Random : Hey you're a programmer right?

Me : Yeah? *excited about possibilities*

Random : I am having troubles installing a game I downloaded. I've been trying for three weeks now.

Me : *sigh* OK, I'll have a look, but I can't guarantee I'll get it right.

*Spend about 10 seconds installing game.*

Random : How did you do that?

Me : I read the error message, it was pointing to the wrong file.

Random : You are a god man *calls wife* come look at this genius. *calls daughter* look at that *calls dog* this guy is so amazing.

I also now avoid Random, he had three hard drives, each with a different version of Windows installed, he totally screwed his bios, he admitted not having put thermal paste on his cpu. And he asked me to fix all of this whenever I have time.

I am not your computer fixer guy. Take It to the shop.

Entering BIOS be like

I know sex is cool but have you ever entered BIOS with only one key press?!

When you try to start bios but you can't remember the key

When you accidently open the bios menu on your smart watch when you're just trying to turn it back on 😂

JavaScript is basically Java

People are fucking idiots. Had agreed to a meeting on Monday morning at 9 with some generic startup. Agreed to listen to their pitch after they had bugged me with hundred phonecalls and emails. It happened that my kid got sick during the previous night and this being the only meeting I decided to work from home and stay with the kid. I sent an email at 2am as apologizing, canceling the meeting and proposing a new time for another day this week.

Well at 9am I get a call from reception that my guests have arrived. I call the contact and she's angry at me that I didn't show. When I asked about the email she snaps at me: I don't have time to read emails on Monday mornings.

Well I don't give a flying fuck about your shitty pitch. Go fucking peddle your shit somewhere else if you can't handle your affairs and start snapping at me. FUCK.

Well..Ok? You don't see this everyday haha.

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

I guess every faced this at the start.

The year is 2025
vlcInstall.exe
"You already have videos, the trusted and safe media player for windows 10"
AtomInstaller.exe
"You already have vscode, the better and lighter editor for windows 10"
SteamInstaller.exe
"You already have Microsoft solitare, a fun, better game for windows 10"
*googles c++ tutorials*
"Try c#, safer and robust language for developers, oh and did we forget to mention use bing?"
*downloads arch iso*
"This file has been marked malicious by windows defender. Oh and we updated your bios to allow only windows bootloader. You're welcome."

Opening BIOS

This actually happend in my secondary school class. A new guy came to our class. The whole family moved from another city.
*new guy want to start conversation with me*
new guy: "So you into computers and stuff like that?"
me: "Yes" *seems like a cool guy , want to develop the conversation further* "what about you man? do you like computers? do yo program or smth?"
*new guy wants to look cool in front of me*
new guy: " Yeah dude, actually I am hacker"
*me saying to myself, oh fuck not again this shit*
he continues with: " Once I got into the NASA system"
*switches mode to making fun of him*
me: "what the fuck man? really? that´s freaking cool, how you manage to do that? "
new guy: " you know the thing when you press F10 when starting a comupter? "
me: "You mean BIOS?"
new guy : "yeah yeah man through that shit"
* I am done, laughing my ass off and walks away*

Just an observation. Researched this a bit and found out that usually people only thank dfox when posting swag thanks posts.

Just wanted to demand some justice for mr trogus who is the designer of said swag and give due appreciation!

Lets @trogus some to deliver the appreciation.

Sister comes into my room

"Can you look at moms laptop, it stopped working I'm scared I broke it"

Ask why

"Idk it just stopped working, all I did was install adobe flash player I dont think that could do it could it?"

Top kek

Take a look

"EFI IPV4 0 (error code) failed to boot"

Weird. Enter bios

"Hard drive: [Not detected]"

Well, that's no bueno

Pop open back, hard drive is loose

Pfft, push that fucker back in

Boot -> works

"Mom is going to kill me I broke it im so worried" -> relieved laughter

Adobeflashplayerkilledmyharddrive.jpg

Shook.exe

Yeah. Exactly. Its the year 2718. Humanity was destroyed by a deadly virus. The only thing that's left is A GIGBAYTE MAINBOARD.

Last year I got an Acer notebook from a guy that stated that "it isn't working". "Okay" I thought, let's boot it up.

> Screen turns on, no splash screen, no hard drive activity
> Well fuck
> Tries to enter BIOS, nothing
> Openes case to reset CMOS
> Nothing
> Okay I think I need to flash a new BIOS
> Acer support site
> "Download the exe to flash the BIOS"
> What
> Spend two hours researching
> Find out that you can flash via USB and by pressing a key combination
> Extract the BIOS binary from the exe file
> Flash it on the notebook
> Splash screen and working BIOS
> Yay!!!
> No bootable devices found
> Fuck
> Connects hdd with test bench
> Completely fucking dead
> WTF
> Order a new hard drive
> 3 days later
> Install hdd
> Install Windows
> Finally working

WTF did you do to this notebook to not only mechanically break your hdd but also fuck up the BIOS completely??!!

Entering bios got me like

Inspired

Entering BIOS be like...

Reinstalled my dedicated server yesterday.

Then you suddenly get errors saying that KVM isn't found.

Searching my ass off for hours because I damn well enabled Intel virtualization in the bios!

Double checked after a few hours.

THE FUCKER TURNED ITSELF OFF OR SOMETHING FOR THE SECOND TIME?! WELL, THERE GOES A FEW FUCKING HOURS 😡

Faaaaaaaaaaaak. Elevator door closed on me and friggin cracked my favorite GitHub coffee mug.. RIP

"Come with me if you want to code"

Perfect timing... I have a call in 7 minutes...

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

Whoever designed UEFI, FUCK YOU!! Giving the OS control over every fucking thing in the hardware instead of letting the BIOS do that separately, WHO IN THEIR RIGHT FUCKING MIND THOUGHT THAT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?!!

And same goes to fucking you Microsoft! How difficult is it to do a fucking ACPI shutdown and do it properly?! How fucking difficult is it to not make the fans spin like jet engines because why the fuck not?! And yes the fucking PC is dust-free and bloat-free so I don't want to see any fucking Wintard comment that.

