Had a customer on the phone who couldn't figure something out. Wanted to give him instructions so I asked him whether he used mac or windows (getting used to not including Linux in that question). His reply: uhm this has a weird name... do you know elementary os?

Me: you're a Linux user?!
Him: yes, I'm done with windows and mac.

Then i gave him the instructions. Nice twist of the day!

Installed Linux on an old windows laptop. This is my conversation 5 minutes ago...

Wife: "Have how you got internet?"
Me: "What do you mean, it has a wireless adapter built in?"
Wife: "But it's not Windows?"

WTF!!!

Me: "Pass my phone, this is going on devRant"
Wife: "Please no, not again"

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

Happened a few weeks ago but still awesome.

Me and a good friend have a website together but we don't monitor it too much.
He studied with me in the same class but went towards frontend/apps where I chose backend/servers/security. He knows how to do basic Linux stuff but that's about it.

We were at a party when he noticed that our site was offline. Walked over to me (because I manage the server) to notify me so I could look into it said I'd look into it (phone):
*visits site: nothing*
*online dig tool: got the server ip*
*remembered this one didn't have pubkey authentication - after three passwords attempts I'm in*

"service apache2 status"
*service doesn't exist*
*right, migrated this one from Apache to nginx....*
"history"
*ah, an nginx restart probably suffices...*
"service nginx restart"

BAM, site is reachable again.

*god damnit, lets encrypt cert expired...*
"history"
*sees command with certbot and our domain both in one*
"!892"
*20 seconds later: success message*
*service nginx reload*

BAM, site works securely again.

"Yo mate, check the site again"

Mate: 😶 w-w-what? *checks site and his watch* you started less than two minutes ago...?
Me: yeah..?
Mate: 😶 now this is why YOU manage our server and I don't 😐

His face was fucking gold. It wasn't that difficult for me (I do this daily) but to him, I was a God at that moment.

Awesome moment 😊

*talking to a customer on the phone*
*tries to switch to the next virtual desktop for a terminal*

*BAM BLACK SCREEN*

😶😐😓

*wild Linux mint logo appears*
*computer reboots*

*realize that I pressed ctrl+alt+delete*

😅🤣

*explains honestly to colleagues and client*

Both found it funny and laughed, luckily 😆

Happened during an exam!
Had a viva session after the exam

Examiner: how much do you know about Linux
Me: (pulls out phone and shows him the kernel I have been working on)
Examiner (to other teacher): give him full marks already

No, I'm not hacking.
No Linux is not a movie.
No, you are not a developer because you can put "Hello World" on a website.
No, this isn't a waste of my time.
Yes, I will use it.
Yes, I'll make you a website for free. NOT!
Your phone is both Android and Samsung.
No, what they did in the movie is impossible.
No, I can't predict the stock market.
No, I'm not Mr. Robot, but I know him...

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

Linux is awesome. In runs on my fridge (Tizen), my TV (Tizen), my phone (Android), my watch (Android Wear), My PC (Ubuntu) and my laptop (Kali). I'm now trying to force my parents to convert to Linux.

That moment at work when we've had no calls for an hour and suddenly the phone goes off

*TRINGGGGGGGG*

*suddenly you have a few Linux support engineers with a mini heart attack*

😅

Clients who keep calling in.

I'm a first liner and sysadmin, both (official title is Linux support engineer) so I do tickets+calls+server engineering.

It's highly annoying when you've got a busy day with loads of calls and I'm the first first-liner and I'm working on an important/high-prio ticket and PEOPLE KEEP CALLING.

Every time I can write like a few more words and then the fucking phone rings again aaaand so fucking on.

Your concentration is gone, workflow interrupted and my short term memory is shit so I entirely forget what I was debugging.

But, phone comes first 😞

This happened a while ago but I till remember it. I'm an Intern within a nice company where everything is open (one big ass room):

Designer: bob
Salesman: peter
(Random names)

Bob: Hey peter, these PDF files you got from the client are corrupt, could you ask him for good versions?
Peter: [on the phone with PDF client coincidentally] Sir, the pdf's you send are corrupt according to our designer.
.............…….............................................
He says that it must be you using a weird operating system.
Bob: Hey dude (me), could you check?
Me: Sure (checked on my Linux, corrupt indeed), yup deffo corrupt or something.
Peter: [on phone] Sir, they really seem to be corrupt. [Talking on phone] He says it must be your operating systems, can it be that your systems are fucking this up?
Me and bob: Highly unlikely!
Peter to client: Dear sir, I've got two very competent professionals here who say you are not right and the document is simply corrupt and I'm definitely going to trust them on this one so may I kindly request a new version!

He is a great salesman!

On my third high school CS lesson. I had corrected the teacher about 6 times and wouldn't shut up about Linux.
He walked to my station, saw that I was live booting off my phone with SSH sessions to 2 servers I was managing.
He instantly gave me an A for the entire semester and told me I can do whatever I want, as long as I shut up.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Fuck you and your shitty updates Microsoft.

I never asked for a fucking weather app on my taskbar.

Why the actual fuck would I EVER need that shit? I have that on my phone already, same for my news, and literally everything else you try to molest me with.

Want to know why Linux is growing market share? It's because it's an OS first and not some husk that shoves content at you and screams "CONSUME ME!"

FUCK YOUR SHITTY UPDATES, AND FUCK YOUR PLATFORM OF PETTY METRIC BULLSHIT.

Morning after my linux administration exam my mother called 15 times to wake me up. When I finaly answered the phone she she was worried so she asked.
Mom: wtf is wrong with you, is everything okay?
Me: not sure, i think something went wrong. I'll send you the log files later. *Hangs up the phone.

Apparently I do shit like that every time she tries to call me in the morning as she writes down our "conversations" just to laugh at me later.

brain@sleep:~$ sudo rm -rf /

I find it so amazing to see when my colleagues (or even me) are irritated/annoyed to the fucking point, swearing around and so on but then the phone rings and they are completely calm/sound nice/happy when they pick it up one second later. (we're Linux support engineers)

This job is the best fucking self control training I've ever had!

