The struggle is real

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

Manager: Hey what was that that you closed on your screen just now?

Dev: That popup? That’s NVIDIA letting me know that a new driver for my GPU is available.

Manager: Isn’t that for video games?

Dev: I mean that’s the reason many people opt into having a GPU but It’s not the on—

Manager: You are NOT allowed to play video games on your work computer!

Dev: This is my personal computer. It’s just an older GPU I popped onto this computer since otherwise it was just sitting in a drawer. My work computer is out of commission.

Manager: Well where is your work computer? How come you are not using it?

Dev: …Because of that blue screen of death issue we talked about yesterday.

Manager: Ok but that doesn’t give you permission to play VIDEO GAMES on your *WORK* computer.

Dev: …

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

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

HW issue causing blue screens? Windows' fault.
Driver bug? Windows' fault.
A program crashing? Windows' fault.
"Forced" updates you could've turned off? Windows' fault.
You have no common sense? Windows' fault.
Your girlfriend leaving you? Windows' fault.

Let's blame Windows because I got nothing else to blame.

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

You've perhaps heard of Blue Screen Of Death in Windows. But how about GREEN screen of death?

Driver issues goddammit.

Mint can't find correct driver for Intel NUC.
The download page for linux Intel graphic driver update tool project was closed.

Asked what's happened on Ubuntu stack exchange, got immediately closed, because of off topic: mint is not Ubuntu...🤦‍♂️

My solution is to uninstall mint, and install Ubuntu...
Still the same driver issue, but at least I could ask...
God damn it.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

Had given my laptop at the repair store. They were just suppose to do a checkup and then give a choice on whether to repair or not. They repaired it and charged me 2.8K. No unit replacement or anything, just service. I didn't mind it (was actually happy seeing my laptop boot up and not have a blank screen). It's a dual-boot (Windows/Antergos(Arch-linux)). It booted to Windows instead of GRUB. Didn't care too much, because it had happened before and I had handled it.
After I take it back home, I discover that the WiFi doesn't work (it doesn't even seem to be a driver issue). Live boot of arch doesn't have access to WiFi either. Reinstalled GRUB, only to discover it doesn't boot successfully (issues with video card). So, now I'm stuck with fucking Windows WITHOUT WiFi and an arch-linux that doesn't fucking boot.
Gonna reinstall Arch now.

P. S. : Windows is super fast, because I haven't really used it and don't really like using it. I feel very limited by Windows.

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

God I wish it was legal to kill people... Taxi driver stopped outside the building.. on the street, not even parked, bur there are many empty spaces that he is also blocking - which would be another issue with these assholes during the day time..parking in the street, going to get some coffee, not the takeaway.. they sit on their fat asses and watch you struggle to park a car cuz it's a narrow street..

And now he's blasting music at full volume.. It's fucking 4 am!! 04:04!! Friggin birds aren't even up yet!!
Fuck you!! One day that it's not extremely hot here and I could actually sleep..and now I can't cuz this asshole woke me up with music.
Just die you sad excuse of a human being!!

8: 00 pm : Found wifi driver issue in Ubuntu 18.04
12:37 am: Still finding the solution...😫😭

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

Installing the nvidia drivers on my linux machine is the bigges nightmare I've come across sofar. As soon as I have installed it and reboot, blackscreen and literally no way around it. Starting the desktop, nah stuck in a crashloop. Installing different driver, same issue. Using diffrent distro, that shit wont even boot properly. Uninstalling the driver seems to fix it but whats the point of running only on third gen i5 graphics. Shit cant even handle 1080p yt properly. And there are ppl saying if it aint broke dont fix it. FFS I DESPISE MAKING COMPROMISES WHEN I FUCKING KNOW IT CAN WORK BUT ATM IT IS NOT IN THE FREAKING MOOD TO DO SO!

>Client: Hey, I lost my Facebook password but it's saved on my old laptop
>Me: ...alright, i'll look
>Laptop: won't boot - "No bootable devices found!"
hoo boy
>opens 'er up to pull drive
this is really heavy for an SSD, Corsair, and especially for only 64GB
>plugs into other PC
nothing
fuck me
>sees jumper pins
>jumps them
>BAREFOOT-ROM RECOVERYMODE SSD DEVICE - 128GB
that's twice the size of the disk, wtf?
but ok, i'll take it, any data?
>Win10: *crashes because driver chokes*
>Win7: *crashes because driver chokes*
>WinXP: *doesn't see it, TestDisk doesn't run because Kernel32.DLL issue*
>Linux: *Issues the instant SSD plugged in, they stop instant removed*
fuck it
RMA

I'm extremely sick of Windows PCs and their reliability, if it's not some stupid bug it's some idiotic overheat issue or driver issue or compatibility issue, I never hear Mac or Linux people complain about their PCs but I could write a book of complaints for Windows

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

Thank to this UPS driver ... i'm not going to get my package (laptop screen) until Monday evening.
Express Priority shipping $35.xx or whatever that is down the drain.

Never had this issue with Fedex and 100's packages delivered.