You know where else I saw the inability to power down? In Linux 4.20-rc2. A kernel that is within active development, and rc2 at that!! A kernel branch that's designed to be unstable, for testing purposes. Meanwhile the stable branch of MS Windows does the same. Also designed to be unstable because fuck QA?! Filthy fucking motherfuckers!!

So my school forced everyone to buy a Chromebook G4 Education Edition which came with ChromeOS and we had to sign some shady e-policy. Days after I got it, I opened it up and manually reflashed the BIOS so I could use SeaBIOS and install Arch Linux.

Great, so I went on to instal Chrome and it was really slow and performance heavy, then I installed the new Firefox and it ran a lot faster...

*So hehe, Firefox works better than Chrome on a Chromebook!*

When trying to enter the bios....

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

THIS is a good BIOS. I just got this thinkpad (since the screen in the one I had broke) and I was like "I'm going to use always fn as ctrl" and I see this. Thank you thinkpad

Booting to bios :D

long rant = this;

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.

First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.

Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.

Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??

Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.

Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.

Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?

Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.

Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.

Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?

I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.

I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.

Mission Impossible :D

Round 2 of unusual BIOS screens

Working at a school for a couple weeks and I've never been so scared to touch anything in my life...

I just had to update my BIOS while trying to update Windows while trying to update the Visual Studio Updater while trying to update Visual Studio while trying to update my C++ Compiler while trying to update the drivers for... my mouse. Mouse, of all things....

FUCKING HELL
My sister has that Vaio laptop from 2012 and she wanted me to "clean it up"... You get the deal. I ran the bios and booted it up from my external SSD setup so I don't have to bother with her bloody Windows fucking 7. When I'm finished deleting some garbage she managed to accumulate on her disk I wanted to switch back to Windows to properly uninstall bloatware she had. AND THEN OT FUCKING STRUCK ME. Can't load bios. F keys don't do shit. Delete doesn't either. The bloody "ASSIST" button is as useless as always. Since the computer is so slow I'm gonna waste a whole day trying to fix it and in the end she will be like: "oh, it took you so long!". Why Vaio, why can't you just get over the fact that some people actually use BIOS and make it somehow ACCESSIBLE? It's the same shit every time I try to do anything with that laptop. I'm always getting shit on from Sony as if I paid them to fuck me. One last time. VAIO, FUCK YOU.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Teacher: Computer settings are stored in the ROM on the motherboard.
Me: *internally* Uhm, yea, sure... and I am the pope
Me: Sorry to interrupt you but how come the BIOS settings get reset when the CMOS battery is pulled out or dies if they are stored in ROM?
Teacher: ....
Me: *internally* yea, that's what I thought, you have no clue what you are even saying - the BIOS is stored in ROM or flash memory while the settings are stored in NVRAM also called CMOS memory...

When you try to get BIOS..

!!rant

When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.

But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.

Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.

I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.

I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.

I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.

Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.

I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT

secretly hoping to get fired over this

Just spoke with a guy who considers himself a PC expert.

He: You can always recover your offline data from your PC, even if you burn it.

Me: You just need to remove your hard drive.

He: Even if you remove your hard disk, offline data can be recovered from from RAM memory.

Me: WTF?? * Trying to explain him that RAM is a volatile memory*

He: Yeah but you can recover it from the BIOS.

Me: r u serius right now??

And I can continue, because we've unfortunately talked for about an hour.

Why these people consider themselves experts and why the fuck do they have to teach you things that the don't know. FML

Customer care guys are stupid
Me : yeah, OS crashed. It keeps getting into bios setup saying there's no hard drive detected on this system and no recovery file found as well, what do ?
Him : "well sir, your OS has been corrupted and now you have to buy new licensed one, if you can just give me your location I can help you locate out nearest service centre which will help you install a new licensed instantly"
Me : *WHAT THE ACTUAL TRIPLE FUCK* atleast try to understand the problem first.
Him : No need sir, I already come across this problem and now you have to pay, as I was saying *beep*
*I smashed the phone*
After that I fixed it myself
These low level shit licking faggots need to get themselves fucked in the ass by horses and then apply the same conversation when the intercourse begins with the horse.
Also, if I could be placed in the same customer care cell, I would do better.
So wk62 too I guess

So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.

So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and

.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..

Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.

Nothing.

So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!

I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,

3.. 2.. 1..

and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.

Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it

P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

I just flashed BIOS on my server. I don't own a UPS, and i was only using 1 of the 2 PSU's since i couldn't find a second power cord.

Without a doubt the scariest 30 seconds I've ever experienced while working with IT

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

To any fellow Linux sysadmin out there, is it true that 32 bits systems can handle a max of 16gb ram?

Running a 32 bits CentOS live disc in my dedi which shows 16gb ram available while the BIOS shows 32gb installed...

😅

Dear Windows,
All I wanted was for you to live in harmony with my Arch install on my laptop. I appreciate both of you guys for different reasons. You guys did okay for for 2 weeks. Then, when I was using you, you blue screened quickly and rebooted.
On reboot, the BIOS couldn't boot. I reboot again, but instead of my normal GRUB menu, it just goes straight to you. I call for Arch, but only you responded.
I understand you are a bit possessive, but you really need to learn to play with others.

You are in time out until your brother is fixed. Now nobody is happy.

Dude: Hey, can you help me with my website? It's for the final year project (IT and Hardware related degree).
Me: Sure, let me see.

Sends a .txt file with two <html> tags, not even closed.

Dude: Can you fix it so it appears with a menu on the top and news on the middle?

This guy got his degree and I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know how to enter to the BIOS of a computer.

He probably doesn't know what a BIOS is.

today i learned bios manuals made ram sticks look fucking massive

A situation i just dealt with on my tech help Discord server:

Beginning:
"my gpu isn't working and i need it to update my bios"

Ending:
"i have to have a cpu and ram to update my bios?"

this kid thought he only needed a mobo, GPU and PSU

he's 19

why

believe or not. I think intel NUC has one of the best UI for bios

Happy (dead) BIOS... ;)

Speechless!

