It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

Boss: I can't open the website.

Me: What connection you using boss? Try to switch to LAN cable. Our office wifi a little bit wonky today.
*plug in LAN cable

Boss: Ahaaaaa! It works now. Please, next time make you develop website wifi compatible.

Me: ****

Whenever I come across some acronyms...

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs

Looking for a bug.

Plugged headphone into my ears.

Suddenly part of code caught my attention, started debugging.

10 minutes of intense debugging, wondering why there's no music in my ear.

Realised I forgot to plug the headphone into my mobile :(

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

First time poster here. Please be nice :)

My biggest workaround is one that's being currently deployed to 40 truck drivers (trucking company here), preventing printers being out of usage while on the road. We also have to use HP ePrint to wirelessly print documents, but that's another story for another time I guess :)

CEO asked us to install wifi printers in our 40-ish trucks which has wifi on board. However he's always picking one of the cheapest options possible, so we got consumer grade printers (Laserjet 1002w). Those printers often disconnects without getting back on the truck wifi network EVER. I have to get physically in the truck, wire the printer via USB onto my laptop and reconfigure Wifi on it with the HP Windows tool. This means lots of printer downtime, which always happens when the drivers are three timezones away from our office

Then I thought: "What if I could sniff what HP sends via USB while I (re)configure the printer, and replay whats being sent later? Our trucks all have an Android tablet with a USB type-A connector with host capability, so I could write a small app that replays the config when plugged in by the user.

Three days of hacking around later, I have a working app. By chance, HP printers (or at least those models we have) uses HTTP POST via USB, so I could easily replay the request.

Edit: the end result is that truck drivers just plug the printer to their tablet, press "reconfigure" in a home made Android app, printer is reconnected to the truck and they're good to go. They don't have access to the network nor know enough to debug themselves anyways

Whoever designed the USB plug to fit perfectly in an Ethernet port: I hate you!

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

Sorry, !dev-related.

Today I wake up tired. Mother barges into my room and tells me I should be already ready, takes time to fucking argue, then does some cleaning(As if I never do it or something), and this evening she starts arguing about that again and just disconnects the plug from my PC, telling me I shouldn't have gotten a person who takes preparing way longer than me and who also got out of the car when I was ready to take off late AND that I should apologise to her for speaking „in a rude manner“, when just a few seconds ago from that she hit me. That hit wasn't painful. It still was a hit, though. Do I have to say how angry I got? As if I needed that. I'm already having trouble with not wanting to kill myself for a whole week nonstop. And she tells me I have to apologise or I don't get my PC back. Oh, I haven't gotten to the best part: My birthday's coming really soon. A week and a day later. Beats me how I will have to force myself to smile like an idiot again just because the actual idiots cannot understand the shit they've done to my mind. So much so I may not be functioning at all if I stay with them much longer.

This combined with all my family telling me how insane I supposedly am etc.

I might try a photography school. My friend(who could be my twin), has been nagging me about trying it...

I need a job.

I need a fucking place away from these blood-sucking leeches.

I need to understand how my horrible self-esteem has potentially fucked my whole life up and how much nerves I wasted on my goddamn nuclear family.

I also need to learn to forgive myself.

Many more, but I will end this here.

Went to go help someone with their wireless printer.

Client: my printer doesnt work.

Me: okay let me take a look at it.. (took a look at it and saw the power core wasnt plug in)
So it seem like you forgot to plug in the powercord. Do you by any chance have it with you?

Client: well it said it was a wireless printer so i didnt think i would need it. I threw it away.

Me: well yeah wireless as in you dont need a usb core to connect it to your computer you can just do it through wifi.. but it needs a power source in order to turn on..

Client: well then why did it said that its a wireless printer if it needs a cord? Thats false advertisement.

Me: Sir the printer is a wireless printer but you cant get power wireless you need a power source in order to turn on the printer.

Client: you probably dont know what youre doing.

Me: *its okay hes only 79 years old*

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 ^^

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

If programming languages where weapons...

1. C is an M1 Garand standard issue rifle, old but reliable.

2. C++ is a set of nunchuks, powerful and impressive when wielded but takes many years of pain to master and often you probably wish you were using something else.

3. Perl is a molotov cocktail, it was probably useful once, but few people use it

4. Java is a belt fed 240G automatic weapon where sometimes the belt has rounds, sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t during firing you get an NullPointerException, the gun explodes and you die.

5. Scala is a variant of the 240G Java, except the training manual is written in an incomprehensible dialect which many suspect is just gibberish.

6. JavaScript is a sword without a hilt.

7. Go is the custom made “if err != nil” starter pistol and after each shot you must check to make sure it actually shot. Also it shoots tabs instead of blanks.

8. Rust is a 3d printed gun. It may work some day.

9. bash is a cursed hammer, when wielded everything looks like a nail, especially your thumb.

10. Python is the “v2/v3” double barrel shotgun, only one barrel will shoot at a time, and you never end up shooting the recommended one. Also I probably should have used a line tool to draw that.

11. Ruby is a ruby encrusted sword, it is usually only used because of how shiny it is.

12. PHP is a hose, you usually plug one end into a car exhaust, and the other you stick in through a window and then you sit in the car and turn the engine on.

13. Mathematica is a low earth orbit projectile cannon, it could probably do amazing things if only anyone could actually afford one.

14. C# is a powerful laser rifle strapped to a donkey, when taken off the donkey the laser doesn’t seem to work as well.

15. Prolog is an AI weapon, you tell it what to do, which it does but then it also builds some terminators to go back in time and kill your mom

All credits go to Vicky from damnet.com

Someday my toaster is going to have an IP address. A bad automatic firmware update will most likely cause it to get stuck on the bagel setting until I plug a usb key in and reflash the memory.

Grandma's refrigerator will probably get viruses, lock itself and freeze all the food inside, demanding bitcoin before defrosting.

My blender will probably be used in a massive DDoS attack because Ninja's master MAC address list got leaked and the hidden control panel login is admin/admin.

Ovens will burn houses down when people call in to have them preheat on their way home from work.

Correlations between the number of times the lights are turned on and how many times the toilet is flushed will yield recommendations to run the dishwasher on Thursdays because it's simply more energy efficient.

My dog will tweet when he's hungry and my smart watch will recommend diet dog food in real-time because he's really been eating too much lately--"Do you want to setup a recurring order on Amazon fresh?"

Sometimes living in a cave sounds nice...

Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.

So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.

They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.

After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.

I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.

Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.

The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?

How to plug a USB in a USB port:

1. Try to insert it
2. If it doesn't go, rotate it 180 degrees
3. Of it doesn't go, rotate it back
4. There you go

I wish android made plug-in enabled widgets available by default. It would be whole lot cooler if I wouldn't have to spend 2-3 hours to make a good looking widget.

Boss: please refactor this js 2k lines spaghetti code class and use it in our reactive functional app

Me: it will take like 1 week to refactor and plug this

Boss: but it's almost the time I needed to write it!

YOU DON'T SAY? MAYBE FIRST LEARN HOW TO WRITE DECENT CODE. ffs.

Client: I am unable to turn on my computer after running you app. Can you plz help me out.

Myself: Sure, since my app is corporate web app and nothing to do with OS lvl functions but still I will help you. (Didn't really had a choice🙄) Tell me your exact scenario.

Client: I think I was downloading some torrent as well, and then I am unable to turn on my computer.

Myself: Ok, try restarting your computer. Press power button 1-2 times.

Client: Nothing's happening.

Myself: Plug in your charger and try again.

Client: ohh! It started.

Myself: DUCK FACE😑😑😑😑😑😑😑😑😑
( Disconnect the call immediately) And start writing code for people who doesn't even fucking know how to start the computer.

Undev life
"If I'm ever on life support, unplug me .......and then plug me back in, see if that works"

HP printer: *starts acting on its own*
*pulls plug*

NOW WHO FUCKING OWNS YOU, FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT?!! WHO PAID COLD HARD FUCKING MONEY FOR YOU HUH, FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT?!!!!

Don't you ever dare to do anything again, unless I fucking tell you to, fucking worthless piece of shit, that can't even do its printer jobs properly!!! WORTHLESS FUCKING PIECE OF JUNK!!!

