#partition software

[find-your-software]

EaseUS Partition Master

Easily create disk partitions and manage data storage space. EaseUS Partition Master Professional is the best partition software that can quickly solve low disk space and resize partitions on hard drives and hardware RAID in Windows.

https://find-your-software.com/easeus/partition-master/

[frog707]

A noisy gong or a clanging bell

One pleasant aspect of writing an interface to an existing software library is leveraging the work that went into that library: not just the code, programming interfaces, nomenclature, troubleshooting, and documentation, but other aspects as well.

Jorrit, the main author of Jolt Physics, has put effort into measuring and optimizing performance, and it shows. Happily, I get to build on his work, so I can perform fun experiments with very little effort.

For instance, modern computers implement performance-enhancing extensions to Intel's X86 instruction-set architecture (ISA). Jolt has code in place to exploit these extensions, when present. Also, Jolt comes with a small collection of workloads for measuring performance.

Recently I began investigating how I might boost the performance of my own project. I determined which ISA extensions my laptop supports and measured performance with and without them. There was a clear benefit on every test, in the range of 10-20%. Those tests were compiled with GCC for Linux.

Then I re-ran test on the same laptop, compiled with Clang, and saw similar benefits from ISA extensions, only the absolute performance tended to be better. And on the same laptop, compiled with Visual C++ for Windows, similar benefits, only the absolute performance tended to be worse.

I decided Clang should be my default compiler for all platforms. (Previously I'd been compiling with GCC for Linux and Visual C++ for Windows.) The switch to Clang for Linux went smoothly, but Clang for Windows caused the continuous integration (CI) job to crash.

Troubleshooting is fun, right?

Yes, but in order to troubleshoot the crash, I need to recreate it locally, not in CI. To do that, I need to install Clang in my local Windows environment.

How does one install Clang on Windows? The official instructions say to download the source code from GitHub and compile it using Visual C++ (!)

I tried that last night, and it took a long time. I went to dinner, and when I came back, the build job had failed, apparently because it filled up my C: disk partition with temporary files.

Today I plan to try again, but in a larger partition and building only the compiler driver and front end. And if that fails, I might try downloading binaries via tinyurl.com .

But the idea of downloading binaries, built by strangers, from a URL that could point *anywhere* on the Internet ... in 2025 that's a damned scary thought.

[relto]

testing around with windows task automation (the goal is to eventually use this to regularly backup files via scp), and i really enjoy that they put so much work into developing and maintaining this feature that it bricks my laptop for a solid 10 seconds every time i take any action in that window.

[mbishiri]

Repair Your PC and Access Your Data with Active@ Data Studio

Active@ Data Studio provides you with a useful set of tools for accessing your data and repairing your PC in the event that Windows fails to start up and you cannot find any other way to access your data.

[xiao-come-home]

stone faced anon (💫 anon if it's free) here; as someone who has a hyperfixation in IT and coding I also think it would be very funny if Boothill had an s/o who wasn't necessarily a mechanic but like a software engineer or just a real big nerd about coding or something. He'll be experiencing a malfunction or a memory leak and go "oh yeah this happens sometimes don't worry about it" and then 10 minutes later he's sitting down plugged into a laptop listening to his s/o rant about how terrible his code is (crack hc: boothill's code was written in javascript) and how it's a wonder he hasn't bricked* yet

Would also be mad funny if Boothill ever got hacked and his s/o basically says "no you're not" and uses a previously made system restore point or something because of course they would both use and design every feature imaginable to keep Boothill in control of his own body, can you imagine the stress that losing control would cause him?? Even better if whoever designed him originally intentionally left a backdoor incase he ever went against their orders and when they try to use it his s/o just goes "oh yeah I quarantined and encrypted all the old files related to that backdoor and whatever else you were planning on a partition as bait and personally rewrote every file and function involved since your code is *an actual crime against technology*. by the way i'm going to go ahead and format that partition i mentioned, boothill- we won't be needing anything on it now that we can trace whoever made it. trust me, this won't be happening ever again."

*(bricking is a term mostly used to refer to hardware that's been rendered basically completely nonfunctional and beyond saving by using it wrong, mostly by messing with system files. Kinda like how windows can't even repair itself if you delete the system32 folder. Though i guess you could still install it with a usb stick if you formatted your pc- i digress you get what I mean. also since this almost happened to me recently: if you manage to fill up a hard drive to the brim, with literally 0 bytes of space left, that bricks it. reminder to check your storage thoroughly and often!)