Amazed to see such amazing UI of BIOS

I don't know who you are but I will find you and I will install linux in your pc

Fuck off bitch
My bios is password protected

The satisfaction a developer get when you see something hacked publicly.

A new online store for custom PC has opened in Switzerland.

For overclocking they want CHF 10 (around 9.50 $) more for every MHz.

I know that some people gonna buy this shit and pay for that. If that people knew that you only need to access BIOS/After Burner for it 😂😂😂😂

#BestSpendMoney

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

Me and my friend in class:
My friend: my computer won't boot can you do something ?
Me: *looks at the screen*
*see he is in the bios*
*press CTRL+ALT+DEL*
*computer reboots into windows*
My friend: :0

I've got a brand new laptop and when the fan is spinning slowly, there is a noise like something is touching it.

I've recorded the noise, sent to the service and these people suggested a bios update. For a shitty fan noise...

Thank you windows update and Lenovo for trying to update my bios and failing in the process.

Now this computer that doesn’t even show bios. Fucking bitch ass pieces of shit.

Stay the fuck away from my bios windows, you shit eating trash of an os.

Let's debug the shit out of this. One hour untill deadline and still not working..

What is your story of your first encounter with a Linux Distro?

Here's mine (Slight long version) –
Back in my 8th grade I used to buy Tech magazines that used to have DVDs filled with random updated contents like Audio/Video tools, Wallpapers and other stuff. There used to be this "Linux Distro of the Month" section that I used to ignore because I didn't know what it is.
But one issue of the magazine had a review of this "amazing new" Ubuntu 10.10. I read it and at first I thought it's some kind of theme for Windows (I know). But then I tried it out on my HP Compaq nx6120 which had a pure BIOS. No UEFI shit. Ubuntu came with it's wubi installer and it installed Ubuntu smoothly like a normal software. Later I discovered that it is a completely different operating system that doesn't run anything from my Windows. I was upset about it and I booted back to Windows.
But I never removed it. I felt like exploring what it was and why people use it.
It's almost 9 years later and I'm so glad with what had happened back then.

Let's dual-boot!

(That's my school classroom in the background)

what the last windows update did to me:

- BROKE the fucking SPEAKERS so i have NO SOUND even WITH HEADPHONES. the only pair that work is a bluetooth one that i used before

- RESET ALL OF MY BIOS SETTINGS. this includes intel haxm so now the FUCKING AVD WON'T WORK.

- BROKE my FINGERPRINT SENSOR, so now i cant use the side of my pinky to login.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.
GO SUCK BILL GATES'S COCK.
DIE IN A HOLE.

Just heard a site IT leader say her laptop was "fixed with a BIOS update" followed by "I have no idea what that means"

How do these people get into these kinds of roles?

Office workspace. Corrected some ergonomics with useless books I had laying around =D

So to start off this happened today while I was at school.

Each student gets a netbook for school and the amount of restrictions put in place are probably up to government spec. Well I brought in my personal netbook and a flash drive with a few distros of Linux on it on it to mess with during study hall(all on my own hardware).

I told my friend that about it and said I doubted it would boot because the bios is password protected and the IT guy probably removed external drives from the boot list but let him use it anyway.

5 minutes later he is showing me his screen with Ubuntu running on it, I was freaking out some and asked for it back and he gave it back to me.

About a minute later he shows me his screen. All black with white text shooting down it saying windows disk integrity check or something like that. All I see is "file xyz deleted" and was freaking out even more. I just sat there for the next 20 minutes thinking of how to explain this to the IT guy and hopefully get in less trouble.

Finally after the longest 20 minutes of my life as a student I see the windows 7 boot screen appear. Probably the one time I actually wanted to see it honestly but I was so happy to see the end of the situation.

Sorry this was so long but I hope it's fine for a first post here, I've been putting it off but after this decided to finally post.

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

You should be able to rate people on LinkedIn, or leave reviews.

The number of absolute fucking idiots I’ve worked with over the years who are on there and whose bios read great, is shocking.

It’s like... wait this guy’s page reads like he’s a total hero.... but in actuality he’s s completely useless fuck-nugget.

So what was originally some issue for my dual booting laptop has turned into something awesome, originally I'd boot and get into grub and choose windows or mint but with a need to get bluetooth to work I went to check some settings in the bios and after no changes I left to reboot and use mint.

Anyways it would only boot to Windows and I got a little annoyed but was able to, with the boot order changer, load up grub.

So now my laptop has a hidden boot option into mint :D thought it was a neat little feature (because I don't know how to fix it lol), completely hidden from my windows partition (unless you check disk manager).

Everybody atheist until it’s time to upgrade bios.

Always back up your data.

I came to my computer earlier today to find it on my Linux login screen. This could only mean one thing: something went horribly wrong.

Let me explain.

I have my BIOS set up to boot into Windows automatically. The exception is a reboot or something horrible happens and the computer crashes. Then, it boots me into Linux. Due to a hardware issue I never looked into, I have to be present to push F1 to allow the computer to start. The fact that it rebooted successfully, without me present, into *Linux*, could only mean one thing:

My primary hard drive died and was no longer bootable.

The warning was the BIOS telling me the drive was likely to fail ("Device Error" doesn't really tell me anything to be fair).

The massive wave of panic hit me.

I rebooted in hopes of reviving the drive. No dice.

I rebooted again. The drive appeared.

Let's see how much data I can recover from it before I can no longer mount it. Hopefully, I can come out of this relatively unscathed.

The drive in question is a 10 year old 1.5 TB Seagate drive that came with the computer. It served me well.

Press F to pay respects I guess.

On the bright side, I'll be getting an SSD as a replacement (probably a Samsung EVO).

Tools don't matter. Use what is comfortable and don't listen to all the brand, OS, editor and tabs/spaces crap. They all do the job and you will find the right ones once you really understand what you are doing. "Tools can be just a way to procrastinate". If you become tool agnostic you can do the job no matter the environment.

After a few hours of trying to get Antergos installed on a SD card I decided to give up and try Ubuntu instead as it usually have better out-of-the-box compatibility. And just like that, I've got it up and running on my School computer. (bios locked, can't boot from USB but SD works for some reason).

