[Sat Oct 31 20:56:38 CDT 2015]

I just bought a Western Digital My Passport external USB hard drive to perform backups of my laptop. The old drive was still working, but it was way too old and bulky. This other one is tiny and easy to bring anywhere. I plugged it into my Linux laptop, and it mounted it right away just fine. By default, it mounts as a fuseblk filesystem. The partition is truly formatted as NTFS. In any case, as I said, it works just fine out of the box with Linux, even though, as it tends to be the case, it is officially supported only with Windows and Mac OS X. I only ran into one minor issue. I wrote my own bash shell script to perform the backups, and the drive is mounted by default into a mount point that contains a blank space:

/mnt/<username>/My Passport

Since my script uses AWK to perform one of the operations, it only detects "My" as the mount point. There may be a way to solve it in AWK itself, but I found it way easier to solve the problem by changing the label on the NTFS filesystem with the following command:

# ntfslabel /dev/sdb1 MyPassport

That worked. Just in case you need more information, the Ubuntu documentation contains an excellent document explaining how to rename USB drives. {link to this entry}

[Fri Oct 30 13:26:08 CDT 2015]

Difficult as it may be to believe, I didn't truly need until today to set a single song to repeat in Spotify. Boy, it wasn't easy! I clicked here, I clicked there, checked the menus, the context menus, the preferences menu...still no way to do it. Well, this forum contains the answer. You know that repeat button in the lower right-hand corner of the GUI? Yes, the one that turns green when you click on it, therefore setting the repeat mode on the playlist. Well, if you click on it twice while you are playing a song, it will set it to repeat only that song. Not sure why they had to make it so diffcult. But it works! {link to this entry}