Hi all :)

My wife's broken her phone to the point where it's not holding a charge properly, so I need to replace it. I've been looking at replacements, but I don't know enough about current chipsets to know which ones are decent.

The main things she needs are, decent battery life, an SD card, NFC, and more than 64GB of internal storage. If the OS can be changed in the future to get security updates, that would be a bonus. Given the direction that they seem to be going, with collecting data and locking down the bootloader, I'd prefer to move away from Xiaomi if possible.

The catch is though, we're on a small budget. Thanks to Christmas, we've only got around £200 to £250 to spend. If there's a significant upgrade, we can go to about £300, but that's a stretch.

I've looked at a few phones, and the Nothing phones seem to tick all the boxes, but are right at the top of the budget. The Motorola range looks good, as does the Poco M6 Pro, but like I say, I don't know enough about the chipsets to know if they're any good.

I'm open to any suggestions. Thanks in advance :)

EDIT: I ended up going for the Motorola Moto G85 earlier today. It ticks all the boxes, plus my wife decided to tell me after I'd been looking at lots of different phones that she uses a Motorola in work, and likes the style >.<

Thank you for all the help :)

I put on an episode of a show I'm watching, and about ten minutes into it, I missed something on screen, so pressed the skip back button on my remote. The spinning loading circle came up, but stayed for a while, and the episode froze at the point where I'd pressed the button.

No problem I thought, I haven't used Plex for a while, it might just need a little kick. I restarted my fire stick, and restarted the Plex server, just in case. A few minutes later, I didn't catch what a character said, so I tried skipping back again. Plex crashed again. Another set of restarts and we're watching again.

About 15 minutes later, the episode just freezes. No error message or warning, just a frozen screen. I gave it a minute and pressed play, and Plex crashed back to the episode selection screen. Pressing play worked again for a few minutes, until I got an error on screen telling me that my network is too slow for the video. It's a less than 1080p video streaming at 10 Mbps over a gigabit connection. This time, reopening the video took me back to the point of the last issue.

So much for relaxing in front of the TV...

I've got a Linux server running Xubuntu at the moment (It was a media player first), and it also runs two Minecraft servers for the family. It has two network cards that are both connected to the internet. Is there a way to bind the VPN to one of the cards and use the other one for regular use?

I've got Surfshark as my VPN, and it doesn't allow port forwarding under Linux. I've got some software that I want to keep behind the VPN, but the lack of port forwarding is stopping me from sharing the Minecraft servers, and when the VPN is active, it slows down the connection to some of my services like Plex.

I've tried to look it up, but I just don't know enough to get myself anywhere. I've found results that talk about name spaces and routing tables, but they assume a level of knowledge that I just haven't got yet.

I want to use the Arr suite and qBittorrent as the main programs behind the VPN, and Plex, Mylar (a comic manager), Syncthing, and Minecraft as the main programs without it. If I set up qBittorrent and the Arrs as Docker containers, can I use Gluetun to bind just them to the VPN? The VPN is using OpenVPN connections if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance :)

As some of you may already know, I manage a website and app for a small music festival. It runs on a shoestring budget and helps to support the village I grew up in, so I volunteer my time and resources. Part of this is creating the site and things like posters using resources that I've made.

Recently we had an issue where someone created a logo for us, and after we'd used it for a few years, they claimed it back. It turned out that when they created the logo, neither side thought to draw up any sort of agreement on how it could be used. I want to put something in place that makes it clear that anything that I create for the festival can be used by them forever, but without restricting myself from using it.

My main concern is for the website and app, so that I can use the same structure in the future.

I'm not concerned about the fine print, like saying that I can use this specific text layout or whatever, I just want to stop either side from restricting the other in the event of a major falling out, with the exception of things that are exclusive to one side or the other, like the name of the festival.

What would be the best licence for that please? Thanks in advance :)

Update: I managed to get it working with the answers from @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me and this link:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-permanently-mount-a-drive-in-linux-and-why-you-should/

I've just installed Mint 22 on my laptop, and I've got two storage drives alongside my main drive. I want these drives to be available to all users on boot, and to be readable and writable. At the moment they're treated as removable drives, and are mounted under the individual user. As a result, any permissions that I'm setting as the owner are not sticking when they're mounted by another user.

The first drive is synced with my main PC through Syncthing, and is synced to Onedrive from there. The second drive is my music, podcasts, and audiobooks, which are all synced through Syncthing only. I'm the only person using the laptop and accessing any of these files, so I'm not bothered about the wrong user accidentally opening them.

I've read some posts about editing fstab to mount them at startup, but they don't cover whether the drives will be available to other users or not. Can I just add them to fstab and mount them somewhere that's available to all users, then sort out the permissions? If so, where's the best place to put them?

Thanks in advance :)

It turns out that something has been watching the Earth in minute detail since before the solar system was formed, down to a sub molecular level. It can give you the answers to any historical questions, but not things like what someone was thinking or feeling.

All the world's problems have been solved, and the information is only used with the strictest privacy, e.g. you can only get information on living people with their permission, or if you're a member of law enforcement solving a crime.

The question is, if you have a hobby, job, or other reason to research the past, like being a geologist or genealogist, would you take the answers, or would you prefer to do the research yourself?