> be me
> install linux on encrypted drive
> takes 8 hours to fill the drive with fake data so theres no chance of data leakage
> save encryption password to phone
> phone doesnt actually save password
> realize you dont have access to pc anymore
> cry
> reinstall linux

Windows vs Mac vs Linux
Swift vs Objective-C
Emacs vs Vim
GPL vs Apache License vs MIT license
Android vs iOS vs Windows phone*
Skype vs Facetime
GIF vs GIF
Peppermint vs Spearmint**
Men vs Women
I DON'T GIVE A FUCK!
IM HAPPY WITH WHAT I HAVE, SO STOP PREACHING OR I'LL STAB YOU!

Ok? 😑

Browsed around the internet for a good linux distro to use.
Someone somewhere recommended Arch.
Downloaded Arch and usb booted it.
Tried to install it for 30 minutes and gave up.(😂)
Found a new recommendation, Bunsenlabs.
Now i have installed Bunsenlabs on every device i have (except for my phone & tablet of course :DD)
It's great!
(Image is not related to earlier text)

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Bought a second hand phone because my current one drains too fast (battery).

Flashing through the recovery doesn't work, I need Odin.

Only windows installation I have left (spare laptop I hardly use) crashes every time I boot up.

Linux version of an alternative is downloadable but the site gives a shit ton of errors.

Well fuck me sideways right now.

Why all the hate? Jesus...
I love my Windows 10 laptop, I love my Android phone, I love working in PHP. But I would never, NEVER, think less of anyone who prefers Mac/Linux/iPhone/C#/Python/what-ever-the-fuck

Happened half a year ago (parents both use Linux although they're very a-techie).

*Dads laptop comes back from store after a repair*
Dad: (on the phone) hello son, could you help me out? they put some weird stuff on my laptop at the repair centre...
Me: Weird stuff? like what?
Dad: It's a virus I think
Me: A virus??
Dad: Definitely a virus!
Me: And what is this virus called?
Dad: Windows 10!
Me: Oh yes coming over asap to get that removed!

I put elementary OS on it again when i went to visit my parents.

So this happened a few days ago. I always want to root my smartphones for that little bit more control.

*Put's new smartphone into fastboot mode*
*Tries to flash root zip onto it*
"You have to OEM unlock the bootloader first"
*OEM unlocks the bootloader*
*Tries to flash but fails*
*Tries to reboot*
Phone: "The bootloader has been tampered with, the device will boot in 5 seconds".
*Screen just hangs there for ages*
FUCK.
*Tries to enter fastboot again to OEM re-lock the bootloader*
*Fastboot appears to startup RIGHT AFTER THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE so can't boot into that anymore*.
FUCKING FUCK.
Hmm... TWRP is still installed...
*Tries to flash some stuff through TWRP*
"The zip file you are trying to flash is corrupt".
FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
*Connects phone to Linux for adb flashing*
*Nothing happens after half an hour of trying*
*Connects phone to ancient windows 7 laptop*
*Laptop doesn't even RECOGNISE the phone although all drivers are installed*.
*Le me about to completely lose my fucking mind*
*Connects phone desperately with Linux again*
*Phone is recognised right away but the SPL flash tool can't detect it*
*Tries to put it into fastboot again*
*Fails for about an hour*
*phone in charging mode again*
*Presses the power button for a last, desperate attempt*
*SPL flash suddenly recognises the phone*
FLASHING
FLASHING
FLASHING
DONE.
*Android boots again like nothing happened*

I can use it again like normal but the No-Root firewall is draining my battery like crazy.
That was one hell of a journey though!

Me a while ago talking to a recruiter over the phone. This was for a C++ dev position.

(R)ecruiter : So except for the development things, we are looking for someone who has experience configuration linux. Do you have any experience with that?

(M)e : Sure, I use Linux all the time. What do you mean.

R : Well, Just using Linux isn't enough for this position, you need to have experience in configuration Linux.

M : Well. I can't answer your question if you don't specify what you mean. Do you mean that I need to be able to install my own packages? Set up my dev environment? Bash scripting? Being able to configure my bash profile to have good aliases? Use Linux to develop software? Because I can do all of these.

M : Or do you need someone who can write Kernel modules for the OS, because I don't have any experience in that but would like to learn.

R : Oh, I don't really know what it means. But the paper says that you need to have experience configuration Linux. So what would you say your experience with that is?

Me internally : JESUS CHRIST I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I KNOW AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ASSESS ME CORRECTLY.

Me 😎 : I use Arch and you have to set it up completely from the ground by your self so I know everything there is to know.

Basically every question was like this with the recruiter. I got further in the process but quit because the workplace looked like it would drain my soul when I got interviewed by the employees of the company.

Jesus Christ though, some recruiters could be replaced by an automated phone system.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Soooo, after raising my issue regarding microsoft's massive invasion of privacy and removing control from the user a couple of my friends, ahem I mean "aquaintances", said this to me:
"Get a mac! So clean, lightweight and user friendly and won't spy on you".

Clearly people who never looked at their list of background processes and installed little snitch. I swear, every couple of minutes something is trying to phone home to Apple.

Now I've been pretty open to all platforms (Win/Mac/*NIX/misc) until recently but this has reached a point it is no longer funny.

When I get a moment I'm gonna shove linux so far up that machine's arse Steve Jobs is gonna feel it in the ether!

long && scam && rant?

At my parent's: phone rings..
Me: hi this is XYZ (in German)
He: hi this is ABC from Microsoft tecnical suport (strong Indian accent, sorry toall Indian devs who might feel offended, no intention)
Me: hi... (I'm learning for my exams and don't have a VM with Windows installed currently, so no time to "play")
He: we got some worrying data from your Windows computer. You might have a virus and we need to run a few tests to verfy it. Do you know what that is?
Me: yeah, a scam.
He: sorry, sir I didn't understand you, could you repeat?
Me: yeah, I know what " this" is. It's a scam, and we only deploy Linux here. (lie, we have Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as an iPhone, iPad and Android devices in the house, guess who is "support"...) But good luck with your next call.
He: (kind of friendly) oh. I see. Well have a nice day too.

Fun drinking game.

1. Phone Indian "Tech Support"
2. Drink every time they "E for echo" or some variant of that.
3. Finally tell them your using Linux.
4. Hang up.
5 Rinse and repeat.

