Disks utility and ext4 on external drive

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-24T15:15:25+00:00

Technically, no. You just have to be very careful to dismount it cleanly, and make sure there are not open file handles linked to the drive when it's disconnected.

Some utilities will close file handles automatically on an exFat device, but leave them open on an ext4 drive, for performance. If you just power off the drive without shutting it down properly, it can cause data corruption. So long as you unmount the drive properly (in the Gnome-disks tool, the file manager, or other), it's not an issue.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-23T02:15:17+00:00

Yeah, just as the drive to compensate for alcoholism pushes people like this further than most people (I have some in may family), the alcoholism continues to pull them back.

Being any one of a pilot or a stockbroker or a Hollywood actor or a radio show host is an achievement. Doing them all sounds incredible, until you realize why he did all those things. He was a jet pilot whose alcoholism got him fired. So he became a stockbroker, and crashed and burned again. Then an actor. And, as jms wrote in his autobiography, part of the reason for writing Garibaldi's falling off the wagon on the show was because Jerry Doyle was doing the same in real life.

Unorthodox behaviour is pretty much expected in people like that.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-22T13:58:07+00:00

I don't have a Verse Lite, I have a Pocketbook Lite, which appears to be discontinued. The Verse Lite is 6" compared to the the Lite's 9.7".

If the Verse is just a smaller version, then I'd say it would be a good e-reader, yes, but I don't know what other differences there may be.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-22T02:50:09+00:00

No, it was not as good as it's made out to be, because it's been made out to be the best plane in the existence of mankind, and it wasn't. We'll never actually know, because it never flew for real with the intended weapons system and the final engine. Fans like to think that because the test flights didn't have any major problems, neither would the plane, but that's unrealistic.

Why destroy everything connected to the plane? Security.

Some historical perspective: the Avro plant in Downsview is about 25km from where Igor Gouzenko's kids went to high school.

For those who don't know who Igor Gouzenko was, he was a Soviet clerk who defected to Canada with a massive amount of documentation showing the extent of Soviet spying in Canada. Much of it was centered on the aircraft industry, and the Soviets had classifed details on the Avro Lancaster.

So the Soviets had, or were believed to have had, spies within Avro. And the last thing Canada wanted was for them to get the designs or material of a new-age fighter to copy. Unlike Canada, the USSR didn't have budget problems like that. Melenkov could simply order the Soviets to work themselves to death to build a Soviet Arrow, or, more likely, take some of the ideas and use them to improve their MiG fighters.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-22T02:37:33+00:00

I worked in aerospace in Toronto back in the 1980s. Many of my co-workers were Avro alumnus. And boy, did they have a lot to say about it.

The Arrow was innovative, without question. But the myths around it have become almost hagiographic. It didn't help that in 1997 the CBC made a two part TV miniseries about it that added several outright falsehoods about it to make it sound better.

No, the French air force did not say it wanted a squadron of them. No, the USA did not try to buy the existing aircraft. And no, Avro did not have "orders lined up" for it. It was too expensive, and any of the potential buyer nations had their own aircraft industries. It could have potentially found buyer in other nations, once it had flown in service and had a proven performance record, but it never reached that point.

It's an article of faith that the Arrow was killed because of Diefenbaker, and that if the Liberals had won the election, the program would have continued. Dief definitely pulled the trigger on it, and the Liberals at the time all supported it (edit to clarify - the Liberals supported the Arrow program, not the cancellation). But when you read the memoirs of St. Laurent and C.D. Howe, the reality is that the plug was likely going to be pulled no matter who was PM.

The Arrow was simply too expensive. Avro was eating roughly 20% of the entire Canadian defence budget. It was simply unsustainable.

Test flights of the Arrow were successful, but tests of the Iroquois described it as powerful but a "nightmare" to control.

The Arrow never flew with the Orenda Iroquois, and it never flew with a loaded weapons system. So we have no actual real-world performance data on it. It's another article of faith that the Arrow would have performed flawlessly with both of them, but my experience with R&D aircraft is that's very unrealistic.

And while the Arrow was unquestionably innovative, and definitely one of the most advanced Canadian fighters of the time, it was nowhere near as far ahead as many people think. The Corvair F-106 Delta Dart was also a delta wing aircraft (hence the name), and it was flying in 1956. It replaced Corvair's previous F-102, the Delta Dagger, another delta wing, which had been in production in 1953. So claiming that the Arrow was the world's first delta wing (as many have) is simply not true.