Guess I'll leave it unplugged until I have a new print job for it at this point. Geez, can't even trust my fucking printer to do what it's supposed to anymore!!! Long live the world in Big Brother. Lest we forget that there exists such a thing as fucking ownership!!!

"Oh my God thank you! How'd you fix it?"
I did literally the first thing you always do: unplug that shit and plug it back in.

I don't know if it is a dream or miracle,
I did plug a usb cable in a single try.

$sis: hey $me, can you help me?
$me: Uhm, sure, what's wrong?
$sis. The printer doesn't work..
$me: what does it say?
$sis: what do you mean?
$me: like, when you try to print something, what does it say?
$sis: uhm... idk...where should it say something
$me: On your screen you should be getting an error message right?
$sis (now getting irritated for some reason): no it doesn't..
$me: okay, let me check it out
*I walk to the printer with my sister's laptop and plug in the usb*
*Select printer > click print*
"Printer offline"
$me: was it also saying this before
$sis: uhm...yes
$me: ok
At this point im already getting a bit fed up
$me: are you sure this port is working
$sis: yes, I am sure
Okay, check other ports just to be sure, also don't work.
After about 15 minutes of debugging, turns out she managed to unplug the cable on the printer...
And all I got was a "o thanks"
Fml

Nothing but the best for little bittersweet jr., so I mask up and bike out through the rain to buy the tiny girl the most expensive pacifier I can find.

When I hand it to baby, she giggles, grabs the nipple end in her fist, and passionately starts slobbering on the back of this luxury mouthhole-plug, sucking the edge, biting on the ring. Angry grunt, yeets the plastic object out of the crib.

Apparently, it doesn't meet her specs at all. When I fall to my knees asking what else I can do for her, she just pouts, groans, whines, and then falls asleep.

That's when I realized.

When my little monster grows up, she's going to be a product manager.

We had a short power outage this morning. 30 min later I got an "urgent" call that someone's "computer" was not working in another branch of our company.

Not one person in that branch could figure this out so after them repeatedly messaging and calling me for around an hour I decided to come over.

I found out that the power wall plug to the monitor has a switch on it which this person accidentally kicked...

I fixed his problem in around 20 seconds. This same employee was one that somehow had his email account previously "hacked" and 8000 phishing emails were sent from his account in 1 hour.

I honestly think it is amazing people like this can even use a computer at all...

Sometimes when I code, I plug in my earphones and listen to music, focused, in zone.

* I let everyone think that.
** I actually don't listen to anything.
*** Keeps the buggers away!

Some genius at apple:

I know, let's have a wireless mouse and when something goes wrong with the boot loader let's put a button there to restart the machine but not select it, also don't load the drivers for the wireless mouse so the user has to plug in a wired mouse to click the button

Me: what an absolute donkey dick of an OS. I will replace you with rasbrian...

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

* playing music on MacBook
* turn down volume
* plug in headphones
* volume jumps to max and ears bleed

Don't apply for a job that you don't like. You're gonna hate your life.

Don't ask for a salary you know you're not worth.

Work in a tech company as much as possible. If you don't, you're gonna be treated as a powerpoint presentation expert, office installation expert, video editor/movie maker expert, IT support guy, loose plug/broken headset repairman, facebook hacker, and a dark magician all at once. Most (not all) tech companies know who you are better. They understand your needs better.

I think I will ship a free open-source messenger with end-to-end encryption soon.

With zero maintenance cost, it’ll be awesome to watch it grow and become popular or remain unknown and become an everlasting portfolio project.

So I created Heroku account with free NodeJS dyno ($0/mo), set up UptimeRobot for it to not fall asleep ($0/mo), plugged in MongoDB (around 700mb for free) and Redis for api rate limiting (30 mb of ram for free, enough if I’m going to purge the whole database each three seconds, and there’ll be only api hit counters), set up GitHub auto deployment.

So, backend will be in nodejs, cryptico will manage private/public keys stuff, express will be responsible for api, I also decided to plug in Helmet and Sqreen, just to be sure.

Actual data will be stored in mongo, rate limit counters – in redis.

Frontend will probably be implemented in React, hosted for free at GitHub pages. I also can attach a custom domain there, let’s see if I can attach it to Freenom garbage.

So, here we go, starting up modern nosql-nodejs-react application completely for free.

If it blasts off, I’m moving to Clojure + Cassandra for backend.

And the last thing. It’ll be end-to-end encrypted. That means if it blasts off, it will probably attract evil russian government. They’ll want me to give him keys. It’ll be impossible, you know. But they doesn’t accept that answer. So if I accidentally stop posting there, please tell my girl that I love her and I’m probably dead or captured

On a tiny vacation in another country. Don't have a converter plug (for the power sockets) so borrowed one.

*connects laptop to charger* (old charger which might die soon)
*nothing happens*
*slight panic*
*tries different sockets*
*nothing*
😨😲😭
"you might want to check your phone with that thing as the socket seems loose as hell"
*tries phone with charger that definitely works*
*nothing*

😰🙌

That was a fucking panic attack right there 😅

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

3.. 2.. 1..

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

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

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

I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.

They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!

I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.

But! No audio.
Damn.

Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.

Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.

But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤

(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)

A friend bought a new PC and asked me to help him set it up. He said he got everything working except the CD drive. He said it took him forever just to figure out how to get the keyboard and mouse to work. "I mean, have you ever owned a computer where the keyboard and mouse had to plug into the monitor instead of the computer?"

He bought a desktop PC, and and all-in-one thinking it was a monitor. He had the HDMI going from the all-in-one to the desktop, and was trying to use the CD drive on the desktop.

Wish you could've seen his face when I unplugged the desktop computer and his "monitor" didn't shut off. He looked at the desktop, and then the all-in-one, and said, "Wait... How is it still on?"

He also had his old USB wifi plugged into the desktop thinking that's what was providing him with an internet connection.

1.5 hours of UI and performance enhancements for the UWP app on Windows Phone, and guess what greets me when I plug it in.
//kill me
//yes I restarted both

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

New dev couldn't get his laptop set up and screens working. After a day struggling I walked over and recommend he plug in the power cord......

Me: *Demoed my search API which supports multiple database implementations at the backend*

My Manager: Great!! Is the API independent of DB? Can you plug this API to any DB?

Me: Yes

My Manager: How can user specific DB at runtime?

Me: Why will user be interested in the DB used at the backend? He will just query the API for data.

My Manager: Let's just assume he wants to select a database at runtime.

Me: While searching a movie on Netflix, do you specific from which DB you wanna stream the movie?

My Manager: *Confused and pissed*

I built a tracking suite for our fleet of printers quite some time ago. Once a day, "bizteam" (aka sales) gets an alert detailing how many printers are in critical need of attention (out of paper, mechanical error, etc.), and how many of them are flat-out offline. They don't seem to care. I mean they do, I think? but. the offline percentage hasn't changed much in the past month or two.

These printers constitute a primary part of our business model and... screw it. they're goddamn important, okay?

A full 16% of our printers are OFFLINE. Most of those HAVE BEEN OFFLINE FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS.

3% of our printers have been online BUT OUT OF PAPER FOR OVER A MONTH.

and what really baffles me...
We've convinced a few of these merchants to actually plug in their goddamn printers. (and yes, they actually *paid* for these things, and they're absolutely not cheap.) Some of those were previously both offline AND out of paper, yet after being plugged in, they're *STILL* OUT OF PAPER?! What the crap, people! It's a printer! it's not difficult! It's the same as every other fucking printer you have! and it's probably the same goddamn fucking model!

Did AlexDeLarge skullfuck your brain into mush? FIX YOUR SHIT!

Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).

When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).

I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.

Pm: "so how long should this take?"

Me: "well, I see at LEAST 8 hours of work here for me, some of which can't be done without graphics, but let's assume graphics are done by designers by the time I get to hour 6 and I just have to plug the images in without much editing or tweaking."

Pm: "So you'll have this by tomorrow?"

Me: "Do you think I just sit on my hands all day waiting for one of you trolls to give me something to do? I said AT LEAST 8 FULL HOURS OF MY TIME, that would be assuming I could get 8 consecutive hours to work on this, and let's face it that's not gonna happen."

Pm: "So Friday...?"