!rant

I met my old school friends today. One of them was apparently showing off his programming skills too much(let's call him X). So much that he(friend X) was comparing Linus Torvalds with himself. And he was telling us that Linux is best because there are so many DEs and customisations and blah blah.

So one of my other friend Y(who's not into computers much) asked him to install Ubuntu on his laptop while we were sitting in cafe.(Y wants to play with command line mainly this semester according to him) So he started complaining that he does not have ISO with him and trying to avoid it.

I said I have kubuntu iso he can flash it right away. Then he(X) said "Kubuntu is too complex for him(Y)".(me in mind : " yeah, just because its a. DE, it becomes complex") So I searched in my phone (faked the search, basically renamed kubuntu iso to Ubuntu iso lol) and gave him " Ubuntu " iso

And this "pro developer" installed that on his laptop and after installation was completed he said that "OMG DUUUDE UNITY IS DEAD, EVEN UBUNTU SWITCHED TO KDE AS DEFAULT DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT, ITS COOL".

FFS

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

In ancient times, a friend and I made a new website for a golf course, in exchange for free golf whenever we wanted it. We were traveling to Texas for work(we were Linux sysadmins for a defense contractor at the time) and found out that mechanical/logistic issues at the airport in Houston would delay our departure by two hours, but this wasn't until after the plane was fully boarded and had begun to taxi. So we sat on the tarmac at Kansas City Airport for two hours with nothing to do but release that website. We finished some perl hooks to site resources, and pushed the site live. This was on a laptop tethered to a phone with a CDMA data connection, before even EVDO was released.

Even so, it went great! I sshed into the server(running netBSD), swung over the necessary tags, and the site was up.

My workflow today is largely the same, just with git and a more elaborate .vimrc.

My father got mad at me, because I had a passwd on my Linux-account...

I told him, that he hasn't got anything to do in my mails at all; Now, he took my phone :) Still laughing at his education-methods xD

BTW: I have to code in the Main room, seen by anyone... i feel like a zoo atraction :( Wish, I could put my PC into my room; I'm old enough after all -.-

What the hell is wrong with you guys taking screenshots with your goddamn phone?! Ever heard of that small magical programm called "snipping tool"? It's like fucking screenshot porn! And yes, there is a screenshot programm on Linux too. Goddammit. Are you devs or fucking newbie users?

!rant/story

I feel so great after switching from Windows 10 to (GNU/(REEE))Linux Kubuntu.

No annoying and redundant programs that are not quitable anymore.

It is like having a rooted phone. I am the god and not Microshit.

I am free. It feels so relaxing.

Sure, while setting this new system up, I broke a lot of things (even with years of preknowledge on linux servers), but I finally managed to finish it.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Since I already posted images of my desktop setups at work(Mac) and home(Linux), I didn't want to repost this week. So, to keep it at least mildly interesting, here's a shot of my garage networking setup.

Pictured:
Ubiquiti Edgerouter-L
Ubiquiti UAP-AC Lite
Drobo 5N
TP-Link cable modem
A big UPS, so we'll still have wifi during a power outage, since that's apparently important
A couple of older machines I'm working on when I have time
A Philips Hue Bridge
An unremarkable 7-port switch
An Ooma phone device
A shitload of my wife's stuff that she's left there on her way in and out of the house.

So I had to use office and image editing tools on Linux today.
Holy mother fucking god are these things awful. Gimp, pinta, gnome paint, libre office, open office... they seem like a project some guy threw together a weekend in his bedroom. The UX is shite and makes 0 sense. They crash and lag all over the place. For fuck sake!
Also... Gimp, libre office and open office. If you want to make an alternative to a well known product (Photoshop and MS Office in this example) then just fucking copy the god damn UI as much as you can. No-one is going to go learn your fucking half ass product, people only use this shit because it's free and available on Linux.
I swear, I seriously considered sending the images to my phone and just fucking edit them there because it would have been so much easier than using this pile of shit.
Fuck!!!

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

//little Story of a sys admin

Wondered why a Server on my Linux Root couldn't build a network connection, even when it was running.

Checked iptables and saw, that the port of the Server was redirected to a different port.

I never added that rule to the firewall. Checked and a little script I used from someone else generated traffic for a mobile game.

OK beginn the DDoS Penetration. Over 10 Gbit/s on some small servers.

Checked Facebook and some idiot posted on my site:
Stop you little shithead or I will report you to the police!!!

Checked his profile page and he had a small shitty android game with a botnet.

Choose one:
1. let him be
2. Fuck him up for good

Lets Sudo with 2.

I scaled up my bandwith to 25 Gbit/s and found out that guys phone number.

Slowly started to eat away his bandwith for days. 3 days later his server was unreachable.

Then I masked my VoIP adress and called him:

Me: Hi, you know me?
He: No WTF! Why are you calling me.
Me: I love your're game a lot, I really love it.
He: What's wrong with you? Who are you?
Me: I'm teach
He: teach?
Me: Teach me lesson
He: Are you crazy I'm hanging up!
Me: I really love you're game. I even took away all your bandwith. Now you're servers are blocked, you're game banned on the store.
He: WHAT, WHAT? (hearing typing)

Me: Don't fuck with the wrong guys. I teached you a lesson, call me EL PENETRATO

He: FUCK Fuck Fuck you! Who are you???!!! I'm going to report you!
Me: How?
He: I got you're logs!
Me: Check it at Utrace...
He: Holy shit all around the world

Me: Lemme Smash Bitch
*hung up*

Knowing the Linux command line saved my bacon!

I was on a plane, unable to connect to wifi, and needed to take a note... while not having any note taking applications or text editing applications on my phone. but what I DID have was a terminal application.

So, I made a file in my documents folder and echoed my notes into the file! A bit longer and more complicated than it needed to be, but it worked when I needed it to!

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

Dictating a linux command on the phone while in class to fix a server issue

I DID IT!!! just fucking installed lineage os <3 never imagined that it could be so complicated... they really don't want you to flash your phone man. I guess the main problem was that my phone is old x)

So I'm trying to get a clean and free environment, any advice about applications? My biggest problem is with telegram, I'll try wire, bit there is anything else that can replace telegram and on android and Linux? I mean I need to keep conversations sync, and I won't use a Chrome application TT so no signal.

