set up a home file backup system. Reformat the computer with the new operating system, install syncthing on that computer and on the computer you want to back up files for and the two installations of the software can sync over your home network. Put it on your phone and back up your photos. The software is open source, encrypted, and you can turn it off so that your computer (or phone) is only running it on a trusted network. You control where the synced data lives, which computers on your network those synced folders are shared with (allowing for sharing between multiple computers) and even what type of file backups happen if data is, say, accidentally deleted. (File recovery!!!)

Plex or Emby - Both are free to install on any computer, point at any movie/tv show/audiobook/music files you've got sitting around, and bam you've got a home media streaming server. Both have paid tiers for more features (including tv tuner integration to act as a DVR), but what they can do for free is already impressive and well handled. Both have easy to use UI and it largely comes down to personal preference as to one is better than the other.

Notepad++ - A notepad type program that can also serve as a decent lightweight code editor. I use it for noodling around with code scripts and snippets, writing lists, and various other small tasks. It's not something I'd use for my professional code writing but it's great for just messing around with something on my own time.

[danieyells]

Hello! Sorry for the bother but do you know how the live 2D files of Tokyo debunker is accessed? I'm like so hyped about this help- Let me know if you could answer for me! THANK YOUUUU

I'm on the way to work so I'll just copypaste what i sent to someone else over DMs. Lmk if you run into any trouble, but it'll be like 8+ hours before I get to it

Hiya! No need to apologize for the sudden message. I just woke up so sorry for the wait!

I can explain the process for you and get screenshots to hopefully help out, and if you have any problems with it you can let me know!

You'll need:

An android phone and a way to transfer files between your phone and computer(a wire is preferable in my experience)

I think you need a windows or linux computer? I'm not sure if the necessary programs will work on mac.

AssetStudioGUI https://github.com/Perfare/AssetStudio

UnityLive2DExtractor https://github.com/Perfare/UnityLive2DExtractor/releases/tag/v1.0.7

First you'll need to transfer the game files to your computer. I assume you already have that part done so I won't walk you through it.

Next go into AssetStudioGUI and go into 'Debug' and turn off 'Show error message' to save yourself some headache

Now you need to open the folder with the files in AssetStudio. This will probably take a long time. Get yourself something to eat or play a game or read or something!

Once everything is loaded you'll need to find one of the live2d files. For tokyo debunker the easiest way to do this is just to go to "Filter Type" and filter to "Texture2D". I don't know the file structure or naming convention for Twst, but the image you're looking for should look kind of like this

Right click and choose "Show original file".

Copy the FOLDER that this file is in to another folder.

If you haven't already extracted L2DExtractor, do that now. You should have these files.

Open the L2DExtractor FOLDER in another tab or window. Then drag the folder that you copied before to "UnityLive2DExtractor.exe" in the UnitLive2DExtractor folder that you have in a separate window. (You can also copy it and right click→paste it INTO THE EXE FILE if dragging is difficult.)

You should get a command prompt(the black box with text in it) with the name of the asset in it. Wait until it says "Done!" Close the command prompt.

Go to the folder that you put the asset folder in. You should now have a new folder named "Live2DOutput". That will have a folder in it. Go into the folder until you find the asset you just extracted.

You should now have the .moc3 file, textures, and motions! You can open the moc3 file with Live2D's Cubism Viewer which you get off of their website. It's free.

If you don't have the expressions in there you'll have to extract them separately! I always have to extract them separately and I'm not sure why, but it's easy enough once you know where they are.

Open AssetStuido back up and change your filter to "MonoBehavior"

Search "exp3"

Order by Container and find the character character and outfit you just extracted(in this case I just need to find "romeo_academy". The name of the asset you extracted should be in the container path.

Highlight only the .exp3 files that go to this asset.

Go to "Options→Export options"

Change "Group exported assets by" to "Do not group". If you want to do any datamining in the future you're probably going to want to change this back to "container path" or else you'll just get a ton of files in one folder, so don't forget you did this! If you're only using assetstudio to get the l2d files however you can leave it as is.

Press "OK"

Right click on one of your highlighted exp3 files

Choose "Export selected assets"

Navigate to the folder with the moc3 file in it. Make a new folder. The name doesn't matter because you'll have to manually move the expressions into l2d every time, but I just use "expressions" for simplicity

Extract the exp3 files into here.

Once they're extracted you can select them all at once and drag them into the Cubism Viewer window OF THE CORRECT CHARACTER. This will instantly import all of the expressions.

You're done! You can view and play with them all you want. But you'll have to do every character individually and then export their expressions separately.