Me: "Tell the client that so long as there aren't any unforseen issues it could be done as early as Thursday. I'll put it on my schedule, but it is not a priority until at least Monday. There's only one of me and 5 other active projects on my desk."

Pm: "I'm gonna tell them Wednesday morning we'll show it to them for approval."

What in the hell is wrong with people?

I smell burnt electronics.... Somewhere. Can't find it. Look, unplug, smell, plug in, look smell, unplug, smell, dance, can't find it.

I need a young priest and an old priest.

My girlfriend has no idea what I do at work, but apparently she thinks I'm the best "computer guy" ever when I can plug in a Chromecast to her TV

Manager: we require people to work in the office but we'll give you a space to get as comfy as you want.

Me: *walk into the open space office, set my mechanical keyboard, plug in my noise cancelling headphones, start coding and mumbling every now and then*

Manager: keyboard is distracting others and we don't allow headphones as we want to be able to speak to you when we feel like it.

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

I was working for a startup that needed to update 300 machines that had just come from the factory. We had to open all 300 boxes and update them one at a time. I made a simple script that would run a folder full of shell scripts then keep track of what it ran so it would not run the same script twice. It made it so we could just plug the machines into the internet, they would query some server, download my program, and run it. It saved me from having to ssh into every machine and run commands. Well the head programmer guy saw what I did and implemented it as the main program that would update the entire machine. I didn't program anything into it to verify updates, the shell scripts did not return any indication of success or failure, and I made it in less than 3 hours. It was supposed to be a temporary program to be used for those 300 machines only, but ended up sticking around for 2 years.

Finally got rid of all those cables, just one usb-type-c-cable to plug in my whole office. Love it!

I hate open space offices for following reasons
- bright environment (I cannot turn off the light just for my own)
- noises (talking, discussions, chewing)
- requests and questions
- people

But I still cannot afford to be in my own office room yet.
Now I have to wear a cap inside the office like a mad-hatter and plug my ears with earphones even without playing any music.

So we send a quote out to a client to update his website to make it compliant with the new privacy guidelines: SSL encryption, removing external libraries, removing Facebook Plug-ins, all that stuff. We didn't get a response.

On Monday, he called in a panic. "The website does not work, fix immediately!"

I check out the server, what do I see? An SSL cert installed the Friday before... Client decided to do it himself, on a Friday, without testing. He broke something, but cannot tell me exactly what he did.

And somehow he thinks all that is my fault :D

!rant
Storytime!

I'm on the phone with an elderly customer.

Customer: Yes, I just got my computer back and now it's not talking to my monitor.

Me: Okay, and the monitor cable is plugged in?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Okay, I think I remember that you had a graphics card. Do you have a horizontal blue port?

Customer: No.

Me: Okay. So let's look near the middle of your computer. Do you see a blue port?

Customer: I don't know. I know the blue monitor cable is plugged in, but I don't know what color it is.

Me: Alright, let's unplug the cable for a second.

Customer: Okay, done.

Me: Now let's look for those two blue ports...

Customer: I only see one.

Me: And it's near the middle of the computer?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Okay, let's plug the monitor in.

Customer: Okay, done.

Me: Now does the monitor come up with anything?

Customer: Let me get to where I can see it... No, there's nothing.

Me: Even if you wiggle the mouse a little?

Customer: What?

Me: Does the computer talk to the monitor if you move the mouse a little?

Customer: How do I do that?

Me: ...You take the mouse... and move it from side to side

Customer: Oh! I understand. Um, no. Nothing.

Me: Okay, well let's bring the computer in. I think I know what the problem is, I just need to put a piece of tape somewhere.

Customer: Oh, okay. Fine.

It's 2017 and Ubuntu still doesn't automatically switch the sound to your earphones when you plug them in the jack. :'(

Fuck you Apple. I forgot the headphone dongle for my iPhone at home, so now I can't (1) plug my apple headphones into anything (i.e. my laptop, which is made by the same fucking company) and (2) use any other headphones with my phone. Buying an iPhone was a mistake. Apple has been implementing the shittiest UX recently. Don't even bring up the fucking bezel on the iPhone X or the marketing bullshit that is "retina display". The worst part is the Apple fanboys that act like everything Apple pumps out has been touched by the hand of God—Tim Cook could show up at their house and kill their fucking dog right in front of their eyes and they'd worship Apple for doing it.

Just finished making the interface for my app in WPF only to find out that it will be waaay harder to plug it to WPF than I thought.

In fact, it would be easier to just remake it from scratch in WPF - which I'm planning on doing when I get some free time.

Don't you just hate when that happens?

..eh, at least it looks somewhat good.

In a new country and in isolation.
Laptop out of charge. Plug converter broke so cannot connect my laptop to power.
Ordered one. Need to wait one whole day for it to arrive.
Perfect gloomy weather to just reflect my mood.
Not even allowed to go out for a walk.
Wrote down some pseudo on paper so I don’t forget.
Only to realise there was a problem with it.
So I rewrote it correctly.
Now just waiting.

Why the FUCK is there an American style plug on the backside of our TV?!? AND I'M IN FUCKING SWEDEN

So my HP laptop got a weird problem lately.

It doesn't charge when I plug in the charger(yes, i turned on the switch). So I began searching forums for a solution and then found out that there are so many people like me out there.
Then I was like ok, chill. There are many people like me, there must be a solution somewhere.

And after doing lots of research and trying all the solutions in the internet, the only thing that worked out is this ....

Step1 : turn on and the laptop and plug in the charger.
Step 2: Turn off the laptop.
Step 3: Now turn it back on and poof there you go, the laptop's charging.

And then I improvised the solution myself, which is u can replace the switch off part with Sleep which saved me some time.

And then whenever I try to show something my friends somethjng on my lap and the battery gets low, I do the ritual. For a brief moment their face becomes like dude I'm gonna kill you off, why the hell did u bring me here and now u r turning that off. And then I explain the history of my laptop.

Why HP whyyy ?

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

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

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

So my friends PC died, since he lives in another country I help him over Signal.

He assembled his own PC a year ago and does a lot of programming for his study. Today Im helping him troubleshoot why his pc does not boot. Does it get into the bootmenu or not? He knows it doesnt. Then I recommend him to try unplugging his graphics card and plug his monitor in the motherboard. I then get a question if there are two HDMI types. Im smiling and think he is messing with me. That must be a displayport. Nope he was serious, he has this HDMI cable that doesnt fit his motherboard.

I sat in a tram and laugh out loud.. Because this is what he send me.
If it was anyone who didnt do anything with computers I didnt think it was laughable, but come on every programmer should know the difference between HDMI and DisplayPort

My work just gave me a new MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. Dear Apples, I can’t even!!!!

What a piece is shit! I can’t charge my phone, plug in my monitor or my mouse without a freakin dongle! Worse of all, I can’t feel the keys to reduce volume, I always have to look does at the Touch Bar, tap twice to reduce the volume. How inefficient!

FU Apple! FU!

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

God, I don't know whether I believe in you or not, but please kill all those people who play loud music in public.

So, I was travelling by a train two days ago. Halfway down the 15 hr journey, the guy next to me took out his laptop and started watching a movie, on speakers, in full volume. It naturally irritated me a lot, and I requested him to use head/earphones, to which he replied that he forgot his one back home. I told him to keep the volume down to which he got personal and put the volume down (maybe to 95%). Since I hate human interaction, I had to plug in my own earphones to keep his bitchy noise away.

The same thing happened today on the bus, the only two differences being:
• mobile phone instead of laptop
• said he doesn't own headphones
• claimed he could do whatever he wanted as it was not illegal

Now, I wished he fell of the bus and died, but the world ain't fair, so he still lives.

Dad called me over for "tech support". He'd bought a wireless mouse and keyboard and couldn't for the life of him get it working. The issue with my dad is that he never lets you touch the computer when he needs help. 20 minutes and 20 questions later, I finally ask if he plugged in the USB receiver. Answer? "It's wireless, it should just... work!"

Tl;dr; even password as simple as 123! Could be too dificult to use for unauth access. Even if you write it down for someone! Some minor HID config changes could be unbeatable for some people.

I always leave my lappy at the office and I leave it turned on and connected so I could connect to it from home if I really need to. The holiday is not an exception. I left it connected too.

