Definitely! I usually name my files starting with YYYY_MM_DD (which makes it easy to sort by the date I started making the file), a number for which entry it was on that day (1,2,3,4… plus sometimes a letter too if I want to keep multiple drafts), and a few words if I have other details I want to remember. e.g. “transcribe_song_by_artist” or things like “cont_YYYY_MM_DD-entry” when I continue working on a piece from a long time I ago. Sometimes I add a title after that too if I wanted to give the piece one.

Deliberately copy snippets of a work you’re interested in as a study – e.g. transcribe it – and experiment with elements you find interesting (rhythm, chords, synths, effects, whatever) in small test pieces to make sure you understand what’s going on. Let the ideas stew for a while and then much later try to use the techniques you learned in a real piece.

That’s what I do anyway.

Glad I could help you make progress – I hope you can get it all the way working now. Good luck!

How 'bout that! :D

If the SSD itself is OK, then it was probably trying to boot the SSD still. The blank screen issue might have to do with the graphics drivers then? I remember having a similar blank screen problem with Ubuntu a long time ago where I had to put in “nomodeset” as a parameter in GRUB when booting until I got the right drivers set up.

the tablet supports pxe boot. Do you think I could get mileage off of that if I set up a server on my other laptop and connected them via ethernet?

Maybe. If it’s not too much trouble to set up and you can’t get the USB to work again, might as well try it before throwing in the towel.

I’m rather confused by the fact that the USB drive worked for you before but doesn’t any more and yet seems to be OK on other systems. Is there anything like “fast boot” enabled in the BIOS maybe? (Try turning that off if so.)

Also, when you’re trying to boot from the SSD, can you get anything out of GRUB by tapping shift or escape (or maybe other keys) while it’s trying to boot?

Do you think that removing the ssd will help?

It’s a sanity check to help you rule out things like unintentionally booting from the wrong device. Can’t boot from hardware that’s not there! If the USB does work with it removed, then something you believe about how the device boots is false and you can then try to figure out what. A lot of BIOSes will “helpfully” try the next device in the sequence if it can’t successfully boot from the first one – which can be really confusing when debugging.

Some other thoughts for things to check: does the device confirm that it can actually see the USB drive in some way? Does a USB keyboard work in the port you’re using? If there’s more than one USB port, have you tried a different port? Do your USB drives work in another computer?

I rebooted to the installation media to try another install. It was black too.

I assume you’ve probably already checked, but in case not, is the boot order correct? What happens if you remove the SSD entirely and try to reboot to the USB without it?

Also, does the SSD boot in another computer?

If you can’t get anything to boot on the tablet, I’d RMA it.

Google puts telemetry in the default keyboard app. Let that sink in for a moment.

I tried booting an old Surface off a USB stick with stock Ubuntu once – probably either 20.04 or 22.04. (I tried this in June 2022 but didn’t make a note of the versions in my journal, unfortunately.) I was able to get it to boot, but I couldn’t get touch/pen controls working so I decided against replacing the OS. I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to bother experimenting with it further – I assume it probably needed the custom kernel.

I think the term would be “necrobump”

That’s from old school forums where posting to a thread bumped it back to the top of the feed and thus thrust old info prominently into everyone’s view again. You won’t get that same bump effect with most sorts on Lemmy. (“New comments” sort might work like that though? I’m not sure exactly how that’s handled.)

otherwise everyone has moved on

It’s pretty rare to get much of a response even after just 24 hours or so – not just in terms of comments, but even for upvotes. I think after that point, posts are usually so far down people’s feeds that almost no one sees it any more. That probably also discourages most people from replying since basically no one will see it. (Maybe the poster of the thread or comment you’re replying to will see it, but probably almost no one else will if it’s more than a day or so old.)

Some people do dig through community archives and/or user profiles – particularly after a new thread is posted – and they’ll occasionally upvote old posts, but they very rarely comment.

Just the other day, I got a reply to a thread from ~6 months ago on kbin!

It was spam. :/

I quit YouTube along with reddit last summer. I don’t use alternate interfaces. I haven’t found a replacement for most of the niche content I liked to watch there – and yes, that sucks.

I’ve mostly been watching offline content (like DVDs and things I downloaded years ago) when I want video entertainment, and doing other stuff with my free time.

You might think that’d mean more time playing games given my interests, but I’ve found I’m a lot less enthusiastic about playing through games if I can’t watch an LP or two of it afterwards. So, I’m actually playing (and also buying) less of those than I used to too.

I don’t know about KDE in particular, but I’ve had problems with USB mice waking various Ubuntu systems when they’re not directly connected (i.e. there’s a hub or KVM in between it and the computer). The workaround I used for that was to remove the mouse input (e.g. by carefully pressing a physical button on the KVM) – which was good enough for me – but I think there is a programmatic way to block particular classes of input from waking the system if some device is waking your system inappropriately.

Doing a quick search turned up this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mouse-movement-from-waking-up-a-suspended-computer – I can’t vouch for any of the specific techniques there though.

Worth noting that while I had a problem with the mouse specifically, other hardware could be causing your system to wake up.