Honestly wow I read it all and I'm a little bit speechless 🥹 thank you 💫 anon, it was great 🙏

Boothill would DEFINITELY appreciate a s/o who's a tech savvy in general! I think at some point, he'd be pretty shocked you're so knowledgeable and just sit there, listening to you rant.. and just letting you do your thing.

Don't get me wrong, he definitely knows a lot about his body, his system and the way he works, but once you start to get in the zone and explain stuff to him, berate his code even, he just sits next to you, plugged in to your laptop, leaning his cheek against his hand listening to you like he obviously understands everything you say.

His other hand begins to gently play with a stand of your hair, humming deeply when the soft clicking sounds of your keyboard reach his ears; he twirls your hair with his fingers and chuckles, "mmm, really now?" Boothill raises an eyebrow, "encryptin' this, encryptin' that... How about we do somethin' more fun instead?" And then you shut him down from your laptop (😭).

Jokes aside, he'd feel very secure with you especially when he first got his new body, just knowing you'll probably fix a lot of things that could possibly blow up his face in no time, maybe even improve his life even more.

[foone]

so when I was, like, 16 I was working on some software that I was releasing to a forum. I put out a version 0.1, and I was planning on releasing a version 0.2 with a bunch more features.

but then I made a mistake re-partitioning my hard drive, and deleted all my source code. all that visual basic code: GONE!

but the real weird part is that I didn't tell the forum this. See, I had told them I was 26 for some reason, thinking that no one would trust software from a teenager (they were all mostly teenagers as well, so I don't know why I thought this). So instead I told them that my apartment caught on fire. I didn't have an apartment, I lived with my parents (because I was 16).

I'm not really sure why I lied about that.

[ravelsquadespresso]

WIP Title Ask Game: Emelina (yes).

@avas-poltergeist said:

Thanks for the ask :)). You may remember writing a post about how Emelina is sorry she’d forgotten merciful Heinrix, but no such thing for the ultra-dogmatic Heinrix? That post set me off to start writing on the game from the middle of the story and it’s fun 😊.  Added some additional cataclysmic activity (I mean, she pushed for the phase transition with all four limbs and the sun already is about to explode when we show up in our ship, so some ceiling crashing is the right thing to do). Also, I was a partition recovery software in my previous life, so I write in patches.

Finally, made her to become a warp ghost after she is dead. That allows her to recover her in-life memories and provide some dramatic commentary!

Some snippets here:

[[Possibly lengthy not yet written Phton stuff ending with in-game mercy killing]]

Above me the argument lingers.

“But why? I’d given her shelter, we could have saved…”

“And you know a few places that could use a new sun, isn’t that right?”

“What?!”

“I am sparing you the fate of Winterscale. He got lucky—thanks to the faithful sod in his retinue.”

“That’s not what I— You…” Her voice cracks and stumbles.

Holding back tears? Yes.

“She was your… friend. Your teacher. You said—”

“She was an unrepentant, stubborn heretic who defended her pact with the Ruinous Powers till the very end. Giving her shelter was never an option. Or did you want to take part in the interrogation, Lord Captain?”

A key player in the Expanse and still confused about who calls the shots. We never relinquish prisoners. We never consult anyone on what is to be done—be they the Emperor himself. But then, in the Imperium, delusional nobles are more of a rule than an exception. More so when they’re let loose on the fringes of civilization with an Emperor-signed leave note.

“All your Inquisition are just a bunch of sick blood-thirsty freaks. All of you.”

A brief charged stillness follows, broken only by the shuffling of the navis imperialis elder and the Drukhari dog he holds on the leash. The elder fears what the inquisitorial response to the insults might be. The dog is greedy for a bloodbath.

Instead of a rebuke, Heinrix laughs. Stifled and forced at first, but freer and freer as it builds—until nothing holds it back. He laughs and laughs, and the air around him grows leaden.

“You’re so very right, Lord Captain,” he says finally, catching his breath, wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s exactly who we are.”

Of course. Monsters make the best monster-hunters. That’s what it means to keep the Imperium safe from the curse of mutants, xenos, and heretics.  And who better to kill a witch… than another witch? What better instrument than one forged from the same filth?

“Well,” she says, voice brittle, turning away to hide her face, “if you’ve filled your murder quota for today, we’re leaving. Abelard—take Marazhai. Clear out the mandrakes. We’ll need the shuttle for survivors. Or do you want to incinerate them too, Heinrix?”