Forba few weeks I was trying to connect to it from home to doublecheck xpra command I was using. Without any luck. The lappy was unreachable all this time :/

today some people came in the office. I reached out to one of them I trust the most to check on my lappy. And he says it's charger is unplugged. Fucking janitors...

I ask to plug it back in and turn it on. LUKS password prompt pops up. I send him the pw via sms along with a note that I'm using non-EN kbd layout. He confirms he'll manage.

20 minutes later he pings me "are you sure the pw is correct?". Yes it is! 5 more minutes later he pings me "... Is this how you type numbers and symbols with your layout?" nope, it's the other way around!

10 more minutes later he plugs in his own kbd, still fails. Sets up my layout in his lappy, spends a few minutes using it, plugs it back to my lappy and FINALLY enters the pw correctly.

Come on dude.. 😁

Backstory: Offering manager brings a project through a few months of requirements gathering / feasibility study etc. Project spends 8 months with a R&D team to flesh out. Our team gets 6 months to turn it into a ship able product. 4 months in, offering manager calls a meeting.

OM: ok so you are all working on project X, well I need your input on something

Team: Ok, go ahead

OM: what do you think the app needs to do?

Team: ... I'm sorry?

OM: well we've been looking at it, and we don't think it does very much compared to existing apps. We need a killer feature but we don't know what. Any ideas?

Team: well we were looking at project Y originally, which was a lot more advanced. But you pulled the plug in favour of this.

OM: yeah, believe me customers will want project X a lot more. It just needs to do something interesting ... you know what I mean?

Team: not really, if it doesn't have anything, why did we go for it?

OM: ok I don't think I'm being clear. Point is, if anyone has any ideas let me know, we need to ship it in 2 months and it needs to be killer

I handed in my notice that week and was asked why ... let's just say I told them.

Today at work I saw 2 tech guys (Russians) that tried to fix an audio system at my hospital clinic.

The PL-3.5 cable was unable to transfer any sound to the speakers from the secretary PC.

So they tried to plug it into one of their phones, to rule out the possibility that it is because of the PC headphones plug.

(The speaker volume currently is on *maximum* btw)

1st guy said "Let's play something nice and relaxing, so the patients (mostly old people) won't get an heart attack"
The 2nd ask "So what should I search in YouTube?"
Then the 1st said "Metallica"

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

So this was going to be a comment but damn!!!!

Windows is seriously about making life harder for power users now, every fucking update lately is moving more easy to change things and fucking hiding them inside hidden menus or stupid links that don’t make sense. I mean fuck I just want to turn on dual screen with my laptop (because for some bizarre reason, just showing the desktop on the plugged in monitor is so hard to do automatically, especially since I just plugged a hdmi cable in) and the fucker was gone with nothing but a “detect screens” button before it would use an external screen.

Fuck I’m so close to pulling the plug on windows, but Linux just doesn’t sell me for daily use (yet... it’s getting there though)

The fucking forced updates (yes I consider a random bsod due to a system interrupt, then as it reboots magically has updates awaiting... a forced update) are starting to get to me, the fucking thing half crashing and not responding due to a network transfer of files (the fucker was 5GB)

If it wasn’t for my gaming needs and someone can show me a very good alternative to MS Visio (I haven’t really found one yet) then I would swap over and just adjust to the not so great (imo) desktop environments.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

I plug in my USB type A's first try every time

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

When I started my current job 6 years ago I was given a desk phone with a 100mb port. Speed didn't matter at the time as everyone was given laptops for our desks. I changed positions in the company where I'm going to be provisioning servers and whatnot over the network. Started using a desktop that didn't have a Wi-Fi adapter. I requested a new phone with a Gig switch port, if possible, so doing file transfers on the network wouldn't be limited. IT had a couple of questions...

IT-Have you noticed slowness when downloading/uploading?
Me-No, but its a 100mb port...so.
IT-Well I just did a speed test and we're getting 60up/5down. Your phone is over that.
(Working from home? Our fiber was way faster than that I thought.)
Me-That's fine, but this will be for internal network transfers. Not going out to the internet. We have gigabit switches on campus correct?
It-Yes but you shouldn't notice a speed difference.
Me, now lost-If you can't change out the phone that's fine. I'll figure our something.
IT-Now now, lets troubleshoot your issue. Can you plug your phone in?
Me-Yes I have it, but I'm remote today. There is no way for it to reach the call manager.
IT-Let's give it a try.

40 min of provisioning later he gave up and said maybe it is broke. Got a "working" one the next week.

PS first post, and writing on phone. Yay insomnia!

I just want a goddamn option to “Never trust this computer. Never trust *any* computer” when I plug in my phone to charge.

Also, only got an hour of sleep. No idea why.

But woke up to find an emergency alert that we’re in flash flood territory, so that’s exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microshaft WanBLowS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While trying to integrate a third-party service:

Their Android SDK accepts almost anything as a UID, even floats and doubles. Which is odd, who uses those as UIDs? I pass an Integer instead. No errors. Seems like it's working. User shows up on their dashboard.

Next let's move onto using their data import API. Plug in everything just like I did on mobile. Whoa, got an error. "UIDs must be a string". What. Uh, but the SDK accepts everything with no error. Ok fine. Change both the SDK and API to return the UID as a string. No errors returned after changing the UIDs.

Check dashboard for user via UID. Uh, properties haven't been updating. Check search properties. Find out that UIDs can only be looked up as Integers. What? Why do you ask me to send it as a string via the API then? Contact support. Find out it created two distinct records with the UID, one as a string and the other as an Integer.

GFG.

Exploring my work machine today

- Nvidia control panel icon in the taskbar

Why is that there? *Click*

- No screens connected to an Nvidia device.

- Goes to system information

- GTX 1050

- Look around back, all of the displays are plugged into system video on the motherboard.

- Facepalm, plug into the GPU

Google, why the fuck did you make the Android default USB connection type be "charging," and NOT "MTP"?! And leave no way to EVER set default to MTP!!!

EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME I plug my phone into my pc to transfer files, I have to open my notifications shade, scroll to the bottom to the fixed notifications, and change the mode to MTP, at which point the phone has to re-establish its connection to the pc!

This has been an issue from Android M and onwards. Nonetheless, Google still left in the settings app under developer options on rooted devices, the setting to choose which default USB connection mode you want to use. Even though it doesn't stay on what you choose!! It's like they left that there to purposely toy with us and get a good fucking laugh from our needless suffering.

Google, I love so much of what you do and your approaches, but honestly, some of the things you do, like this and for disabling Chrome extensions on Chrome internal pages, makes me want to strangle you and then throw you in a river of molten lava.

*Breathes in and out*
WHO THE FUCKING FUCK MESSED WITH THE WLAN ON THE PI?!
WHY THE FLYING FUCK DOESNT wlan0 WORK WITH THE NEW STRETCH IMAGE?!
WHO THE FUCK PROGRAMMED
THIS SHIT OF AN IMAGE?!
EVEN THE SHUTDOWN ISNT WORKING PROPERLY!
I FUCKING LOVED THE OLD JESSIE ONE! OK!!
*Begins to smash head to table*
WHY THE FUUUUCK DOESNT THIS WORK!
PLEASE! FFS IT JUST WONT CONNECT!
*Head begins to bleed*
FUCK!!!
*Stops smashing head*
*Tried once again*
Huh, it takes Longer now...
Error...
FUCKING FFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
I HAD SO HIGH HOPES FOR THIS SHIT TO WORK! PLEASE RELIEVE ME OF THIS FUCKING BAD DREAM!
*Takes a Deep breath once again*
Shutdown -i
Error, another user is connected.
THIS CANT FUCKING BE! IM THE ONLY FUCKING USER ON THIS WIFI AND PI!
THIS SHIT MUST BE KIDDING ME!
AND NOW IT WONT SHUT DOWN!
*Realizes that I ran out of fucks to give*
OK...
IM NOT ONLY PULLING THE PLUG NOW, I WILL BE PULLING THE GODDAM FUSE OF MY ROOM!!
EVEN MY DUCKY DIDNT HELP ME!
THIS IS USELESS!
FUCK.

btw, there should be Raspberry Pi Capes.

Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...

I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...

And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????

This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?

Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <3

Interesting plug-in (Intellij)

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

Sometimes my "L" keys stops working. Then I have to plug in another keyboard to press the "L" key there. After that I can unplug the second keyboard since the original key started to work again.

