Awesome, thanks

First paragraph:

Free speech organizations are sounding the alarm over a recent decision by Comraine, Michigan’s District Library Board of Trustees to circumvent its own review process and move dozens of LGBTQ+ books from the children’s section to the adult section without first assessing them.

They were fascist until the mid 70s. But it looks like after the carnation rebellion they unbanned all the books they had banned and they still struggle with the balance between their history and culture of censorship and their freedom of expression granted in their post rebellion constitution. One book was banned after liberalization, but was unbanned later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Portugal

i don't think she could open it, and loudly announce it if they were banned there

Wait, there are banned books in Portugal ?

Love to hear good news on my city. 🖤

I try to avoid admiring celebrities too much, but Dua is my very non-guilty pleasure, and she seems to be a better pop star role model than many I can think of. In addition to this advocacy for literacy and free speech, she was critical of Israel even before the October 7th attacks, when it was much less common sentiment, and probably cost her fans. Stuff like that; her wikipedia is littered with examples of her being on the right side of history.

And her music is legit great. Future Nostalgia is incredible.

Had no idea anything about her personal life. I thought she was a vapid guilty pleasure I enjoyed on the freeway. This is dope to learn.

Yeah that happens a lot from the handful that I’ve watched. I’ve seen her bring a few authors up short and express surprise and gratitude for the depth of her question. You can also see their whole engagement change when they realize this isn’t just a fluff thing. It’s neat to see.

I read Hernan Diaz's Trust because I heard that she was a surprisingly great interviewer and I wanted to watch that interview. It's an excellent book but her interview is better and the author is almost giddy as she consistently brings up angles and references that he didn't even know about himself. So much research and thought behind her questions and comments.

She is a real one. She’s a surprisingly good interviewer of authors too, something she does as part of her book club.

Dua Lipa, who in 2023 launched her Service95 Book Club, has now partnered with Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, to open a physical library. Opening June 27th, The Manifesto Library is dedicated to books “that challenge power, censorship, exclusion, and dominant narratives.”

“When I founded the Service95 Book Club, my ambition was for it to become a home for writers and readers, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances. Reading the world brings us closer – but sadly, not everyone is in favour of that,” Lipa explained in a statement.

“Here you will find one hundred books that ask questions, or have been questioned. Some have been banned by school districts for themes of race or sexuality. Others, written for LGBTQIA+ readers, have been restricted from display. In some cases, the author has paid for their words with their life,” she added.

“This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed to read. You are invited to visit and decide for yourself what belongs on these shelves. Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.”

I can recommend watching The Librarians. A 2025 documentary about book banning from public libraries in the US and librarians fighting against it.

I recommend it, I use Kopia

Linux Mint

Do I need a Linux application for backblaze b2 as it mentions in your link?

It might be NTFS still. Its my internal HDD and yes same PC I switched from windows to... Main is an SSD and no issues.

Okay I'll check if that exists.

Thanks for rec for CachyOS I havent heard of it.

Which client are you using for BackBlaze?

I would say food preparation but I worked in dish rooms for years. So kinda adjacent.

What format is your HDD? If you recently switched from windows, it's possible the HDD is using the NTFS filesystem, which is not well supported so many distros will not auto mount NTFS partitions to avoid file corruption. Good news, though, better NTFS support is coming with kernel version 7. Anyway, for starters you want to check if /dev/hda exists; if it doesn't, that's a whole other problem...

Edit: I hesitate to recommend this distro to someone new to Linux, but it occurred to me CachyOS has a decent chance of solving every one of the issues you mentioned. It's gaming focused, has the latest kernel already, good hardware support, and includes an environment for running windows apps. Unfortunately, troubleshooting or installing new apps will likely involve a much steeper learning curve. But again, it might have ready to go support for everything you need, so...

Yeah, that's what I'm suspecting...

Good! What's your bar?

Well, you might be able to talk a library into hosting a 'computer education' class weekly or monthly, with a focus on linux, but I highly doubt you're going to be paid for it. It would certainly have to be a passion project, just to get people off of windows more.

I was told by BackBlaze "The error "No such file or directory" means the b2-linux file isn't in the directory where you're running the commands."

So I have to figure that out.

Re: ProtonDB. They're on there.

BackBlaze PC backup is Windows only, you have to do BackBlaze B2 bucket backups instead: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-back-up-linux-to-backblaze-b2
For games, it's a good idea to check ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/

your going to be competing with me for that.