Friend: I hate my new OnePlus 6. It's really slow and hangs a lot

Me: I can't believe

Friend: Use it yourself, you'll know.

*Me using his phone
*Realising it was really slow
*Checking his installed apps

- CCleaner
-DU Booster
-Antivirus free version
-Antivirus pro
-Antivirus ultimate
-Battery Saver
-App Booster
-Super Cleaner
-RAM Master

*poured poision in his coffee
*enjoyed watching him die slowly

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

Got my new workstation.
Isn't it a beauty?

Rocking a Pentium II 366 MHz processor.
6 GB HDD.
64 MB SDRAM.
1 minute of battery life.
Resolution up to SXGA (1280x1024)
Removable CD-Rom drive.
1 USB port (we like to use dongles, right?)

Also it has state of the art security:
- No webcam
- No Mic
- Removable WiFi
- I forgot the password

And best of all:
It as a nipple to play with!!

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

Got my new phone a few weeks ago, it rocks a 11000 mAh battery.

Was sceptical as for how long it'd last anyways so charged it last Sunday to see how long it will last with my usage (few hours of devRanting, loads of signalling and quite some firefoxing plus Spotify a lot):

At 40 percent now 😯

Battery testing new app at work. Boss wants us to test Pokemon Go for comparison. I get to leave the office for 2 hours to catch Pokemon and get paid...

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

"New revolutionary technology, ai powered smartphone, 720° camera, 8 screens"

Cool

Can i have 2 days battery life instead?

New job, started two months ago. Forced to use a MacBook. First time using iShit in my life.

- Laptop reboots randomly every three weeks or so "because of an error" (thanks, very informative error message).

- Sometimes if I use two screens and I lock my laptop, only one screen gets locked.

- The most simple tasks require a fucking large number of clicks. There are almost no keyboard shortcuts. My hand hurts because of this, and after two months the pain is getting worse and worse.

- Yes, I know there are apps that give you extra keyboard shortcuts, but those don't help much. I never used a mouse in 10 years.

- Window management sucks. It's so broken and poor in so many ways, I don't know where to start.

- Random errors and pop-ups are the norm.

- I have only four fucking USB Type C ports. I can somehow understand having only Type C because it looks cool, but fuck at least give me 6 of them, or 8. Do you really have to force me to use a USB hub, in addition to a shitload of adapters?

- Multiple monitors don't work unless the laptop is connected to the power adapter.

- The above point means, in practice, that I have exactly zero USB Type C ports available to me: one is used for the power adapter, two are for the two monitors, and one for the USB hub. Whenever I have to connect something that has Type C, I have to choose between monitors and going fuck myself.

- I don't want to comment on performance, cooling system or battery life. This would be a waste of time. Let's just say that it's shit.

Now, dear Apple fangirls and fanboys, please downvote this rant. I want your downvotes, so please don't hesitate to press that (--) button. But please let me say that these products are shit, pure shit. Fuck Apple and their overpriced products.

Me: I'd like a new phone please.
Manufacturer: Okay, what do you look for in a phone?
Me: Well as long as the other specs are good, it's important to have a headphone port, SD card slot, and removable battery.
Manufacturer: Okay, fingerprint scanner. Got it.
Me: What?
Manufacturer: The only thing you want is a fingerprint scanner?
Me: No I don't care about that, what I want is-
Manufacturer: A fingerprint scanner, we know. Every device needs one.
Me: But-
Manufacturer: Shhh... Don't worry, we know our customers.

From Bauhaus to Jessica Walsh, all the previous design experience and vision of the entire civilization lead to this.

This monstrosity is apple’s new battery icon in Big Sur.

I’m speechless.

What I did wrong during my home office cleaning session this morning:
- put soap on my mouse mat
- snapped my enter key
- vacuumed up my F8 key
- absent-mindedly cut my ethernet cable
- lost my zero key
- dropped my backup hard drive (data was recoverable, but I need a new drive)
- lost one of the nose pads on my glasses
- got a cocktail stick stuck in a USB port
- exploded my mouse by using the wrong type of battery

Things I did good:
- nothing

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today in train programming:
Pushed a new build before pulling into station
Battery dies
Test on tablet
Build is broken, files missing
Upload files manually to Azure (WHY)
try to log in to my sure to treat, forgotten password
Try to reset password, smtp details in DB are wrong...

I'm doing well

If I get the new arm I looked at today, I'll always have a battery pack on me. It's USB C and will charge my phone

So I says to the wife, I says, “When you go to Costco tomorrow, I need a new Oral B electric toothbrush. My old one’s battery is no longer able to hold a charge.” I’m picturing her coming back with one that’s pretty similar to the one I had. You turn it on, you brush your teeth, you turn it off.

She comes back with the Oral B Pro 6000. Go on. Look it up. I’ll wait.

So this thing has about 6 modes and Bluetooth that connects you to an app that not only keeps track of how often you brush, but tracks your performance and gives you trophies if you do well at specific tasks and techniques. And there’s a coach to take you on an “oral health journey” depending on your particular goals. There’s even a mount you can buy to attach your phone to your mirror so the app can watch how you brush and give you pointers. I don’t have the mount so I got an 85% on performance because who can hold a phone pointed perfectly at your face while brushing? The final report had what might be the app dev’s attempt at a pun.

It’s 2019 and everyone is judging you. Why not your toothbrush as well?

Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.

Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"

Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.

Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Disclaimer: I have a strong hate towards apple for multiple reasons and this will only be temporary. (thank God for that)

My oneplus one is battery dead and the power button quit as well. Repair costs would be as expensive as buying a new phone (200-300 price range) so searching for a new one.

But, I need a temporary phone in the mean time.
A phone with googled-android is absolutely a no-go. I used to do that sometimes but those were wrong decisions.

So, for the sake of trying, I'm going for a second hand iPhone.
Will be testing how it works for me (never been able to form an opinion on it since iOS 4.2 (iPod touch)) and will also be searching my ass off for a smartphone which supports lineage/rooting (TIPS BETWEEN ABOVES PRICE RANGE ARE VERY WELCOME) because I'm fucking hell not planning on using that (the iPhone) fucker any longer than a month.
Even if I love it over android (highly doubt that), I won't continue using it for very specific reasons.

Wish me luck 😅

This is my little "setup".

Have a gaming laptop, too. Battery is barely dead but meeh. Maybe I'll try installing ACK... ehm... ARSCH linux on that 🤔

Some specs as new screenshot in a comment below ☺

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!

TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!

*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*

But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎

But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?

*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?

*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!

*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*

Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?

*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.

*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<

*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...

Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.

Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

*wondered for 4 years how a bootloop looks like*
Nexus: yOU wAnE kNoW wHaT a BoOtLoOp LoOkS LiKe?!

*bootloops itself to shit*

Well I guess that I know what I'll be doing tonight then. Flash that new StatixOS build because the phone shat itself.

*tries to reflash the recovery*
*still bootloops*
*tries to flash the stock OS*
*still fucking bootloops*
*finds a post on XDA saying something about fucked big cores that need to be disabled*

Fucking piece of junk. So not only the battery is shit, but also the CPU is shit, huh. Certified pieces of shit.

*flashes the patched boot.img that disables the big cores*
*phone loads Google logo.. good*
*BOOTLOOPS FUCKING AGAIN*

MJHUIETHNIUBESZPTUIBG ESVGU d

FUCK!!! Fuck you Google, fuck you Nexus, fuck you Huawei, HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO DESIGN A FUCKING PHONE?!!!

So yeah. Looking for suggestions for a new phone. Anything of which the kernel source is released and of which the battery is halfway decent (unlike this fucking piece of shit) should do.

Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊

Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.

Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.