“These are technically your subjects, Lord Captain,” he pretends to ignore the barb. “I know you won’t let me incinerate them. I will have them watched.”

Meaning: they will mysteriously vanish when no one is looking.

“Word of advice,” he murmurs once the navis imperialis and the xenos are out of earshot, his voice like a hand around the throat. “Most inquisitors would not tolerate such speech. Even from a peer of the Imperium. You don’t get to call the Emperor’s servants monsters and freaks. Luckily for you, I am a very patient inquisitor. But you, you should control yourself, lest you commit the worst kind of heresy in public”.

“Of course,” she snaps, seizing the opportunity. “Because calling you what you really are—a bunch of murderous fanatics—is obviously the most horrible thing about this situation.”

“Amanar,” his voice softens, rife with fear now. “I… I want you to survive. I only want you to remain well.”

He steals a glance at what used to be my body. A crooked, broken husk—more metal inlays and cogitator interfaces than flesh. Disfigured by memory banks. A husk, a discarded cocoon.

He means:

I want you to remain. For me. With me.

Everything I was denied—I want to keep.

Obsessive devotion.

“Survival is not life,” Amanar says simply, and hits a pile of rubble in frustration. “Seems we’ll have to go back to the Webway if we want to live.”

Webway.

They’ve been places together. She may have once believed him human—seen the spark of sentimentality that hindered his career since the day he came to my tutelage, a broken youth of twenty-something. The same thing that stopped him from ripping out contents of my banks through Eighth’s action.

Whatever he wants to say, there is no time.

The avalanche is a small, quiet thing at first—microcracks running through the stones, the blocks, the carrier wires of the dome. It creeps into the caverns, the archeofactorums, the cemeteries—crashing into the planet’s warped crust.

Catastrophes are as sure as the universe itself.

The diviner witch feels it first. Noradrenaline surges on the crest of insight. Pupils eat up the irises. She looks up in awe, her gaze meeting the falling plinth and stone blocks—and she can’t even scream.

[[some not yet written action here, after which our somewhat stoned heroes and heroines manage to escape to some deep caverns where they need to take some rest and have an adult talk about wtf just happened. There is a cool campsite with an interesting cave bear-proof flaming food storages and wall graffiti by Chaos Banksy]]

“You’re afraid of me”, he says, resigned.

It was inevitable. Expected. Whatever she’d seen in him—a boy who loved riding with his sisters through the Guisornian fields of dandelions, a regicide dork, a battle-brother at her back—all of it would melt away, revealing the terror within, a cursed blade in the hand of the Ordo. A weapon, implacable against the Emperor’s enemies, be they the creatures of the Immaterium or the traitors within. Cold steel and stone, unmoved, unfeeling, striking with precision.

An acolyte of the Holy Ordos is not anyone’s friend, but a friend-shaped surgical tool.

I would know - after all I was the one who brainwashed him, broke him, rebuilt him and made him into this.

In saturnine silence, he dips his hand in the pale copper of her hair, letting the strands run between his fingers. The mind knows itself to be a monster, but the body refuses to surrender the memories of embrace and warmth and comfort. Of acceptance and recognition.

When she speaks into the stifled stillness, it’s but a hushed murmur.

“Of you. For you. For the choices that are dealt you, where mercy killing your mother is your best option.”

That is not fear, but anger she is describing, tired, barely smoldering. Wearing her down.

His mother. Sweet child of whatever pleasure resort for noble debutants you are, his mother was I not. More like his evil step-aunt—the kind that shows up at the door with veritas-laced apples and a warped loom of eternal data-dreams.

[and on, and on this continues, but ends happily (relatively speaking), I promise. All will be well.]

[andmaybegayer]

Any recommendations/cautions about using Alpine Linux on the desktop? It's always intrigued me and you're the only person I've seen post about it

Alpine is pretty good for desktop, very stable, good security practice, professional development philosophy, broad package availability. You will run into some very obvious pitfalls, although they can mostly be obviated by using some modern applications.

The Alpine wiki is a little sparse and at times can be weirdly focussed, like spending a lot of the installation page talking about the very specific usecase of a diskless install. Nonetheless, it's quite good and should be your first port of call. A lot of the things I'm mentioning here are well covered in the article on Daily Driving for Desktop use. I'm basically just editorializing here.