This might sound daft, but something similar used to work with live discs.

I've got Windows 10 and Mint 21.1 dual booting on my computer at the moment. Every so often I'll realise that I've missed something from my Windows installation. If it's important, I then have to boot to Windows to get the information, or the settings etc.

Is there a way to virtualise my Mint installation so that I can run both the OSs at once to make sure that I've got everything?

VirtualBox had a tool to do this with a live USB, but that was back in the MBR days, so it probably won't work with modern hardware.

EDIT: Sorry, I should clarify, Mint and Windows are on the same physical disk, and the plan is to remove Windows once I'm done.

Update: I'm giving up. It looks like it is possible if you have separate disks with separate boot partitions, but getting it to work with a shared boot partition is harder work than I'm willing to do right now.

VMware Player can use a partition or disk, but might be in read only mode, I couldn't get far enough to check.

Thanks for all the replies :)

I've just finished getting my laptop set up the way I like it, including maximising the RAM and upgrading the screen. I opened it up to use it, and the screws on the hinge tore through the plastic.

To top it off, the plastic on the bottom of the laptop, the side that's been removed here, has also broken.

My wife definitely didn't drop the laptop while she was tidying up though...

EDIT: Apologies all, I'm having trouble with Lemmy today, and it's not letting me reply.

I'll try to reply tomorrow, but in the meantime;

It's a Stonebook branded Clevo n751BU, a 7th gen i5. It's held up respectably well until it appears to have been knocked in the corner where the hinge is. The plastics on both sides of the hinge have given out.

I've ordered a replacement base, but the palm rest which is pictured is not available anywhere that I can find. I'm going to dismantle the hinge to clean and oil it, then reassemble it slightly less tightly, and epoxy the screws into place. The reason for taking it apart in the first place was to add a third hard drive. It has an nvme drive, and I had two HDDs going spare that can hold my documents and music. They're being synced now as I was having problems doing it remotely, but once they're in they can be managed with Syncthing. The laptop shouldn't need to come apart agin afterwards :)

I've been building and repairing computers and laptops for about 30 years, so I'm comfortable with completely stripping it, and can use it as an excuse to give everything a clean again. Short of replacing these HDDs with SSDs, there's nothing else that can physically be upgraded, so I'm half tempted to glue it shut so that I don't get tempted again :D

Hi all, I need your expertise please :)

tldr: I'm looking for something to create and share lists with my wife, but that also allows her to edit them, preferably with a WYSIWYG editor, on both our Android devices and Windows and Linux computers. To complicate things, I help to run a small music festival, and some sort of collaboration tool would be helpful there too. Joplin looks great, but I can't figure out the collaboration without using their server.

The longer version is, I'm taking my family to visit the in-laws, and was making a list of things we need to take. I have complicated medical needs, and my kid is autistic, so there are things that we cannot forget. I realised that a list that we can both work on would be better, and would be something that we could use in the future for things like medical appointments.

While I was looking for some software, I realised that it would also be helpful for the music festival committee.

I'm looking for something that we can edit on any device, and have the changes show up immediately on any other logged in device. I want anyone with permission to be able to edit the document too. Ideally it needs a WYSIWYG editor, and needs to be simple to use once it's set up.

Joplin looks great, but it's not clear whether collaboration is only available through Joplin Cloud, or whether it's available with a self hosted server.

Etherpad and Padland look good, but Etherpad doesn't currently have mobile support, and I can't tell whether Padland is standalone or needs Etherpad to work.

I'm happy to self host something, but the simpler it is to run and use, the better :)

Thanks for reading through all of that :D

Hi all :)

I'm setting up a small business in the UK, and need some accounting software to keep track of everything, and generate invoices, that sort of thing. I tried Wave a few years ago, and it looks like it does what I need, but is US based and proprietary.

https://www.waveapps.com/

It has the option of linking to your bank account too, and automatically pulling your transactions etc. This is quite important, as I'm trying to get diagnosed with ADHD, and have a terrible memory. I won't remember to manually enter transactions regularly.

Being able to use it on Android and Windows / Linux would be ideal. I can self host it if there are any options that work.

Does anyone have any ideas please?

Hi all :)

I manage a handful of websites and their emails using the PortableApps suite on Windows, so have a separate browser and mail client for each one. This has worked well for years, but now I'm switching to Linux, Mint specifically. I've read that I can set up profiles on Firefox and probably Thunderbird, or maybe run separate instances with things like AppImages, but it sounds like it's a messy solution, and could end up with me using the wrong profile by mistake

What I want to do is set up a virtual machine for each site, and have a completely separate instance of the programs, and hopefully a way to easily transfer the machines to other systems if needs be.

I'd prefer to use a Debian / Ubuntu based distro with Apt and the 'Windows' style desktop, as that's what I'm already used to, but am I better off installing Mint and stripping it down, or is there something more suited to this?

Thanks in advance :)

Went out on a rare clear night to a wetlands near me to take some photos of the stars. As it was so dark, and the stars are so small, I had to rely on the focus peaking function of my camera to tell if the stars were in focus or not.

I've got home and started to process the photos, and I've found out that despite the camera telling me that they were in focus, they clearly weren't.

Hey ho, what's a wasted few hours in the freezing cold between friends...