Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
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!10 -
Typical interaction in any XDA development thread:
User: How do I put these ROMs on my phone? Plz halp!
Me: ROOT -> flash RECOVERY -> enter recovery -> flash ROM -> flash Gapps -> profit.
User: How to get the roots? Can halp me?
Me: You're in a Nexus forum. There are directions on how to root everywhere.
User: I can't find. Plz halp.
Me: Fastboot oem unlock, fastboot flash recovery.img, flash SuperSU, flash ROM...
User: Where I can get fastboot?
Me: *link to Google developer's page*
User: Can you just tell me?
Me: No, you need to figure it out, so you know what you're doing.
*2 hours later*
User: HALP! I use toolkit for to get roots, and now phone won't come on! How to fix?! Halp, halp, halp!
*5 minutes later*
User: bump
Me: Looooooool11 -
Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:
Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)
Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.
Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)
Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.
Issues?
Would I mention this one if there weren't?
Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.
Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.
Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.
Welp.
well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)4 -
May 2020, for me, was still a massively shit month. All of my tech has eaten some amount of shit:
- Spare PC: Board and last spare PSU up in literal smoke all at once.
- PS3: Suddenly rejects *just* the OEM HDD. Also refuses all CFW for seemingly no reason despite being hacked.
- Xbox One: External HDD is having more and more corrupt reads and is taking longer and longer to serve data.
- Wii: Nearly ate shit as the OS disappeared mid-game for fucking no reason but thanks to my 5-year-ago forethought, saved. (God bless pre-boot homebrew menus)
- Phone: grabbed it to read an overheat warning with cold-ass hands, screen exploded.
- Desktop: Literally just now, PSU and possibly GPU fucking died mid-game.
Anything else? You still got like 4 days, you still got time to fucking kill me, May, you fucking bitch10 -
I was depressed doing a course I hated.
3 years in and I switched to Computer Science.
Best decision ever!3 -
So I literally made a Gentoo ebuild just to install a OEM wallpaper..
I really need to do something with my life4 -
> phone has OEM unlock disabled
> phone is vulnerable to like 300 race conditions
> reboot phone, get to menu as fast as possible
> sure enough, what do you fucking know, option is unblocked for a split second if I get to and open the dev settings perfectly
> manage to pull it off again
> SETTING STAYS ON AFTER REBOOTING we have ourselves a winner
it's never this easy, i have yet to check if it has a key or not, will keep you posted, but if this all works this will have been the most retardedly-simple unauthorized bootloader unlock ever5 -
Wow, I didn't expect this! My phone brand (Huawei) actually updated my phone from Marshmallow to Nougat! I was so used to OEMs letting their customers die with old versions :)2
-
!(!(!(!(!(!(!(!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 (:\)8 -
I was just removing empty folders from my MOTO X (Devs sometimes get time to kill).
Saw an empty folder "/storage/emulated/0/"
...DELETED...
~Everything has gone from my gallery, music and I felt like sinking~
Sometimes I think, it is good not being an Android Developer...(Unfortunately I'am)
The positive part of the story:
>>fastboot OEM unlock
I rooted my phone and did too many crazy things I could do with a rooted phone.2 -
Xiaomi's bootloader unlock procedure is So. Fucking. Tedious. I have no words... oh wait, I do. HIDING THE PERMISSION BEHIND A HUNDRED DEVICE-SIDE SWITCHES WON'T MAKE IT ANY SAFER, IT WILL ONLY MAKE MODDERS ANGRY. Why do you need a third switch besides OEM unlock and USB debugging anyway? If I toggled OEM unlock it's obvious what I'm trying to do and every other option should change to comply with that intent. Don't roll your own Android if you know fuckall about UX.9
-
So I was looking for a way to easily take android screenshots in a lossless image format, since my OEM only does jpeg.
Didn't want to install another adware and wound up with the adb shell screencap command since I need the pictures on my PC anyways.
