Zenbook data rescue

RIP, Medusa (2013 Zenbook). I believe her power socket is finally dead.

Which was a bit of a bummer because I'm not too regular in my backups and the old Zenbooks feature non-standard 18pin-connectors instead of the more recent M.2/NGFFs. Ah well. There are adaptors for everything.
There were exactly 2 drive types with this form factor, SanDisk's SASA5JK and ADATA's XM11 and I got a board that transfers to a standard SATA and can then be stuck in a USB drive case like the one pictured above (I got the adaptor from here, but there are other suppliers as well).

KDE freezes on Special Window/Application Settings menu

I wanted to disable Global Shortcuts for Blender and happened on a nasty bug on Kubuntu 16.04 (applies to all windows).

The standard method is to go via right click on the title bar, 'More Actions' and 'Special Application (Window) Settings', clicking which completely froze my desktop. It wasn't reproducible on my laptop running 18.04, so I just note the workaround: don't ever click on those menu entries. Save your work more often. Change Window Rules via System Settings -> Window Management -> Window Rules.

Spyder 3.2.8, pip3 and and PyQt5

I recently ran into segfaults on all my computers after upgrading spyder via pip3. Lots of Qt5 error messages. The trouble seems to be PyQt5-5.10.1; spyder 3.2.8 requires at least 5.10.0 (which happens to work). Thus pip3 install --upgrade PyQt5==5.10.0 spyder 
solved my issue.
Note to self: pip3 install PyQt5== is a handy way to list available versions. Sadly, it's deprecated (--use-deprecated=legacy-resolver).
Second note to self: There's also spyder==4.0.0b1 which seems to work with newer PyQts. Good thing I switched to virtual environments.

Moving your thunderbird data to a custom location

Thunderbird's profile data is stored in ~/.thunderbird by default.
If that's inconvenient, i.e. due to disk quota limits, here's is how to move the profile folder. It will have some random name, we'll call it pr0f1le.default, and ~/.thunderbird contains a file profiles.ini and a folder named pr0f1le.default.
Here, I've moved the profile folder to e.g. /media/data/thunderbird/pr0f1le.default and changed profiles.ini to (changes in bold):

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=/media/data/thunderbird/pr0f1le.default
Default=1

IsRelative has to be 0 because I've given Thunderbird an absolute path to the new location.