The installation procedure is command-line only, but pretty straightforward, you run setup-alpine and follow the prompts, assuming you want a basic system. If you need special disk partitioning, you'll usually have to do it yourself. There's a whole whackload of helpers to get you set up, like setup-desktop which will help you install any of 'gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway', or 'lxqt'. Most of these are called by setup-alpine for you, but not the desktop one. You can call it at any time though.

Most obviously, musl libc, no glibc. Packaged software will work fine. There's a compatibility shim called gcompat that will usually work, but might fall apart on more complicated software expecting glibc, for example I've had no luck running glibc AppImages. For more complex software, Flatpaks are a good option, e.g. Steam runs great on Alpine as a Flatpak, I run the Homestuck Companion Flatpak. Your last ditch is containerization and chroots, which are fortunately really easy to handle, just install podman and Distrobox and you can run anything that won't run on Alpine inside a Fedora or Debian or Whatever container seamlessly with your desktop.

Less obviously: no systemd. Systemd underpins some really common features of modern Linux and not having it around means you have to use a few different tools that are anywhere from comparable to a little worse for some tasks. Packaged applications will work smoothly, just learn the OpenRC invocations, Alpine has a really great wiki. For writing your own services, it's a lot more limited than SystemD, you're not going to have full access to like, udev functionality, instead you get the good but kind of weird eudev system.

If you're mainly installing things from the repos you'll barely notice the difference, other than that every package is split up into three, <package>, <package>-docs, and <package>-dev. This is a container-y thing, to allow Alpine container images to install the smallest possible packageset. If you need man pages you'll have to install them specifically.

Alpine has a very solid main repo, and a community repo that's plenty good, and worth enabling on any desktop system. It'll generally be automatically enabled when you set up a desktop anyway, but just a notice if you're going manual. You can run Stable alpine, which updates every six months, or if you want you can run Edge, which is a rolling release of packages as they get added. Lots of very up-to-date software, and pretty stable as these go. You can go from Stable->Edge pretty easily, going back not so much.

There's also the Testing repo, only available on Edge, which I don't really recommend, especially since apkbuild files are so easy to run if you just need one thing that has most of its dependencies met.

Package management is with APK, which is fast and easy to work with. The wiki page will cover you.

Side note: if you want something more batteries-included, you could look at Postmarket, an Alpine derivative mainly focussed on running on smartphones but that is a pretty capable desktop OS, and which has a fairly friendly setup process. I run this on an ARM Chromebook and it's solid. Installation requires some reading between the lines because it's intended for the weird world of phones, so you'll probably want to follow the PMBootstrap route.

[warningsine]

All right, since I bombarded a poor mutual yesterday...

Privacy is not security and security is not privacy. These terms are not interchangeable, but they are intrinsically linked.

While we're at this, anonymity =/= security either. For example, Tor provides the former, but not necessarily the latter, hence using Https is always essential.

It is impossible to have privacy without security, but you can have security without privacy.

A case in point is administrators being able to view any data they want due to their full-access rights to a system. That being said, there are ethics and policies that usually prevent such behavior.

Some general tips:

Operating System: Switch to Linux. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are widely used for a reason. Fedora too. And don't worry! You can keep your current operating system, apps and data. If you're on a Mac computer, you can easily partition your hard drive or SSD by using Disk Utility. If you're on Windows, you can follow this guide.

You want to go a step further? Go with Whonix or Tails. They're Linux distributions as well, but they're both aiming for security, not beauty so the interface might not be ideal for everyone. Many political activists and journalists use them.

You want anonymity? Then you need to familiarize yourself with Tor. Also, Tor and HTTPS and Tor’s weaknesses. When you're using it, don't log in to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. and make sure to stay away from Java and Javascript, because those things make you traceable.

Alternatives for dealing with censorship? i2p and Freenet.

Is ^ too much? Welp. All right. Let's see. The first step is to degoogle.

Switch to a user-friendly browser like Firefox (or better yet LibreWolf), Brave or Vivaldi. There are plenty of hardened browsers, but they can be overwhelming for a beginner.

Get an ad blocker like Ublock Origin.

Search Engine? StartPage or Duckduckgo. SearXNG too. Like I said degoogle.

Get a PGP encrypted e-mail. Check Protonmail out.

There's also Tutamail that doesn't cover PGP, but uses hybrid encryption that avoids some of the cons of PGP.

Skiff mail is also a decent option.

Use an e-mail aliasing service such as SimpleLogin or AnonAddy.