But instead of a nice one-liner like
adb shell screencap -p > screenshot.png
I need 3 lines in a bash script.
Can we please just end the line ending wars?
5 -
Why does Google FRP even exist?!
For everyone who doesn't know what FRP is: FRP (Factory Reset Protection) is a partition on an Android device that stores data about the last used Google account on the device. It "protects" the device to be used by a second person (or a thief) even AFTER a factory reset when executed via bootloader.
Last week I bought a HTC One A9 second-hand w/o any documents. I ensured it has been reset, so I took it home... I then wanted to set it up, as following message appeared on the screen: "This device has been reset. Please login using a Google account that has been synced with this device before."
I checked the IMEI for being blacklisted, but it wasn't. Unlocking the bootloader and erasing the frp partition is not an option, because on HTC devices you have to enable OEM unlocking in the settings first. Someone stated on a forum, that you can bypass the bootloader lock with a "RUU Image" (I'm not familiar with this so pls don't blame me for that statement). But since the phone has a branding from Vodafone Germany, I can't find a RUU Image that would flash the device without a CID mismatch...
Why the f*** does Google have to implement a feature that prevents to use the phone when bought from another person that you don't know?12 -
Somebody, anybody, tell me what I'm missing here that makes this get mass-produced.
I've always been a bit if a pyro, and ive certainly made random, pointless texh for no valid reason beyond "why not?'. I also have dealt in international OEM sourcing and manufacturing. I even missed the selfie stick boom back before anyone knew they existed... muktille faxriries I've done signing business with were selling them(dead stock) below cost due to lack... silly me thought they were too ridiculous; one of my hudiness cards literally says ".Really cool stuff you almost alwats want... but never need". Most nonsense novelty is the majority of one if my businesses
...but seriously... who thinks a rechargeable battery, compact soeakers, and lit gas canister is a good idea??
I think I may need to re-rank my mental list of most asinine things I've encountered this week... wsl GUI capability built-in with default images and the reminder of pointoess features like passwords for groups, seem less worthy now.
27 -
My dad, the man who taught me cutting corners is less possible in the IT field than any other field and that you have to do it CORRECTLY unless you're deliberately asking for problems, is using the OEM recovery utility to reinstall the OEM copy of Win7 Starter onto a shitbook destined to be a diagnostics machine for smart cars *because he doesn't wanna go driver hunting.*
They're all literally right fucking here. On this one page.
My mentor has become the bad example he once steered me away from becoming.
1 -
I only just started learning Js. And it's going smoothly. In two weeks, I should have gone past the Beginner's level. Then what next?7
-
I build my friend's pc
He didn't had windows
The site where we bought the oem license was messed up
and yes... I had to use teamviewer to disable his adblocker...
Oh, and 12 hours later to activate windows...
And yes, it was me spending 10 minutes on the phone to acivate his windows key since we got a already used license...
Adding it up, including the whatsapp remote support, If I would st art charing I would get rich...1 -
Just feel like going to a raised platform over my town and scream, "AHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....!!!"
-
I just got my third 128GB MicroSD card off Amazon, this time SanDisk. Yet again, trying to do anything not involving the OEM full-disk exFAT partition staying intact (which, fuck that, all that uses that is Windows and Linux, i'm looking for splitting this thicc bih up) shifts EVERYTHING, including MBR+PT/GPT down the disk by 16MB exactly inserting data from... the atmosphere? whatever's using it? ...do SD cards have that secure key/DRM store space thing still?
(EDIT: I do verify that they ARE genuinely the right size after purchasing before reformatting or repartitioning, by the way.)
First it was a Silicon Power card, then a Samsung card, now a SanDisk.
(Also, why all S?)
