My phone: battery low
Me: ...
Phone: battery low!
Me: ...
Phone: battery low!!
Me: ..
Phone: battery low!!!
Me: well, if you stop whining about it every minute you'll save your energy and won't die!

《WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A DEVELOPER IN ZIMBABWE》

Working on my project and suddenly power cuts off

Laptop doesn't have a battery
So it instantly shuts down

Ohh snap !!!

Luckily I've set my Vs Code to auto save every 3seconds

[Sigh..]

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So this shit happened today...

We were asked to implement a functionality on the device that allows it to go to standby mode to save battery power. Once the device enters that state, it can only be woken up by actual bus-network activity, and usually that means connecting a shit-ton of wiring harness and network emulation devices... Before implementing and releasing the device software that does this, we told that fucktard customer how difficult it would be for him to connect to the device without such a setup. He seemed to be fine with it and said rather arrogantly that we should implement the requirement as asked...

Well okay you cock-sucking motherfucker, you'll get exactly what you asked for... We implement the functionality and deliver the software...

Now this pile of shit comes back running his mouth on how the device tears down all its interfaces (to reduce power consumption) and he can't connect to the device anymore.... Well what else were you expecting you dickhead.
To make things worse for me apparently he runs to the manager describing his apparent problem. Both of them come to my desk.. With that fucking Bastard hiding his smugly mug behind the manager's back... He thought he was going to have the upper hand... Well guess what fucked piece of shit, I came prepared... I showed the manager how this was a part of the requirements by throwing that JIRA ID in their faces... The manager seems to understand but this relentless fuck wanted me to implement a "workaround" that would allow him to connect to the device easily... The manager almost had me implement that workaround, when I expose a huge security flaw in doing so. Guess what, now the entire team comes to my desk and start supporting my statement... To make it better they also tell how doing so will violate other requirements...

I've never felt so happy in my entire fucking career, when the entire team stood by me and watched that asshole drag his sorry ass back to his place

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

You'd think that with OLED screens becoming the norm for smartphones people would start offering dark themes in their apps to save a bit of battery and prevent burn-ins, but NOPE there comes Google with their material design and everything is suddenly brighter than the sun, especially YouTube where 3/4th of the screen is static most of the time.

Thank God you can still mod things.

I used to think Electron apps were gonna do great and make it more accessible for companies to produce high quality programs with ease.

Oh boy I was wrong. All it did is enable big companies with the ability to refactor all of their software to run 5 times slower, consume 10 times more memory and kill your battery 20 times faster.

I fucking hate all of this prototype fast optimize later bullshit. Can I get some value for my dollar? How come technology is just being degraded for the same of "ease of programming".

You save programming time but sacrifice end user time, cus our time just doesn't fucking matter.

I hate windows.
I hate windows update.
I hate windows update rebooting my PC and not reopen everything from last session.
I hate windows update trying to install updates while running from battery in power save mode.
I hate windows not being able to figure out where to put windows on dual head setup.
I hate developing in windows environment.

Man I'm glad that I use windows at home only for gaming.
Man I'm glad that I can choose a non-windows PC on my new workplace.

Why is whatsapp just AIDS?!

The privacy thing is big but let's take a look at the app.

It's the only messenger app I've ever used that forces you to save incoming images to your gallery if you want to see them, like wtf?

The UI looks like shit and it's kinda hard to understand from a UX perspective, for example read receipts which Messenger does beautifully. Facebook owns WhatsApp so A it's not really a better choice than fb messenger and B it basically has a shit quality application compared to Messenger. The messaging experience in sketchy Chinese dating apps is better.

Also it basically hacks your phone. It turns on notifications and permissions by itself even when I explicitly turned them off, and sends me notifications for muted conversations.

Speaking of notificatikns. Every time I get 1 notification, notifications from every single chat even an unread messages from 3 years ago gets sent to my phone.

It guzzles battery like a monster.