So, I'm going to run Ubuntu from a 32GB SD Card, should I upgrade to something bigger?

Edit: I survived grub update. Phew..

Swagged up the setup with some art by the missus.

In my day off I was eager to try overclocking in my pc and this is how it went:

- Fucked up overclocking parameters for cpu and ram speed.

- BIOS is broken, had to take out gpu to do a reset taking out the bios battery.

- BIOS is up again, default values loaded, bla bla

- Did not try to fuck off anymoar with overclocking, just kept playing star wars and went to sleep safe and sound like a baby.

- Gotta work now. docker does not start, closes itself after tried to start, docker panic, I panic, tried to uninstall, tried to update. nothing works

- Then I remember bios default values leaves virtualization off. enables it again, docker still not working. I panic again, restarted pc like 10 times between disabling/enabling hyper-v in windows.

- Docker dies. not gonna change my overclock options again. silly me 🤦‍♂️

Right let's get this straight once and for all. Being able to one click install WordPress on your shared hosting account doesn't make you a web developer or ann am expert so please remove this from your social bios on Twitter etc.

- booting Linux
- starting Clonezilla
- kernel panic after some time
- WTF, this used to work
- look at sensor values
- CPU is really hot
- CPU fan doesn't work
- BIOS warning disabled because the lowest regular fan level is 0 RPM

Luckily, I still had some cheap 120mm fan which is a bit louder, but works. What's astonishing is that in normal operation, i.e. without full load, the case fans alone provided enough air stream for the CPU cooler.

Today I went to a computer store to buy laptop with my friend. When we were waiting for the store technicians to check the laptop for my friend, we found out that nearly all technicians (about 4, 5) of the computer store don't know how to enter BIOS setup for the laptop :/ How the fuck they become the store technicians if they don't fucking know how to access BIOS setup of a laptop? (one of them even suggested to use a screwdriver (wtf?) to access the BIOS the new laptop o.O)
Don't know what will they do with my friend's new laptop if I didn't tell them how to enter BIOS
(It's a Lenovo laptop, the combination to enter BIOS is fn+f2 and the store we bought the laptop is a large store in our city)

>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good

~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved

...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol

I just woke up from a nap. This may seem weird but I had a dream about organizing a devRant meetup at my location. dfox was in town for some reason it involved alot of beer.

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

OhhhYeaaah! Got the dream job at the best devshop in town!

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

The effect of updating the bios via USB (possible only on windows) when all computers run on Linux.

😵 help - I totally fucked up.

I managed to delete my /dev/sda1 partition with gparted while trying to format an USB-Stick...

Now my laptop not even trys to boot. It only opens BIOS without any boot options. I absolutely have no idea how to fix that shit. 😣😰

I guess no mo' coding for me today. Time to grab muh good old flasher :)

Someone in my class disabled my networking card from BIOS. Took an hour to find out why it was not working.

Fuck i hate myself right now...
> Wanted to install minikube on my homeserver(which doesn't have a graphics card in it)
> Error: Virtualization is not enabled
> Take the server out of my rack, opens my desktop pc, takes the gpu out, puts in it my server, and then goes into bios.
> Find that virtualization is enabled.
> Realize that I'm running a dozen docker containers on a daily basis from my server, so OF FREAKING COURSE virtualization is enabled...

So after all that, I figure out that I should probably just google my issue, which leads to me find out, it's just an issue with virtualbox, and simply running 'minikube config set vm-driver none', it fixes it, and I am now running minikube.............

Took half an hour of work, to realize that I'm a complete fucking idiot, who shouldn't be allowed near a computer

Swaggy AF, swagatron2000

Ty David&Tim!

Domain server goes down, it's the gateway and DNS too.

Ok I'll just remove the domain, it's been orphaned really since you went to the cloud.

Don't have local admin password.

Ok call old it company who set up gear

Out of business

Ok boot to Linux and reset

Usb boot locked

Don't have bios password

Call old it company

Still out of business.

Wait, can I just set manual ipv4 ? Ok domain without a domain controller... If it works it works.

This is a follow up to my previous rant where I complained about Lenovo firmware update failing and bricking a relative’s computer.

We bought a chip programmer, got the bios from some forum and the thing fucking worked. I’m actually surprised it did, I’m not used to doing shit like this. I was pretty fucking scared of burning something.

The programmer also came with a clamp so we could hook it to the chip without desoldering it. Thank god.

I’m terribly depressed so good timing with that I guess.

Observation

Usually happens when hitting some heavy development after waking up to an idea at 5am and rushing in to the office to make it happen. Then you write for hours straight refilling some coffee once in a while.

At some point you start finding other people at the coffee station and the smalltalk starts. For some reason I can't turn my brain into social mode. Someone asks me stuff like "How was your weekend?" And the answer can be anything between "I like turtles" and some totally uninhibited and unintended truth in the TIM category.

Flow is strong but it totally fucks up my social capabilities. It also makes me happy =D

Back in Tinyland from Stockholm and this is the first thing I see in the bus.

Lovely, home sweet home ☕

I did not use my Windows 10 since weeks. Now I wanted to play some games and I got a bluescreen. It reboots several times. I did not miss it.

this.isrant = true

Visual studio YOU BITCH!

2 hours of struggling to enable VT-X for docker but never seeming to be enabled when I boot back from the BIOS, turns out the motherfucking IDE sneakily enables hyper-v when I install Windows phone SDK, which I apparently need for xamarin. Well Microsoft? GO FUCK YOURSELF. I ONLY USE YOU FOR THE SUPPORT! I hate Microsoft and it's sneaky background shit that I don't know about and would probably freak out about if I did. I'm swapping to Ubuntu with MSSQL and MonoDevelop ASAP

I was asked to check something today that was handed over on a USB stick. "Could you check that the file structure is correct". Of course I said. Then I prepared my camera, changed the insides of the stick to my rubber ducky, wrote a little script and uploaded it. Oh yea and corrected the structure.

The face of the colleague was priceless when I brought back the stick and he sticked it right into his computer.