Man I love VM's!

I'm on a very tight deadline and my laptop died this morning and needs a reformat, usually this would be a very dire situation... Luckily I use a virtual machine for my dev env so I just remoted into a pc at my office using my phone, launched an instance of my vm and forwarded a public IP to it.

I'm currently working on my rasberry pi while machines installing linux. The only noticeable difference so far is that I only have enough ram to keep open around 5 browser tabs. :-D

When i started to get into computers i didn't know a shit about Linux, i had the typical idea that is for hackers. Now i see how things that we use everyday like the phone uses it.
#againstignorance

Guy sees me on my laptop and says "is that Linux?". I say yes then he says he is into computer "stuff and can hack anything". Not having a clue what that means I replied with a "awesome".

I don't have really any friends that are into "computers", so I decided to play ball.

I asked, "Are you into coding?.. he says, "Yes". Then I ask, " What languages?" He says, " Just what ever, anything really, it depends on what I am doing."

At this point I understand what is going on but it is so awkward. He continues.. "Recently I used.. what's it called abd or adb, you know I like rooted my phone"...

And let's talk about something else....

Why do people feel the need to lie or whatever you might call what happened. It might be different I think if he wasn't about 40.

I feel like this is a pretty common story

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

client to Freelance programmer : we'll need a website, an android app, an ios app, a windows phone app, a windows desktop application, a Linux app, a mac app, we also want an interactive game version of the app, for learning and tutorials, can you develop all that? *developer : yes. *goes to learn c# : )

It's impressive how much root can actually get you, that's debian running xfce on my lg g3 and chromium.

It's always nice to know that you can have a portable server etc. straight from your phone. I even used that kind of setup as a portable laptop some time ago and it worked quite well.

What things did you do via chrooted linux on android devices? would be interesting to know if somebody maybe is still using it as some kind of laptop as I did.

Compiled new linux kernel for my phone today.
All went good.

Except it got really hot and it appears that my sdcard died.

At least now I can tether over bluetooth.

This “Auto save” feature in the latest app version is buggy..
-> new rant
-> prefilled with previous rant..

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

Apple, go fuck yourself, seriously.. put your trillion dollars way up your arse...

Moved to Ireland, want to switch country..
“If you want to switch countries, cancel your Apple Music subscription first”..
so be it. Cancelled it..
“Your subscription will be cancelled in 28 days”.

FUCK YOU, YOU COCK SUCKING BASTARDS!!
I NEED TO SWITCH THE STORE TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD BANKING APPS AND STUFF LIKE THAT..

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

Suddenly iMessage stopped working. This is kind of a big deal because I have unlimited data but only unlimited sms to Irish numbers and I need to communicate with people in Switzerland and Germany..
Internet works so I try to turn iMessage off and in again. But that doesn’t work.. i can only reactivate iMessage via WiFi.

So I go back to the hotel, reactivate iMessage..
“Verifying imessage” >> google..
Leads me to an Apple forum: “the verification of iMessage can take up to 24h”.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a new country and rely on this overpriced shit..

Fun but sad fact, I have a second phone with me. IPhone 4 with iOS 7 and that thing WORKS!!

If this is where the future is going we’re all gonna die very soon.. plains crash, power plants explode but hey, at least they have data about it and it looks shiny. That’s all that matters..

Another reason to switch to android..

MacOs fucked me up so I already switched to windows + Linux. Next one will be getting rid of iOS, they don’t build small phones anymore anyway..

I know this guy through some mutual friends that tries to brag about everything he does that involves a computer in some way.

One time (probably 4 months ago), he used inspect element to replace the text on the Google homepage with like Amazon versions (Amazon mail, Amazon drive, etc), then proceeded to take a picture of the screen WITH HIS PHONE and show every single person he saw.

Every time I talk to him, he always brings up some pointless thing he did to make it seem like he knows what he's doing. But whenever I mention some more specific stuff (today I mentioned Linux), he claims to know exactly what I'm talking about but quickly changes the subject to something about his car (he drives a Jeep and has to let everyone know, like an Arch Linux user)

Dude just claims to know everything there is to know and can't back it up and it gets more annoying every fucking day

Anyone else ever have to deal with someone that clearly don't know a ton, but knows just enough to be dangerous/annoying as fuck?

my first day with Linux.

1. downloaded the Ubuntu 16. 04 LTS and made bootable.
2. install it on my system.
3. after installing wifi is not working.
4. searched on internet with my phone and connected my PC with USB thetering.
5. now installed wifi driver.
6. now my Nvidia card is not working installed its driver too.
6.finally i look at my desktop and its looking really ancient and old.
7. installed gnome desktop and switch to it.
8. now gnome is not much functional so added some extensions like dash to dock, dynamic transparency.
9. now setup java and android studio.
10. after that android studio font is looking blurry. finally stackoverflow made my life easy and i fixed it.

now after all this my system is working crazy fast.. Android studio is opening in just 5-6 seconds.
really happy.. 😍 😍

SPECS:

- Dooge X5 max (worst phone ever, can't reccomend, randomly shuts off, displays advertizement, gets super hot)
- Bottle of coke light (so I don't get fat)
- Auna Mic 900-b (I used to do videos on youtube, though they were so bad i've deleted them lol)
- Two HP 24es screens (one of them broke when I let it fall while switching overheating cables)
- Mech keyboard with MX - Red
- Razer Naga 2014 (I regret buying that already)
- Wacom intuos small (I wanted to become a designer for a game with @Qcat)
- Computer with
CPU: ryzen i1600. 3.8ghz, 4ghz with boost, 12threads 6 cortes
RAM: 16 gig
Storage: 250gb SSD, 1tb hdd
Stickers: Generously donated by @gelomyrtol
Cooler: alpenföhn brocken
GPU: ATI 560 (something like that. I took the cheapest as I needed to fit a gpu into the budget, ryzen doesnt have integrated graphics units)

OS: fedora GNU/Linux with KDE as de (though i'm not sure wether i'll stay with it. I recently used cinnamon but it was too slow.

If i'm not on my desk, i'm either doing music studies, sleeping or i'm at school.

When on my deskj, I do
1) programming
2) Reading
3) watch nicob's danganronpa let's plays
4) programming.

