Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I don’t bother with Calibre or anything similar; I simply use the directory structure. Easier to show it with examples than explaining it.

    Full path description
    /storage/reading/language/David Marcus - A Manual of Akkadian.pdf language book
    /storage/reading/light novels/The Faraway Paladin/04.epub light novel
    /storage/music/Die Ärzte/2003 - Geräusch/05 - Dinge Von Denen.mp3 music track
    /storage/tarballs/ROMs/snes/Donkey Kong Country 2 - Diddy’s Kong Quest.smc SNES game
    /storage/tarballs/Utils/Android/F-Droid.apk installation file for F-Droid, Android system
    /storage/videos/movies/The Lord of the Rings/2002 - The Two Towers.mkv live-action movie
    /storage/videos/animes/Kimetsu no Yaiba/Season 3 - Entertainment District/01 - Sound Hashira Tengen Uzui.mkv anime episode

    You get the idea, right? No additional software needed, any automation tool to move/rename files can be used to help you out, and since metadata isn’t used for the organisation you can take your sweet time checking and fixing it. And sharing it across my network means simply sharing a directory with everything in it.

    Key points to use this approach effectively:

    1. Keep it simple. If you need to think on where an item should go, you’re probably over-engineering your sorting.
    2. Keep it objective. For example, genre is usually a bad sorting criterion, as the same piece of media can belong to 2+ genres. Author, franchise, set (season, album, etc.) are typically better.
    3. Keep it flexible. It’s fine and good if each subdivision has its own sorting criteria. Just be consistent with it.
    4. Keep it accurate. Names are part of the sorting structure, and should be descriptive.
    5. Keep it clean. Don’t add unorganised items to the file structure; if you must, keep a separated “to sort” directory elsewhere.
    6. Keep it broad. You’re probably already used to this due to the Johnny decimal system, but broader categories are usually better. Just don’t create artificial divisions to arbitrarily nest divisions, though; remember #2.
    7. Keep changing it. Ultimately the goal of a sorting system is to find your stuff; it is neither to be a control freak, nor to follow the advice of some random internet person like me. So if something is not working well for you, change it.

    Ah, on automation:

    • GPRename and Bulky are useful to… well, bulk rename files.
    • EasyTag can do it for audio files, based on the metadata and/or info retrieved from the internet.
    • Wikipedia “$series_name list of episodes” for descriptive names for anime or live action seasons. Often you can copypaste the whole text bloc into a text editor, and use some find-and-replace to get rid of everything except episode number + episode name.
    • Calc (yup, the spreadsheet program!) is a godsend. Specially with the above, plus a terminal; it means you can create on the spot a bunch of commands like
    mv 01.mkv "01 - The Sphere.mkv"
    mv 02.mkv "02 - The Inhabited.mkv"
    [...]
    

  • Let me guess: you were trying to pirate Windows games and software. Right?

    If yes, look at it this way. You’re pirating games for one system, and trying to run them in another system. Of course it’ll involve one or two additional loops to make it work. It’s like baking bread on your stove, you know? It can be done, but it isn’t as streamlined as using your oven.

    That said it isn’t really difficult. I have a bunch of pirated Windows games installed in my Linux. Steam helps by a lot, because of Proton; add the game to Steam as a “non-Steam game”, then force it to use a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. You can do it without Steam but it streamlines everything.

    You’re still better off looking for native software, though, made for Linux. A bunch of good games have Linux versions.