The script was roughly:
- open browser
- open history
- search "porn"
- select second row
- enter

=D office pranks <3

TL:DR; DON'T GET INTEL+NVIDIA LAPTOP FOR LINUX.

In the same vain as Linus Torvalds: "Fuck Nvidia, and Intel".

Trying to get intel+nvidia laptop prime w/e working is a living hell.

I'm running Manjaro(arch for lazy people) with I3-gaps(larbs).

So Manjaro provides this handy script/program mhwd that supposedly would enable the non free blob Nvidia driver except it doesn't work cause it uses bumblebee and it's saying it can't find the clearly installed fucking Nvidia driver.

Bashing my head against a wall is more fucking productive then getting my cum stain of laptop to work properly.

"Just disable the intel graphics in bios"
I would except my old shitty Acer bios piece of fucking crap can't even after booting Windows for usb hdd and flashing BIOS.

GUESS WHAT LINUX COMMUNITY THAT'S WHY NOBODY WANTS TO FREAKING USE LINUX FOR GAMING.

I fucking love Linux but I gave up gaming for it.

I'll start joining red team from now on instead of trying to use your broken shit.

Well well well.....

*needs to repartition disks
*is mounted, need live usb
*download and burn gparted live, ≈20min
*reboot, usb not bootable
*try again, maybe it's corrupt...
* nope it just won't boot
*download and burn puppy Linux ≈20min
*is bootable
*installs gparted
*opens gparted
*repartition disks
*NOPE
*e2fsck failed: get a newer version of e2fsck
*already the latest version
*hmmm, maybe if I build it myself
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*give up
*download and burn Debian live ≈40min
*try to install gparted
*can't get WiFi drivers working
*give up
*download and burn Ubuntu
*opens gparted (already installed)
*partitions disk, leaves to complete overnight (it will have to move ≈60GiB)
*comes back in morning
*computer went to sleep after 10 mins
*late to work but oh well I at least got it done

I hate that my bios take twice as long as Linux, to start. It is only 15 seconds, but still.

!rant

Oh yea. Got an interview on the first try to the best devshop in town. Exited! Let's hope our interests meet. Applying for the first time in 10 years. Feels like going on a first date. =D

Who remembers bios?

I upgraded a PC with an SSD and had to reinstall twice because windows thought it would be a good Idea just to use the boot partition of the old drive instead of creating a new one on the SSD.

I first noticed that something was weird because I could only delete the system and not the boot partition on the old drive using diskpart. I restarted the machine thinking it would help only for the bios to tell me there was no os on the ssd. I tried booting from the old hdd and sure enough, I landed on the desktop of the ssd install.

To resolve that I had to unplug the other drive, reinstall windows and only then I could boot normally.

60mins of my life wasted as I had just finished installing all the software...

Me: Ok, lets jump back into my linux install

*Turns on PC and instantly boots into windows*

Me: Hm, that's odd, maybe I accidentally changed my boot order

*Opens BIOS and sees Windows SSD is first followed by Empty SSD...*

Me: *Cries in the corner realising I have just accidentally removed the Linux SSD and put it back in to try and install MacOS*

Lotus fucking Notes..

I have an EXAM tomorrow and my motherboard wont even post to BIOS

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

Tried to dual boot Arch with Windows yesterday.

Everything was going smoothly. Shrunk the C: partition, ran the installer, installed the OS fine. But it was still booting straight to Windows.

So I edited the BCD to point to Grub instead of Wilndows. Then the plan was to boot into Arch, find Windows, and add it to Grub, problem solved.

Wrong. I had forgotten to disable secure boot. Arch and Grub were booting in BIOS mode, but Windows was UEFI. Grub couldn't boot or even see Windows.

So now I was stuck with just Arch. So I flashed a Windows drive, booted from that, automatic startup repair failed. Opened up the command prompt, tried to rebuild the BCD from there. Surely I can just rebuild it and forget about trying to dual boot right? I just want to get back to being able to use my PC.

Wrong again. Didn't find Windows. Had to get rid of the BCD file before I could rebuild it, but couldn't find it. Found out that I could use diskpart to mount the system partition and assign it a drive letter, renamed the BCD, rebuilt it, and finally was able to reboot into Windows.

Learn from my arrogance. First time Linux users should not attempt to install Arch, let alone do it alongside Windows on the same disk.

I'm freaking done trying to get Linux on my machine. I've tried every distro with many different versions of the kernel and I always run into the same problem on my desktop.

The computer super stutters for 2 seconds ish than freezes.

I've spent DAYS looking into this issue trying to find something. The worst part is that it can happen 5 minutes when I boot or 5 hours. At first I thought it was Compton. Then I thought I installed arch wrong. Maybe an update to the BIOS? How about downloading updated microcode? Maybe this obscure bug with AMD processors and setting power idle to typical? Nothing. I'm now behind on my school work because of the massive amount of time ive spent getting this fixed. It works just fine on my laptop, but it doesn't work on the machine I built to code with. I'm done. Give me Force Lightning, a red lightsaber, and call me a Sith baby because I'm joining the dark side. Here I come Windows.

For those who are wondering my setup:
Ryzen 7 1700
Rx 480
Asus x-370 prime
16 gb Corsair RAM

And no, Windows has never had this bug.

So I'm about to buy a laptop, and as any good developer Im already thinking on what are the first things I'm going to do with it, so far I've this list:

1- Enter BIOS and make sure everything is right.
2- Boot and configure all the crap that Windows asks
3- Download and install chrome and uTorrent
4- Download Fedora
4.5- Format the HHD
5- Partition my SSD and install fedora
6- Configure my dev environment, IDEs, runtimes, git aliases etc
7- Install Windows in another partition.

I'm I the only one with a routine?