My current projects:
clinl.org
github.com/wittmaxi/zeneural

I see loads of rants complaining about getting asked for tech help. And then I see Linux getting recommended as an OS.

Me? I'm telling everyone to use ChromeOS so they leave me the fuck alone.

In the future, I'll tell everyone they are too fucking stupid to own a computer and phone is the way to go.

Systems thinking, people.

I finally decided to switch to Linux (I still have Windows for work, but I want to give Linux a try too). I was about to complete the installation (Arch Linux so I was quite tired and stressed cause of fuck ups) when BOOM my fucking phone with the installation guide falls on my laptop's power button and powers it off. Fuuuuuuuuuuuckkkk. I have to do everything again. Shit.

Reinstalling my linux partition and... Oh whoops.. ... ...
That was the windows partition.. ...
*face palm*

Well I guess that's gone forever now...

I should have learned by now that I don't multitask well... Note to self: Don't talk on the phone and re inst... Scratch that... Note to self: Do one damn thing at a time dummy..

-" hey Linux, webdeveloper from ****** is on the phone and he is having some trouble"
; "aight send him over"

;" Linux speaking"
+" Hi its ***** from *****, my site wont work"

I ask him about more details and the the name of the sites, I quickly realize something...

;" Uhm, it seems like that you have not uploaded any files yes?
+" no I have not, I just wanted to test if the site on your hosting that I just bought Works as I was promised by the salesman"

;" FML"

I got interested in Linux through using custom Roms and kernels on my phone.
And now I want to learn more about it.
Any advice will be appreciated

I use Mac in office for daily dev and tasks, and a Lubuntu laptop for Linux related jobs. My home PC runs Ubuntu. And my personal laptop has a Ubuntu-Windows dual boot. I haven't used the Windows for more than a year. Even I do most of the basic tasks in Terminal, both in Mac and Linux.

Now I need to install a custom ROM in my Android Snapdragon based phone. And all the tools I need runs in Windows only. I don't even want to open that boot partition. 😥

Any help on this? It would be better if I can get something which runs on Linux.

Using Zoom to share my screen so my colleague can use his Skype Business to record the Zoom window so that the other people can see my screen and I can call in using my phone

All because Linux does not have skype business :p

Seeing how smartphones are advancing every year, I would say in about 10-20 years, we will see lots of people using smartphones as their personal computer

What do you think?

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

I use Windows on my desktop, Linux on my laptop, and Android on my phone. But I've never never had a good use for Apple products! I'm fine with others using them but I need to have a little control over my devices!

Anyone else?

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

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.

fuck oracle. fuck my company.

Using Oracle VM Manager/Servers to host Oracle Phone transfer solution without support coverage from Oracle.

Requiring Unix sysadmins to update to latest release and not telling that we do not have coverage from Oracle if anything goes wrong.

Gues what.. We've updated to Oracle VM Manager/Server 3.4.5 which was released this year and it uses fucking XEN hypervisor version 4.4.4 which has been deprecated and dead since who knows when. Latest release of XEN is 4.11. But that is not an issue, whatever, enterprise, legacy software, etc.

This fucking update introduced memory leak on the hypervisor which has been reported as per xen 4.4.4 history. Furthermore, we have no support from Oracle which means that I have to dig through mailing lists and limited information on the net since oracle has freakin support wall on nearly each of the major bugs found on that shitty software.

I have no idea whether any newer version of xen will work with that old Oracle Linux kernel or not.

Furthermore, Oracle provided great documentation on how to rollback the fcking update. Reinstall the hypervisor. Riiiight. XEN does not have export/import feature.

eh

I am sick of misrotated videos.

Sometimes, the phone camera software saves a video vertically because the user hits "record" before the software has detected that the user is holding the smartphone horizontally, because the software stupidly launches in vertical orientation by default.

So the software wants the user to wait until it has finally detected horizontal orientation, which causes the user to miss out on a moment.

How about the camera software actually saves the video in the orientation it was recorded in for the most time, rather than only the beginning of the video?

If I can think of this idea, billion-dollar companies surely can.

In the meantime, misrotated videos can be fixed using this ffmpeg command on Linux or Windows:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="0" -c copy output_file.mp4

And if the phone was held with the home button to the left side:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="180" -c copy output_file.mp4

This solution is superior compared to using -vf (video filters) because it only touches the metadata of the video. No re-encoding. This means no quality loss and no CPU/GPU power needed to process the video again. It just passes through.

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

Sick of seeing the 'proprietory is the devil' fucking argument, I'm super keen for the pine phone and to a lesser extent the librem 5 but seeing people already boycott them because they still use some proprietary libraries and components...

Who gives a fuck, yes open source is better for those who love to tinker and learn the inner workings but there is nothing wrong with using proprietary software on one of these devices.

It's the same toxic shit as 'microsoft bad, Linux good' and we really need less of it around

Anyone else excited for the purism and pine phones to hit the main market? Wanna hear what the devRant community is thinking of this?

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.

(Not sure if this is a rant.)
My mom got a Surface Pro a few days ago. I'm kinda happy because she'll be using more tech stuff. I mean, she used to do most of her work on her phone or on plain paper. Maybe she'll warm up towards using a laptop and maybe I can slowly introduce her to Linux. 🤔
Any suggestions for a Linux distro for a complete newbie?

What? You've been messaging me for days? I'm sorry. I got a new phone; it extremely experimental, as it's using linux and not android or iOS. I guess I just haven't gotten your messages.

The pine phone gives be the best excuse I've had in years for ignoring people!

For the record though, I *have* been getting all their calls and messages since switching to Postmarket.

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

I always love trying something new, especially when it's Linux.

In this case, I'm installing Plasma Mobile on my phone to see how it handles.

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

My older brother introduced me to linux and android custom roms when I was like 11. So I flashed my old sony Ericson phone with custom roms from xda and tried Ubuntu live CDs on my mother's old 40gb hdd laptop.
But my introduction to programming was when I saw some videos about the raspberry pi on YouTube.
I was like 14 and programmed basic scripts for my raspberry pi in nano over putty or notepad++.
At first I didn't even knew to intendent but in the process of my first project (Python sunrise alarm clock with tts) I learned many valuable things about Python and Linux/Debian.
The years after that I learned more with my now multiple RaspberryPIs, Arduinos and other hardware.
So in conclusion RaspberryPIs, the diy/open source community and especially my brother introduced me to programming.
I am now doing bigger projects with my brother and have (really basic) knowledge of java,Javascript,php,html,Arduino/C++ and Python.