My Nexus 6P died yesterday..
A new battery that I ordered for it months ago, arrived.. today.
4700mAh. If only I could've tested it.

This feels so much like it was just to rub it in a little bit further that that Nexus is gone forever.. just before I could fix the first shitstain, the second one occurred already... Fuck me :')

Don't you just love it when you're pitching new project ideas and there's always that one negative person that has to find something to complain about?

They literally said to me "But what if the user runs out of battery? that will make the application useless for them"

At this point it just feels like this person is turning down every idea for the sake of turning them down.

Yay a new iPhone.
3 cameras and fast charge and.... omg 5 more hours of battery life 😱

But wtf Apple, $1900 AUD.

This is seriously getting to the point Apple don't want people's money anymore.

Oh and just to clarify,
- sent from my iPhone

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

When the last battery of one of your phones die. And you don't want waste more money with a new one.
But you need to perform a backup.

I love my Nexus 6P but goddamn do I hate its battery. Shuts down randomly at 25%, lasts only half a day, and a lot of other crap. So I want to replace it, bought a new battery from AliExpress but didn't buy any tools for it.. so I'll have to make do with what I currently have. On iFixit I found that the replacement process is apparently quite difficult as it's glued in (God I fucking hate that) and can only be safely removed by heatgunning it (which I don't have a heatgun for). Are the results worth the risk of breaking it? Is it possible to pull it out while cold, without too much risk of breaking stuff or damaging the battery? I've got experience in disassembling 2 previous phones and one of them had the battery glued in as well.. and I didn't break the battery (in fact I'm still using it) but it was very difficult.. and this is my daily driver. So yeah 😶

TL;TR

My mum just came to me asking me why the mouse is not working ...like I'm GOD of electronics :( (I'm just a simple dev) I simply though that the battery is dead because it's old. Soooooo.....
I showed her how to open it and how to change the battery. After 5 min she came back with a new battery and the same mouse asking me to fix it for her....

In my mind I literally snapped my brain was bleeding and exploding at the same time.

I just cringed a fake smile and changed the battery in front of her very slowly. I sure she won't remember how to do it next time.

At the end of the story I can't talk back or be angry to my parents I have to much respect for them. They though me everything from how to poop, speak, dress, eat and so on.

Be kind to your parents.

My Android phone is 5 years old. Everybody tell me I should buy a new one but I'm a stingy environmentalist and I refuse buying new stuff if it is not strictly necessary.

So, for 9€ I replaced the phone battery and then I installed a custom ROM, so it looks a bit newer.

Unfortunately, it seems that something in the network configuration has been fucked up.
The phone is able to browse the Internet, but:
- WiFi hotspot is not working
- USB tethering is not working
- Bluetooth tethering is not working
- PPP over USB is not working

But, hey, I never give up, so this is my current setup:
- I installed a proxy server on the phone
- I'm using "adb forward" to forward the proxy port from the phone to my laptop
- I configured Firefox to use that proxy

And, yes, I'm using that connection to write this post. :D

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

I live in the USA. Recently moved to a new state. Contacted car insurance company to change my policy to the new state.

Upon doing so, I was told about a new program they have where you install an app on your phone that monitors your driving. It gives discounts to your premium for driving safely.

Intrigued, I decided to try it out. At the end of the month, my discount was TWO DOLLARS.

Uninstalled, not worth the surrender of personal information that they profit off of in addition to my premium payments as well as the drained battery every day.

Disillusioned, again.

Has anyone else had experiences with similar discount programs, and was it worth it for you? Maybe I’m just a shitty driver ;).

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

This freaking laptop.

The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.

The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.

The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.

nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.

In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.

Just. It's frustrating.

It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.

Asus have now decided that a removable battery is a feature people do not need anymore on a powerful laptop.

My battery or charger had a fit and blew the fuse on my charger and broke the battery, and now I have to send my laptop back because they can't send me a new battery, as replacing it myself would void the warranty.

Please for the love of all that isn't completely retarded, nobody start taking more pages out of Apple's book, even some completely non-technical people could handle changing a battery before, this benefits no one.

To make things worse, I'm on holiday right now and leaving the country for a year a few weeks after I get back, so if they can't get it back to me fast enough, I won't have the laptop for the whole bloody reason I bought it for, just because some smart arse designer has clearly never owned a laptop in their life.

Bought a new Chinese phone a few months back but the battery is already bad as fuck (my fourth Chinese phone, first bad battery). Define bad, every minute of devRanting was 1 percent of battery gone.
It was empty after like two hours of usage :(.

So just went back to my old phone (6000 mAh) and after two hours I am at 86 percent!

Man, this relieve 😀

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

Building my own accounting software because everything else is overly complicated and is trying to compete with enterprise accounting tools. All I want is some budgeting, some bill tracking, and categorization.

Writing in Ruby because I'm a masochist. Using built-in minitest because again 😈.

I have currently around 62 assertions. As soon as I add ANY new test that's literally asserting true, everything comes unglued and 20+ failures pop up. Take it out, 62 passes.

I feel like I'm going crazy at this point. The errors also don't make ANY sense. Shit like, "that record doesn't exist" when it's clearly a part of fixtures and is only used in ONE test(the one that's breaking).

Installed minitest bisect, and it's like 🤷‍♀️"lol get fucked bro!"

So I came here to rant about this before my battery dies and I go drink myself to sleep.

Thank you for coming to my dev-talk.

Ok... So iPhone X cames with 3gb ram and 2.7 mAh battery....
Fuck the new Xiami that costs 1/4 comes with 4gb ram and a 4mAh battery...

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.

Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.

But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.

The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.

I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.

Just got my hand on a new Windows 10 machine and used IE for its one true purpose.

Yet what I saw truly boggled my mind.

Wow. Microsoft truly got an inferiority complex nowadays.

(And I had to smile about the "browse longer" part, given I am on a desktop workstation I no fucks are given about battery live.)

When you buy new laptop battery and on the next day you spill beer all over the keyboard making laptop totally useless.

Today, Linux kernel 5.8 was released, here is how it runs on my new laptop.

- Realtek shit ethernet still doesn't work (no, I didn't return it, because I would have to buy at least 2 times as expensive docking station instead and it is just not worth it), but considering Realtek, it is probably not a Linux kernel issue
- Battery life while watching videos was improved pretty significantly from 6.5 hours to about 7.3 hours (1080p HEVC)
- All temperature sensors are now working correctly
- Fan is a little more silent overall, probably because of some power draw improvements
- Subjectively, the system is a little bit more responsive overall

The inner calm when you get a new fresh laptop battery

There's a lotta memes about Google spazzing out whenever you log into a new device, but Fitbit is even worse lol

I not only get a notification that my Fitbit's battery is low, I also get a fucking email about it.

Like y'all chill out. I know it's low.

I'm sure this can be disabled somewhere, but I'mma probably get a new watch soon so I'm too lazy to deal with it

Guys seriously why would you buy a macbook if apple will support it for like 7 years then you won't be able to upgrade to newer OSX versions? whereas a good laptop machine could run Linux for a lifetime, you could even change distros if you got bored.

Let me dive into it, If I buy a brand new macbook and use it rarely, its condition will barely change however one day I will get the message you need a greater version to install X app, seriously apple?

Real life scenario: I have an ipod touch 5 i rarely use it, one day i decided to install an application and boom no you can't buddy you need to upgrade the iOS however the currently version of iOS is the latest version i could get for that ipod touch model, so the thing is, I have a perfect condition product that is unusable unless for some music playing and what i already installed as apps, does it look fair to you? I have the same issue with an ipad mini, its condition is perfect, battery life is decent, I can't receive anymore updates, the youtube app stopped working, im stuck again with a product that i can use only to read some ebooks or use youtube through the browser, apple wants me to buy a new ipad which is absurd.