I thought I just lost everything on my computer because somehow automatic update from win made my ram run at 1300mhz instead of 1600mhz and it assumed there was a hardware problem and completely froze up every time it started. Luckily I decided to comb through bios first and Bam! Ram at wrong speed! I changed the setting and windows booted happily. Piece of shit update system. 😑

*trying to install arch linux for the first time*
> reboot
> system goes into a boot loop
> cant get into BIOS
> taking pc apart rn

I keep a 20 year old PS/2 keyboard around specifically for that rare event I need to edit my bios settings. My mobo doesn’t enable usb until half a second after it stops listening for input because who uses usb keyboards, anyway?

the worst project I've ever worked on was a BIOS update utility for the desktop techs at work. They wanted a tool to open that would let them know when there's a BIOS update and install it for them. The problem was the file share that held the BIOS updates had no naming convention, Dell doesn't name all BIOS updates with Axx, people would fat finger the BIOS password and model numbers for the computers was a pain to match against the file share. After at least 800 lines of C# code I give it to them. A couple months go by and I still see them going machine to machine upgrading BIOSes in labs even though my tool does it to a lab silently with a switch... hhhhhh.

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

Just updated my motherboards bios and didn't think to fucking backup the fucking uefi settings so now it won't fucking detect fucking grub or windows boot manager fucking fucking fucking cunt

So I did a clean Windows 10 restore recently on my laptop from Insider program to just Anniversary Update . Went away from my computer for a day or so by the time I got updates completed and Visual Studio up and running. So earlier today I went to start back up development on a project of mine to come across the emulators not working. The thing is that I lost 6 hrs of production to figure this out. I tried everything possible so I gave up and reinstalled VS to just remember I forgot to turn on my Hyper-V in BIOS setting. So I'm half way in VS reinstalling and I can't do anything about it. GOD FUCKEN DAMMIT W10!

When you flash a BIOS update and find out that your OS ain't booting.

Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...

Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.

A bit later...

I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.

Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?

Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?

Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.

THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.

I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?

No.

Please be nice to me...

Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.

I've got a report that one of our machine-learning purpose computers broke down suddenly. I took a look and saw that the thing was stuck at the BIOS screen. The thing that was off was that it did not prompt for any keystrokes. Like, if there were a BIOS problem, there would usually be a prompt to press <F1> to ignore or something, right? But, nope! Even BIOS did not do jack s#!+.

I tinkered around the peripherals for an hour before finally finding something odd - why the f*<k does this computer have a screen hooked up via f*<king D-Sub????????

Yup, somebody hooked up a screen to the base motherboard via D-Sub when they rearranged other computers, even though that machine needed to have a screen hooked up to a GPU via HDMI.

🤦

i asked my dad for help with a GRUB issue (EFI file wasn't seen in my BIOS anymore, nor booted when pointed directly at, even after ALL THE CONFIGURATIONS POSSIBLE) and i walked away for a while, content he'd figure it out (there's still a few things he knows more than me about.) I come back 30 minutes later and he's zero-filled my main drive and is halfway through installing Win10. His reasoning? "I'm installing surveillance software since you won't give me your college passwords and I need access to your college's site and your account. I can't do that on Debian."

I didn't give him authorization for this, and I thought he had zeroed my backups drive too, but it turns out it was having I/O issues (my controller is finicky sometimes, a boot cycle with it removed fixed it, luckily I can't write to drives it doesn't like when it's being a shithead)

What do? I can't sue as he owns almost everything I use and the house I live in and would no doubt kick me out and take all "my" stuff, but I feel like this really can't go ignored. I can't just talk to him about it as he thinks anything he wants done has to be done as he sees himself as above all other people, so he just shouts me down...

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

Removing the CMOS baterry to reset bios is like when you wake up on the hospital bed and you are asking everyone, "who I'm I?", " where I'm I?", "who are you?", "when is today?", "what time is it?".

So,
Acer has a corrupt BIOS,
Lenovo is a bug fest,
HP supposedly also sucks.

So which brand of laptop does not suck?

Fuck arch.

I know what you're thinking
"arch isn't that bad he's overreacting"

WELL I'M NOT OVERREACTING!

Thanks to me trying to install Arch i cant get my laptop to boot. It just say some thing about network boot failing. I cant go into BIOS either. It doesn't work! I cant even boot from usb!! It still just say some thing about network boot failing, shows some weird black screen with a black bar at the top left and after a while shows some thing about network boot failing again and that repeats

Fuck you. Fuck them. Fuck everyone. Fuuuuck. I hope and dream of the day people become programmable cyborgs or stupidity is spliced out genetically. Or someone invents an implant that disables the vocal cords when stupid'O'meter goes to the red. Or a system that paralyzes the body temporarily as a fine for stupidity. Or an AI that takes over once shit is approaching unacceptable levels. SOMETHING! Some kind of an incentive for the fucking sheep to develop their little raisins. FUCK!!!?!?!!

Been working on some projects that will hopefully train me for work projects on my personal laptop. Ever since my reinstall there has been a crap-ton of screen tear.

Looking at BIOS today...32 MB video ram out of 8Gb...

I'm in sad nostalgia....

32MB BIOS updates take a loooong time.

Reset...

Hey. i'm updatinf the LED firmware.

Reset again.

Hey. I needed to reset all settings.

BIOS.

Fan detection for min rate.

Dozen settings changed.

Laggy mouse because EFI and graphics is slooooow...

I miss the old days of just keyboard based BIOS. And where updating didn't take 15 mins....

So apparently bitlocker fucking hates it if you update your bios. 🤬

Setupwars. Show off your epic coding zone setup.

Your biggest oh fuck moment as developer. "I dropped the prod DB"

Oh fucking hardware virtualization.
how many times have I failed at setting sth up googled it and just read "check your BIOS ... and enable..."
Well I would IF I FUCKING COULD. THERE AIN'T NOTHING TO ENABLE ON THIS CHEAP CPU.

I know. I know. Should just get a newer setup, this lappy ain't that powerful anyways - but still - it's frustrating to get excited, start sth and than hit that dead end realizing they presupposed sth I don't have.

Server bios corruption, yaay.
Server external backups, naay.

This happened just before migration to another server. I feel stupid for not having proper backups now, and molested by a dying panda because its less than 6 months ago i got the server. It was used, but still.

