Mercator k55k knives can be had for less than $50 on Amazon. Many Opinels are available on Amazon for under $20. Great knives if they're what you're looking for.

I'm lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn't think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.

For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I'd care to enumerate. There's a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!

I've never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I carry a 2 TB Silicon Power drive on a keychain sometimes.

In addition to an encrypted partition for secure data transport, I keep a fat32 partition that can supplement phone media when I travel.

A few file formatting choices (mp3 or mp4 suffixes) mean that media playback usually works with tvs that I trust, too.

If I need more space, I can temporarily delete a few albums. No big deal.

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren't playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

One option is to convert to txt for any text-only epubs that you have. There are a ton of lightweight options if you're willing to use format-shifted copies on your computer.

On my distro, hitting print in the Office365 web app autogenerates a searchable pdf. As mentioned by others, it is trivial to generate a searchable pdf from LibreOffice as well.

I've used Ardour to capture keyboard midi input before. Not beginner-friendly, but it works if you want to play something, pick a soundfile, edit a flubbed note or two, and add it to a project.

The bones are their money, so are the worms!

Okay, I'm seriously impressed. A buddy of mine has a garage setup where he uses a turbo oven lid with a rotary popcorn popper base, but this looks like a MUCH better way to get even roasting on the beans. What a great project!

I'm sure it differs from person to person, but a significant portion (possibly a majority) of the people at my law school seemed to be there because they didn't have any other ideas about what to do with their undergraduate degree. Easy access to ruinous student loan debt can seriously warp a person's decisionmaking process.