Check OpenPGP out. Claws Mail is a good e-mail client for Windows and Linux, Thunderbird for Mac OS.

Gpg4win is free and easy to use for anyone that wants to encrypt/decrypt e-mails.

Instead of Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Telegram etc. use Signal for your encrypted insant messaging, voice and video calls.

Get a metadata cleaner.

Get a firewall like Opensnitch, Portmaster or Netguard which can block Internet for trackers.

Alternatively, go with a private DNS that blocks these trackers. NextDNS is a good paid service. Rethink a good free option.

Replace as many of your applications as you can with FOSS (free and open source) ones. Alternativeto can help you.

Always have automatic updates on. They are annoying af, I know, but they are necessary.

Keep your distance from outdated software.

Always have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled.

Do not use your administrator account for casual stuff. If you're on Linux, you probably know you can be sudo, but not root.

On Linux distributions use AppArmor, but stay away from random antivirus scanners. Other distributions default to SELinux, which is less suited to a beginner.

Never repeat your passwords. If you can't remember them all, use a password manager like KeePass.

Encrypt your drive.

Honestly, VPNs have their uses and ProtonVPN, Mullvad and Windscribe are decent, but eh. If you don't trust your ISP, why would you trust the VPN provider that claims they don't log you when you can't verify such a thing?

[techav]

On Boot Failures

Headlines everywhere on Friday, the 19th of July, 2024 were about the massive computer outages caused by a faulty update to the CrowdStrike antivirus software. It seems some config file choked up a kernel module causing Windows machines to fail with the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

I recently started a new job and was perhaps a little smug in the fact that in my new job I am no longer responsible for hundreds of endpoints running CrowdStrike.

Karma's a bitch though.

I shut down my home PC Friday night to install a memory upgrade and after powering it back on I was met with the very same Blue Screen of Death.

"A critical process died" it told me, with no information about what said process actually was.

And no log files.

And no dump files.

System Restore failed. sfc /scannow failed. dism /cleanup-image failed. Everything I could find failed. I couldn't even just reinstall Windows over the existing installation because apparently that requires being already booted into the OS that currently isn't running.

The log files from dism led me to believe the problem might be related to registry corruption, but my attempts at replacing system registry files with clean ones from an install wim were not successful.

I was grasping at straws. Starting from scratch with a clean install is daunting and would have set me back weeks. I was contemplating pulling out an old SSD and just running with Linux Mint for a while.

Through desperation, I downloaded Hiren's BootCD PE so I could poke around a little more. None of the tools included there were able to resolve the issue either, but just having access to a standard Explorer shell and a web browser helped.

Finally I came across ShadowCopyView, a program that can explore the System Restore images that Windows (can) take regularly. In one last desperate effort, I moved out all of the system registry files from C:\Windows\System32\config and used ShadowCopyView to replace them with copies from an automatic restore point the previous Monday.

That actually did the trick. I was able to reboot into my primary Windows partition and sign in like normal.

I have no idea what may have been lost in a few days of registry updates, and I have no idea what may have caused the problem to begin with. But I am happy I was able to find something in the end that would get me back into my system without having to reinstall everything from scratch.

... Although maybe I should anyway.

And should anyone encounter something similar in the future, these were the kind of errors I was seeing that a Google search wasn't really coming up with anything useful:

dism.log: failed to open registry root

dism.log: failed to query for path to user profiles directory

dism.log: failed to load the default user profile registry hive

dism.log: failed to load offline store from boot directory

srttrail.txt: pending package install

strtrail.txt: boot manager generic failure

[daemonhxckergrrl]

Linux ask game!!

Can I get an order of a 2,8,13 and 15, please?

woagh, cats can tessellate ? d: sure thing, coming right up !!!

2 - what was your biggest linux fuckup?

2: most of what I do is real cursed lmao but ig the time I deleted the wrong partition on the family computer. thankfully, extundelete saved my bacon.

8 - do you know your way around vim keybinds?

8: I consider myself vim-proficient. navigation, selection, substitution, motions, split/tab/buffer management, basic regexp. my window manager, browser, file manager, shell, and a buncha other stuff all have vim-style interfaces. I'm not a vim master though

13- Xenia or Tux?

13: Xenia - she's a tranny like me !! child me didn't vibe w/ her original art, but that was a familiarity and autism issue

15- stock distro or hours of yak shaving?