Hope that helps. If you need anymore help let me know.

[gamesception]

This has been around for a few months, but I'm only just hearing about it. Artic Base for homebrew 3ds lets your physical 3ds connect wirelessly to a modified version of the Citra 3ds emulator (available for android, linux, mac, and windows), so that the emulator can read game files from the 3ds and write save files back to it. You are emulating the game - contrary to some youtube videos you are NOT streaming the game from the 3ds - but all the files are taken from and go back to the 3ds, so there's no piracy involved and no need to find or download roms. Unless the games on your 3ds are themselves pirated, in which case shame on you you naughty child!

This allows a switch-like experience where you can play a game portably on your 3ds, then when you get home boot up the same game and the same save file to play on a bigger screen in higher resolution with a more comfortable controller via citra, saving your game back to the 3ds. It also lets you take advantage of Citra's ability to play multiplayer online even though the 3ds servers are down by emulating a local connection over the internet. It's also an easy option to stream or record gameplay if you're into that without the trouble of installing a capture card mod onto your 3ds.

Now, granted, this was all already possible by copying save files back and forth from your 3ds memory card to your computer, but to do that you still had to go through the bother of setting up citra and getting your game files on there - either by finding roms or by dumping the files yourself. That could be a pretty significant hassle, but Artic base handles it all for you.

There is a downside - every time you load or save anything in your game, that data has to be transfered between your 3ds and Citra over wifi, which does add a delay and some slowdown whenever that's happening. But most of the time gameplay runs very smoothly.

Anyway, Artic Base requires a modded 3ds. Instructions can be found HERE. The process isn't very difficult, but read the directions carefully and take your time, as there's always a risk of breaking a device when installing custom firmware if you mess something up. Don't rely on video guides for this process! if the video is out of date, it might give you instructions that are no longer correct for the current methods and files!

Even if you're not interested in Citra, modding adds so much utility to the 3ds that you really should look into it if you have one. Button remapping, using larger memory cards (I wouldn't go over 128gigs), backing up save files, backing up entire games so you don't lose access to them if the aging cartridges go bad, even community ports of entire games like Doom or Off or Fallout, access to the pretendo network which is slowly rebuilding online functionality for 3ds and wii, the ability to stream from your computer to your 3ds, access to h-shop to download game updates and patches no longer available from nintendo after the e-shop's closure, and so much more.

Anyway, once you have a modded 3ds, Artic Base can be found on the Universal Updater app. I prefer the .cia version over the .3dsx version, so you don't have to go through Homebrew Launcher every time you want to use it. If you want to install it manually instead, it can be found HERE.

You also need a modified version of Citra to connect to your 3ds, which can be found HERE.

[bleghablah]

friendship ended with VS Code. holy shit, friendship majorly ended with VS Code. I regret ever saying it was a decent text editor.

I was stuck on windows during a meeting I didn't have to be a part of and had a huge data migration looming over my head so I wrote a shell script in VS Code to transfer the files, SCP'd it over to my RedHat machine, and got it started. I don't know where things went wrong, but somewhere between saving it in VS Code and transferring it to my Linux box the formatting got fucked, and so twenty minutes after deploying my script I checked the progress and it appended spaces onto the end of alllllll of my copied directories.

My unscheduled downtime of my (luckily backup) production server was prolonged an extra half hour as I manually CP'd the files by hand, and tomorrow I'm going to have to do so much cleanup.

luckily my server is back up and my new environment doesn't have to go live until EOD tomorrow, but hooooly fuck, next time I'm just going to ssh into my Ubuntu box and use Nano (fuck vi and emacs)

[felixcloud6288]

I've managed to install Linux Mint on the new PC and am working on transferring files from the old computer. Every time I tried to do a backup restore, something went horribly wrong so I'm forced to just copy and paste files over instead.

Meanwhile, I'm just dealing with trying to get drivers working. Firefox is dealing with constant issues with text and the PC isn't recognizing my ethernet cable.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

So if you want to know how "functional" Windows 11 is, I just got a new laptop, and while I was tearing its guts out to make Windows 11 less obtrusive and ad-ridden, I discovered a problem.

Modern versions of Windows have a built-in system for transferring files to other Windows computers on the same network -- you mark certain folders as "shared", and then you can just open them on another computer from the "Network" window after entering a password.

Well, I could connect from my desktop to my laptop just fine; however, I had a devil of a time connecting from my laptop to my desktop. Didn't matter what username or password I used; just "your credentials are incorrect."

Then something occurred to me.