Let me just get right down to it.
FUCK YOU Hewlett-fucking-Packard FOR YOUR SHITTY LAPTOPS! Don't you even keep your customer's needs in mind when you design these things? Besides all the bloatware you stuff into the Windows you ship it with, at least make the quality of your shit better. These flimsy screens and loose hinges, I've had to get that shit replaced multiple times in just the past year.
Want to upgrade to an SSD or plug in more RAM? Guess what! I've to tear the whole thing apart! Keyboard, palm rest, all if it! What even happened to just popping a cover at the bottom to swap out the hard drive!? I have to fucking congratulate you, you fucking cunts, for making an easy process as difficult as it can fuckin possibly get. You guys deserve an award for this, preferably presented to you, shoved up your asses.

I can't get the wifi generation. I love cables (except when they are in front of the tv), their performance, their plug-n-play without conflicts, that high level of nerdy childish porn of 80's in all the magnificence. It's just me? *snowflake feelings*

I provide hosting for my clients. About 3 months ago I discovered that the hosting company that I'd been using had been swallowed up by EIG, which explained why the tech support had gone downhill.

So, I jumped to another hosting company. Same shit different company!

Apparently the fact that my browsers sit at "connecting" for up to 30 seconds, and I get a "could not connect to" message half the time while I'm trying to fucking work on a deadline is the fault of some plug-in in a WordPress installation!

Oh yeah? Why then does this shit happen when I'm working on a pure html/css site?
Why then did it start happening after they "updated" my shared server?!

Oh, but the bastards suggest that I buy Cloudflare or pay for more space!

You fuckers made my work take 3 times as long, and you made an important migration fail!

Network places make mistakes. We all do. That's cool. Fucking own up to it, talk to me like a techie, and DON'T TRY TO BLAME IT ON ME OR MY TOOLS!

Fuck you! I think I'm gonna give Google Cloud a try, and do this shit myself!

God, the iPhone 11 pro's triple cameras ARE SO UGLY. OnePlus 7 has three back cameras and it's not ugly, so it can be done! It's just so, so fucking ugly. It looks like where you might plug in a high voltage power cable or something. And of course it still has a notch. That's two design failures in one expensive phone. No thanks!

(From owner of iPad Pro - not an Apple hater!)

Why the fuck does Apple hate developers so much? I just want to test and play around a bit. Why do I have to own a fucking Mac? Why do I need to pay 99$ a year just to install a debug build on my own device?! It's literally impossible to get into ios development without being rich or having some kind of plan for revenue...

Testing my app on Android:
Install Android studio -> plug in phone -> run code in Android Studio or simply install the resulting apk on your phone.

Trying to test my app on my iPad:
Google how to build app for iPad -> reading that you have to own a Mac to run xcode when you want to build Code for iOS -> searching for a workaround -> find a way to build my app online -> setting the tool and building it -> Trying out 5 different tools to sideload the app, no one works -> finding out that you need a developer account to sign the app for testing purposes on MY OWN DEVICE. I really would appreciate it if I would be able to install personal stuff for testing and LEARNING without being forced into insolvency. Why are people putting up with this kind of bullshit?

So I pulled an OLD ibm out of a trailer, that is literally falling down, today. Anyway, this cpu had been rained on and been in extremes of heat, and cold, so much so that there was moss growing on it.

I pulled it out and plugged it in, with the original plug *that was rusted in*, and.. it worked. The screen and everything worked perfectly! The floppy disk that hadn't been used in over 14 years and was stuck inside the reader, worked...

Mind blown!

As the old saying goes, they don't make 'em like they used to.

In the past, the company that i worked gave to all the employees usb to save whatever they want, after that, this happened.

Me: Hi, how can i help you today?
User: The USB that IT gave to us it's broken.
Me: Broken?
User: Yeah, i can't plug-in in my computer.
Me: Did you try turn around?
User: Of course i.. ah, f**k yeah.

And ends the call.

TLDR: Find a website that requires a subscription but doesn't check their cookies' integrity, now I'm on a website for free.

>be me
>wonder if it's possible to intercept browser data
>download Wireshark
>download Fiddler
>find that none of these really fit me
>go to youtube, search how to intercept POST data
>find something called BurpSuite
>Totally what I was looking for
>start testing BurpSuite on devrant
>neat!
>I can see all the data that's being passed around
>wonder if I can use it on a website where my subscription recently ended.
>try changing my details without actually inputting anything into the website's form
>send the data to the server
>refresh the page
>it worked
>NEAT!
>Huh what's this?
>A uid
>must be a userID
>increment it by 1 and change some more details
>refresh the page
>...
>didn't work 😐
>Hmmm, let's try forwarding the data to the browser after incrementing the uid
>OH SHIT
>can see the details of a different user
>except I see his details are the details I had entered previously
>begin incrementing and decrementing the uid
>IFINITE POWER
>realize that the uid is hooked up to my browsers local cookie
>can see every user's details just by changing my cookie's uid
>Wonder if it's possible to make the uid persistent without having to enter it in every time
>look up cookie manipulator
>plug-in exists
>go back to website
>examine current uid
>it's my uid
>change it to a different number
>refresh the webpage
>IT FUCKING WORKED
>MFW I realize this website doesn't check for cookie integrity
>MFW I wonder if there are other websites that are this fucking lazy!!!
>MFW they won't fix it because it would require extra work.
>MFuckingFW they tell me not to do it again in the future
>realize that since they aren't going to fix it I'll just put myself on another person's subscription.

Spent 6 hours implementing a feature because my senior didn't want to use a 3rd party plug-in.

After said 6 hours, went to look at the plugin's source code to get some inspiration with a problem I was having.

Guess fucking what? Plug-in was implemented exactly as I had done it to start with. Even better, actually, since it fixed some native bugs I couldn't find a way around.

Went back to my senior, showed him both sources and argued again in favour of the plug-in.

Senior: "Meh, I'm not sure. Don't really like to keep adding plugins"
Me: "Why? Do they cause performance hits? Increase memory usage?"
S: "No, not all. But I don't like plugins"

/flip

We ended up using the plug-in, but I "wasted" a whole day doing something we scrapped. Guess I learned some interesting things about encryption on Android, at least...

"Oh yes I have to try three times until I put the USB in correctly"
Hey. If you have eyes, would you use them to fucking look at the ports of what you're trying to connect together and ONLY THEN try plug it in? If it still doesn't work the first time, you are probably an idiot.

Now I will defend USB-C untill my face turns blue and my mouth turns into a thunderbolt 3 port but fuck me some people complain about the stupidest shit when it comes to adapters...

Saw someone on twitter complaining because to get an ethernet port on his MBP... Only to notice he had purchased a USB-C to USB-A just so he can plug in a USB-A to ethernet...

Now maybe I'm thinking too logical but if you wanted an ethernet port, surely you would buy a USB-C to ethernet port and not seperate things to do the same job and then complain about it?

I can justify complaining about USB-C to auxiliary to some extent but for fuck sake I swear some people just get off on complaining about self inflicted issues -,-

The sales team sold a project using our 'innovative framework', which had 'prebuilt components', which we 'only needed to plug n play' with a 10 week deadline. Of course, the framework didn't exist. Guess who was the lucky guy who had to create the framework AND finish the project in 10 weeks? fml...

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

*places an order on OnePlus' website for that OP6T*

Alright, payment.. with my bpaid card that I ranted about earlier, because apparently the fuckers accept only credit cards. External payment portal, card's got a chip.. well that's gotta be the same payment process as the usual Bancontact purchases then, right? Where you plug your card into your Digipass card reader, get a start code from the website, type that in, amount to be paid, PIN code, and then it spits out another code that you give to the payment portal.

Except it isn't. That CVC thing is apparently the only thing that stands between you using your card and someone else doing the same with your card information. Not even the card itself! Why the FUCK do we even have PIN codes then?! This is even worse than the magstripe and the skimming issues related to it (the magstripe essentially just blurts out your card information to whatever wants to have it, so demagnetize it and don't use the payment terminals who refuse your card on grounds of not being able to read the magstripe afterwards. Your chip should be responsible for that.. but I digress). Credit cards with chips in it that aren't even used. That's what you Americans use? Seriously?!