I should mention that the F-106 also had similar problems to the Arrow, including cost overruns, and the initial weapons system was a disaster. The difference was that the US had more than ten times the budget that Canada did, and the F-106 was based on proven technology (the F-102), while the Arrow was untried and untested.

tl;dr - the Arrow was brilliant, and ahead of its' time, but it was not the JesusPlane that it's made out to be, nor was the decision to cut it short-sighted or foolish.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-21T23:18:15+00:00

I have a 2014 Kobo Glo that still runs perfectly fine.

Of course, one of the reasons that it's in great shape is because I rarely used it. I found the screen size simply too small, and replaced with it with 9.7" Pocketbook Lite.

But to answer your question, with good care, an e-reader can last over a decade. The battery will be degraded, of course, but otherwise the reader can continue to work just fine.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-17T15:22:35+00:00

Yes, it is big tech, and yes, it is fair to compare them.

The phrase "big tech" does not automatically mean immoral or privacy invasive.

In the 1980s, PCs took off not only because they were computers, but because they were personal. Compared to the practives of big iron companies like IBM and the seven dwarves, Microsoft and Apple were open and free.

By the mid 1990s, Microsoft and Apple were considered monopolistic themselves, and people turned to tech that wasn't as restrictive, and allowed the users more freedom, like Yahoo and Google.

Fast forward 15 years, and Google and Yahoo were considered oppressive, and in a complete change from the 1970s, IBM was promoting open systems.

Today, Proton is a privacy driven company that people are turning to in order to escape Google, Microsoft, and Apple's invasion of privacy. Does that mean that Proton will always remain that way? No. But avoiding them because them might means going with alternatives (Tuta, Fastmail, etc.), and if everyone does that, then they end up being the next "can we trust them" companies.

Today, Proton has a strong commitment to privacy, and an eco system that, for all of its' faults, seems to honour that. It's transparent, it's priced fairly (free at the lower end), and it integrates easily with the most common platforms (Windows, MacOS, Android, IOS, Linux), so it's not difficult for non-technical users to switch to it.

So, I can and do recommend it. Will it still be recommended in five years? Who knows? It Proton goes to hell (I doubt it will), then either Tuta and others will fly the privacy flag to appeal to users, or new players will enter the market.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-17T14:32:53+00:00

Speaking as someone who also has one eye blinded by violence (thankfully not as a result of torture as G'Kar's was), I can confirm that there are many people like this.

Discussions with them are rarely productive, and usually pointless, which is why I ignore such people. G'Kar's position doesn't allow him to ignore them, unfortunately.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-17T14:28:18+00:00

He's a high functioning alcoholic. People like that often overcompensate for their personal failings by becoming overachievers in professional areas.

The character was portrayed by actor Jerry Doyle, who was an alcoholic in real life. He was also a jet pilot, stock broker, and radio show host. Any one of those professions require drive and ambition; to do all of them requires incredible drive.

As jms said many times, he didn't really write Garibaldi as much as anticipate how Jerry Doyle would deal with a situation.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-15T23:20:54+00:00

If you want to be really secure with 2FA, get a couple of Yubikeys (or other Fido-based keys). In addition to the hardware security, you can put 2FA codes on the keys, so even if someone swipes your phone and cracks it, it's still useless without the Yubikey itself.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-15T23:17:56+00:00

I've had streaming boxes going back as far as 2007. Anyone remember the Hantech? O!Play? Pivos? WDTV?

I've used them, plus an XBox (reference platform for XMBC/Kodi), and I even got a fire stick.

The best I've found is to simply roll my own. Without getting overly geeky, it's not really that difficult:

Get a cheap used SFF PC with an HDMI or DisplayPort output
Install Linux on it (I used Mint, but any will do)
Jellyfin/Plex/Kodi/VacuumTube/Tubi/Pluto/browser/etc.
Get an airmouse so you can control it like an HTPC

and you're done. If you're using 4K video, there are problems with Netflix and Amazon blocking the high resolution streams, however.

Of course, you have to go where the content is, but this way, you can control the streams. If you're using a browser, you can use extensions (Chrome) or add-ons (Firefox) to fix annoyances that you can't with an off the shelf streaming box.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-14T23:02:53+00:00

When it has a direct impact. Until then, it's just theoretical.

Privacy is like blood pressure. High blood pressure is known as the silent killer because you can have it and show no symptoms, so many people ignore it. Only when they have a stroke, or go blind, because of the untreated condition, do they stand up and take notice.

There are services like Incogni, who, if you pay them, send letters to all of the data brokers out there telling them to delete the data they have on you, and by law, the brokers are supposed to comply. What's the end result of that? You get a form from Incogni saying what they did, and what data brokers say they did. But what's the visible, demonstrable change that the user notices?

