No, you’re absolutely right. That’s what happens when you have the WaaSMedic service running, which cannot be easily disabled in services.msc. I would think I had finally gone the “full-nuclear” option and broken al updates by disabling and stopping the update services (that I knew about), but they would re-enable themselves without fail.

This comment explains where you need to disable it (if you want to go that route).

I’m not sure what the purple app was.

It was a website, and after a Lemmy user reminded me of privacy.sexy, I realized it is decidedly un-purple.

Yes!!! ⭐ ⭐

And it isn’t remotely purple! Thank you for sharing!!!

Its all coming back to me now. Must’ve been repressed memories…

For the record, the service names are: UsoSvc WaaSMedicSvc wuauserv

WaaSmedic must be that watchdog that kept re-enabling update services after I disabled them years ago. I just remember my OS would start a multi hour encode or compile, and I’d come back hours later to a login screen and update history telling me it rebooted when I didn’t have automatic updates enabled.

Thx for the reply.

That is similar to the web page I was thinking of. Thx. I’ll check it out.

God bless Steve Gibson! Security Now! I used Spinrite back in 92. I’ve used his other utilities (when they were relevant), and ShieldsUP too. That man is a treasure. Thanks for the link. I know he gets it.

On second thought, while this is great, I need to block all updates in this PC.

2024 > 1985

FTFY

Unused to wonder if the radio announcers that are always reciting the station call letters found that the letters stopped sounding like individual sounds, and the whole recitation became a sort of “word” for them. Like “You’re listening to 102.9FM WBLM!” Did it stop being “double-you bee ell emm,” and turn into more of a mashup of “dubbleyabeeyelmm”?

True, the difference is pretty subtle, especially to a listener, but I wonder strange things sometimes…

Don’t tell them about insid-- dang! Too late

Good drugs

Not really doing a great job finding the right place for your posts. You broke three community rules posting this here; rules 1, 2 and 9. Perhaps you should try a comics community?

Re: DuckDuckGo:

You can sign-up and manage your aliases from any browser on any OS

But not on the TOR or Mull browsers on Android:

ETA: I use both DDG and SimpleLogin. I recently bumped up against the ten alias limit in SL, but I prefer the ease of creating outgoing aliases in their dashboard vs the DDG method of manually typing with underscores. That said, they both come in handy and I have dozens of DDG aliases that helped me break my dependence on gmail as my single email provider. Never tried Addy.

I’d use the find command piped to mv and play with some empty test folders first. I’m not familiar with Nemo, though I’ve used it for a short while. I’ve never tried the bulk renaming features if they exist.

Depending in how much variation you have in the preceding underscores, REGEX may be useful, but if its just a lot of single underscores you can easily trim them with a single version of the script.

Edit: corrected second command typo. I think there’s a rename command I haven’t used in ages that may have args to help here too, but I’m away from the PC

If you dare, you can automated it with some simple scripting. If I had more than 20 or 30, I’d probably go that route.

Yeah, that sounds like a better long-term solution for you. Once you change your workflow, you shouldn’t have to do it again anyway!

Not a fix, but a workaround I use when symbols and punctuation are treated this way: I use lowercase letters to precede folder names to get the sort I want.

aFolder1
bFolder2

Not elegant, but it works in your case. You could also try other file managers, like Thunar to see if they manage sorting differently

Now that you mention it, I think I can tell yt-dlp to give me vorbis, but it might still entail a conversion.

Thank you for the comment. I have libopus0 1.3.1-3 installed. While I can play back opus files in strawberry, there are many missing integrations, like metadata cover art, and also audio level normalization seems to skip my opus files completely, as evidenced by viewing scanned files in the playlist with the “integrated loudness” or “loudness range” columns visible, or in the context tab if configured to display loudness parameters. Until I can get that sorted, vorbis is my go to.

Thanks also for the tip about variable bitrate. After reading some more about both codecs, I realized my constant br isn’t doing me any favors, and both excel when it comes to vbr. I’ll also dial back to the 6 or 7 vbr level and go from there. Honestly, my process to develop the conversion that “worked” for me was to take several 320k mp3s from way back in my collection and do a CBR conversion to vorbis that resulted in approximately the same file size, or slightly smaller. Not a very scientific benchmark. I just stuck with that when converting from opus.

Thanks again!

PS I added my current conversion string to my OP. I’ll share my results back here after I trial the new one.

ETA: I think I recall now that some conversions using variable bitrate would fail because the source files didn’t match up to the bit depth or some mathematical multiple of the source bitrate or some such thing that confused me, and was fixed by switching to a constant bitrate. Course, I could have it backwards. I do that a lot these days…)

Thx for this comment.

My main drive for self hosting is to escape data harvesting and arbitrary query limits, and to say, “I did this.” I fully expect it to be painful and not very fulfilling…