Start with the man pages. Running the command man followed by a space and then followed by the command you’re using will almost always give you a man page of the basics of how that command works. The fstab has its own man page too. An internet search “man fstab” or whatever command you’re interested in should also net many mirrors of the those man pages as well.

For me at least, it’s not that you’re asking questions. I answered, so obviously I’m sympathetic to confusion in this area. I’m just trying to encourage you to seek your answers in the documentation and manuals FIRST. The way your question was worded led me to believe that you had not read the manuals at all and were simply copying snippets of code and commands from some random question and answer style forum that did not teach you anything about the fundamentals of what those commands and code actually did. That’s fine too, lots of people started off that way, myself included. Reading the manuals gives you the context to step back and understand how those commands work and what they’re really doing. If you do, you’ll be much better able to troubleshoot your own problems, you’ll be able to ask better questions in forums like this, and you’ll get better and more useful responses.

With all due respect, RTFM. Mount and umount are two sides of the same operational coin. You mount the drive to use it and unmount it when you’re done. fstab is just a file system table used to remember and consistently apply the options used whether you’re mounting the drives manually or telling the system to do it at boot.

Deleting a line from fstab is not the same as unmounting, it is just a shortcut to tell the system how you want that drive mounted when you or the system run the mount command. Mount directories (usually the folders in /media/ or /mnt/ ) also do not get automatically deleted just because you “yanked the drive”. Again, those directories are just where your system is expecting to mount the drive. When the drive is mounted they will be the root path to its contents, when the drive is unmounted they will be empty but they still exist. If your planning on mounting the drive again leave them there. If you’re not planning on mounting them again, delete them.

If you’re not planning on regularly mounting a particular drive, it probably shouldn’t be listed in fstab and you should just run the mount command with the appropriate options (again fstab is just a table for remembering those options for the mount command).

Many desktop Linux distros are also capable of automatically mounting new removable drives in such a way that the user can access them and doesn’t have to worry about touching fstab or the mount directories.

I did say fancy.

Aren’t sqilte files themselves (like most other things) just fancy text files?

Any breakfast at home is almost always better than breakfast out, if you’ve got the time and ingredients. I can, with the right ingredients and tools and while half asleep, hungover, or still drunk, make a full breakfast for a family of four better than 90% of the breakfasts I’ve ever had out. Sure it took some practice, but breakfast isn’t rocket science or usually particularly complex recipe wise.

The only thing I haven’t been able to do better at home breakfast wise so far is making my own fresh bagels or donuts. I don’t like making poached eggs either, and hollandaise sauce is a pain in the ass, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an eggs Benedict out at a restaurant that didn’t make me immediately regret my choice. Same with biscuits and gravy (why do restaurants think that gravy comes out of a box and should be bright white?) , bacon (just bacon flavored bacon please), eggs (sunny side up does not mean I want the whites to be clear and runny too), etc. All things I really like, but can’t tolerate having someone else fuck up and charge me for it.

Blocklists are ineffective by design. Each and every member of the swarm can collect all the data necessary to flag you to your ISP. Obviously any professional collecting this kind of data can avoid a blocklist. There is no such thing as a better blocklist.

Teach us then 😭

I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.

A decade ago we figured out blacklists were ineffective. What’s changed?

Most papers are made in TEX or LaTEX. These formats separate display from data in such a way that they can be quickly formatted to a variety of page size, margins, text size, et al with minimal effort. It’s basically an open standard typesetting format. You can create and edit TEX in any text editor and run it through a program to prepare it for print or viewing. Nothing else can handle math formulas, tables, charts, etc with the same elegance. If you’ve ever struggled to write a math paper in Microsoft word, seriously question why your professor hasn’t already forced you to learn about LaTEX.

My head cannon is that TIE fighters don’t make sound exactly as they zip around, but they do something to the electromagnetic fields or some other techno babble thing that causes other things, like droids, space ships, rocks, or skulls to scream with a Doppler effect like that as they zip by.

I wonder whatever happened to Knoppix. All I’ve been able to find online is speculation and questions.

Lars ruined Napster. BitTorrent came around some time later after Limewire, Soulseek, and DirectConnect. Lars might have had something to say about Bit Torrent, but by that point no one was listening.

Besides, back then, we really were using BitTorrent mostly for Linux ISOs. At the time it was more reliable than http. It really sucked having to download an entire ISO again because it failed the checksum. BitTorrent alleviated that.

I’m not a nice person. I’m not a kind person. I’m not even a good person. I try to be all of those things and sometimes it feels like a struggle. I don’t think I’m evil or a total asshole or a sociopath or something. I just think it a metric we have to constantly check-in on and adjust. I don’t really trust people that think of themselves as nice, kind, or good. I don’t think I really agree with those people about what it really means to be nice, kind, or good. For example, I do believe the song got it right, sometimes you do need to be cruel to be kind in the right measure.

Downloading from YouTube or Spotify is still piracy. And those sources offer mostly shit quality far removed from the artist’s intent.

Believe it of not, there are things that aren’t on Spotify, YouTube, TIDAL, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or any streaming service. Sometimes when a streaming service does have a song or album, it’s either not the best quality or only a radio censored version available, even if Spotify claims it’s the explicit version. And that explicit tag feels like a slander because the original intent should be default and the radio edits should be the one’s with the CENSORED tag.

There is great music out there you can’t purchase or stream a digital release of.

There are old and often played CDs in my collection that can’t be ripped properly (by me) for one reason or another.

There are some really high quality vinyl recordings out there, done by people with better hardware and more skill than I. Again, many of these vinyl releases are not available in any other format and are no longer available for purchase anywhere.

The real primary reason I got into it, in the long ago times of Napster, was that I liked to make mixtapes/discs. When radio was no longer playing songs I wanted on those tapes, the wilds of Internet was the answer.

I still regularly support the artists I like as directly as I can: buying albums and merch directly from them at shows or their own websites. And I spend more of that money on more artists and especially less popular artists specifically because of the habits listed above.

You did it again.

You’re so eager to argue that you didn’t actually comprehend what I said.

And my point was that a separate corporate device makes it trivial to manage my privacy and availability. Using my personal phone for work is a hard NO.

The amount of downvotes on this comment is a symptom of how toxic this community has become.

Who cares? It’s a work phone that is used only for work, they are entitled and expected to track it as much as my work laptop or any other company equipment. That’s not a privacy issue unless you’re using company resources for personal stuff. If I don’t want them tracking me I just turn it off or leave it at home.