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I know some of you also have a Plex media server set up in their homes, so hopefully someone will be able to give me a clue about what's going awry with my new setup... People on the Plex subreddit haven't had any suggestions so far.

I've been able to set up Plex Media Server from a RPM on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed just fine for the most part, except for one thing — it can only detect videos that I place in the first library I create, never the second. Both are in subfolders of a "Videos" folder in my home directory (for example, ~/Videos/A and ~/Videos/B) with identical permissions, no symlinks involved.

If I place video files into Library 1 and tell it to rescan, they appear; if I move those files into Library 2 and have it rescan, both the web app and the desktop app will continue to insist that the library is empty. Move them back to the first library, and voilà, they're detected and available again!

I've tried naming the libraries different things ("Movies" "Shows" "Mom" "Library1" etc.), setting them to auto-detect, manually telling them to rescan, completely uninstalling & reinstalling both the PleX Media Server and desktop app (including deleting the configuration directories), creating the libraries in reverse order ("B" then "A") logging out & in again, rebooting my computer...nothing seems to help.

Separately, even though Plex Media Server was installed from an official RPM (not Snap or Flatpak), I was also unable to get it to work with symlinks (including relative symlinks) or mounted disks aside from / and /home. It's not a big deal right now as my video library is fairly small, but over time it could become an issue.

Any suggestions?

I could have sworn that I posted about this the other day, but it doesn't appear to be in my journal...odd.

Anyway, I wanted to recommend a guy on Youtube who has been producing interesting videos on events in Ukraine and Russia:

Combat Veteran Reacts

He's an Army vet (and big military history buff) who was stationed in Afghanistan around a decade ago and is proud to have brought all the soldiers he was eventually in charge of back home alive in spite of the violence going on at the time. He's been using his knowledge to explain and analyze troop movements, PG-rated combat videos, and other things related to the war over there. I'm not really into military stuff, but his work is surprisingly interesting, plus offers a lot more information than what appears in our regular news media.

I just had a jaw-dropping experience with the DMV that I thought some of you would get a kick out of...

I needed to renew my car's registration, so after getting it smog-tested, I hopped onto the Vivaldi Web Browser on my phone and tried to log into the DMV website, only to land on a screen informing me: “Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”

I typed my old one into the Old Password box, then a new one into the two New Password boxes, and hit enter.

“Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”

I tried again, being extra careful to make sure I wasn't typing it wrong.

“Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”

I double-checked to be sure I was following the rules (at least 4 letters + 4 numbers or symbols, total of 8-20 characters), then came up with something different.

“Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”

Figuring that it doesn't like Vivaldi or that its ad-blocking is the problem, I opened Chrome and tried yet again.

“Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”.

At that point, I assumed that the DMV's website simply doesn't work with mobile browsers and hopped onto my desktop.

Vivaldi: “Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”
Chrome: “Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”
Firefox: “Your password has expired. Please pick a new one.”

Exasperated and annoyed at the thought that I might have to waste the afternoon sitting at the damn understaffed DMV, I put my old password into all three boxes...and voilá, it worked!

This year, due to concerns about COVID-19, all of the cities in my region canceled their usual professional airborne fireworks displays. Which would've been fine...except most of them also thought it'd be a great time to ban the use of the "safe & sane" street fireworks we've been restricted to for the last few decades, partly out of a paternal fear people will injure themselves, partly from the fear that setting off ground-based safe fireworks in really wide suburban streets far from anything flammable could cause massive fires.

Apparently they thought that meant everyone would obediently have a quiet evening at home...just like banning all recreational drugs instead of regulating or restricting them means nobody uses them. You know, especially when people have been been under varying degrees of lockdown for 3½ months.

So, instead of driving across town and fighting traffic to watch the city's official 20-minute display as I normally do, I stayed home and (as anyone with an ounce of foresight could predict) got to watch about two hours of almost-equally-good fireworks overhead being shot off from people's backyards.

Today's regional papers, not shockingly, had headlines indicating that illegal fireworks set hundreds of fires across the Bay Area; my county's paper said that the FDs here had more than double the normal number of calls.

I'd say that it'll be fun to see whether "safe & sane" fireworks are banned next year or whether city councils will rethink their approach, but to be honest, I don't think that local politicians are bright enough to put cause and effect together enough to do that.

Normally, calling Kaiser's advice line results in talking to a front-line rep within a minute or two, then waiting 5-10 minutes to talk to an advice nurse. Last night, calling them resulted in waiting on hold 5-10 minutes to talk to the front-line representative, and 30 minutes to talk to the advice nurse...and today, it was 10 minutes to reach a rep, and an estimated hold time of one hour. Which, as it turns out, meant that at exactly 1:00:00 the line went silent, then hung up on me ten minutes later. Fucking figures.

Just to make it that little bit more annoying, every 20 seconds (yes, I timed it) their system repeats the "we're still assisting other members" message and restarts the on-hold music. So I just had an hour of hearing the same 20-second clip of two songs over-and-over-and-over. Maybe it's a deliberate attempt to annoy people into ending the call for their own sanity.

(No, I wasn't calling about the coronavirus... My mother's having some problems with unexplained severe nosebleeds that last several hours, and I needed to know at various stages whether it was severe enough to warrant a trip to the ER.)