AM BIOS: "Hi, I am your new Kaby Lake Motherboard. Nice to see you on my first ever run. I have seen that you have some disks attached to me. They must be new because I am ....Let me initialize a raid on them."
Me: o0 (W)ell (T)hat's (F)antastic!*

* Finished restoring a 6TB Backup to my raidz mirrors this morning at 6am, fuuuuu**

** Kaby Lake Rocks nonetheless

Pressing F2 and poking around with BIOS settings in Windows XP

TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.

Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.

Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.

Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.

Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.

Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.

Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.

Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!

Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.

When I was younger I had a decision to go into hardware or software. I chose software and have loved it.

Recentily I just spent 5 hours trying install a Linux distro on an old server. I made no progress.

I made the right decision. Hardware freaking sucks! You spend hours working on outdated pieces of crap and find that to fix your problem you need to sell you kidney to finance your project. Not to mention you have to wait for literally everything! It's like gradel builds everywhere! Want to install a new distro on your USB? Bam, 5min gone. Want to boot into bios and change one setting? BAM! more time wasted...

A note to the sysadmins out there: thank you. I love you. I am so happy you do this kind of work so I don't have to.

OMFG, Dell, why can't you be normal and make your batteries die like any other batteries - by simply switching the laptop off immediately when the charger is unplugged???

Guess what it looks like when a JD25G (XPS13 9530) battery is dying (still 88% health)!

Constant screen flickering (yes, even in BIOS). Good thing I'm not an epileptic - my screen is fucking strobing!!!

I know it's a battery, because I had the same issue some years ago when I replaced the died original one with a cheapo made by GreenCell. Boi that was fun - I saw my laptop do miraculous things I never would've thought of! Screen flickering was one of them. As soon as I replaced that turd with an original one all these magic powers went away.

Lovely... About a week ago I moved my manjaro installation from bios to UEFI.
I ran a system update last night... and, well, my boot broke, cause mkinitcpio failed to build my initramfs. I was up till twelve cause now my system wouldn't mount a fat32 partition, so till I had my esp mounted and finaly fixed, it was 12. (And I wanted to go to sleep early that night)

Oh God, how I hate a new windows laptop.
The machine just stutter for simple things. I literally spent almost two hours to download a 2 gigs .iso file.
With my speed test as normal as it always was with my previous and slower machine.
The worst part is to install another os.

I struggled to find an option in BIOS to disable Intel's RST. Which was a no no because Ubuntu couldn't understand it's config.
There's an app that comes pre installed to manage these settings. And the sucker didn't have any option to disable. Why? Because It's deprecated!

I spent 5 hours to understand that l needed to access the machine BIOS and activate a hidden option (did you think the option was right there huh?) in order to remove Intel RST.

Oh God how I hate tech monopoly.

Now my machine can breath without shitloads of unused apps and garbage "file checkers" and "anti viruses" that comes pre installed.
And things download super fast without any struggles.

All I have to say is that ThinkPads are a wonderful piece of hardware that are worth the price but if they have their BIOS locked (if you buy it second hand) they're the worst thing in the world that should just be thrown into the gutter as you can't even reinstall windows in most cases nor install Linux due to secure boot being enabled and BIOS being locked ffs I had great hopes for this one

Trying to install Centos7 onto my proliant g6, red screen, try a fix, red screen, try another fix, red screen, finally find a fix that seems like it is the exact problem, screen dies can't see bios... god damnit.

So I wanted a newer Linux OS for doing certain things at work. I went for Kubuntu 21.04 as it would have reasonably newer software and had the tools I needed for managing exfat partitions. I installed it on a second drive and everything went smoothly. I booted to the OS and it said it needed to do updates. Okay, lets do that. I started them and walked away.

I came back later and it had finished. I rebooted the machine because I needed to run windows. It came up to a prompt and a grub command line. WTF. I am like oh fuck, it didn't just fuck me out of my windows install. So I rebooted into the BIOS. I looked and it now had switched the drive I installed Linux on as the boot drive. That is weird. So I switched the M.2 drive to boot. It went right into Windows.

Kubuntu 21.04 installed on second drive as intended, switched the boot drive to the second drive, and then fucked itself on first update. And people wonder why non-techies don't run Linux. Its a pile of shit only a masochist would love. Because we are the only ones who can possibly sort out shit like this.

I know its probably a webpage away from fixing, but I needed to work in windows and could not be fucked to fix it. Its a distraction to actually getting my work done. Just disappointed in the entire ecosystem.

So while talking always nice about Linux (today as well on devrant), my laptop wouldn't boot. I realised the battery was drained out as i had put it to sleep.

Now when i switch it on the light just blinked and nothing happened. After sometime when the battery was a bit charged and i had tried to hard reset the laptop, still wouldn't boot.

An hour later it was stuck at the bios screen asking me what I'd like to do- boot normally or repair. Anything I clicked it'll reboot and get back to that screen.

I realised after sometime that it was the RAM that was being the pain. So got a bootable usb to check the RAM. Post that it booted without new installation. Phew...

Soo insyde BIOS got a big bug via 17.10 ubuntu iso
- Settings not getting saved in bios
- USB booting is a no-go.
- suspend never wakes up without battery removal
Infected systems mostly include acer, LENoVO and hp mainly

I am surprised it took them this long to notice the bug.

Ive been tryna install hearthstone on linux for the past 4 hours. In this time i could have bought an ssd, installed windows on it and played like 10 matches.

Which reminds me, if i put a windows on an ssd can i just change the boot drive in the bios?

Ffs, I just spent the whole weekend setting up our new storage server. Moved it into the rack. Entered the UEFI to enable idrac. And BAM! The uefi decided to load it’s own raid config over the raid controller.

Raid controller bios doesn’t let me load it’s own config after that. So I have to reset the controller and setup raid, os and the whole shot again.

To make it even better. Debian doesn’t load the firmware for the broadcom chip, since it’s a non-free driver. Making me have to do lots of manual config after the install just to get it on the internet.

I wish I could’ve just bought a new server instead of working with this shit.
I would’ve used FreeBSD with ZFS, but our server only has 8GB ram, and I need about 120GB extra to work smoothly with all the storage.