I will never buy an apple product again

Fuck you Apple

Any nexus 6p users are out there? I'm thinking of flashing a new rom because the performance is taking a big hit and battery life is becoming abysmal. Any recommendations for this particular phone?

I bought a new laptop yesterday and just fell like superheroes at the end on movies when they find out exactly how powerful they are and what real power tastes like :D

Moving from 4gb to 8gb of RAM and a to a working battery i just bliss :)

Developers are supposed to be eager to try new stuff, however most devs on devRant prefer to hate on Edge and hate who use it.

I'm not here to defend Microsoft but I bet 95% of the people that hate on Edge haven't tried the latest version.

It's really easy on weaker hardware and on battery life. Try using an old ultrabook (2nd gen i5) as I did for some time while using Chrome or Firefox as your main browser!

BAT0 (Charging - 100% remaining time 00:00:00), health 100.0%: 8.318V 0.592A 4.92426W

Fuck yeah!! No more "Charging - 186%", no more "health 54%". I feel alive again!!!!

My new phone - the Motorola C Plus - has insane battery life.
Took it off charge Monday 07:30am with 100% battery.
It's now Thursday 11:00pm and it still has 10% battery.
You're looking at 90 hours Standby right there. Damm, Motorola.
I put it on Airplane mode when I sleep and have the screen brightness turned down, but still.
That's impressive.

Gdpr thing aside...

Does anybody read the new policy...

I just did for 2 apps (intel driver software and 9ga.. You know it)...

On the things that they collected on the side without you knowing include:
9ga:
Device memory, language, battery level, timezone, unique device identifiers, compass, accelorometer and microphone... Even service provider and signal strength

Intel:
Website you visit, how you use your computer(vague too vague) and computing environment.

Did anybody knew for sure before this that their apps are listening to them? That they just made a profile of you with all the data?

With all this they dont even need your ip they already know who you are and what you do on a daily basis...

There are 20 more but it will be waaay too much to write about. These 2 are way worse since 9ga doesnt use microphone for anything... And why a driver reads what websites i am going to?

!(!(!(!(!(!(!(!rant)))))))
My new HTC smartphone hates me.
First it started to shut down all of the sudden yesterday night, when I was solving quadratic equations on my laptop.
I thought that it might be due to low battery. So I have restarted it. After putting itself into a bootloop for 4 start sequences, it was able to fully start to the page where it told me to enter the security pin to decrypt my files. I also had 30 attempts left. Like a ransomware.

I was like "tf I didn't set anything up".
So I decided to use my first attempt as I had 30 attempts left.
I entered the pin (I can swear that it's correct) and it told me that it has to wipe the /data partition.

I did that. I pressed that button. After waiting for 30 minutes I gave up and rebooted into the bootloader.
Bootloader -> Download Mode -> wipe /data (stock rom + stock recovery btw.)

Some error with "e: mount /cache failed[...]e: mount /data failed"
So, I tried using the adb sideload - no success.
Fastbooted into RUU Mode - HTC keeps rebooting itself into the RUU Mode - no success

Tried to flash the firmware and twrp recovery from Download mode - no success
Then I tried to flash all these things from the sd card - no success

Searched for revolutionary (I know this from my old HTC sensation device).
It wasn't big of any help.

Then someone on xda recommended htcDev (htc's <b>developer-friendly</b> lol site)
I followed every step. Everything seemed to be okay.
I got to the last step.
I needed to get my encrypted token by entering "fastboot oem get_identifier_token" to be able to submit it to HTC, and after they would send me an e-Mail with an .bin file that would let me unlock the bootloader to be able to flash my way through all this headache giving fucking piece of dog shit!

But since I can't back to the phone settings to select the bootloader activation box that would let me get my token... but nah.

FML

------------
Sent by using the devRant web app (:\)

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

The battery of my good old Huawei Y300 is slowly dying. So I thought it was time to cut the battery consumption a little. What a delusion. A new battery costs < $5 btw, but I'm too lazy to order :)

I've tested 16 highly acclaimed (of about 20,000, didn't count all of them) battery apps - they're all!, and I mean all!, total crap. There is not a single app that does what it promises. And all totally fucked up with advertising - including some of the paid apps. Most apps consume more power than they actually save.

The winner of all this shit was the app "Battery Repair", which supposedly repairs broken cells. Well, well.

All that junk should be thrown out of the store. But, no, these crap apps have ratings of 4.5 - 4.8 with millions of downloads. I don't get it.

The only app that actually works is, hard to believe, Kaspersky Battery Saver.

So if someone else wants to "optimize" their battery - forget it, it's not even worth looking for it.

!dev

What a fucking son of a bitch day...

I’m hungover as fuck so i don’t wanna drive, so I want to pay parking for a few hours.
I didn’t find my fucking key, when I pulled up the couch to look under it, my XPS fell of it and smashes the screen. At that moment my landlord knocks on the door to take a look at the kitchen ceiling and t he kitchen is a fucking MESS! You know when you’re drunk and get a late night cooking attack? Yea, that sort of mess.

Completely fucked in my head I got the reserve key for the car, unlocked it and the bloody alarm went of because the keys battery is empty. So managed to turn it off, went back into my apartment and found the key BEHIND the motherfucking couch.. BEHIND THE COUCH, HOW WOULD IT EVEN GET THERE? Ffs...

I’ll just continue drinking now and hope tomorrow is gonna be a better day.. and order a new screen for my laptop, it’s not at all like I’m short on money this month anyway..

Almost died few minutes ago. My laptop was plugged to power, while I was using it, for last one hour. Then power cut and my laptop went off too. I was really afraid. Just 9 months ago I purchased a new battery for my laptop. When power came back, and I restarted my laptop, to check status, it was saying "Plugged in. Not charging" on windows. Now I was in serious shock. "Fuck battery died again. This time so soon". Also no red light which reflects charging but white, which reflects "laptop running on direct supply". It gave me some indication when it stopped showing red light during charging for last couple of days

I removed the battery and reinserted it. Replugged the charger. Now it's charging. And red light is back

This makes me even more serious. As similar to this, is what happened with me last time battery died.

Now let's see whether my laptop battery is going to see this night or not. Next few hours are crucial

Only company that I really "hate" is Abstergo haha.

All others have their up and downsides I guess....

Microsoft:
+ Xbox One
- Windows

Apple:
+ iPad Mini (don't know any company that produces such high quality but very small tablets... Therefore I still use my ~6 years old iPad Mini 1. (The battery life is insane! After all this time it still lasts about 6-7 hours!)
- The new iPhones. No innovation. Just making money.

Samsung:
+ TVs
- Smartphones (a few crashes here and there, kinda ugly, explosions!)

LG:
+ TVs (webOS is the shit!)
- Heard the Smartphones suck, not sure

And so on....

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

Not my week for tech.

5 year old 21" desktop monitor burns out. 2nd monitor, so at least not completely down.

Then my toddler reached for my root beer and spills it on my 1 month old laptop. I quickly pull the plug and turn upside down, get it wiped off and pray. Next day, arrow and enter keys a little sticky and battery is blown. The 2 exact fucking reasons I bought the new laptop. (keyboard issues and battery)

Keep em coming tech gods.