This ends the rant.

I really regret switching to manjaro. So many things keep breaking, like my laptop won't sleep anymore, it stays up, whenever I plug in another display I get an error thrown at me. Among other weird behaviors (all screen related) that I can't seem to fix and make the experience feel like I'm running a very clunky win-poop machine.

On the other hand, setting up a very custom sddm theme and installing certain software like hadoop, rust, gimp, xfce tweaks and other things was such a breeze D: just "yay hadoop" and 90% of the work was done.

Grhhh... Wondering if I should accept defeat, and maybe switch to Linux MX or spend hours fixing what probably is a display driver issue that's pissing me off 😠

Under pressure for a big feature that had to be merged into develop like one month ago. But I couldn't because of issues I discover every single fucking day.

Today's issue is that a Cucumber test fails. I try reproducing it on my machine, it fails with a different error. Apparently I need to download some 10GB database file from some company server.

Alright, let's download it. But it's damn too slow. Well, let's have lunch in the meantime.

I come back, the download timed out at basically the same point I left it at.

I don't wanna try again. Not without trying to improve things. Download speed is ridiculous. Switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet definitely helps, I thought.

The cable doesn't work. The port LEDs are both off. Is that cable even connected to something? So I follow that damn cable throughout my colleagues' desks. I'm now doing things without even remembering why.

I finally find the other end. It is plugged to the wall. I try another plug, but that fucking LED is still off. A colleague tells me: not all the sockets are actually connected to the switch, you have to call IT to have yours patched. Stay calm, stay caaaaalm...

A small lamp turns on in my head. Maybe something in my laptop is broken. So I try with a colleague's ethernet. That fucking LED is still off. A-ha.

Turns out, the shitty macbook adapter has this Ethernet port that DOESN'T work out of the box. It needs a driver to even realize there's a port. I look for it, I find it. I finally have wired connection. It's like having drinking water again.

I turn off WiFi, I re-try downloading that fucking database.

Nope, it's still stupidly slow. The bottleneck was in the dumbfuck internal server.

FUCK.

At least I have Ethernet now.

Just moved my computer up to my new office... just to find that I'm suddenly having a driver issue (I think) that wasn't there before.
Basically my audio and mouse pointer hang for 1/10 of a second every few seconds.
The bad news is, it seems to disappear when I disable my wifi card, which I kinda need for my internet.. and I already have the latest drivers.

Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.

Fuck you mesa

I installed arch again due to some other mess up (another rant 😂) and this time I was facing problem with sleep.

The system froze every time I tried to wake it up from suspend state.

This is how I wasted past 2 days:
- Wifi device sleep issue, disabling wifi
- Probably sddm issue, let me try lightdm
- Last time I installed gdm, might try that as well
- Had to remove all the bloatware then I suspected plasma
- Checked system logs and found amdgpu error
- Tried disabling graphics using nomodeset, system failed to boot
- glx IP block hung!, it's the graphics driver
- Checked another arch forum, a guy was having a same problem after upgrade
- Downgraded mesa to 18.3.4-1

Worked like a charm though hibernate is still not working

My team decided to do a MOB programming in one of our tickets.

New joiner: Perfect we did a mob yesterday .

Me: Great, that's good. How did it go?

New joiner: Well, we work together in the gaming room next to each other and trying to solve the issue. I think it's very productive.

Me: Awesome! Let's do it again today... When we started the MOB, all of them are using their own laptop. And I was like.. so, this is how you did the MOB yesterday?

New guy: Yes.

Me: This is not a MOB programming... MOB programming uses only 1 screen, 1 driver and everyone work together, will tell the driver what to do, we need to exchange the driver every 10 to 15 minutes, everyone can be a driver. (devs, qa, ux, product) and do a retro after.

New guy: ah.. wow! Interesting.

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

!long rant
Trying to work from home is always a pain, since we need to use company laptops (no ifs, ands or buts about it).
Yesterday I took the laptop in to check for updates that just wouldn't run while at home (my first mistake), and I couldn't get past the "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login" screen, laptop keyboard didn't seem to be registering clicks, and an external keyboard wasn't either (and I forgot about the on-screen keyboard). A couple of restarts later with no further changes to the situation, the laptop then didn't get past the BIOS screen.
So I called support (my second mistake) and logged an incident.
Couple of hours later someone comes to my desk and asks about the issue, so I describe it, show them (by now the laptop was once again getting past BIOS screen), and leave them to it. Since these laptops are just used as preconfigured VPN and RDP gateways, I said it would be okay if he just wanted to reinstall the OS (my third mistake).
Several hours later, after staying late last night waiting for it to finish, I loaded my profile, installed updates, shut down, grabbed my stuff and left, without checking VPN or RDP over WiFi (my fourth mistake).
Turns out that some of the buttons on the keyboard just no longer work, but now USB keyboards do work, and I can just use OSK to login while out. I figured this would be my only issue with things, and that it was acceptable.
This morning I attempt to use the laptop, and forgot about OSK and the faulty delete button, so spent a few minutes on that. Try to connect to WiFi and find it can't connect, because of course, it doesn't remember the WiFi password, so I root around for the code in some drawer, enter it, and it works. VPN tries to connect and... get told to insert my smart card, which is already inserted, because the driver is wrong!
So I'm sitting here writing a post, not quite believing that I'm considering cancelling my plans for the day to go into the office because of a bloody driver issue now...