At this rate, you can keep your fucking credit cards.

Incredibly drunk last night.

Decided to take the CD/DVD drive out of my old PC (now a server) and put it into my new gaming PC.

Required a partial rebuild because:
1) GPU was too close to PSU to plug in a new SATA power line
2) CPU cooling lines were directly in the way of the space for the DVD/CD bay
3) Had to route the new power cables of course

Incredibly, even though I couldn't stand, I was able to perfectly execute the maintenance on both machines and I'm even using the new PC to write this rant now.

I must be a God.

So I tried to render the Facebook page plug-in and guess what..

Some guy at Facebook has added an online style on the preview: display: none !important.

So the plug-in preview was literally empty, thought I was not doing it right, how can the act of simply entering a url be wrong, seriously?

Production bug at Facebook facepalm

I had a USB WiFi dongle installed and working great. Then someone pulled it out of my computer, without talking to me, so they could use it. I found another in the office...exact same model...plug it in. Drivers don't work. Can't update them. Reinstallation crashes. Try to restart computer, it crashes. Restart computer and now Outlook won't even open. No idea what to do now, but this is going on an hour and counting of no productivity.

WTF Windows? You can't even handle a WiFi dongle right?

We had a wifi connectivity issue at work and all this guy had to do was unplug the power cable and plug it back in. Dude left the office to find me to fix the wifi issue since according to him, "he's seen me writing that weird stuff (code) on my computer"... And I'm all like..

When the poet in me fuses with the geek in me:

Will you be the css to my html?

When I encountered you,
My system threw a fatal error
My RAM was overloaded,
And my CPU went haywire

Will you be the css to my html?

I would show you my source code,
And let you merge your branch into mine
I will help you fix your memory leaks
And I will try filling all your nullpointers

Will you be the css to my html?

Your frontend would perfectly plug into my backend
I can compile all your heavy code,
Just in time

Baby just promise me,
You'll provide the JSON
To my API calls

Will you be the css to my html?

This is my first draft... Constructive criticism is welcome!

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?

"Yesterday "
Client: ''Perfect! How did you do this do quickly? "
Me: "I used a library"
"Today "
Me: "I'm still debugging. It will take some time"
Client: "well, It has already taking too long.... I can hear Mozart in the background. Maybe you need to go to a library to get some quite and get it done fast. Visit the one you used yesterday. "

Me: "library?Ahh... I meant plug in like.... Code, a library is a bunch of packed code. "

!Dev / story

My phone starts dying gently but surely. Since last week I cannot use my jack input anymore, and thus can't listen to music in the car. I also compose music, and was eager to listen to my latest production (for reviewing purposes) in the car. In my frustrated search for a spare device with a jack, I found a pile of blank CDs instead. "Aw yiss, I can haz music in my car" I thought with a huge relieved grin.

I grabbed a CD, looked at my pc, and my grin faded instantly to an "oh" of disappointment: I deliberately did not install a CD drive in my computer.

Not losing hope, I grabbed my Mac and tried inserting my blank disk in the drive. "Clunk, clunk", the cd won't go in. "Ah silly me, I replaced that drive with a SSD". So I went looking for that spare cd drive.

After I found it, its SATA power interface was smaller than regular SATA devices, and any connectors I tried were too big. "Hmpf, ok, I'm desperate, let's remove that SSD in my Mac". So I went grabbing some screwdrivers, removed the cover lid underneath the computer, and removed two screws from the SSD casing, allowing me to lift the unit up, disconnect the cable, plug in the cd drive, flip the Mac carefully, turn it on... And burn my CDs, and finally I resetted everything back to normal, carefully removing the cd drive and closing the computer.

What one doesn't do in frustration...

Ok I fucked up.. I installed elementary OS on a USB from my school pc..
Windows still work but I have to plug in the elementaryOS USB for grub to boot so I can boot windows

Fuck me

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

A friend of my mom asks me transfer some files from her hard disk to her pendrive because I am supposedly *good with computers*.

As an obedient son, I go to her house to do the needful.

I switch on the laptop and plug both right in. At this point, I am wondering if this really my life is for.

Lost in my thoughts, I accidentally format her hard disk. Now I freak out. Seeing no possible way out, I remove both and say her work is done.

I quickly leave the house and never look back. To this day, I have never gone back to her house.

Why I can't be a politician? Because I would be that kind of guy who will definitely end this pandemic by suggesting the public to have their lung surgically removed.

I am a software engineer , I often remove cable from my local server and plug back in and it works. So I conclude , I can't be a politician.

In the land of Kangaroos you can claim education expenses directly related to your profession on your tax return. I am developing a plug-in for X-Plane. Do you guys think I can claim costs of my flying school as "education to better understand flight characteristics so that my plug-in works better"?

For anyone who's interested, I'm building a six pack using round LCD displays and an Arduino

Possibly the start of a very bad adventure: I'm helping my brother-in-law set up a website for a business he'd beginning with his wife. I'll be needing to provide him a simple cms & shopping cart that he can manage. No payments as we want to just use PayPal so as to avoid having to actually manage user data & credit card information.

Wish me well....

Also advices appreciated cause otherwise, I'm gonna use a simple Drupal or WordPress site with like 1 theme and 0 plug ins.

As I am working with WordPress for the really first time I am making horrible experiences now.

My client wants a simple submenu on the sidebar if the user is logged in else he want the login form to be there. Easy peezy done with php and just good old plain html. Maybe some JavaScript to make the login process asynchronous.
But fucking bitch - NO. As I found out after searching and digging. I have to create a menu in wp-admin first. Then add a menu-widget to the sidebar. And then install a plug-in to make the links only visible for logged in user. Wtf?

WordPress takes all the joy in doing web development for me. I won't do that anymore. I will force all new clients to use proper tools to make their shit work for them. And as I am the expert in this things I am the one who suggests the right tool.

Fuck this shit.

If microsoft developers were ever on life support, we should unplug then plug them back in and see if that works!

Ok, so I REALLY HATE ChromeOS. MY story is this: I'm using Chrome, and I want to get a file from my computer to my phone. Simple enough, I just plug my phone in, and... oh, wait! First it has to open two new windows for my phone's two storage areas. Ok, fine. I close the windows, get my file prepared, and I click/drag it over to the folder I want. Except, the computer doesn't FUCKING see it as a device anymore. It knows it's attached, but it doesn't fucking communicate with it. Ok, maybe it's a cord problem. Nope! Same issue. Maybe I need to update? Nuh-uh! That doesn't work either, since my computer's not supported anymore! And, the cherry on the top of the fucking shitcake that this whole situation is, the Files app, the one that you use to view the stuff on your hard disk? OH, IT JUST GOES AND CRASHES. I can open it! Nothing shows up. No devices work. It's just stuck like that until I reboot my machine.

God... FUCKING damnit, chromeOS.

Got a new headset, guess it's time to plug her in and jam out to some sabaton while attempting to build 'something'

Still can't stream videos absolutely smooth on Fedora. Tried Chromium, Firefox and every fckin' plug-in they keep asking for. Half the stuff either just keeps loading or buffering. And the moment I give up and switch to Windows, everything just works. Why are we not building better stuff on linux? *Sigh*

I'm really tired that everyone in my family asks me to fix or help with every fucking thing that has a plug (like telephones or the air conditioner)

It would be great if CS students graduated and emoloyers could plug them in anywhere knowing that they can do their job without anymore training.

There for I think students sould have full on collaboration with high risk companies. Deadlines with serious consequences if they aren't met (i.e bad reviews on your profile). Computer science and programming really needs deep thought and concentration. Being able to work in a team to deal with issues as fast as possible.

These days you don't need to know a lot of theory to get started. Knowing it all helps, but being able to figure it out and then finding beter ways to slove the issues as you progress through becoming a master in your field really burns the knowledge and skill into your being.

Call me crazy all you want, but I love my tangled mess of cords

Yeah yeah, I know, I know, wouldn't I just love a cordless setup and workspace ...

NO

Bluetooth devices are at best unreliable and at worst don't even work with Linux

I want to just be able to plug my shit in and work, not wait for everything to sync and hope I don't have connectivity issues

Call it living in the past all you want, I don't care. I love my cords

Fuck you and your bluetooth shit

My friend works for my favorite company Apple, his boss ranted Apple is about giving options.