Really? You want me to install you an old windows release because "you don't understand the new one"?
What don't you understand? Fucking square buttons? Basic color palletes? Big fat icons with a description below?
What do you miss in a ten years old shitty OS? The need of three antiviruses? The satanic settings layout? Lack of any drivers?
You have a family, you're making them too experience all the security breaches, all the compatibility problems with thing are a "must have" today, and all the slow performance.
Fuck you. Please, please, please, go fuck yourself with your trashy laptop's burnt battery. Pretty please. I already hated you, but now it's out of the charts.
PS: Actually, fuck myself with your crappy laptop's batteries, because my girlfriend told me to help you, and I can't say no, so see you in two weeks, when porn ads are invading your desktop and you're ready to blame me.

Oh great, now garbage websites can even break the browser's reload button. Wanna reload the page that never stops loading or crashes its scripts? Click the button and watch the browser do fuck all and a little bit of nothing.

Nah, you see to refresh that polished rotten turd you gotta close the tab and then restore it, and if that doesn't work open a new one and copy-paste the URL because who the fuck doesn't like some invalid state.

Can't wait for the day I have to shutdown and disconnect the battery because some idiot messed up the layout.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

How many of you fellas have thinkpads? Bought this refurbished unit about a month ago and the machine is great, really. Very happy with its performance, sturdiness & reliability.
Only thing I'm not too psyched about is the battery life. Probably need a new one as I'm hitting about 4 hours max on a 6cell.

Running Xubuntu 16.04, might switch distros as quite there are a few bugs in the new release but at the same time I don't wanna downgrade to 14.04.

At this rate, the upcoming iPhones won't have a charging port and you've got to buy a new one once the battery dies.

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.

Finally replaced my laptop battery.... No more desktop feeling😀😀

Fk you Google!

My Samsung note 10 screen went dead near a week ago... it's a secondary line so waiting for parts wasn't the end of the world.

Ofc the screen (curved and incl a fingerprint reader thatd be a major pain to not replace) was integrated to the whole front half... back panel glued, battery, glued immensely and with all other parts out, about 6mm space only at the bottom to get a tool in to pry it out.

New screen (off brand) ~200... all genuine parts amazon refurb ~230... figured id have some extra hardware for idk what... i like hardware and can write drivers so why not.

Figured id save a bit of time and avoid other potentially damaged (water) components to just swap out the mobo unit that had my storage.

Put it back together, first checked that my sim was recognised since this carrier required extraneous info when registering the dev... worked fine... fingerprint worked fine, brave browser too...

Then i open chrome. It tells me im offline... weird cuz i was literally in a discord call. My wifi says connected to the internet (not that i wouldn't have known the second there was a network issue... i have all our servers here and a /28 block... ofc i have everything scripted and connected to alert any dev i have, anywhere i am, the moment something strange happens).

Apparently google doesnt like the new daughter board(i dislike the naming scheme... its weird to me)... so anything that is controlled by google aside from the google account that is linked to non-google reliant apps like this... just hangs as if loading and/or says im offline.

I know... itll only take me about the 5-10m it took to type this rant but ffs google... why dont you even have an error message as to what your issue is... or the simple ability to let me log in and be like 'yup it's me, here's your dumb 2fa and a 3rd via text cuz you're extra paranoid yet dont actually lock the account or dev in any way!'

I think it's a toss up if google actually knows that it's doing this or they just have some giant glitch that showed up a couple times in testing and was resolved via the methods of my great grama- "just smack it or kick it a few times while swearing at it in polish. Like reaaaally yelling. Always worked for me! If not, find a fall guy."

Smart me.. Updated OS X from 10.10 to the ‘new’ 10.12 just before leaving on my vacation. I’m currently at the boarding gate, wanting to develop some bits and pieces.

Apparently, the update fucked me once more.. My XAMPP server, the Git commands, my permissions, .. Nothing works.. Now I have to google all this stuff to get everything working again, but the Wifi is sooo damn sloooow.

Doubted so many times to install ubuntu on my macbook, but I have no idea how Ubuntu handles the battery life, the led keyboard, the function buttons, … The whole OS X works for me, but once in a while, it fuckes me so hard, I would've liked it if it took me out for dinner once in a while.. :D

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

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

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

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

Someone else hates his notebook because of the fucking low battery capacity? From 100% to 7% in about 40 minutes and all I did was editing a Python script and tested it using the bash..

Can't wait until I get my new laptop

cars do feel like downgrades these days. never ever want i to buy som like tesla e only shit. but oh - for the eNvIrOnMeNt i buy a NEW Tesla car because it is cLiMa nEuTrAl when running. mhhhhh. that shitty earth destroying battery wont even last 10 years, the build quality of these cars suck also. and your shitty auto pilot life isnt even worth radar, but cheap cameras. why not buy a used car to save the climate huh? meh - e is suposed to be better right... nahh it uses the energy out of the plug from coal mines instead to a great extend these days - - - or is it cuz ur country funds e cars? - why tf does a country want to support buying NEW cars fOr cLiMaTe right mhm. the car world is on a downhill. what sad age to grow up in. and then theres that ebike shit happening ... - ugh

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

new addition to the most frustrating moments in 21st century along with loading screen and low battery.

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

My 2013 rMBP's battery just died at 56%, even though iStat reports that the health is still at 75%. May have to take it in to the shop for a new battery soon...

So I'm going to wait a bit longer to actually buy the phone since I want to have at least had my S7 for a year before I buy a new one, but for those who saw my other rant about buying a new phone, I've made a decision.

I'll be buying a One Plus 5. It's just... How can you even say there's a better phone out there? So far the only phone faster than it is the Note 8, and eventually iPhone 8. The only difference is that those phones are $1000, and the 1+5 is only just over $500. (Don't believe me? Go watch the phonebuff speed tests with it. It actually beat an iPhone 7+. The first phone to do that in a couple years)

Sure, it doesn't have any of that great screen tech in the S8. But it's still got a great AMOLED screen, and it's battery lasts much longer than most of its competition. And Dash charge is much faster than Samsung's fast charging. Did I mention it's only 500$? Selling my phone would make they $350! How tf is it even that cheap?

Look, I'm not saying other phones out there are bad. Not at all. Hell, I love Samsung's phones. But the 1+5 is just better than the S8 or any other current flagship.

Just found out that android looks for new SSIDs even when wifi is off...
Why does it do that?
Isn't that a waste of battery?
Well since I use the SSIDs of my company to save the time of entry and leaving I don't need to have wifi on now, but still... Why?

Just replaced my dead battery on my Dell XPS 13 2013 with a brand new one. One whole month I was unable to unplug without a shutdown, not to mention that I couldn't boot it easy due to the dead battery... finally... justice.

My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.

Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.

The iPhone is only good for consuming apps, that's it. If you want to use it for anything else, good luck.

Its keyboard is miserable.

Its browser is the new IE.

If you connect to a share folder, at random you lose all networking and you have to restart the phone.

You don't reliably get notifications so good luck explaining to your boss or client or girlfriend why you didn't reply back for hours.

Once the battery permanently dies, you're just expected to spend another $1k for the privilege of this suffering.

It took over 25 edits to get to this point in the message. I had to restart this status symbol 3 times in the last 24 hours in order to restore its ability to communicate. It is agony to use this substandard pile of garbage and it has objectively made my quality of life worse in the 18 months I've had it.

It's an iphone 12. I bought it new from the store. I thought Apple only intentionally made older phones unusable through updates, but this has been unusable since the beginning.

Battery life worth some sloppy seconds is part of all mobile devices nowadays, mainly because it's standard by now to charge all your devices in your dedicated charging room, stacked with millions of chargers, where you connect thousands of devices before you go sleep. (dont forget to put your smart pillow on charge too)

Having a day or two worth of battery life in a laptop with normal use or a phone that can easily power through heavy usage for 3-4 days or more is really just so rare.

I can see how all mobile processors jumped multiple thousands of generations with power consumption, but that doesnt help, if companies just put a thin layer of battery to actually power it.

