Brickfrog

Yikes! Yeah if the SSD storage isn’t easily accessible then it’s not worth the disassembly headache.

If that is the case then OP’s only option is to try writing the bootable ISO onto a second partition on the current drive while in Windows and boot off that partition… assuming getting the USB port repaired is a no-go.

Does the Surface Go have a SSD in it? And/or can you install a SSD into it? The specs do imply that it supports SSD so you should at least have a port in there for that. If so, as long as you have a spare machine you can install the Surface’s SSD into another system, then install Linux Mint normally there, then re-install the SSD back into the Surface Go.

I’ve never done that but it’s been mentioned a few times in the Linux Mint forums so apparently that is a roundabout way of installing on a machine without working USB ports. e.g.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=388243

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=361542

Not sure how well Mint works specifically on Surface Go but it’s worth a try, most likely you’d use the same steps to install other distros on there.

EDIT: Without a spare system you might be able to download then write the Mint ISO onto a second partition inside Windows and boot from the Mint installer partition afterwards. Not sure how well that would work but someone else in the forums mentioned it https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=369154

Thanks for the share! It’s not something I’d need to use but I’m all for people sharing their scripts with the community for this stuff :)

One suggestion, you may want to look at re-writing your script to move away from the VBScript (.vbs) dependency since Microsoft is moving towards disabling and eventually removing it from Windows 11 and onward. It’ll likely be disabled by default in 2027 so you have plenty of time.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/vbscript-deprecation-timelines-and-next-steps/4148301

OP’s example use case in the post was with the internet still being up. Building off of that yes, I’d log into the power switch remotely via the internet where I can then power cycle anything plugged into it - for me it was just to restart unresponsive desktops or whatever was plugged into it.

But you wouldn’t need internet to power cycle the internet router itself by using scheduled tasks. e.g. the power switch can check that the internet router is responding to pings every x seconds/minutes and power cycle it if stops responding. (it has other checks/conditions it can use besides simple pings)

That said my own equipment rarely/never needs a reboot so in the case my network loses internet access it usually means the internet is actually down, nothing I can do about that aside from maintaining backup internet if I needed.

if the primary internet router goes offline but the internet isn’t out (ie a router reboot would fix the problem)

Maybe you just need to give it a simple power cycle remotely? There are devices that do that sort of thing, I have a Digital Loggers Web Power Switch Pro that I’ve used on-and-off over the years for this purpose.

https://www.digital-loggers.com/

At one point I had to relocate for half a year while needing to remote access a slightly unstable desktop that wouldn’t always reboot cleanly and get stuck at the BIOS, it sometimes needed a couple of power cycles to come back online. The Power Switch was perfect for that, I’d log into it remotely and power cycle anything that was plugged into it.

It should work for routers too e.g. it can automatically power cycle something plugged into it based on different conditions like maybe it stops responding to pings or whatever. Or I guess if you had multiple IPs / multiple internet connections the switch itself can stay online and accessed remotely without needing to schedule anything automatic.

Pretty sure there are more pro-level (and more expensive) types of devices to do this sort of thing if you look around

Sorry… are you talking about piracy or privacy? They’re different things, you start off referring to piracy but most of your post is about privacy :P

Anyways I’ve never considered Lemmy as a “privacy” platform so it’s not really how or why I ended up here. Most Lemmy instances don’t even allow Tor usage, some block VPN usage too, and most require an email to sign up and register. On top of that each Lemmy instance is going to be as private as the instance admin is willing to make it.

I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig.

Does your setup have any way to do noise insulation? I suspect the answer is no but figured I’d throw it out there, surprisingly noise insulation helps more than you’d think. I have a bunch of drives inside a desktop case with insulation panels built in and the drives themselves are in there with rubber anti vibration screws/mounts. Barely ever hear anything from the drives (granted my WD Reds are probably quieter than your current Seagates).

Just something to think on whether it’s an option for your current NAS rig or a future configuration.

It’s been a thing, not specifically just Canada

https://www.wired.com/story/phone-searches-at-the-us-border-hit-a-record-high/

That said I don’t personally know any canadian citizens that have traveled in/out of the U.S recently. Not too sure if it relates to OP’s question, OP never mentioned canadian citizens only that they has a GF that goes to school in Canada.

Are they looking at the files on her MacBook or something?

If the apps are logged in yes, that’s what they do. The agents have a lot of discretion so it’s sort of up to them how much they want to search around on a phone/laptop/whatever but I assume they would look at every single social media app for starters. Essentially any app currently logged into an electronic device would be fair game for an agent to review. And since CPB can ask for your phone/whatever password (or ask you to unlock it for them) that will give them access to basically any logged in app on the device.

I don’t know if OP is referring to a U.S. citizen or something else so the specific rules that apply may be different but that’s the general idea.

Bit strange, the Strawberry app itself already mentions how to donate in the Help/About Strawberry window. Maybe the dev could distribute the Windows/MacOS binaries and simply code in a massive donation pop-up when the OS detected <> Linux.