My craziest interview prep was for the role I just started last week. I applied to AWS and forgot about it, a month later I got invited to do a phone interview followed by a 5 hour on-site loop

I had just 4 days to prepare while already working full-time so I basically didn’t do anything after work for those few days other than cramming through over 50 hours of content on ds & algo, linux, networking and scalable system designs.

It helped that I’ve been working as a software engineer for many years so I just needed to review what I already knew

Just had a discussion with a support person, it seems I need or use safari or opera OS to be able to watch a recording of an open class I has.

The platform they jse works on with flash (fucking hate it), and it seems linux is not supported because I need to install flash.

I was just reporting a stupid bug, I am watching these on my phone and staying away from installing flash.

God dammit.

The reason I don't use Linux on my desktop is its hobby of saying “fuck off” spontaneously and without warning when I need it the most.

A designer friend shares his After Effects project and asks to export that to Lottie? Fuck off.
Your Android phone decided to brick itself with an OTA update (yep, happened to me, thanks Sony), and you need to unbrick it? Fuck off!
A musician friend wants to connect his audio card (that of course has no Linux drivers) and record some bass riffs? Tell him to fuck right off mate.
Your boss suddenly asks you to check an MS Access file for him as he's en route to an important meeting? Yep, you guessed it — fuck off.
Your government now requires your tax papers to have digital signatures? Fuck off, it only works for Mac and Windows.
Want to connect an old digital camera? Would you please fuck off?

I know I'm gonna get heat from Linux fanboys, especially on this platform. After all, a designer should know how to export to Lottie if he's a real designer, you should've bought a better phone, your friend should've had his laptop with him, your boss should've used open source tools instead of MS Access… Wait, he was tasked that from above? Then his boss should've used open source tools! Government mandates digital signatures? Well, tell them to port that to Linux! Start a riot! Get a better government! Move to a better country! Digital cameras? Who uses them in 2024, especially old ones! Are you some kind of hipster?

I know preparing for corner cases is bona fide premature optimization, but that's the whole point — with Mac or Windows, you don't have to prepare at all. You always have options. With Linux, your number one option is to have Windows handy if need be.

Linux works perfectly on my server, but not on my laptop.

I am that dumb, my linux wasn't able to show me the sd card in file manager so i can merge NOOBS .
I got mad so i asked my friend if i can use his windows laptop to put NOOBS on the sd
But guess what , my phone reads sd cards aswell 😂😂
I just downloaded from my phone, copy and pasted
Bam worked!
Took me about 1 day to realize

Cause there's no really safe solution for that right now, finally release my favorite and verifiable secure linux password management tool for the web and as apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone - including online synchronization, so you can access your passwords anywhere. (Web and Android first, the other platforms later).

At the moment it is still a pure gpg based Linux terminal application.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

How to put dark theme on Windows?
Do not suggest using Linux, I am a gamer and dual boot is a pain.
I already have dark theme everywhere, Chrome, IDEs, and even my phone... its just Windows that hurts my eyes. :-/

I was told by my aunt that my niece (who also lives in Colombia) would call me (I live in the Netherlands). When I asked why she would call my aunt responded saying that she did not know. I was happy, it is not very often that my Colombian family calls me.

So I waited.... and waited... and waited... finally she called very late. Turns out she wanted to ask me which Smartphone was better.... :-(.

That was a disappointment... Normally if I go visit my familly there in Colombia they bring all there devices and ask me if I can fix them or install a certain program on it. I dont mind doing that. It can be very interesting. For example: a few months ago another aunt asked me to look at her computer to find out why it was so slow... turned out she had a very old PC with Windows XP installed on it. I fixed the problem by installing light linux distro on the computer. (she only used the browser so that was not a big problem). But yeah... I played for a while with good old Windows XP.

Okay back to the beginning. It is awful if family just calls you to ask witch phone is better.

Thats all... :-)

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.

Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.

Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.

Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."

My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.

They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.

That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.

Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken...

Devrant app cant even open ten rants in a row without crashing. Oh of course you have android inside Kubernetes running on top of arch Linux on your phone and it works fine, please fuck off.

Linux - Debian
Hey guys
So I finally have a phone that can run Linux without lag

Already have Debian installed and lxde... Im a complete noob, what should I install more? And any tips for a new user??
Thanks

I'm contributing to a project that allows you to control your Linux desktop from your phone. I managed to implement controlling your PCs volume form the phone. At first the code was ugly as hell, include a fucking long bash statement, but I even managed to turn it into a nice solution.

A few weeks later I was invited to meet the core developers.

Worst support experience so far: German ISP sent their cheap default router which I opted for, hoping that I didn't need to rent a costly FitzBox. Provider activates the connection, everything fine, but slow and unstable on my Linux laptop only. Try using their website, their support chat etc. as they made it very hard to even open a support ticket. I gather all the information, ping, traceroute, netstat, logfiles, router settings, broadband measurement etc. and finally manage to open a support ticket of my issue adn they say they will send an engineer to my place in about 4 days. I stay at home that day and wait for the whole day, nothing happens!
I get back to them, even get a phone call after waiting about 1h in the waiting queue, only to listen to someone tell me that the appointment had been cancelled as the ticket had already been closed. WTF! They said they measured my connection and could not reproduce any error. Did not even mention my lengthy log files etc. It took my own research and another hint that there is an incompatibility with that specific router and some specific devices so I should really replace their cheap router with a FritzBox device. What they also did not tell, that you dont need to rent their branded FritzBox, there are cheap second hand models from another ISP that you can reconfigure by simply chosing another ISP in a dropdown list that contains every popular German ISP. But why are they popular? You can only choose between the different bad ones, that's why they don't seem to make an effort.

So a bit ago I posted a rant saying that I would be getting ElementaryOS onto my computer and trying it out, buckle up kiddos because this goes to shit in just a moment.