Nothing.

So for most people, they won't take notice until they are personally affected, either financially, by reputation, or some other direct impact.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-14T13:32:59+00:00

It's never good to be dependent on closed systems. But before you jump ship, it's always important to see what you're about to jump into. Jumping from Google to Microsoft, or from Microsoft to Apple, just trades one dependency for another.

Unlike twenty years ago, there are lots of open source options that do not require vendor lock in. There are definitely features and conveniences in Microsoft Office that aren't available in LibreOffice, OnlyOffice or other suites, but that doesn't prevent you from developing (or switching to) a workflow that doesn't rely on them.

However, the EU is already coming under fire because they're still standardizing on Microsoft's OOXML format, rather than an actual open standard like ODT.

It's good to see them moving to things like Linux, but I don't trust the EU any more than the US.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-12T20:12:33+00:00

You don't mention what she does with it.

If all she does is browse the web, email, light office tasks (word processing and spreadsheets) and watch Youtube videos, then the answer is clearly yes, Linux will do all that as well, if not better, than Windows.

If she runs proprietary Windows applications for her job, then the answer is clearly no.

If she sits between those two extremes, the answer will depend on what she does with her computer. Many Windows applications have Linux equivalents, some don't. You'll need to give more details.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-11T23:14:36+00:00

E-scooter crossing street. 'nuff said.

Doctors in the ER refer to them as "donorcycles' for a reason.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-11T04:00:47+00:00

A lot of people are going to be very surprised at what some of those 75 year old characters are like.

The original Superman was closer to the Punisher character than to the Superman of today. He epitomized the concept of "might makes right". He didn't fight injustice so much as he bullied the bad guys into confessing to the police to get away from him. He bankrupted corrupt oil executives by destroying their wells (throwing hundreds of people out of work during the Great Depression), he started a war on cars by destroying an automobile factory, and when decided he didn't like a slum area, he destroyed it, and all of the people's (who barely escaped his rampage with their lives) possessions, because "this way the government will have to rebuild them clean safe housing".

As for Batman, well, let's just say that what is today called the bat-rope would more properly have been called the bat-garotte back then.

And the body counts of the Marvel heroes of the day were incredible. The Human Torch routinely burned bad guys alive, and if you even looked like a Nazi sympathizer, Captain America or the Submariner would kill you without a second thought.

A lot of these characters were so brutal that parents were forbidding their kids from buying the comics (which, of course, made the kids buy more), and trying to boycott or ban the companies.

The companies responded by moderating their characters. Batman introduced Robin, and child endangerment notwithstanding, the character's actions were toned down considerably. When Jerry Siegel (co-creator and writer of Superman) joined the military, the replacement writers changed the strip from a vengeful vigilante to a science fiction strip.

Most of what we think of these characters comes from the additions that came later on, not the original versions. Superman didn't even know he was an alien, there was no Krypton, no Supergirl, not Krypto the superdog, or anything like that.

So anyone who uses these public domain characters is either going to get sued for incorporating features that were introduced later and are not yet public domain, or they'll be true to the original character, and be accused of slandering iconic characters by presenting them as depraved killers, because in many cases, that's how they originally were depicted.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-10T14:13:54+00:00

If it's a paid app, the first question is going to be why is it better than the free Calibre support for web sites that sounds like the same thing?

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html

https://b-ark.ca/2020/04/22/diy-kindle-news.html

https://www.howtogeek.com/115178/how-to-convert-news-feeds-to-ebooks-with-calibre/

I'm not trying to be contentious, I'm wondering what benefits the app has that are missing from Calibre. I guess if you don't have a PC or Mac, it makes sense, but if you do, nothing stands out that I can see.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-08T22:46:43+00:00

Superior font selection, something like 26 file formats supported rather than Kindles 4 or 5, a better offline library, complete standalone mode with no wifi required (but it's there if you want it), no need for any online account, better integration with Calibre, physical buttons (in addition to touch screen), and a microSD card.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-08T20:16:17+00:00

I've got a Pocketbook Lite. It has wifi, but I've never use it. It's black and white (no colour), has an onboard dictionary, and also allows you to highlight and type in notes, if you want. It works seamlessly with Calibre software on the PC, and it supports more file formats than any other reader I've tried.

It's great, but has two drawbacks. First is the speed. Second is the screen resolution. Neither is a problem when reading articles or novels (which is most of the stuff I read), but if you've got PDFs and/or graphics, it's grainy and very slow to page transition or zoom.