I am so glad I am finally again able to have both a laptop and a mobile phone that don't force me to charge all the time or carry around my huge battery packs.

A full day of my new phone gets me only down to 75-80% and I really started appreciating again, how just a slightly thicker phone can make such a huge change.

I now have further proof that Android 9's fancy Battery Management is shit:
The compass on my new (flagship) smartphone uses the air pressure sensor and the air pressure at sea level to display your current elevation. The air pressure at sea level is fetched from the weather app. And of course, the weather app has its battery policies set to auto-managed.
Can you guess what happened? "Weather app could not be found" and an elevation of -17m
Because no one thought the battery manager could decide that the weather app should not be launched by other apps. Has no one thought this through? Good thing I figured out what was happening pretty quickly.

Aaarrgghh! Stupidity of some webdevelopers! Ordering new battery on e-shop and got in my mail devilery report from one freemail service. Checking what kind of spam it is and those lazy bastards are taking my full order and sending it with my e-mail addresses in From to their freemail account. Which correctly rejects it based on SPF as the freemail suprisingly does its job well. Who the hell thought this would be a good idea? Grrrr!

Second Rant incoming!

I have a Elephone p9000 (China Smartphone). Great Value for it's price if you don't mind a shit camera.

Also, this is actually my second model! I cracked my screen and tried to replace it. Somehow I managed ti puncture the battery and nearly set my house on fire but that is another story.

This rant is about how the sd/sim-card read is FAILING ME! Everytime I call someone, my sim-card ejects spontaneously, thus ending the call. It's so goddamn annoying having to recall the same person every two minutes...

I tried inserting the sim-card in the other slot because it has dual sim but nothing changed...guess I need a new Phone. FML

I have lost now another device to planned obscolence (how is that still legal), my g3 officially took its last breath two days ago, first it was its battery dying (thousands of devices broke that way [exactly two years after buying it] and at that time there was no batteries to replace it with) - whoever was brave enough to hold onto his device for longer than the battery failure - he then faced the simcard reader breaking and that was my case now too.

I asked many colleagues for help and even found a guy that does repairs for the oldest phones (got too excited), but even he couldnt find the issue, besides a guess that its the main chip that partially died on purpose or it got somewhere desoldered by the always and poorly managed overheating issue, which would cost almost the same to replace as just getting a new phone in the end and even then, theres probably a third switch they planned, to give you the final bullet.

I got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 now and really gotta say they have an amazing near vanilla android experience and their "two phone" isolated spaces are quite handy to seperate work and private notifications, apps and files.

It was even compatible with lineageOS and has a simple website to unlock the bootloader (a first for me, never saw any company making it that easy), but after trying their version of it, I don't even have to switch.

I will still miss the vibration motor of the g3, the feedback of it when typing is still to this day the best one I ever tried.

Acer vs MSI Laptops.

Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...

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.

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

!rant

Ranters, I would like your suggestion:

I have an early 2011 13" macbook pro with 4gb ram, 320gb hdd and <400 battery cicles, which I use mostly for web dev. I started to get some annoying slow downs since last osx update, and now I am trying to figure out what to do.

I could buy an SSD hd and a new set of 16gb ram (8gb x2) and replace the internals. This would increase the performance greatly.

Or I could sell it and buy a new Retina version (with 8gb ram and 128gb ssd), at the expense of not being able to update the ram or the hard drive in the future.

It is a ~$200 option against a $1200 one. What would you do if you were in my situation?

Our keyboards/mouses are getting replaced (it's a matter of years) to Bluetooth ones. No spare batteries are given. From some of the offices the helpdesk where they give you new batteries are a few kilometers away, you have to call a shuttle...

Nobody communicated, but finally turned out that there is a floor responsible who has spare batteries. Of course, they are kept in a locked down cupboard, so each time that poor person has to be interrupted if someone has a drained battery.

Shall we stay with the gold old USB keyboards?

Currently I own a Lenovo Thinkpad which I bought in 2013. As it is aging, I'm thinking about a replacement. Where would you buy a new laptop, constraints:
- Swiss keyboard (or Option to swap it for one)
- compatible with Linux (prefered if there's a option without Windows pre instaled)
- NVMe SSD
- good battery live
- abillity to upgrade the RAM in the future

I've been looking at System76 now for a while, but since I've worked with Swiss keyboards for the last 12 years, I don't want to switch to an en_us layout...

So where do you buy your laptops?

Old mainboards be like "new CMOS battery, who dis?"

My new Mac Mini (which I bought begrudgingly for one project only) comes with a warning about a coin battery and how swallowing it will cause harm. Are we, as a species, getting dumber by the minute, or is it only Mac users?

Fellow iPhone users and broke bitches too cheap to get the battery replaced or buy a new phone, I have noticed that I get a lot smoother performance and a more gradual if steeper battery life with apples bullshit process slowing turned off. Now anything below 20% is a flip of a coin if the phone will turn off, but with it on it chews the top end of the battery much faster and seems to die more when idle.

PS don’t use fast chargers.

Oh shit... My XPS 13 seems to slowly approach it's EOL :(

It has lost power 3 times already since yesterday. The last time it shut down while I was browsing BIOS (UEFI) settings, on a charger...

shit :(

Yes, I am drooling at the new XPS 7390 with advertised battery lifetime of 21 hour. But I'm so used to my lappy.

Shit :(

TL;DR: Phone akku is draining, I steal our schools power. And secret plans to become rich.

My phone accumulator (heh, not a battery) DRAINS these days. It's fucking old and the temperatures are so hot that we actually afternoon classes are cancelled 🔥
So anyways, I'm sitting in the library (15 min break) and secretly charging my phone, devRanting on these wrongly configured, distorted monitors of this one computer that is connected with like 20 work stations xD
I'm stealing the schools power but the school owes me time (+2h of more useless sitting at school with my new timetable) - and time is money. And the schools money buys power. So I don't feel bad about it.
Actually a friend and me wanted to develop and install a plugin - when being able to bypass the reset-application in our school network - that uses the schools computers and their power to do crypto mining.
I wouldn't feel bad about it.

I've always been a strong critic of the mac operating system and apple in general for they're overpriced products. few months back my old laptop kicked the bucket and repairing it was not an option as i was sick of charging the laptop after every 3-4 hours and had to purchase a new laptop immediately. loooking at my options around 50k rs or 700$ all windows laptops available in indian markets sucked (except for lenovo 320s) so i made the shift to macbook air 2017.my daily work involves photoshop illustrator and a dash of premiere pro. I also work on nodeJS and python using the pycharm and atom IDEs. After using it for a month i feel in love with mac platform and macos. Its a wonderful experience. gone are the days of crashes and the windows updates (ugh). the boot of the laptop is like magic and softwares like wmware imovie and notes keynote are f**king awesome. Long hours of work have become fun rather than hell dealing with constant windows gimmicks and bad battery optimisation on linux.

An explanation why all developers (except for the ones who require high powered gpus) graphic designers should shift to macos rn.

Advantages of using mac

No forced updates update whenever now or a f'ing month later no probs.
better battery optimisation than linux
no more installing os again and again (ubuntu)
better vm than virtualbox (vmware)
terminal for running bash commands
no crahes
Xcode platform
trackpad is worlds better than the best windows trackpad

Disadvantages

some softwares not available for macos
storage is generally less on macbooks
UI is simple (less elaborated than windows)

Workarounds

get a vm and install linux(vmware fusion 8)
ps. u may not need it though
wine and wine bottler for using windows apps
get a microsd to sd adapter for macbook and expand storage

I just downloaded battery monitor app to figure out why my new phones battery is draining so quickly...

