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.

I have anxiety as well. I’m not saying that your problem is the same as kine, but I’m going to tell you what happens to me so that maybe it’ll make you worry a little less. I generally have a very slight ringing in my ears. Most people probably wouldn’t notice it but I’m autistic so I do. If I have to increase my dose of antihistamines for my allergies, I will have a noticeable increase and qualitative change in the ringing. If I am overly stressed and my anxiety level is higher than usual, I’ll have more ringing. If I get less sleep than I need I will have an increased ringing. It’s not always the same in both ears either.

I’m not telling you it’s nothing but stress. That would be irresponsible. I am telling you I get the same symptoms and it’s nothing but stress and usually resolves in a few days once I get myself under control.

On another note, I would really recommend doing something about your anxiety. Brief high intensity exercise works well, if you can handle it. Guided meditation works well too, even if you hate the whole idea of it (like I do). The best overall remedy is probably to get adequate, good quality sleep, but I know how hard that can be. The easiest immediate relief is blood pressure medicine, if that is an option for you. For instance, if you lay down to rest you should not be able to hear your heart beat. If you can, your blood pressure is too high and you should get it dealt with, because it will absolutely make your anxiety substantially more manageable. Whether or not the anxiety is the problem with your hearing, dealing with it will improve your life, and from one person with anxiety to another: friend, it’s obvious from your post you need some help with this.

For the time being, if you need a short relief from the ringing, I’ve found that certain types of computer generated noise played through headphones will stop my ringing, at least for a few minutes. You might want to try that, just be careful not to play it too loud.

deleted by creator

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.

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.

I’m glad you’re happy with Linux. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that things have progressed that far. I’m stuck with the feeling that gui settings and such aren’t reliable, because they didn’t used to be. Moreso, I just know how to do things in the terminal because that’s how I’ve done them for decades.

But you do you. Its great to have options.

11x17 is incredibly common too. Usually it is oriented landscape and z folded to get a large diagram into a document. It’s kind of irritating that the most typical large format size is 24x36, which is a different aspect ratio than 11x17, for a variety of reasons. If you’re designing something you need to know what aspect ratio to design for. Most copiers can do 11x17, and if the standard large format size was 22x34 it would be exceedingly easy for most offices to produce good working copies of large documents. Best compromise I’ve seen is when people put a logo or header on the side that can be omitted when you switch aspect ratios.

I’ve not had a problem with nextclouds experimental selective sync. Have you tried clearing all your nextcloud dotfiles and setting it up from scratch?