Post title misleading, Strawberry project still up and running at https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry , coincidentally I had just installed it on Debian 13. Then saw this post saying Strawberry was taken down except that it wasn’t.

Like the other comment says this is just about unofficial binaries that were floating around. That said it’s kind of a bummer that Windows/Mac users can’t download pre-compiled binaries from their github page. Maybe someone can create a script that does the downloading/compiling for those OSes similar to how some ffmpeg scripts do it e.g. https://github.com/UBTL/ffmpeg-windows-build

Not sure if this answers your question, on my fresh install of Debian 13 it seems to default to using

/etc/apt/sources.list

For example, I had to go in there to enable non-free and it worked fine.

There is a newer/recommended format of sources files ending in .sources in the same folder. The newer format is supported as of Debian 13 but for whatever reason Debian 13 doesn’t actually default to installing the newer version on fresh installs. I’m a bit confused by that but Debian’s own docs do discuss it.

https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList

On my fresh install the /etc/apt/sources.list.d still exists, it looks like other software still create their own sources .list files in there when adding their own repos. Debian 13 itself does not seem to generate any files there.

My suggestion is to install Ubuntu with whatever desktop environment works for her. Since you’re using Ubuntu too, and you’re essentially going to be her tech support, it’ll just be easier all around to stay on the same distro at least for now.

More importantly, how Windows-centric is she? Some people may prefer Gnome since using it is just a bit less complicated to use without needing to set a bunch of different settings. But if she’s expecting the Windows style start menus and such then maybe she’ll prefer KDE. Or there’s always installing Linux Mint’s Cinnamon on Ubuntu, Cinnamon would be easier than KDE for a ex-Windows user I suspect (https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ also exists apparently).

Hmm I think your issue is specific to Windows Sandbox. I’ve only ever used full VM software (Microsoft Hyper-V, VirtualBox, etc.).

Never touched Windows Sandbox but it sounds like a sort of hybrid VM/Container thing… I could be wrong :) hopefully someone else knows more about using that or maybe you’ll need to post in another community to ask about it.

EDIT: Looking into it a bit more, Windows Sandbox isn’t actually a VM. So you’re really asking if you can run multiple apps (VPN+torrent client+whatever) inside a sandbox app like Windows Sandbox…I don’t think that’s how sandbox apps work, they usually are for sandboxing a single app, so you may need to experiment and figure it out. Everyone looking at your post is thinking you’re asking about VMs, not sandboxes :P

e.g. see this https://superuser.com/a/1775271 answer

also https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-faq

Yes that would work fine, you can pretty much run anything inside a VM. So yeah a properly set up VM with internet access + VPN client + anything else you want to install will work.

Not too sure what the issue is that you are encountering, you’d need to update your post with a lot more info. My suggestion is to start over and make sure the VM is set up correctly e.g. install the OS in the VM, verify it has normal internet access. Then install the VPN client in the VM, verify VPN is working properly. After that qBittorrent or anything else can be installed inside the VM. (probably best to save snapshots of your VM after each step in case you screw up and need to roll back)

Not as popular but there are other apps that do TV automation, SickChill and Medusa for example are still active forks of the old SickBeard/SickRage software.

There are probably others I’m not thinking of right this second, nowadays people mostly prefer using the *arr stack for automation (Sonarr, Radarr, all the other arrs).

More likely those seeds are super-busy so it just takes a while to keep a consistent upload. these type of seeds tend to be on a ton of other low seed torrents. So any new seeds helps.

And of course there’s the seeds that just don’t have great connections e.g. could be a laptop that is literally only online x hours a day or even week, or they can only upload at night or whatever.

4 seeders

4 seeds means it’s not actually a dead torrent. Slow uploading sure, but not dead. I’d suggest just leaving it alone, if it’s going at 8% per week it should finish on its own in roughly 13 weeks assuming the speeds don’t change much. That’s going to be a while but once you’ve got it you’ll be seed number 5 as long as you keep seeding it on your end.

If I can find find the exact releases of as many roms as possible in the collection from other singular sources, can I resurrect this torrent by just copy+overwrite into the unfinished folder?

Sure that may work in theory. Just keep in mind you’d need to find tons of ROM files that are exact bit-by-bit matches of the files in the torrent - otherwise overwriting mismatched data into your currently downloading torrent would make things slower for you since you’d now have to re-download that data to get back to 8% or whatever.

EDIT: Looks like you lucked out, congrats seed #5 :)

Already using Debian on my desktop so an upgrade will happen sooner or later.

The WD sales are decent if you’re buying new so if you’re feeling like it’s time for a purchase this might be worth it for you.

I did the same earlier this year though in my case I tend to buy the current gen large capacity WD Reds & stick with them for a few years at least. When their 24 TB / 26 TB drives went on sale they actually were cheaper than what Newegg / Amazon had done with their own sales up to then so for me it was worth it.

The other thing to keep in mind, if you’re in the U.S., the whole tariff situation isn’t going to make this stuff any cheaper in the future.