The app says though it's best to charge only up to 80%.

But logically if this were true, shouldn't the manufacturer adjust for it themselves so that when Android says 100... In reality it's actually 80?

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

RIP Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite.
Battery died only after 1 month.

Motherfucking HPs, new battery died again, which I bought just 9 months ago.

Sometimes I feels there is something wrong with me only. Not with the brand. My SONY Xperia XA dual, after just 3 months of use bent itself, and screen burned while using, though i had handled it very very carefully for the time I used it.

Also last time laptop battery died, I only used the laptop for about a year and frequently only for 9 months. I was using laptop for last 9 months strongly for development work.

I feel I have a way with electronic things. How well I handle things, I somehow get fucked. I am not the one using these stuff. Terrible things somehow always find me.

After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.

I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?

Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...

On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...

Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

Spend half a day trying to make sound work on my antergos install, after multiple image builds, kernel jumping, reinstalling alsa, realized that people working on making cherry trail laptops sound work - stopped working on it since like april 2017 and new kernels have simply no patch to make it work, great.. debian docs mention that you should be able to use an external soundcard atleast, but the whole alsa and pulseaudio shit doesn't make that easy at all.. atleast the battery time with arch+powertop+tlp is almost the same as what I would get with windows out of it

So my phone updated to Android 5.1.1 (can't remember the actual number of the update) against my will. I chose no a couple of times. One day I woke up and pop! New version for you! Yay!!!
Now my battery is draining faster then ever before. Camera is freezing sometimes. I hate you Lenovo. My Vibe K5 was such a glorious phone, for my use of course, but now it's just a desk phone since it's always plugged in a power outlet 😒

my phone is dying. Very slowly, i see the first signs of decay, i probably have months or even more than a year, but it will die on me. I knew it will happen.

I currently have an asus phone (ZE552KL), it is technically DualSim or SD-Card, has a camera that is..badish and sometimes the bluetooth wont start and then it reboots. Also the camera has a pure software bug where it isnt able to ever focus properly, but with tricks you can get it to work again. The asus forums constantly refer to sending it to a repair station (wherever one is in germoney). That annoys me.

Back to dying. For now its definetly the battery.
I remember when you could change the battery on a whim. Great times. My last phone died duo battery aswell (well, the gps module broke aswell so it wasnt all flowers besides the battery).

My current asus phone was something around 300 € and according to reviews 2 years ago it has a good bang for the buck ratio.

I havent looked into the market, just a cursory glance. But apparently if you want a phone that has a decent battery life, is not basically a tablet, has an sd card slot and a camera that is not total rubbish it gets hard. Its hard to balance those things, and if you want a swappeable battery all hope is lost.
Further i have started to misstrust chinese phones, the asus software support is wacky and some stuff is weird. I suspect its as bad with huwai and all the others. Also its apparently kinda hard to get any resemblance of quality in accessoires for non-mainstream brands (i mean cases and display protection)

So i dread the future, the future in which i need a new phone that is somewhere in the mid price segments and fits my needs. In the end i will take something suboptimal and be unhappy with it till it dies.

I despise the phone market.

I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.

I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!

The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.

Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.

Conclusion:

- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.

- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all

- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use

So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils

Fuck... Am getting my laptop's battery changed and this feels like someone's doing a heart transplant of my precious.
What if the new battery isn't compatible, what if the guy turns out to be a thug and takes away my laptop parts ,what if what if what if.... Damn kill me now

Bought a laptop off my friend for $100 so he can get rid of it since he no longer uses it, and he can use the money to get more fans for his desktop to help that with it's overheating issue.

I took it home and for some reason didn't want to turn it on immediately. i decided to first take it apart and see if there's any internal issues just in case. As soon as the back cover is off I see that 1 out of the three segments on the lithium ion battery expanded. yep gonna order a new one of that tomorrow. I'm not the most hardware savvy but I'm pretty sure an expanded battery can cause an explosion

What positive support stories do you guys have?

I have two:

One, is from myself. I lost the power cable to my XPS 15 (the fancy one, 4k touch) and had a knock off replacement battery that got in flames. I called support that I can't find original adapter anywhere for my XPS and told also that I lost the original one. They just sent me a new one for free! Would it have to do since it was such fancy laptop?

Other one was from a friend, together we tried to install Linux on an iPod (such classing one with 80gb I guess) and that thing did nothing anymore in exception of showing a penguin and turn off again. Anyway, he went to the store and got it replaced for free!

Worst support: OpenAI. It has automated service pretending to be human that emphatizes with you. It defines your problem in it's own words (pretending to have listened) and says things like "Oh, that sounds bad if x y z", And that's all. I wrote several emails so I know they're fake as f. Always that empathy email. They're evil. The amount of things that don't work at OpenAI is too damn high!

Pine cone: I told them about their weird billing practices, got nothing back. I still often e-mail them. But I do not think they spend time on a lost customer.

Well fuck...

Korora 26 finally came out and I wanted to install it on my new laptop. I'd previously put Ubuntu MATE on there, with Cinnamon kind of tacked on, but it wasn't great, mostly because it wasn't Korora.

Unfortunately, Korora (and Fedora) still have a bug in the installer where it will complain if your /boot/efi partition is not on /dev/sda, which in my case it was on my M.2 drive. However, I was able to eventually get it working.

But when I booted it up and tried to log in, it would take me back to the log in screen. I logged into a TTY, where I was reminded that when I had set up my Ubuntu install, I had chosen to encrypt the home folder.

Not knowing how to set up the eCryptFS with an existing encrypted home folder setup, I opted to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch--I had a backup of most of my files from the Ubuntu installation. However, I lost some very important documents that I'd set up since then.

Fast forward to today where my laptop won't boot unless it is either a.) unplugged with just the battery or b.) plugged in without the battery, with a different power cable from the one I got with the computer.

Thankfully the people responded quickly after I mentioned I was having issues. Hopefully it doesn't get worse...

!rant

I'm in the lookout for a new laptop for my dev work and occasional gaming (Dota 2 only), needs to have at least 16GB, 256 SSD, decent battery life and portable.

Which laptop do own?
Which do you recommend?

I'm looking into buying a new laptop. I want something speak and ultrabookish, but dedicated graphics are a must.

Will be mostly for work, so a good CPU and RAM are important, but probably will do some gaming. Battery life and cooling are pretty big too. I've looked at the Aero 15X, the XPS 15, Razer Blade, etc. I just can't decide. Need to get it this year for the the tax deductions for my contracting income. Any thoughts? What's the best one out there?

First laptop I ever owned (around a decade old) continues to live, just in another form. After the first 6 years, the battery died, half the keyboard doesn't work, and the monitor began to fail.

But it still works, so I have decided to give it new life. Gonna make it a new body, add an SSD, new battery, substitute screen, replace keyboard... Maybe this is too costly. No, it must be done.

Finally install a lightweight Linux distro. It shall be glorious!

Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.

Damn you software and hardware corporations.

You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.

Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.

If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.

Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.

If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.

Get me out of here you asshole.

iOS 14, two thoughts.

1. It manipulates people. They added app gallery and now when you try to delete app it asks you if it should rather hide it into the app gallery, exploiting your hoarder bias so you have more apps and thus more notifications if you haven't disabled them. That's a no from me.

2. It fixed a LOT of bugs and annoyances. I quit next js because of the exact same thing being important to me — they were busy doing only the new features to constantly pitch and lure investors, they never responded to issues and never fixed anything. I'm happy that Apple realizes that it's important to fix bugs.