I figured out some missing options in my iPhone X
Need to listen music: sorry can't plug in a headphone we removed that option 😉
Other phones have option to unlock through face or finger print (oops we removed one option)
No option to take a photo in 16:9 aspect ratio (4:3 only)
No option to change themes or layout to personalize your phone

Any positive thoughts on this option statement? If I missed some option examples 😅

Ah yes, my Bluetooth speakers playing my favourite song.

The lyrics to which start with - "Battery Low. Please plug the charger in".

When you put the USB plug in the right way round...on the first try!

Well what an adventure with this SSD...😑
my sis' laptop is from 2013-ish(?) and has/had a slow HDD in it. I wanted to speed it up, before her study, so I bought a new internal SSD (no new laptop wanted).
Created a bootable USB, exchanged the hard drives and install the OS on it. Seems easy enough...
The laptop restarts to finish its process ... laptop shuts down immediately, no warning whatsoever. 😳🤨
Start it up, loading screen, fan gets louder and louder ... instant shut down.😳🤨🤨.
Redo process, this time landing on blue-screen, error code critical process died? ... instant shut down again.🤔
Restart from old HDD, normal.😐
Retry with boot USB and reinstall SSD. Setup process copying files, meanwhile instant shut down.😳 Please don't tell me!😩 Since every part of the laptop was working, except the new inserted SSD, I thought "FUCK not a broken SSD!😣"
I had my own PC with internal SSD slot, so tried to find out, whether it would be broken...
All starting up fine??🤨🤨
Ok then? Finish the setup for the third time now ... everything up and running.😐🤷
Normal shut down, unplug, plug back onto laptop, it works. HOW?? WHY?? 😕
Why the fuck are you suddenly working? 😐🤷🤷🤷
That's some magic...

I have a little big question

I don't have electricity most of the time but the ethernet cable from my internet provider is still working if i plug it in my laptop.
Except that i have to setup the credential from the provider, user and password.
Now!
I want to plug the ethernet into the raspberry pi (3B+) make it work , because idk where should i enter the credentials and then make hotspot so i can have a router powered up from the power bank.
A pi as router

Is it possible?

Because so far i have seen people who connect the pi to the router but mine requires electricity as any other else.

?? Welp

CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.

not sure if this totally classifies as a rant, but here goes:

so my Pi is giving a lot of problems. can't install software, keep getting weird error messages. so I try DD a new image onto the card. does not work at all. tried on three different machines :D
next I try run rm -rf /
it's obviously totally fucked. nothing works. pull the plug and plug it in again to see what happens.... it boots up again :D all the commands are back. no files are gone.

and that's when I was like fuck this and I returned the sd card :D

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

programmers after Rust:
- cat ears: on
- pink thigh-highs: on
- butt plug: in
“I… I use Wust 😏🤤 bwazing fast UwU”

programmers before Rust:

To whoever builds electron boilerplates.

STOP ADDING FUCKING JQUERRY AND WEBPACK TO THIS SHIT, I DONT EVEN USE YOUR BULLSHIT BUT OTHERS DO AND THATS WHY SO MANY ELECTRON APPS SUCK. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THINKS THAT THIS MADE SENSE PUT YOUR CSS LOADER ANAL PLUG IN TO YOUR ANUS AND BUNDLE THEM TO YOUR SINGLUAR BDSM.JS WITH BROWSER BACKFALLS AND BETTER MAKE SURE TO WHIPE YOUR DIRTY SHITFACE WITH A FULL BLOW CSS RESET BETTER MAKE SURE THERE IS NO ACCIDENTAL MOZILLA STYLE IN YOUR CHROME.

Lately my sister's sound wasn't working. So i came over to see, whats wrong. Her boyfriend was also there, who claims to be a programmer himself, so i asked myself why he hasn't already solved the issue. But instead of asking, i just got on her computer and looked around.

First, i checked the audio jack, which was plugged in normally. There's a little wheel on the table, controlling the volume. There was a little light on it, shining. I assumed, it had to be a software problem and got into Windows' Audio Manager. Everything was okay. I spent the next 10 minutes checking EVERYTHING, even tried a restart (obviously changed nothing, but you never know ;D ). Drivers, Audio Settings, everything was okay.

Desperately I leant back in the chair and shot some looks around. Turns out, the plug wasn't plugged in. *facepalm*

The little light, shining on the wheel, seems to get its power through the audio jack.

It's always the simplest thing.

Back at <biginternationalorg> I witnessed a developer deliberately build an xss vuln into a company web application, so that he could plug a JS file in with all of his passwords hardcoded. Bear in mind, this is an org that provides services to both the UK and US military, and if you have access to some stuff you have access to the tools you need to impersonate high-ranking military folks.

I know its like, twenty different passwords, but that's what a goddamn keychain is for! If you don't trust windows keychains, do what I did and run a VM with a Foss keychain installed! Don't build a vuln right into a public facing web app, that's just stupidity.

Here's an idea: starting my own botfarm to automatically downvote obnoxious adbots that simply won't stop tickling our collective fucking testicle sax with unrequited love stories and crypto bullshit.

To detect the sheeit, just look for idiot giving contact info in a rant about hacking the device of your unfaithful spouse/treacherous cyber girlfriend who also ran a bitcoin scam and fucked you in the ass with a welding torch. That should do the trick, I can give you that power with a perl script, because fuck you that's why.

But since there is no moderation in this bitch, daring to offer me sufficient knowledge to the inner workings of such a construct would be exceptionally perilous to your asshole. That is to say, nothing could then stop me from redirecting said botfarm to target my enemies and anally assault their every rant and comment.

Indubitably, this would in turn quickly spiral into digital warfare of cyberfeudal lords pitting their automated fake accounts against each other. Millions will die. Upside being hexical gets to pull the plug without guilt.

What do you say? Should we begin the apocalypse?

Okey, so the recruiters are getting smarter, I just clicked how well do you know WordPress quiz (I know it's from a recruiter, already entered a php quiz An might win a drone)

So the question is how to solve this issue:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2348617 bytes) in /home4/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line xxx

A set memory limit to 256
B set memory limit to Max
C set memory limit to 256 in htaccess
D restart server

These all seem like bad answers to me.

I vote E don't use the plug-in, or the answer that trumps the rest, F don't use WordPress

TIL that you can plug a mouse and keyboard into a Samsung phone and use it to interact with it like you would your finger. Now before you say this is such a useless feature, because of this, I was able to recover my backup from my screen shattered phone (really fucked it up so touch quit working) , and transfer it to another phone in a matter of minutes. To whoever thought of this, thank you so much :).

That moment when your phone turns off AFTER you plug it in...

So I'm working our remote build/testing server, and all of a sudden my computer just turns off. No crash message, no error, just turned off. My co-worker tries to help troubleshoot the problem.

Nothing.

I take the computer downstairs to the hardware department. They plug it in and it starts no problems.

After it finishes updating, I take it back upstairs and plug it back in.

Nothing.

I suggest that it is the power cable, and my co-worker looks under his desk. Turns out he had kicked the switch on the surge protector. 😑

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

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

A bit later...

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

So we have a desktop in each meeting room. In case you need to present something. And some of the desktops, if the previous person hasn't gracefully logged off, you can't log on.

Most people would take down the login id, run back to their own desktop, lookup and call the previous person to come and log off.

I'm not one of those nice people as you've already guessed - but there's no reset button on those desktops.

So instead of holding the power botton for a few seconds and tap again, I just unplug the power, and plug it back on.

This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.

A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣

I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it

Do you ever feel like some days are so damn monotonous? I’m nearing 10 years in the industry and lately my world consists solely of Plug-in development, templated or basic sites, PRs, and documentation galore. How do y’all keep your brain from turning to pure mush? Learning anything cool/new? The Burn out is real. 😖

I used to work at a startup company that was so mismanaged that they lost track of when the Visual Studio licenses expire.

So during a critical week, the Visual Studio instances stopped working, and they have to scramble getting new licenses, which took a while.

In the end, the client lost confidence, pulled the plug on the project. I also lost confidence in the company and bailed out. Less than a year later the company went totally bankrupt.

Okay, so yesterday was crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm not even typing this on my phone. I'm typing it on an LG G4.