See, I'd wanted a specific home directory name. This entailed 1. logging into my Microsoft account the first time I started my laptop, thus creating an account on the laptop with an automatically-selected name; 2. creating a second administrator account with the username/home-directory-name I wanted, without an associated Microsoft account; 3. deleting the first account, 4. connecting the second account with my Microsoft account. I did this on my laptop, and I'd done this on the desktop.

Thing is, in step 2 there, I'd given the second account the same password as my Microsoft account, because I knew I was just going to overwrite it. See where this is going? The correct password was not the password for my Microsoft account, but rather, the password which I'd used to create the Windows account without the Microsoft account. And I've changed my Microsoft password multiple times since getting the current desktop computer.

Solution:

Remove the Microsoft account from my desktop. This entails setting a new password.

Have the laptop connect to the desktop with that new password.

Add the Microsoft account back to the desktop.

Anyway this might be the straw that makes the camel start looking into Linux.

[techav]

Revisiting Wrap030 Disk Access

I have more ideas for projects than time or budget to work on them. Already this year I've gone completely through the design process for two new large homebrew projects that are currently too large for my project budget, plus a few small ones I never got around to ordering. So rather than spend more than I should taking on a new project, I decided to revisit an existing one.

It's been over a year since I last worked on the original Wrap030 project — my old stack-of-boards MC68030 system. Its current configuration includes the main board with CPU, ROM, RAM, UART, & glue logic; a hand-wired breakout board to add a second UART; a custom video output board; and a mezzanine board with FPU and provision for an IDE disk that is not yet working. It has been functional in this configuration since last February.

My goal for this project from the beginning was to build something capable of running a proper operating system, like Unix System V or Linux. To do that though, I'm going to need to get disk access working.

I had started on disk access, but didn't quite have it functional when I turned my focus to integrating all of boards into the single Wrap030-ATX motherboard. I had added IDE cycles to the CPLD on the mezzanine board, and had added a few rough drafts of disk functions to my ROM. I set the project aside when I realized my function for checking dish presence was reporting a disk was present when there wasn't one.

I have worked with IDE before — my original 68000 project had an IDE port on it. I had gotten that project to the point where I could read a sector of data from the disk, but never could wrap my head around how to actually navigate even a simple file system like FAT16. It was this code that I had adapted for Wrap030, so when it didn't work, I assumed it was a problem with my logic.

Turns out I had just inadvertently clobbered a register in the disk check function. The logic worked just fine. I was able to write a couple quick BASIC programs to read a sector of data and even run code from the boot sector.

My assembly function for reading data from disk however was still not working.

I tried rewriting it.

I tried rewriting it in C instead of assembly.

I tried again, and again, and again. I added delays and loops and print statements and everything I could think of. I scoured datasheets, read though all the different release versions of the ATA specification, ported code from other projects, looked at every example of reading from an IDE disk I could find.

No matter what I did, I always got the same result.

This did not make any sense. Reading from an IDE disk involves setting up the sector address, the number of sectors to transfer, sending a read command, and then reading the IDE data port 256 times per sector. Each time the data port is read, the disk will give another 16-bit word of data. But for some reason, all I was getting was the first word of data returned 256 times.

There is nothing in the specification to explain this.

I knew there was nothing wrong with my logic, because I could read the data just fine with my BASIC program or by manually poking the right addresses using the monitor. Maybe there was some edge case affecting timing when running in assembly, but even adding delay loops and print statements didn't have any effect.

I reached out for help. I got great feedback on my read functions and my timing and how IDE and CompactFlash cards worked, but still could not solve this problem.

But then @ZephyrZ80 noticed something —

I had shared my code and was explaining that I had added some extra NOP instructions to enforce minimum time between IDE access cycles in PIO-0 mode. At 25MHz with cache enabled, the 68030 can complete an instruction in as little as 80ns, so a few NOPs would ensure enough time elapsed between cycles.

With cache enabled.

… cache enabled.

… cache.

The 68030 has 256 bytes of data cache. My disk read function is running in a tight loop that only really hits a few addresses; not nearly enough to invalidate and flush the entire 256 bytes of cache. The CPU does have a cache inhibit signal to use with peripherals that return new data on subsequent access to the same address, but it turns out I was only asserting it when accessing the UART on the main board.

It's a simple enough hypothesis to test. When I initially added support in my ROM for enabling cache at startup, I included user functions for enabling and disabling cache.

… It was cache all along.

Now I need to add some way to inhibit cache while accessing the IDE port, and then I can move on to trying to use the disk for loading programs.