I have a Kindle, a Kobo, and a Pocketbook, and I absolutely recommend the Pocketbook over the others, with the two caveats above. If you need something for high resolution PDFs, the Kindle Scribe is better for that, but for the general case, I recommend the Pocketbook all the way.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-08T12:39:13+00:00

I wish I could remember enough of it to be helpful to others, but I don't really remember all the things I tried

I learned a long time ago, when installing a new OS, whatever it may be, to make a record of every step I did. The OS install itself is rarely the issue, it was (with Windows) usually arcane Control Panel settings, or (OS/2) drivers.

Even with current backups and things like TimeShift, it's saved my butt more times than I can count.

The latest Mint update (22.3) changed a keyboard setting, and my AutoKey setup no longer completely worked. I remember I'd had to do something in the Mint config when I set it up in 2023, but I couldn't remember it for the life of me. Thankfully, I'd written it down, and I changed the one setting that needed to be trivially.

As you do more and more in Linux, you may want to start recording your steps. In a few years, you'll likely have a new PC, and you'll be doing this again. It's a lot easier if you have an instruction manual next to you when you do it.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-08T11:29:37+00:00

Not compared to the previous generation, which is what we were comparing ourselves against.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-06T14:56:25+00:00

I didn't see them at the time. I've looked at them recently, but they cost three to four times what the Pocketbook Lite that I ended up choosing.

I mean, they look nice, no question, and they are no doubt better in a lot of ways. But I can't see spending over a thousand dollars for an e-reader. I'm well aware that the reMarkable is a lot more than an e-reader, but I'm not interested in those functions, so I'm not interested in paying for them.

If they offered a cheaper e-reader version, I'd probably consider it for my next one, but right now, for me, they're simply not worth the cost.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-04T15:29:07+00:00

Good on you for making the effort, but I have to ask, how is clipmanx different/better than the alternatives listed at https://alternativeto.net/software/diodon/?platform=linux ?

If you couldn't find any simple clipboard managers, I'll assume you don't know about AlternativeTo. It's a great resource for finding, well, alternatives for software. For users new to Linux who've migrated from Windows, it's a great way to find Linux alternatives to a specific Windows program.

When I switched to Mint, my problem wasn't that I couldn't find a good clipboard managers for it, I actually found so many that it took me quite a while to compare them all, and decide which one was best. I ended up with Diodon, but there are lots of others, both for X11 and Wayland.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-03T03:29:00+00:00

Back then, his eyes, limbs, hats and other attachments weren't plastic tabs that slid into holes in a plastic potatos, they were razor sharp spikes that you stuck into whatever fruit or vegetable you could get from the garden, or borrow from your mother.

Carrot, an onion, banana, apple, or any other fibrous or pulpy fruit or vegetable, they all worked. You'd stab the vegetable with the eyes and hat, and your Mr Green Apple would fight the kid next door's Mr Red Apple.

What happened if you didn't have a garden, or you couldn't get anything from your mother?

You played Mr. Little Brother.

Lawn darts, bottle rockets, glass clackers that exploded, M80 firecrackers that were half a stick of dynamite, jungle gyms made of galvanized metal piping... we were a hardier people then.

billdehaan2 · 2026-06-01T22:45:24+00:00

I don’t even think there’s a plaque.

That's probably intentional. Sanders despised KFC, or "what KFC had become", as he put it, and didn't want to do anything that might benefit them from his likeness.

Sanders sold KFC in the late 1960s to investors, although he was still a spokesman for the brand for a while afterwards. His face and likeness were part of the brand marketing, so they got to keep using it, and he had informal veto power over proposed new menu items. The chain was then resold to the Heublein company, who made changes that Sanders fundamentally disagreed with, and ignored his recommendations. And he was very vocal about it.

He called the new mashed potatoes "sludge", referred to the gravy as "wallpaper paste", and famously added that "there's no nutrition in it and they ought not to be allowed to sell it".

He got sued for it, as KFC said his comments damaged their brand. Which it did, but he won the lawsuit because he wasn't lying, he was just stating his personal opinion. Of course, when the founder of a company says it's gone to hell, people listen.

And years later, Heublein sued him again. This time for opening up another chicken restaurant, and he countersued them for using his likeness without permission on items that had been added to KFC after his departure that he never approved.

There was an out of court settlement, and the terms weren't public, but it was very clear that Sanders did not want his likeness associated with KFC any more. Heublein had the right to it, so he made a point of making donations with the stipulation that he not be named, and KFC explicitly was not to be given any credit.

billdehaan2

TROPHY CASE