I did everything right, used Rufus correctly and didn't destroy my computer nor my installer, good! I set it up, get everything going and everything is running smoothly. One problem... I couldn't download **any** programs that weren't from the Ubuntu Store, which really annoyed me because I like to use Brackets, and I couldn't find it in the UStore...

So I messed up **really** bad here... I didn't *format* my Elementary Installer, but tried to delete the files like a pleb and stick an Ubuntu ISO in it's place, I didn't even think on going through Rufus again, I just slapped that shit in there without a thought.

I restart my computer, I read a forum stating that I would get an option that allows Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) to take over the partition of a previous distro. Neat! Another bloody problem is that I decided to use "Win + R" and manually delete the Elementary partition **myself**... What is even wrong with me...

So I restarted it, and before my father left to go shopping, he said I should go into the BIOS to change the boot order (Now this is where I **really fucked up**. Thought what I said before was bad?).
Cool, so I boot my PC and go into the BIOS, now I couldn't figure out on my computer where the boot order was, when it was right in my face the whole damn time... I managed to almost destroy my entire BIOS with the fucking file in my USB stick, because I was being an idiot...

I restart, GRUB opens up with a black screen and white text in the top left corner, know what the most important line is in that small block of words? "unknown filesystem"... Of fucking course I fucked it that bad, GRUB didn't even give me the option of just using Windows 10 instead, just quietly gave me the middle finger since I basically nearly fucked everything.

What's funny is that I had someone (who lives with us, let's call him Jeff) look at my computer because I was done being a dumbass.
He told me that I still had my BIOS (which was a bloody relief, because I thought I basically destroyed my computer doing what I did) and that all I need to do is fix the installer I tried to use.

I gave him the USB and just started to play on my phone.
Then I remembered something maybe an hour or so ago... I had an older installer that I used on my shitty laptop awhile back, if I can find it again I could just use that instead of waiting on Jeff. I dug around my room and found the USB that had a working Ubuntu ISO on, correctly placed inside this time.

I basically walked up to my computer, plugged it in and started it up, and it worked. I got Ubuntu and Windows 10 back, and I was basically laughing like I just saved a man's life.

Moral of this story: Don't be like me and do something stupid, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're attempting at...

What are the challenges of using standard Linux on phones, perhaps with a phone-optimized desktop environment?

So i kind of fucked up...

I am currently living out of town and only have my laptop and rpi with me. Wanting to try something new, i decided to challenge myself to only use linux until i get back home, but i also wanted a new distro. (Oh and btw my only internet connection is provided by my phone and tablet, which is used as a hotspot, and because i already used all of my monthly data on the tablet now i only have my phone and an unlimited 128kbps connection which turns into a decent connection only after 11pm)

I downloaded the distro image last night and was planning to install it today, so i shutdown the laptop immediately after the download finished). If only i remembered that i had already wiped the old linux partition containing GRUB.

So now i need to wait until 11 pm so i can download another image on my rpi and flash it to my usb drive. Fuck me...

I guess i'll relax until then.

Fair / Not Fair
I hate when an interviewer would ask me to code something for them for technical interview.( happy to show non propitiatory previous work) So now that I am the one doing the interviewing, I am doing what I would have wanted, and I have to say it is working out. I thought I would share my experience so far and find out if the community at large sees this practice as fair or not fair.

People reply to the job post then I call and do quick phone interview ask a few key questions. After I find somone I think should go the next level I direct them to freelancer site and give them a paid project.

most recent project: Build simple(i mean really simple) ASP.net Core MVC web application (code first) that remotely connects to SQL server and can be published in linux ubuntu.
bla bla user accounts/ subscription bla bla. But it must me completed in 10 days. reward $1000.00 us dollars.

I build the SQL server for them and put blank database in and provide connection details.

To be fair
I have already built this app my self it and it took me 5 days.

So, Fair / not Fair

So I am really happy/frustrated right now.

I successfully booted into Arch Linux

Bluetooth headphones sound like I am talking on a phone.

Mhm my windows just went full retard on me and I was such a mastermind that before I installed win10 I installed a kali linux so that when the windows would fail to boot then and only then would kali boot up to save my arse...then again , apparently , grub dislikes windows over it so...I'm just sitting here...in my kali cave , with kali only booting when my phone is connected via usb (?) searching like mad for a usb stick...I made this whole failsafe thing so long ago I barely remember how I did it...

I set up a Linux server on a Rock 64 which connected with a external hard drive at home. Now I can download torrent and run crawlers anywhere from my phone.

Yes I know this is more of a stack overflow question but no one seems to have asked it and not going to waste time getting downvoted and having my account banned for not knowing something again .-.

Just wanting to know if anyone is able to recommend some libraries that would be useful for making mobile Linux apps with GTK?

Preferably ones that will interface with Vala as I'm wanting to build a mini ecosystem of apps for the pine phone to interface with Elementary OS?

Experience with Plasma Mobile:

After an hour of confusion and bash file trolling (as in scrolling through a bash file, not trolling someone with a script), I ended up needing to reinstall Lineage OS on my phone.

While it's a new and seemingly exciting expanse for modern Linux and Android phones, it's very obviously not ready yet.

Even after fixing some bugs within the bash file, my phone seemed to have a mind of its own; prematurely attempting to boot into the OS during a critical part of the setup. Even after finishing the setup correctly, my phone never actually boots into the system.

While I like the concept behind Plasma Mobile, it does still have a ways to go. But I have some hopes that the project will start getting bigger and better as the time goes on.

I love cortana, but it isn't officially supported on my phone due to region limits.

My question is, what Personal Assistant do you recommend?
I have looked into Ok Google, but that doesn't work on PC...
Siri just is a general nogo (see OS'es section)

Requirements:
- allow reminders
- allow quickly searching for something
- allow quickly opening an app (phone, PC is also nice)

OS'es:
- Windows 10
- Linux Ubuntu
- Android 8

What's the best way to turn a phone into a dedicated http server? I have a useless android lying about. Wanna turn it into a server.

Linux tools on android? Or forget about android and install Linux on it from scratch? Which flavour?

Any tips?

Is it possible to install a Linux distro on a android phone?
I have already unlocked bootloader so it should work right? Android is linux too.