[andmaybegayer]

After I deleted a bunch of projects (thankfully non-critical, though representing a great deal of work in total) during a recent fresh OS install, I realized that my backup practices are practically non-existent. Any tips or sources on getting started making, and eventually automating, effective backups?

I am stealing the concept here from jwz's backup guide, but I am recommending different tools, focusing on personal files only, and also addressing Windows. jwz's guide is a good reference:

Doing a way, way better job than most people of backing up one single system is very easy. Let us begin.

The most basic step of having decent backups is getting your hands on two external hard drives at least big enough to hold your entire system, and putting a label on them that says "BACKUP ONLY DO NOT USE FOR ANYTHING ELSE I AM BEING FOR REAL HERE"

Once you've got those, plug one into your system wherever it spends the most time. If you have a desktop then that's solved, if it's a laptop hopefully you already have a USB hub you plug it into when you sit down to work or whatever and you can just leave it there.

Now set up regular scheduled backups to that device. On Windows and Mac, there's a built in tool for backing up your system to an external drive. We'll assume that you just want to back up your user files on Windows and Linux, since doing full system backups isn't tricky but is kind of unnecessary.

(Ugh. Windows seems to be trying to phase out Windows Backup and Restore in favour of their File History thing. That's annoying, let me log in to windows and check how this actually works. Mac in the meantime)

Mac has Time Machine. Time Machine is extremely good, and you can tell Time Machine to save its backups to a disk. Point Time Machine at your external hard drive and tell it to schedule a backup however frequently you want. If anything goes wrong in the future, you can ask Time Machine to look at that backup disk and it'll show you a few versions of whatever you backed up there. I'm not a Mac user but I think you can even use Time Machine to transfer between an old computer and a new one.

Windows now has File History which I have never used in my life, they added it after I stopped using Windows. Same idea though, pick some folders and back them up to an external storage device. If anything goes wrong, use File History to go back through that device and find the version of the file you wanted. I don't know if there's still a way to access the older Backup and Restore system.

On Linux, my favoured way to manage simple desktop backups is Deja Dup, a GUI for Duplicity. Duplicity can do a lot more than just backup to a disk, but we'll start there. Install Deja Dup, open it up, and follow the prompts to back up your user files to the external drive. Deja Dup can also do backups to remote storage servers, Google Drive/Onedrive, and commercial storage providers like Amazon and Backblaze. It will even encrypt your backups if you are worried about Amazon spying on your files or whatever. If something goes wrong, point Deja Dup at your backup drive and it will offer you a suite of restore options covering a few versions.

Now, you have a permanently plugged in hard drive that will always get rolling backups you can restore from. These aren't safe from, say, ransomware, or your house burning down, but at least you won't lose anything when you update a computer or accidentally delete something and have an ohshit moment.

Now you take that other drive you bought, and do the same backup you're already doing to that. Now you go put it somewhere else where it's readily accessible and won't be accidentally used for anything, keep it at the office, give it to your dad, whatever. Set a reminder on your phone for once a month. Once a month, go get that drive, run another backup, and put it back. You now have better backups than many medium sized businesses.

This is impractical to scale beyond one PC, but if we're being honest even when I had like half a dozen laptops, only one contained much of value. Back up the system you care about.

Don't worry too much about making sure your backups are space efficient, like, yeah it would be a good idea to exclude game installs and stuff from your backups to save space but if that sounds daunting or time consuming literally do not do it. Decision paralysis is brain poison, just back it up and sort it out later. 2TB external hard drives are cheap.

FURTHER STEPS YOU CAN TAKE:

Easy Cloud backup: Backblaze personal backup on Windows and Mac is $6/month and pretty easy to use. If you are struggling to keep track of a monthly remote backup, or you want an easy remote backup. Backblaze is a reasonably reliable company and one of the Go To Companies in the world of data reliability. Yes, it's a cloud subscription. If you don't want that don't use it.

Network backup: If you have access to a storage server, that can be a good way to make a remote backup without having to shuttle disks around. That could be a physical server if you maintain some kind of lab, or it could be a cloud storage provider like Backblaze B2 or Onedrive or whatever. Deja Dup specifically supports backing up to a lot of different network storage providers, and even if you only have a fifty or sixty gigabytes of network storage on hand, your most essential personal files can probably fit in there.

Drive failures: Eventually one of your drives will fail, either your storage drive or your backup drive. If the storage drive fails, well, that's what the backup is for, go get a replacement and restore from the backup. If your backup drive fails, well, that's why you have two of them. As soon as humanly possible go get a replacement drive, and substitute it in for the dead one.