Overall I'm happy. My iPhone X is pretty old already (87% battery capacity remaining) but it's much faster with iOS 14 than with iOS 13. The main thing is reduced latency pretty much everywhere. Especially the screenshots, I'm barely detecting the click and the screenshot is already done. No perceivable latency if you ask me. New refreshed look is amazing, backside tap actions are cool, new music app is amazing.

People tell me that apple is forcing you to buy new gadgets with updates but explain to me then WHY my old iphone X got much faster with new iOS? That's a contradiction. If I buy a new iPhone it'll be because of dead battery (that's physics and not exclusively Apple issue) or just because I want 120hz and lidar bokeh.

Looking for a new laptop where I can boot Linux. Any recommendations? Has to be light, a good battery and be my primary.

Has anyone had experience with taking a 2009 MacBook Pro apart?

About to give mine a new lease on life by replacing thermal paste and battery but probably going to replace the wireless and Bluetooth card (with a working one) but noticed it is installed on the underside of the screen hinge (because that's a logical place other than connected to the main motherboard), just wanting to know if anyone can give recommendations to avoid fucking it irreversibly...

Ok so i have two laptops, one has One slot with ddr3 4gb ram and is way too slow for school, the other one is 5years old but fast as hell but has a dead battery. Should i buy a 8gb bank or a new battery. Providing the price is roughly the same.. ??

Boo boo, Apple is artificially slowing down old devices so people buy new ones 🤡

EVERY phone becomes slower over time because of battery degradation. I’ve changed my iPhone’s battery yesterday, and it’s as fast as new now.

Morons.

Question about conditioning my new android lithium battery.

I dont understand what's happening with my phone. Have old Xperia Z3 D6603 (running android 6.0 marshmallow).

Had problems with battery since it was not lasting even 5 minutes so bought a new battery from ebay and installed it yesterday.

So first time I put it to my phone it showed that it had 70% of charge. I've read in battery description that I have to discharge the battery and recharge 3 times.

First time I wanted to discharge from 70% to 1% and with a battery discharge app + youtube 1080p videos + wifi signal it took only around 1 hour and phone was at 1%. From 1% till complete discharge it took me extra hour and then phone died.

I plugged it to charge and after 15 minutes it showed that battery now is at 100% (which is insane, it should take 2-3hrs to charge it up to 100%). So I charget it for 2-3 hrs ignoring that it said 100% already.

I discharget it from 100% to 1% in 1 hour and now again phone is stuck at 1% and it took me 2 more hours to discharge phone until battery died completely.

I don't believe that this behaviour will fix itself. How can I fix this problem so that battery percentage would be distributed evenly? Now it drops from 100% to 1% in 1hr and then from 1% to 0% in 2 hrs.

Hi guys, I need your help. Mostly those who use MacBook for development. I'm looking to buy a new laptop and was thinking of getting a MacBook. This will be my first time owning one. I always used Windows but for almost over a year now, I've been on Elementary OS. I do programming on my current laptop in Eclipse, IntelliJ and mostly, Android development in Android Studio. Also, I'm learning HTML and CSS. The battery of my current HP laptop has degraded to the point this thing only last 30 - 40mins when unplugged. Because of this, I can't do much on-the-go. Buying a new windows laptop, I know I will definitely dual boot with another Linux distro or better full boot Linux and get rid of Windows. My question is, how is programming or development on a MacBook. How's does Android studio perform? Are there anything that MacBook users wished worked better on Macs which involves Development? Please help because I can't decide and since I haven't used a MacBook as my daily driver, I'm not sure how it will affect my work writing code in there.

Thanks I'm advance for your answers. 😁

Not only does every app need to have an export option, but new exports must create new, time-stamped files rather than overwriting an existing export!

A counter-example is "Battery Monitor Widget" by CCC71 or 3C71. That app creates a file in the main user directory, named "bmw_history.txt" (no relation to the car manufacturer).

When a new export is created, the existing bmw_history.txt is overwritten. This could lead to data loss if the user is unaware of this behaviour.

The developer thought of creating an export ability, but messed up at the file naming process.

Mandatory time-stamped user data exports for every app would not be so bad. This makes sure no developer would forget about it. GDPR gave us data portability for social media platforms. Let's do it for apps too. (Sorry, Samsung Internet, you can no longer lock in saved pages. Your users are sick of it.)

Looking for a new phone with good battery life, 6"+ screen, medium end...

What do you think about xiaomi?
Any other recomendation?

Thank you.

Had cleared up my deadlines today and wanted to try the new Google AR stickers on my one plus. Accidently deleted build.prop then unfortunately battery died and phone didn't not. Been installing and setting up the mobile since hours. AR stickers works now not a frustrating day.

I like the new WhatsApp!!

There I said it.

Why?

- Snapchat was practically useless piece of crap for me. No one that matters to me used it. That app is a data hog and battery killer.

- Meanwhile, What'sapp cared enough to be datafriendly to those in developing world. Like, enabling video playing while it's downloading.

- Whatsapp is not a data hog or battery killer.

- Snapchat sucks shit unlessn on ios.

- I hate Facebook because if it's spam and i stopped using it. With new WhatsApp update, I'm less likely to miss out on what is happening with people i actually know. I know facebook owns WhatsApp, but it doesn't really matter.

- No stupid discover ads or promos like in snapchat

With all the CES nonsense, wouldn't you love it if they didn't make shit smaller and thinner and actually made it the same size as 5 yrs ago. While upgrading battery life and cooling... I see all these new laptops and small form factor pc's and I just think "well there is something to keep me warm in the winter". Priorities people

I kind of need to replace my ThinkPad T430 soon. I bought it for about $200 3 years ago, and I love it and it just works and does it's job. But the fan noise is getting annoying, the battery is pretty much dead and yeah well, the screen does suck.

I've been thinking about replacing said parts, which would cost me about $150. Which is almost what I paid for the device back then, but I don't know I don't really want a new one. The T430 is a sexy old lady, just needs some polishing.

Now to my questions..

Would you say it's worth it?

Is there a big noticeable difference from a glossy 1366x768 LCD screen to a matte 1600x900 LCD screen?

Would you pick matte over glossy?

Do LCD screens always suck?

In case you would just buy a new notebook, can you give me any recommendations? The notebook market is huge and I have no idea what to look for.

I'm not a big Hardware guy as you can see, I have honestly no idea about screens and panels and such.

A single update broke my Asus RoG phone 5S.

WhatsApp has started to silently get voice calls out of nowhere.

New messages don't ring a notification sound anymore. Nor any updates on the lock screen/notification drawer.

WiFi doesn't connect automatically after turning it on. The list doesn't even show up. I have to turn my phone off and turn it back on after 5 mins to restore that functionality.

My phone automatically switches off at 18% battery. I've seen it happen 3 times by now.

Fuck modern software.

Since my XPS battery is dying I'm flirting with an idea of a new laptop. Requirements:
- 13" display
- 4k display (I'm so used to high-res that x1080 looks like accessibility mode)
- 16 (worst case), 32 (OK), 64 (possible?) GB RAM
- long battery life
- i7 or Ryzen equivalent (I need lots of ram, lots of computing power)
- plays nice with Linux
- GPU preferably integrated (don't need a separate GPU)
- ultrabook (small, compact, light) (I don't like to exercise while carrying it. God forbid I'd grow a muscle... )
- purrrrtty :)

So far the best candidate I've found is... XPS13 again :D The setup I'm after costs ~1.6k€ which is not that bad, really.

Is there anything else in the market that'd meet the criteria? Anything worth looking into? Better deals?

Had to send my new, shit Nokia phone in for repair as the forced update fucked half the built-in apps. My dad tells me "use my old phone for now, it's terrible." He hands me an LG V20.