15: I'm a serial yak shaver xD but I'm getting closer to comprehensive dotfiles I can pull from. like my ideal is an installation process of

distro installer

software install helper

dotfiles pull

also I currently main void soo stock would be TTY and gnu utils (unless we say stock includes anything in repos but default configs only)

[visual-latex]

House interior at night - Doubutsu no Mori e+ (Gamecube, 2003)

Study; pencil, colored pencil and watercolor

Original screenshot:

First couple layers:

I paint very slowly.

Doubutsu no Mori e+ is basically the North American version of the original Animal Crossing (i.e. with new American holidays), translated back to Japanese, with the Japan-exclusive furniture added back in, as well as some extra content. It is the most complete edition of the original Animal Crossing, and all combined it feels a bit like a crunchier New Leaf, which is funny.

The red text on the partitioning screen reads "Nintendo" and "software company". Except software (sofuto) is written backwards??? for some reason?????? Like, it's "tofuso", not "sofuto"......

And the green text reads "Marufuku".

(Warning: We are now entering a tangent zone)

I believe this is a reference to a real company, Marufuku (no relation to Marufuku Ramen), which was a telephone subscription rights/financial services company. This business model (I'm not explaining this) collapsed when Japan's very... particular landline system was abolished, shortly after the time of the original Doubutsu no Mori's release.

(photo source: hoshner_sigmaniax on Flickr)

Although defunct, Marufuku is still known for their abundant and iconic red-and-white signs. There's even a whole site dedicated to them, which estimates there were originally about 500,000 of such signs (although they can't estimate how many have survived). Obviously the item here has a different color scheme, maybe I'm off base here, but I can't imagine what else this could be referencing?

In the painting I tried to make it look more like the real sign font, but (being from the US) I didn't catch the reference until I had already started on it, and my handwriting is bad at any rate, so the result is a little... well, it's a bit wobbly.

I'm surprised the developers put a real company name in here, but it's so tiny, and I can't imagine Marufuku was in any financial position to file suit over this kind of thing anyway. It's weird to think about, but it's entirely possible the video game item will outlast the real-world Marufuku signs...

By the way, the version of this item in New Leaf has overwritten all of the text with what seems to be nonsense (although the Nintendo portion is still somewhat recognizable).

Anyway I hope you like my house

[woohoojuicesimoleons2]

Eventually I'll make another master post about how to improve your PC and game performance. Like I've mentioned before, I primarily played on an iMac back in the day, and had a Windows OS installed through Bootcamp by partitioning the HD, so I was more familiar with only the software side of things when it cam to Windows boxes.

As much as I loved my Mac, money wise, this PC was the better investment. I'm able soup this thing up to my liking, no proprietary BS like with Mac. And I can't wait to share what all I've learned. But time and laziness and the want to play my game lmao, I'll work on it eventually I promise.

This is an old ass game and there are so many tips and tricks to get this baby running smooth like butter, even on non-high end PCs.

[frog707]

Wilma again

I have ongoing issues with the Linux Mint installation on the laptop I use for software development and blogging.

You may recall I tried upgrading to version 22 (code name: Wilma), encountered a graphics regression, and had to revert the upgrade using TimeShift. Since then, my Linux experience hasn't been quite right. While troubleshooting an issue, I uninstalled Python; this broke APT, causing routine software updates to fail.

Yesterday I created a new partition on the HDD and attempted a clean install of Wilma there. After several tries, I suspect that my largest USB thumb drive (NXT brand, purchased in January 2024) suffers from data corruption.

Believe it or not, my 2nd-largest thumb drive is too small to hold the 2.9 GByte ISO image, so this morning I'm off to buy a new thumb drive.

[azspot]

Writers also obsess over the tools that might make their craft more tolerable. Quentin Tarantino writes the first drafts of his screenplays longhand; Neal Stephenson wrote The Baroque Cycle, a series of eight books set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a fountain pen. (For a while, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in Seattle exhibited his handwritten manuscript, empty ink bottles, and discarded blotting paper.) Many writers, myself included, swear by specialized writing programs such as Scrivener, which will organize research materials and partition projects into numerous pieces. Others remain loyal to whatever software they first mastered. George R. R. Martin still uses WordStar 4.0, which was originally released in 1987. He runs it on Microsoft DOS and saves his manuscripts to floppy disks. When a person is struggling to write, all of these details matter. If using a fountain pen or retreating to a mountain house can make the cognitive load of producing text even somewhat more bearable, writers will consider it.

What Kind of Writer Is ChatGPT?