It’s just a pita working with this. One step forward, ten steps back.

GoLive for this big feature is set for Thursday. So the customer approaches me and asks can our team do it. Sure it can be done if everything goes perfectly, but... This means that the feature won't be tested, everything won't probably go perfectly (which it didn't because of customer selected third party api surprise nondocumented features (bugs)) and Thursday release is almost as dumb fucking idea as Friday release. I said it more nicely and I got:

"I don't agree with you"

from a person who has 0 understanding of what is going on and whose boss pays me to tell them what it needs in order to work and prosper.

And we had this fucking conversation three times. So basically he interrupted my coding that directly impacts the schedule in order to debate how fast things can be done. Don't these people understand that everytime you interrupt a software engineer the deadline is pushed by the same amount of time you waste of mine + 30minutes of refocus time to get back into the thing you were doing.

Best part was that the deadline was this magic date the guy pulled out of his ass without consulting the developer team and nobody really cared about the deadline =D

FUCK

Me yesterday:

"I think I've been too harsh on desktop Linux. Maybe I'll give it one more shot. Ok, debian 9 looks decent."

- Unetbootin fails to recognize usb drive

"Hmmm ok. I'll use ether to to put the iso directly on the drive."

- Bios requires disabling of secure boot

"Uhhh..I guess I'll just disable it in the bios."

- Debian fails to configure network

"Lol fuck this."

Lately programs have been crashing a lot on my pc, I've tried different things like disabling SWAP for a sec, BIOS changes, remove firefox and use Google Chrome, try different commands, it kept happening.

Obviously along the way I started investigating what was causing these crashes, looking through bug reports and my syslog. There was no consistency, except for 1 thing: SIGENV. Everything that crashed had a segmentation fault, now I'm not an expect and I don't know what this means or how to fix it, so I went to Google to ask for answers.

Then I downloaded memtest and ran a memory test, error palooza. Then I went to Windows and ran memory check, error palooza.

This is week 3 of this high-end gaming pc which was a huge investment AND IT HAS BEEN FUCKING WITH ME BECAUSE OF BAD MEMORY HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS HAPPEN I ALMOST STARTED TO DOUBT UBUNTU BUT IT WAS A FUCKING FAULT IN BRAND NEW MEMORY MODULES WHAT THE FUCK.

Obviously I'm pissed off. Today I'm gonna call the store that assembled it to voice my complaints.

Thank you for listening to my TedTalk.

I hate servers that only support EFI boot with a passion. Yes, legacy / BIOS boot is old, but it was so simple. I've been spending hours trying to get EFI boot working on servers with swraid-ed disks and *nothing* works without ugly hackish patches all over!

Anyone successfully got an EFI partition (/boot/efi) on an MDRaid device? D':

Those feels when you are waiting for a call or an email about a job you really really want and it's friday and you know it isn't gonna happen untill monday. Weekend suddenly feels too long.

Needed a flash drive, went to the store and got a SanDisk cruzer blade and figured 16gb for a mix of personal files and the eventual installation of a different distro would be enough.

Got home and went to give some work to my new red friend, my laptop was running lubuntu, used it for like 2 weeks, didn't like it that much, figured I could experiment with mint, downloaded the iso, ran unetbootin and voilá, got a bootable usb drive.

Only that no. I didn't. Tinkered with it the entire fucking day and I couldn't make my laptop's bios recognize it, tried with every possible format that disk utility could format into, tried with 3 different distros and nothing.

Feeling determined to thrash out my current system, I went on a scavenge hunt, trying to find a flash drive anywhere in the house, after a couple hours tossing papers and a number of different things aside, I finally found a 10 years old Verbatim, loaded mint in unetbootin and finally, a bootable usb drive. So thanks Linux god!

By the way, I'm installing xfce mint, anyone have some tips on customizing it?

I fucking hate ryzen issues with linux
Random freezes.
Added processor max c state in grub and disabled c6 state in bios

Motherfucking os still freezes

when you try to get BIOS..

F*ck software updates..

So while working today, one of the IT support guy came and asked to update my windows machine due to some stupid company 'security policy' they were following .. That update took more than 3hrs.. The reason it took so long because I somehow managed to avoid any updates for 6-8 months.

But that is not the end of the story... Windows update was followed by a bios update, some softwares, and at this point I just gave up and went for a cup of coffee, and left my machine locked in a drawer still updating and it will stay in this condition until tomorrow.. We'll see if something breaks after updating.

F*ck why are there so many updates and why each of them requires a f*cking reboot...

Productivity today was less than the number of side projects I completed. 😪

Tl;dr Why would someone preconfigure a hardware raid on a server AND NOT TELL ME?

Recently we got a refurbished server that has some nice specs and works quite well. It had six 2.5 bays and came with two 248gb HDDs. But it only included 2 rails, so we needed more, and we got more.

I installed windows on it (yes, some of the software we use is windows only), and for some odd reason the forth HDD (this was the second one that was pre shipped) wouldn't show up in the disk management, which was odd especially considering the fact that the SAS did detect it, and would get pissed at me if I took it out. I was in a rush so I left it alone for then.

I had needed to setup a raid for these, and while I was trying to figure out what was wrong, I noticed that windows can do a software raid so I set it up on the third HDD (which is the first pre included HDD). I haven't actually used it yet.

At some point I stated to mess with the HDD that wasn't showing up (switching them around, etc.), when I noticed that windows saw the raid was setup on both of the HDDs, which made me wonder what was going on.

So I decided to check the SAS to see if there was something wrong there, as it was booting, bios let me know that there was a raid that was in the process of rebuilding, so then I thought "oh cool, windows actually does a hardware raid!" Well actually it doesn't, as I was looking I saw that this raid was only setup on the two HDDs that were acting funny, and therefore it was only coming up as one device in windows. I wasted an hour trying to find that!

Someone called me and asked why wasn't Linux live USB working. I asked him to check whether safe boot was disabled from bios. His reply I can't find boot settings in windows settings.

This would not be a big thing if it was some non technical person. The person who called me was a CS student.

*claps*

I think he was trying to find a runnable file from the live USB.