So, I took an Uber out to a Sprint store I'd been told did repairs. My phone's vibrator was broken. So, basically I thought just like that R&M episode "20 minutes adventure in and out" - only to find out they'd need to wipe my goddamn phone, and then send it to Texas. I now have to wait 6 days for my phone lmfao.

So, in the meantime, they took an hour to get me this G4 which makes me miss all the finer things in life - I miss my USB-C and not having to give a damn about how I plug it in and I miss my fingerprint reader (I know, I'm a lazy fuck with first-world problems. I don't care to hear about how fucking stupid I am for either of those thoughts, STFU). Also the G4 is prone to hardware failures, so they said they weren't too happy about giving me this, but it's the only one with NFC.

So in the middle of setup, the Sprint store's power went out. FUUUUUUCK. The phone was pretty much at 5% battery and was being slow as hell, so you can just about imagine the irritation me and this guy had when the phone died in the middle of setup.

The next thing is an unrelated story, but I'm sure some of you older guys here will love this. I was at a place called Triangle Park last night. I go there for burgers, but they also have a bar. Sometimes I get sent to the bar and the bartender gets me my food. So last night I went to pick the food up from the bar for takeout.

The bartender must've had an accident and messed something up, so she told me to sit at the bar. I thought it was obvious I was only 19, so I barely sat. I'm literally not old enough to sit at the bar, even though when I was younger my dad and his friends used to let me sit with them because I had a history of saying stupid shit that made his friends laugh. Nonetheless, I sat with my ass hanging off the edge because I knew it was wrong :/

She comes back and asks what type of drink I want. I had to tell her that I was 19. I wasn't gonna sit here and lie because I'm pretty sure she could've lost her job for serving a minor. I exited and waited in the lobby.

But are we at the point where 19-year-olds look like 25-year-olds? I don't want to think about this because it means I'm getting older. That's a lot to take in. Later in the night it was still gnawing at my gut.

Yesterday was one hella day man.

I actually found a use for Outlook's scummy default behaviour to open links in Edge and not the default browser.

On my company laptop I mainly use Librewolf because it allows installing plug-ins despite group policy. I only use Edge for Azure DevOps and company portals because MS SSO doesn't work with Librewolf for some reason.

Because Outlook disregards the OS settings and uses Edge by default, MS software forms a sort of bubble, and I can freely set Librewolf as my default browser.

What the hell has happened to Hewlett Packard?
They used to make the best notebooks around. 10-15 Years ago, basically all notebooks my family bought were from HP. These devices lasted for at least 6-8 years each.
Now I have a fucking expensive OMEN series notebook failing after 2 years with the most embarrasing hardware problems: Once a shielded piece of plastic from the bottom broke off and made a short on the mainboard, next time the way too thin power line that goes from the power plug to the PCB was placed alongside a sharp metal piece that damaged the isolation and again produced a short. When the display is moved, the webcam disconnects, which is also a hint at the production quality.
From my daughter's HP notebook the Display just broke off after like 18 months of use. When we brought it to service I asked the guy whether this happens a lot, he was like "I have 6 other notebooks of that type with the same problem in repair right now". After a repair that took forever because they couldn't get the proper replacement parts, the integrated webcam has died.
Never ever going to buy anything from this shitbrand again.

Just got my laptop back from the store, after having sent it in over 6 weeks ago due to a faulty keyboard. I had made a system image of the hard drive before I sent it in, so I could just restore it and have it ready to go. So I get the backup restoring, and at around 75%, the laptop died. I forgot to plug it in.

I am now currently downloading windows. This is going to be a long night.

Context: We have a 96-port wall-mount patch panel. We're not even using half of those ports. "We" (read: "I") are completely redoing our network rack, as it's an ancient nest of wires. Currently all the ports in use on the patch panel just have random-length cables which are just drooped down beside the rack before running to switches. When I need to trace a cable from patch panel to switch, it's a complete nightmare. However, the cables going to the patch panel do have enough of extra length to do a rack-mount patch panel. I suggest this...

MGR: "Ehhh... I don't really like the idea of tying the rack to the wall... What if we want to move it or something?"
(this rack is in a tiny room and has been there since probably the 1800's.)
ME: "Well the problem currently is that it's all but impossible to trace cables. And even if I rewire it and bundle them nicely, it will still be a headache. With a rack-mount panel, we could just have super short patch cables and so it's super easy when I need to move stuff around."
MGR: "Okkkk..... So what if we would purchase like 3 or 4 switches to get 96 ports, then we run a cable to every patch panel port. That way we never need to change anything :)))."

Dude. Great idea. Let's drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on switches we don't need, rather than just doing a single patch panel. Brilliant. Also another great idea that, running thirty or forty unnecessary cables that we aren't even using. That won't clutter up the rack or use up valuable space or get confusing which ports on the switches are/aren't in use.

I'm trying so hard not to scream right now. I can't deal with this.

EDIT: It gets worse. Apparently part of the reason he wants to do this is "to make it simple". Currently we have our POS system running to its own switch, the printers are on another switch, etc. (yes I know some of this could be accomplished with a VLAN, this was set up before my time). But apparently "if we just had every single port wired then we could plug in whatever we want wherever we want and it wouldn't matter." I just... That's... That's not how you do a network.

Had to take the bus because train people are on a a strike, almost lost public transport card, almost lost usb cable, train decides to leave right in front of my nose, I arrive late in class, grub doesn't boot unless I plug in my external ssd, headache raging...

Luckily grub works again and I had a wonderful lunch with a capacio sandwhich 😋

So how was your monday? :)

Why do most web sites have so bright design? Aaarghgh, my eyes!

Anyone who dislike screeching default color themes? Black, red, blue, on full white?

Then I guess your editor and terminal are on low contrast light grey on dark grey, or something like that, right? Maybe even your window manager?

If your setup looks like this and the web is what hurts your eyes, try Dark Reader for Chrome or Firefox. I've tried several such plug-ins in the past, but this one is amazing.

(not affiliated)

this happened to me the other day and ever since any UPS we set in that room fries itself ... mysterious .... maybe the volage on the plug it wrong

Meeting about brand new web app system to replace an ancient MFC app.
director: can we just use the old subsystem manager? (horrible mix of management ui and SOAP listeners in the same app...)
developers: No, that's an MFC app... not even just a server.
director: but... can't you just plug it in? you're using web components right?
developers: *weary sigh*

You made a very important device used in pharmaceutical labs which stores important data, but for some fucking reason you decided to write the communication protocol so poorly that I want to cry.

You can't fucking have unique IDs for important records, but still asks me for the "INDEX" (not unique ID, fucking INDEX) to delete a particular one. YOU HAVE IT IN THE MEMORY, WHY DON'T USE IT?!
How the fuck you have made such a stupid decision… it's a device that communicates using USB so theoretically I could unplug it for a moment, remove records, add them and plug it in again and then delete a wrong one.
I can't fucking check if it's still the correct one and the user isn't an asshole every 2 seconds because this dumb device takes about 3 for each request made.

WHY?
Why I, developing a third party system, have to be responsible for these dumb vulnerabilities you've created?

Dear Windows,

Why can't you FUCKING remember my choice to "Open folder to view files"? WHY BOTHER asking every single time I plug in a USB if you can't be fucked to remember what I say?? Why is this even an issue?

## building my own router

I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.

What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.

I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??

And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.

Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.

Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?

iw list

My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!

Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.

BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?

This is the worst possible thing that can happen, when you setup a new computer.

I live for about a decade on ubuntu. I got an invite for a LAN where games are being played that I cannot run with wine or are not ported to linux.
Fine I get an old harddrive and setup a fresh Windows 7. I have a little update script that takes care of updating and restarting.
BUT I CAN NOT DO ANY UPDATES.
As you can see in the picture the original Windows 7 installation disc that was part of my computer did not carry the matching NIC drivers.

A friend of mine gave me a spare WiFi dongle. That did not bring its drivers on the USB dongle but on disc that he lost.

WHY?! HOW?! This is not plug and play. This is a part that SHOULD be plug and play.

After I got an other WiFi dongle that was plug and play, I could finally download the right drivers.

Why can the Windows 7 disc that was part of the computer setup not contain the right drivers, but a ubuntu 12.04 live disc can?!
ARGH

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""