I'm sorry if this is more of a xda-developers or stackoverflow question. Tell me if i should move the question somewhere else.

Just wanted to do some scripted image resizing for school in school because the teacher asked me to help her with that.
So I thought: Let's just write a tiny script. Written the script in almost no time (just iterates over all jpg's and resizes them)

30sec.

Now I tried to run it. Didn't have my laptop so I had to somehow run it on their windows PCs. At least it's windows 10, unlike other schools that still run XP and stuff so I thought it might be doable. Well guess what, nope it wasn't.

First tried to install imagemagick, that didn't work as only teacher accounts have admin and the teacher was already pretty scarred once he saw me doing stuff in powershell so I thought I'd better not ask to do this via a teacher account and mess with stuff as admin.

Next method: Installing msys2. That worked at least (after taking forever to install and having to mess with the av software to get it to run).
And there comes the next problem: pacman doesn't connect via the proxy so I can't download any packages. There is free wifi but only for teachers, and students aren't going to get access until the school finally has a faster connection because they'd (understandably) cause this connection to be constantly overloaded. I just happen to have access to this wifi network, too, because at least the guys from the IT dept know how bad using proxies under linux is. So I connect via wifi and it works. At least I thought: After running the script it yields weird errors about unsupported arguments even though the command is exactly the same I have been using for years (already checked typos twice)

Then got the idea of simply installing imagemagick on termux on android and transferring the files onto my phone.
Too bad we aren't allowed to attach our own USBs to the pcs. Luckily I got a rooted phone so I simply activate adb over network and connect to it.
After downloading the platform-tools I can't run them because of AV software. Luckily there is an option to add an exception per executable so I do that. After doing that it works.... nope it doesn't. The wifi only allows 443/tcp and 80/tcp, even for internal network devices.

So that's it. I'm simply going to upload that stuff to my nextcloud and convert it at home.

Windows, I hate you!!!

Just Realized... I have like 1 of every device... I'm a full on fence sitter...

iPhone X -- work phone
Huawei p20 -- personal phone
MacBook -- work laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad running Arch Linux -- personal laptop
Window Surface -- research/teaching laptop (use it when I teach and need to bring notes)
Gaming PC -- Gaming PC

And all of this took ~5 years to garner... Geez... I like all of these devices too (and sometimes i hate em) Holy...

I haven't even turned on my old laptop for a year. It's about six years old and becoming sluggish with modern software. Now I want to participate in a workshop for Raspberry Pi that requires you to bring a computer.

I feel like I should get me a new laptop, and knowing myself I'd get something in the upper mid range that gives a good bang for the buck and is slightly more pricey than I originally intended.

But I think it would be a very ridiculous thing to do, because afterwards it would just stand there while I do everything on my stationary computer, tablet and phone.

Maybe I'll throw in some lightweight Linux distro and see how far it takes me.

And feel like I should get me a new laptop.

SMB/CIFS support on Linux distros is a nightmare! Switching from wired to wireless will cause ALL mounts to freeze, and they all become impossible to dismount normally. You can't even ls the root folder anymore if there are frozen mount folders inside. It's f#&%ing retarded to have to reboot your PC twice a day because you lost WiFi signal for one second, and the underlying processes don't understand SIGTERM. And I could go on about MTP! Standard file transfer protocol for Android but boy it is hellish. Trying to copy a structure with subfolders will take forever because every ls call to the phone is like an API call to some free webhosting company in Australia, takes forever, if it even succeeds. I won't even get started on WebDAV and SSHFS (the latter is even worse than CIFS). Those make me want to do unpleasant things to my computer. So frustrating! I can't be the only one who has experienced this, right?

Am wondering when are we going to have devRant on PC or Linux...am getting addicted to my phone too much nw..if we could use it on pc like whatsapp, that would be great...pls tell me its going to happen soon.🙄

android devs/linux users, a quick help is needed.
My Ubuntu is not detecting my phone for debugging , but rather its just charging it.
(My phone should show a notification of being connected as a MTP device, but nops, it is not detecting laptop at all, it connects as if I have connected it to a charger)
This problem just started today, idk how or why...

Is there any way to make a file on your Linux or Windows computer where you can back up your phone through the magic of the interwed?

The "recycle bin" feature of Samsung "My Files" is amazing for data loss prevention when moving files out of the smartphone.

There used to be two ways to move files out of the smartphone to make space free. One is direct moving, the other is copy-deletion. The first is self-explanatory, the second means first copying the files and then deleting them on the phone.

Thanks to the the recycle bin, which keeps data for a month, files on the phone can be copied out and then put into the recycle bin instead of immediately deleted.

This means that if the copying was incomplete, there is a thirty-day grace period to get the files back from the phone.

The benefit of moving files instead of copy-deleting them is the lack of the deletion step. Moving files out directly does not have the emotional barrier of deleting the files from source like the deletion step of copy-deleting does.

Moving files feels like moving items to a new room, where as the deletion step after copying feels like destroying something.

So why not move files out? Because there is a risk of data loss if the device disconnects while files are moved to an USB OTG device. Due to write buffering, files that are moved out might be deleted on the phone shortly before they are completely written on the USB-OTG.

This is not an issue with MTP (Windows or Linux through USB cable) because the file systems are managed by the computer, so if the phone disconnects while files are moved out of the phone using MTP, the file system is kept intact by Windows or Linux.

Now, thanks to the recycle bin, there is no emotional barrier to deletion because the files on the phone are automatically deleted after 30 days in the absence of the user. The user can press the "delete" button without worries because of knowing "I can get it back until a month from now anyway".

How do you guys sync your music library on your linux PC on your android phone. For apple products there is iTunes. I know about a deprecated tool for samsung phones called Samsung Kies. Is there any good option with a GUI that allows me to sync music on my android device. (Yes I can just mount it and copy it over but thats a bit inconvinient when you only want to sync a few songs). Also, no, google music is not an option. Any suggestions?

Guys i want to clone my phone into a virtual one under Linux like a virtual machine, i do have Authy, and few financial apps i want to install on it in case I don't have access to my phone or if it's dead, what are the best options

Today in my house, all the internet on everyone's device has failed for a while. My Linux computer and my phone are the only devices that are not affected for some reason.