Spec relations:
Nokia 3.1 A vs LG V20
RAM: 264MB free w/ nothing running vs 1342MB free w/ nothing running
CPU: 4-core 1.7GHz vs 4-core 2.1GHz
Onboard storage: 16GB/5GB user-accessible vs 64GB/51.5GB user-accessible
Battery life: 7 hours under load to 4 hours under load

I don't think he's getting this back.

(He doesn't use it as "it's so slow" but like... with proper care, the only issue is that switching apps sometimes doesn't fully clean the LCD of the old app and it burns in really fast, but minor annoyances for a WAY better device?)

so my poor old hp bro is starting to give up on me after 3 years . there are both battery and performance issues. I knew its death was near when i got its keyboard replaced i saw its battery's state 6 months ago. it was fat as me . Now it can't live without the wire for more than 30 mins.

apart from that am getting frustrated with everyday performance of my system. all i open is 50 tabs of chrome and android studio where bitch gradle generates a billion byte sized files at million places and cache folders . (and sometimes a terminal and/or files and/or vscode).

I have decent specs tho i5 7th generation/8gb ddr4 ram/ 2gb nvidea graphics/ 1tb hdd. but still my ubuntu gets stuck everytime i switch between chrome and AS . (maybe i have not made correct swap partitions or maybe there is an issue due to ubuntu/windows dualboot)

what should i do ? I guess i have to spend some shit on a new battery. But apart from that, iwanted to know about performance. how to get a beter performance?

I have heard of solutions like getting an sdd or increasing ram, but am broke af and might not afford a 1tb ssd (yes i do need that much amount of memory, my system is currently at 650 something gb) and about ram i have heard it doesn't offer much improvements. is that true?What should i do?

7 monthos ago, i invested a ridiculus amount of money on crypto. The day this month i decided to buy a battery for my loved laptop, i was notified that this crypto had doubled its price. Thanks Lord My God, i said, without any work and stress, i had 100% profit, i would totally buy the battery from the new money, i converted them all in euros, and started my odyssey.

Well, the platform, need 2fa to withdraw your money. But it did not inform you, it only had a popup saying "Reming me later".

WTF means "remind me later", for me it is something optional!!!! No red colours, no messages like (try again, your transactionr requires this ) etc.

Time is the only resource that do not come back, and i feel that my profit is already less, since the hour i spent searching, and searching, and then searching the chat (which is very well hidden...) and then chatting, and then writting this rant, i could have worked for the same amount of money.....

Holy crap, Meta Developer Connect keynote. Amazing innovation. This is what Apple **used to be**

Granted, the hardware is not as elegant as Apple but the cost is 1/10 and the capabilities are close, same, or exceed (Llama) what Apple is offering.

Now here is the gut punch, they figured out that the mobile app build system needs to build AR/VR/MR apps. That was Apple's edge.

As a developer, I am not enamored with Swift and it is pretty clear that if I have to change and use a niche language like Swift or change and do dev on Android, to target new Meta hardware and AI... well... lets just say I think Swift is crap from a language standpoint and I suspect it is the reason Apple's hardware uses so much more memory, battery and storage than it should. At the same time Meta's Orion runs on a god damn battery in the early piece of glasses. My AVP's have a huge brick.

#define kApple kGigaBloat

If I were Apple I would be shitting my pants watching this Meta presentation.

I love sudden battery deaths. Few hours before it worked like a charm, 7 hours on a battery, then finally plugged it in AC and what I see - "not charging".

In december...

WTF! WHERE I'll get a new one in DECEMBER?!?!

Tip of the year? I bought an iPhone 7 because the battery in my 3 year old iPhone 5s was very bad. It had less than 25% of its original capacity.

I gave the 5s to my son but quickly realized that he could not use a phone with such a bad battery. We therefore considered buying him a brand new 5s.

Luckily I found out that repair shops can actually replace the battery! I thought that this was not possible. So now my son has a 'new' iPhone 5s for 1/10 of the price of a new 😄

OK Guys I need your advice. I got an (I think it's about 8 years old) Aspire from Acer. Windows 10 is installed after upgrading from Windows 7, which was the worst decision because now it runs at speeds below good. I want to clean install a new OS. But which route to take?

Windows or Linux?

What distribution? I have my knowledge in Debian. Or could I go with RemixOS because it's most user-friendly and best for work abroad? But is there an IDE for Android based distributions?

You see what my dilemma is don't you? ^^

May some of you could help me

Specs: 4GB of DDR3, 500GB HDD, a shitty battery and an AMD Dual core with something about 2.5GHz

Am I only one with this? : Got new macbook, and every time it gets 100% charge immediately after unplugging it, I am checking a lot when it's coming to 99% and trying to make the battery consumption low. When it hits 99% , I tell to myself it's lost, ideal dream is over, let's use it into its full power. And typically adjust brightness, turn on things I was holding on. But it's changing with time :D Sometimes I feel like it's overheating, or too quickly discharging.

I want to buy a new phone.
I value long battery-runtime and easily flashing of custom ROMs most.
ATM I'm thinking about OnePlus 7T, Pixel 3a or Fairphone 3.
Can anyone of you provide some opinions on those, or another alternative?
Note that IPhone is out of question, not only but foremost, because of money.

I've been an android/anti-ios person for around a decade and im now seriously considering switching to ios when the new iphones land. My mother is an apple nut and my brother is on android and everytime i bring up even the slightest nitpick about ios or macos (such as the fact that the "always use this application" checkbox on macos does not work or that you have to upload music through itunes) they jump on the "wtf then why would even consider it??????" train. In short its because ios seems at least a little bit more stable overall (havent had much experience with ios in general this is really more of a first impression). Well I got a replacement LG V20 just over a year ago and it has not aged well, had to replace the battery because i barely got 4 hours with minimal usage, even when i got the thing it was rather jittery, and its just now getting oreo (and surely wont be getting pie). Hell i was removing several apps earlier and it took a solid 4 MINUTES to uninstall an icon pack. After some investigation into the ios ecosystem i found that all the apps that i would need are on there so that was great. What im really hoping for though is some stability/longevity, im ok with paying around 1000 for a phone if it lasts a while and stays in decent shape. Finally the fact that the updates are sparing at best (with the exception of pixel phones) is a great annoyance whereas my mothers (around 4 years old) ipad is rocking ios 11. Could someone who has made the leap make a recommendation? I love android but i feel like all i would accomplish is buying another phone that craps out after less than a year.

I'm kinda looking for a new phone, should be super cheap (so a used one would do), I wanna modify it to be secure (proper encryption, VPN, etc.), very good battery time and not very big (more like 4"). I have been looking at the Lenovo P2 a lot, but I'm afraid my current phone will die before I have enough money for that one (I'm a broke trainee yay).

So what do y'all have or can recommend?

Is a used ThinkPad T440/440s (or T430) worth it right now? Assume that it's powerful enough to run whatever I need, and weight isn't really a concern because it's going to spend most of the time sitting on a desk or in the library where the extended battery will come in handy.

I'm eyeing it because build quality and keyboard, and because I can get one for a pretty good price (if I buy a new laptop at the same price I'll get a shitty celeron or low end i3 based thing)

Want to change distro and wanted your advice. I'm moving away from Kubuntu mostly due to tons of issues on power management (hibernation either not actually hibernating and depletes battery or not waking up afterwards)

I'm thinking of Pop OS or MXLinux, mostly for checking out something new. Do you have any experience of these?

Finally back using my pc after a long time trying to buy a new battery for my UPS (I don't want to risk my computer during a power outage in this fucking country)

Low on money? Need a new phone?

Then install Facebook messenger, use the maps for sat-nav whilst charging it, and blow your battery to make your insurance claim now....