I'm stuck in a bit of a rut for work and trying to help out a department. We're going through a massive cash flow problem that we will see the other side of. There is zero budget for this, but I have spare kit.

The problem is that Legal have pulled all paper archives for all of the projects for the past 20 years of operating and need them digitally stored. Right now, we have a company runner scanning in a document to email, who then saves it off to a folder structure and renames it. The structure is on SharePoint, but the scan is image, not even OCR'd.

I have discovered Paperless NGX and wonder if this would be a better option for fast ingest. I can host on prem easy enough, either on a bare metal or VM. It looks like it can SSOd via many different options.

Any input would be great before I just go ahead and do this. I'm after pros and cons, alternatives, etc.

Thanks.

I'm looking at some recommendations for books about childhood trauma and abuse. Every book is almost the same. Something with a very long title like "You Are Your Own Blorbo: 25 Strategies and Steps to Overcome Your Hurdles and Achieve CHIM".

Then there is the uninspired and very fake summary. And then some supposedly impressive quotes by some supposedly bigshot people.

When you check out the author, they're often mentioned as a therapist with [insert experience of a few decades that doesn't necessarily mean anything]. They don't generally even mention what kind of therapist the author is (a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a mental health councillor, a different type?). They certainly don't give too much specifics about the therapy techniques they're specialized in and actual education, you know, two very important things.

It all feels disingenuous and scammy.

Thanks to this dishonest marketing style of virtually every single book in the industry, none of it means anything. You could write the absolutely worst, actively hurtful book, and still get all of this plastered on.

Beyond this marketing illusion, I know there to be some books that are actually helpful (have read a few), but vast majority of self-help books are either scams or overselling their quality. The problem is, even quality books seem to have this marketing shtick going on. Internet isn't too helpful either, because people -especially laypeople- too often misjudge. The only way seems to be seeing what the fuss is about yourself. But that takes a lot of time, and there's also the possibility that you will come out of the other end with internalized crap. It's genuinely a soulless ordeal to sift through all this utter shit to find something of worth.

I know it's not hopeless, as I read some good books throughout the years, but damn can it feel that way. It's especially more frustrating when you're just trying to find something to help tackle problems, and you're met with a capitalist epistemological nightmare.

This is a rant, I absolutely detest this industry, but this post is also meant to start a discussion. There is something rotten about this, and I wonder what other people have experienced and think about it. Experiences, frustrations, solutions, etc. are all welcome.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

After several bad experiences lately, I am interested in grinding meat at home. Does anyone have experience in this practice? I have a KitchenAid stand mixer and after some research, I am interested in buying the meat grinder attachment. However, there are literally dozens of weird Chinese brands on Amazon purporting to sell an identical set for much less. AliExpress is even cheaper.

Has anyone bought and used the KitchenAid version? Has anyone tried a cheaper version?

Thank you for your advice.

Thank you to everybody who commented; I'm going to look for the official KitchenAid attachment at a good price.

I have an M1 MacBook Air. I use UTM to run a Debian 11 virtual machine.

After the initial setup, updating and upgrading, installing Firefox and a few small programs, (I almost called them apps, d'oh), the Debian.utm file size was about 6GB. Now, less than a month later, it's almost 9GB.

The VM size increases after each use. I haven't downloaded or installed anything close to 3GB worth. I have downloaded files, then put them into the trash and emptied the trash, could the trash not be emptying properly?

I have run ncdu, but nothing stands out. When I drill down into /usr and into each large folder, no sub folder is larger than a few 100MB. I can't see any big files lurking.

I've googled using many search terms, but I can't get past results that are about how to increase the size of a VM that is running out of room.

Thanks very much for reading this, any ideas?

Very similar to how the recipe book in the game "Potion Craft" is organized. I essentially want to be able to mark pages and assign an icon, letter, symbol, or whatever to the tab. Clicking the tab brings you to that page. I also want the freedom to arrange these tabs around the perimeter of the book.

I'm not even sure what search terms to use to find a software like this. I'm not looking for anything robust, just a simple reader app with minimal page marking with intuitive visual organization.

Does anything like this exist?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

When I was in elementary school, I found some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books at a yardsale. I read through them, brought them to school, and played through a basic campaign with some friends. Since then, I haven't met anyone interested in pen-and-paper RPGs. I still hope that I can one day convince someone to play with me, but I don't even know which system I should try to learn. There are now so many different editions of D&D, in addition to countless alternatives and endless arguments over the merits of each.

Whatever system I decide to learn, I will need to invest time and energy into learning and teaching the game to others, and I'll most likely be the DM, so I'd like to choose one that won't be too difficult for beginners to get into. While I enjoy exploring interesting game mechanics, I think the idea of creating an interactive adventure story or a world to explore with friends is what attracts me the most. The Fate system sounded interesting, but I had a hard time understanding the core rulebook. I've recently read short summaries of several other systems that seem like they could be fun and not too hard to get into, such as Index Card RPG, Shadowdark, Tiny Dungeon, Five Torches Deep, Fantasy AGE, and Creative Card Chaos; but I can't afford to read through each of them and seven editions of D&D to determine which one is most suitable for me.

Does anyone have any advice on how to evaluate my options or a suggestion for a good one to start out with?