Luckily, this time it wasn't a pain in the ass to get it to read as anything but "Bad Card" or a 0-byte/empty/non-existent device in Windows/Linux (respectively) so I was able to see that it was indeed the same issue without taking 3 days to jump through device hoops to finally get it to do it again but in such a way that it shifts out and back in all zeroes.2 -
Who, more than I, totally HATE emoji?
lol I hate emoji after it caused so much problems with Microsoft Outlook and email backups from said program combined with emoji in subjects.
Wrote an subject filter in exim4 (took 3 days to debug and get working propely) that totally eradicate anything that isnt ISO-8859-1 from the subject line, then converts the rest to UTF-8 (because said IMAP client isnt following standards).
it also converts ISO-8859-1 characters in subjects to UTF-8 even if the original subject is declared to be UTF-8, because obviously some software (especially newsletter software) are transmitting ISO-8859-1 subjects that are declared to be in UTF-8 (but the opposite isn't true).
And also cuts subject to 100 chars, because too long subjects are a problem too. Same with date headers, I replace them with the server date/time because some software are sending Date: 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00, because some of these erronous headers are put by some mailing list software, aswell as causing problem in OEM clients like Samsung Mail.
Problem solved, all IMAP clients happy on internal network.7 -
I just fucked up real bad:
My phone was giving some error about not being able to install an update. Fair enough, i think to myself, so i try rebooting. Still nothing...
I then remember that i at some point OEM unlocked it for some testing, so i start up adb and see if i can connect during the update process. I can't. This is bad: I can't get into my home environment, nor can i connect with adb
Then i try booting into recovery, but instead of booting to ACTUAL recovery, it boots to some custom made "E-Recovery" made by huawei (my phone is a huawei p9 lite), which only gives me the option to download the update, which crashes, and no way of resetting. However, from here, i am finally able to connect to my internal storage via hisuite to make a backup
Next up: Bootloader
So i next load up the unlocked bootloader to try and manually flash the update. That works great, but it still wont boot normally. So i figure: it must think my device is in fact a different device. At this point i'm pretty fucked: Even though i have my data backed up, i can't manually download the update from huawei's site because i don't have the right keys, and i can't download an OTA because their site sucks and half of the downloads don't work, including the one i need. So now i'm stuck here with a bricked phone because EMUI doesn't know how to install an update.
I then did the stupidest thing i have done to date: i wanted to flash a custom recovery image over the "E-Recovery" in order to do some troubleshooting, but instead of writing
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash recovery recovery.img"
I wrote
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash boot recovery.img"
Meaning i flashed my BOOT partition with a custom recovery image that turned out to not be able to run. Great! Now i've totally fucked my boot sequence
I can't call their support line either, because as soon as they realize i've tried to restore it myself, and therefor had my OEM unlocked, they basically just hang up.7 -
I keep phones for two years, or try to anyway. Later this year I will hit that two year mark, and rather than excitement at the idea of getting a new phone, I find myself thinking that there's nothing out there that excites me at all. And also, my current phone is in no way deficient. It doesn't hold a charge like when it was new, but that's totally normal, and as degraded as it may be, it's still not a problem at all.
A powerful phone with a snapdragon and 6 or more GB of memory, that measures under 5" and doesn't have some bullshit OEM skin on it. To my knowledge, it doesn't exist.6 -
Was digging through an old HDD's OEM Windows recovery partitions and found FON-format fonts that are accurate to several old systems. Several Commodore and Amiga ones (some for 80-char mode too!) and lots of DOS ones. They have names and everything, but I can't use them after installing them... (there were a few blank ones in there too, which is odd...)