And they have basically formed a cult in the indian community, so now everyone thinks its the best and no one uses anything else because "it's so convenient" which it's NOT. It has a terrible interface, and the only thing I like about it is the fact that it being so shit gives me an excuse to uninstall it and ignore all the fucking spam on there.

Honestly, the app needs to die ASAP because it is frankly the shittiest of shittiest messaging applications.

So my grandma just called me saying that there is something wrong with the computer and the UPS is making a weird noise. When I went to find out what's going on, the UPS was beeping constantly and the computer was in the middle of a startup repair. Obviously there is no way to cancel the repair, and unplugging the UPS would probably do more harm to the computer. So we had to listen to that constant, loud, high-pitch noise while waiting for the startup repair to complete. And mind you, I'm talking about a very old and slow computer with windows 7 on it. After the repair was done, I quickly turned off the computer so I can reset the UPS and save my eardrums from burning in hell.

The worst thing is that I've downloaded the documentation of the UPS, and there was no mention of what a constant beeping means, it only described the meanings of normal beeping patterns (battery low, etc...).

My eyes are still ringing and my ears are still blurry from 20 minutes of that noise.

Black theme is great for my AMOLED screen, hehe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just found out my phone (stock, no root) has user-settable minimum DPI? The battery saver thing drops the DPI some and auto-adjusts the DPI and resolution to save power, but I didn't know I could set it... (Minimum 320 DPI, max 960 DPI)

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

Fk you Google!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have this little problem,

there is no constant electricity In the country where I live, in fact for the past 4 days there was not a single blink.

I enable auto save on my vs code to save me from tears,

now I have a file server with backup batteries and since it's a laptop mobo that was converted to a server, hooking up the battery was a no brainer.

I just saved copies of my files on it and if I edited any of them I'll just overwrite the file. this was only possible if I did this before the power goes out or else I am stuck again.

I decided to try vs code extensions that will save me from all that copy and paste work.

tried ssh, unsupported architecture error, didn't care I just needed ftp or sftp

I tried the simple ftp/sftp extension. worked pretty well. allowed me to connect to the server and add the remote directory to my workspace and with autosave the changes are uploaded immediately which means once power is out I can continue on my mobile phone(I have some android text editors that support ftp).

little problem. I discovered some things just don't work. even if I opened the whole directory, the contents will not be loaded unless I open them up like stylesheets and images and whatnot.

imagine having to open every single damn file before it appears on the browser, very annoying.

I need a solution, I have really tried.

It would be great to get a blackout mode to save battery on devices with an AMOLED or OLED display as black pixels are off
Basically something like the Reddit darkmode

I generally do not like google for many reasons, but if they added this feature to android "disable app notifications by default", I would love and kiss them to death.

Notifications these days are just about the most abhorrent feature of smart phones. I have never owned an iPhone so cannot say anything about that, but on Android its just bad. The system itself is good, but its being misused by developers. Today I checked out this app called "CPU Cooler", its one of those apps that tricks people into believing they should close apps in order to save battery life. Anyways, I opened it, I "cleaned my phone" and closed it. About an hour later I got this notification "heeey, you haven't cleaned your phone in a while".

Fuck off, uninstalled.

If it ever becomes socially acceptable, I would buy a Nokia brickphone in a heartbeat. My cousin said we would be much better off without smartphones and he is (possibly) absolutely right.

Anybody has a good recommendation for a laptop for mostly full stack web development?
I think I should look for following features:

- minimum 16G ram
- Althought is 2021, just in case, I add: usb C to connect to a dock with two screens and SSD
- I'll run several docker containers at once
- time to time I make non-exhaustive work on c++
- good screen dpi
- I use linux
- portable. No need for the lighter in the market but easy to carry in a bag. Good battery.
- not too expensive

I can save on:
- I don't need the latest processor, just a good one
- I'm not a gamer. I not need the latest GPU. However, some GPU is appreciated. I don't need colorful leds neither.

Do you have any recommendations on laptops and/or features to search for/avoid?

Apple better not be slowing down my Ipad Air 2 to save battery because goddamn it costs $300 to fix at my work!!!