Well... guess not. First driver issue with Linux when not writing them myself.

Installing Linux distros on ryzen gigabyte motherboard was a pain in the ass. I gave up on Ubuntu and mintlinux and went onto install fedora with malfunctioning mouse(driver issue, mouse was fine). Basically had to hack around with only keyboard for few hours before I could install the latest Nvidia drivers and got my mouse to work. I don't who is at fault here but the Linux community needs to put enough pressure on vendors like gigabyte/amd to make sure they release updates for their hardwares across os. Installing an Os shouldn't be this hard

!long_rant
So, my previous rant was one of the most liked rant for me so far, in which I simply stated I am moving to Ubuntu.
I feel ashamed to say that I am moving back to Windows(for now at least).
The reason is not Ubuntu, I actually found it lovely. Its my friggin laptop. While there are many other problems, but the biggest is that the wifi adapter's range has fallen drastically in linux. On Windows it was working fine, I also checked Kali and tails(live) and both show the same issue. My router was literally 3 meters away and this shitty laptop couldn't connect. Since, it connects on Windows properly, its obviously a driver problem, the shitty creators haven't released an API for linux devs. Now, I have tried a lot of suggestions from SO but if I can't find a solution I will either have to arrange another laptop or simply go back to that always updating OS. There is another problem, the graphics card is not even being recognized. No idea how shitty hardare this laptop has.
Btw its an HP ac110tx.
Tell you what, I recently bought it from Paytm and thought its an i7 5gen processor with a graphics card for a reasonable price, what can go wrong. This is the issue. Hardware was shitty. I hate this laptop. If I had the money I wouldn't think twice before dumping this laptop on ebay/quickr. But, we are struggling devs(at least I am), don't have a big amount coming soon.
Very depressed and angry!

I recently started working on laravel. As the community says it was easy to get along with the framework and its methodologies. But then i had to do multiple login with framework in same domain.

Oh man, i spent a week to make it work. All those guards and middlewares realted to login was driving me crazy. The concept was clear, but somehow the framework was like "You! I shall make you spend a week for my satisfaction". The project demo was nearing and i was doing all kind of stuff i found. Atlast after continous tries it worked. Never in my 4+ years as a developer i had to face such an issue with login.

So here is how it works,if anyone faces the same issue:
(This case is beneficial if you're using table structures different from default laravel auth table structures)

1. Define the guards for each in auth.php
Eg:
'users' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'users',
],
'client' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'client',
],
'admin' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'admins',
],

2. Define providers for each guards in auth.php
'users' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
'table' => '<table name>', //Optional. You can define it in the model also
],
'admins' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
],
'client' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
],

Similarly you can define passwords for resetting passwords in auth.php

3. Edit login controller in app/Http/Controller/Auth folder accordingly
a. Usually this particular line of code is used for authentication
Auth::guard('<guard name>')->attempt(['email' => $request->email, 'password' => $request->password]);
b. If above mentioned method doesn't work, You can directly login using login method
EG:
$user = <model namespace>::where([
'username' => $request->username,
'password' => md5($request->password),
])->first();
Auth::guard('<guard name>')->login($user);

4. If you're using custom build table to store user details, then you should adjust the model for that particular table accordingly. NOTE: The model extends Authenticatable
EG
class <model name> extends Authenticatable
{
use Notifiable;

protected $table = "<table name>";

protected $guard = '<guard name>';

protected $fillable = [
'name' , 'username' , 'email' , 'password'
];

protected $hidden = [
'password' ,
];

//Below changes are optional, according to your need
public $timestamps = false;
const CREATED_AT = 'created_time';
const UPDATED_AT = 'updated_time';

//To get your custom id field, in this case username
public function getId()
{
return $this->username;
}
}

5. Create login views according to the user types you required

6. Update the RedirectIfAuthenticated middleware for auth redirections after login

7. Make sure to not use the default laravel Auth routes. This may cause some inconsistancy in workflow

The laravel version which i worked on and the solution is for is Laravel 6.x

So, yesterday I have been working on a php project (commitent asked for it to be php) and I spent the whole day trying to solve a "driver issue" exception.
I previously worked on various WordPress projects as a freelancer, so I should be fine, right?
I couldn't fix it in the whole day, tried all the solutions on google up to the 5th page, searched around stack overflow etc, and the error message is just "driver not found"... Gee php, thanks for the details! I am sure it will come out it's something small and easy, but I have learned enough about php and I want to stay as far away away from it as possible.

!rant

Ever since the Windows 10 anniversary update. Whenever I resume a video after pausing for a couple minutes on VLC the audio is super loud and distorted. I've been troubleshooting this for a long time and tried multiple driver versions and what not. Anybody else facing the same issue?