-
How much does it cost to order a small batch of oem smartphones, port a decent os like Minix to them and develop some stuff like gui and necessary apps. I just need a device whose ui DOESN'T FUCKING LAG on quad-core cpu and IT DOESN'T FUCKING TRACK EVERY MOVE I MAKE7
-
I MISS TIGERDIRECT! a haiku&rant
Tiger, so direct
Hardware haven, my tech friend
Killed, by poor Insight
I thought I had found ways to cope with it all... became a cert'd refurbisher at enough lesser operations to rebuild some semblance of my hardware connects. I even resorted to newegg to fill small voids... why is it so hard to find a quickly shipping, scriptable, 2 WAN in 6+ channels out, non WiFi noob crap, router... or even an L3 managed switch for <250$ not tied to some bullshit excuse for network management like a "cloud management platform" with some rando 'security' bloat?!?! Not even trying to force the PoE functionality (realistically i know I'll just wire that up myself after procrastinating too long)... i even tried newegg and damn amazon, neither seem to realise that real routers and switches arent interchangeable terms.
I even tried tolerating supporting the murderous, treasonous, obfuscating high prices and insisting you register as your business and let them trap you in the equivalent of a 'free' ski trip, with "short" timeshare presentation.
All bullshit and overpriced af trying to force some bloat down your throat so you "feel" like you're properly managing a network.
Anyone have an ace up their sleeve? For quick delivery (USA) minus bloat, pandering and ass-to-mouth rape???
I even tried stooping to a current Cisco OEM!
I mean, if it was *only* a bit of ass rape, I'm fine with that... but the bloat, pandering and shit-stained lollipop...
I'd rather just disappear from valid business obligations, get somewhat intoxicated, and hyperfocus tear apart my tech graveyards, go ghetto apocalyptic tech macgyver on that shit and emerge days later low on solder, in dire need of a flintstones size whetstone, more arduinos, a tetanus shot and a shower.1 -
God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.
Examples and predicted responses:
-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.
-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.
-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...
-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...
-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)
-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.
-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.
-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.
-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...
-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.
Now, a harder one:
-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.
-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.
-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.
Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.
If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.14 -
Seems like the #1 rule of thumb in hacking is
"if you can't break it, make it irrelevant".
Seems to be true because god some of these OEM recovery discs are just... awful at securing themselves. -
What are you currently working on? You can be as vague as possible and let others try to figure it out.
I’m currently working on something to make pelican based blogs look a bit decent.7 -
How long does it take to start writing codes without having to do “too much” looking up of some context?
I’m quite at the intermediate level and I fear I do a lot of cramming(and pouring) than actual coding.
I want to code all on my own, or at least tons of lines before having to check something up.
How do you guys do it? How do I become ‘pro’?6 -
some recent discoveries of mine:
- DOS FDISK has totally-undocumented CLI (partitioning with auto-format and OTF drive mapping... like one OEM used it for their machine recovery discs and no one else even knows it exists) docs coming soon (this is a lie i found this a year or two ago but forgot till yesterday)
- nuitka is a fucking blessing and the man who made it deserves so much love for it
- my existence is one massive waste of time
- apparently some B450 boards require you to hit a button and test your fans' min/max values and it takes like an hour and IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM VISIBLE FROM THE OS ASROCK YOU FUCKS
- the new Ryzen took my latest project's compile time from 30 hrs to like 6 because I can compile 12 things at once instead of just 4
- installing debian sucks ass now, they forgot to push part of apt to the 10.3 stable installer so you just can't install shit through apt until you fix that, though dpkg works
- apparently they pushed a grub-efi-amd64 version that breaks all efivars??? i know debian sid is like meant to be unstable but a bug like that should never have even been rolled into a package till it was fixed like ???????????
- depression sucks ass11 -
Of all the custom ROMs out there either by community or OEM, MIUI seems to have the least contribution to android.
-
Is it just me or has a company run out of ideas when their keynote is more about their partners and vendors than them self? ** Caugh Apple **
(I'm an Apple user myself) -
Does anyone how to configure a mouse in Manjaro Linux?
Damn thing has a tendency to copy and paste, with a single click of the scroll wheel.
If would be awesome if I automate that.3 -
I got an weird situation at Windows 10 which is annoying. Security updates always destroying PCs with OEM licenses.2
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View