I hope someone gives you a good answer, because I’d like one myself. My method has just been to do this stuff little by little. I would also recommend calibre web for interfacing instead of calibre. You can run both in docker, and access calibre on your server from whatever computer you happen to be on. I find centralizing collections makes the task of managing them at least more mentally manageable.

You might want to give an idea of the size of your library. What some people consider large, others might consider nothing much. If it is exceedingly large you’re better off asking someplace with more data hoarders instead of a general Linux board.

That’s exactly the problem we have over here. You can’t become a cop and change the culture. The culture is mandatory. They seek it out and train it it, and the ones who won’t at least turn a blind eye to it aren’t allowed to stay.

It’s important to also point out that a huge portion of the population carries guns. There’s no reason to assume that someone armed is a threat at all, and statistics bear that out. In the south of the US even most liberals don’t think twice about the number of guns they encounter every day. The reason why police are a unique situation is , obviously, partially because they deal with criminals, and partially because of their confrontational and aggressive approach to most situations. It’s not so much that you got to deal with a good or bad cop. It’s more that you got to deal with a cop in a good or bad mood. They way they choose to interact with you has very little to do with things you can control.

Believe it or not, it’s possible to act on a shoot last, ask questions first policy even here in gun crazy Florida. Literally everyone other than police officers do it every day.

I haaaaaate progressive muscle relaxation. They made us do it in school when I was little and I have a mental block about it. I’ve had success with guided meditations on an app called insight timer. I’ve also had success with the worry box technique. If I decide I’m not going to deal with something till another time it goes into the worry box.

Eight year olds, dude.

Thank goodness I had a newer monitor then, because I would definitely have toasted several.

I’m so divorced from normalcy I have no frame of reference. Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices? I figured they just used whatever came on whatever device they wanted to buy.

Did you ever dual boot Linux and windows, and also have VMware installed in both so you could boot the other one from inside whichever you had booted? Because I spent an insane amount of time screwing around with that for as excruciatingly slow as it was back then.

You never know when you’ll need to install period Linux on an old piece of hardware.

I think you need to qualify that having used or tried Linux in college was normal in the 2000s for someone in computer science or engineering, or basically my fellow undiagnosed autistics and autistic adjacents. In my experience it was fairly normal in college for most people to have trouble operating a basic word processor, and they would not have had any idea what Linux was at all.

“mailing list and Usenet support”. Yeah. If you’ve ever looked up some weird issues and the only thing that you can come up with is some Debian message group that looks like it was typed on a typewriter, is extremely difficult to follow the response chain, and is apparently from before Y2K… That’s what it was like to run Linux back then.

How wrong did you have to be to break your monitor? Because I’m positive I got it very wrong a whole lot of times and never managed that.

But it’s the one you deserve.

Yeah, and I assume future me will be even dumber than present day me, so I try to make it really easy for him to find out what he needs to know.

Another good tip is to put timestamps and increase the length of your bash history. That way when I log in half a year from now I’ll know what I was up to.

All of your issues can be solved by a backup. My host went out of business. I set up a new server, pulled my backups, and was up and running in less than an hour.

I’d recommend docker compose. Each service gets its own folder inside your docker folder. All volumes are a folder in the services folder. Each night, run a script that stops all of them, starts duplicati, backs up to a remote server or webdav share or whatever, and then starts them back up again. If you want to be extra safe, back up to two locations. It’s not that complicated if it’s just your own services.

I’ll have you know my neck beard is thoroughly covered by the rest of my beard.

They heard you liked birds, so they put birds on your birds so you can birdwatch while you birdwatch.

There’s no forgetting where I have something hosted. If I ssh to service.domain.tld I’m on the right server. My services are all in docker compose. All in a ~/docker/service folder, that contains all the volumes for the service. If there’s anything that needed doing, like setting up a docker network or adding a user in the cli, I have a readme file in the service’s root directory. If I need to remember literally anything about the server or service, there’s an appropriately named text file in the directory I would be in when I need to remember it.

If you just want a diagram or something, there are plenty of services online that will generate one in ASCII for you so you can make yourself a nice “network topology” readme to drop in your servers’ home directory.

Landlords are familiar with utility install people and how unpredictable they can be. Even if they get mad, this will put the blame squarely on someone else so it’s probably a good option for you. “I dunno why he put it there. You know how utility guys are. It’s the only place he’d put my hookup.”

Second this. Landlords don’t want their stuff screwed up by inexperienced tenants’ diy projects, and they don’t want to pay for something they think it’s unnecessary. I’d get an estimate for a pro to do it (could be a guy off Craigslist or whatever, just someone who does this for a living) and then just ask the landlord if they’d be alright with you paying to get it done. They’ll probably want to know exactly what they’re going to do, and they’ll likely say yes, especially since you say they already have coax running through the house.