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Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]
It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.
I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.
Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.
It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.
*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"
Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.
I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.
She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.
I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.
Got a call a few weeks later:
"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."
"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."
"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"
"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"
"I understand."
The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.
After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.
"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"
"Hello, yes, speak up?"
"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."
The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.
She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.
My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.13 -
hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.
here's mine:
ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}
i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:
current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}
if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!8 -
!rant
Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.
Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.
My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):
- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.
- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.
- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.
- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.
- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.
- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.
- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.
- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.
I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.16 -
FUCK SPOTIFY
This bloated buggy piece of shit
This fucking piece of bull dick that runs efficiently as much as a legless cockroach this motherfucker thinks its offline even though its in the motherfucking browse screen and I have a 4.5g connection (this retarded cunt) fills space faster than a hot gas released in a vacuum chamber just to fix its goddamn internet bug I have to reboot my damn phone. I see so many damn bugs in this shitty app that I think they rolled back to the alpha versions sometimes if I had any other god damn alternatives (google music is not available where Im from fuck you too google) the only thing I would give them would be my middle fingers. It just fucking froze on me while I'm just trying to listen to my Retrowave playlist while I fucking get ready for bed FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU YOU RETARDED INFECTION FILLED CUNT I WOULD PUT A BIKE CHAIN ON MY DICK AND RAM YOU WHILE WE ARE TIED TO A CAR THAT DRIVES OFF OF A CLIFF IF YOU WEREN'T AN INCOMPETENTLY PUT TOGETHER 1S AND 0S7 -
Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.
Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.
Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.
A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.
The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.
Consider this example.
Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..
As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.
But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.
One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.
But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.
So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.
As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.
If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.
Thanks for reading.8 -
Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.
iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.
After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.
When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.
iPhone actually cured me.
MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.
Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.
I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.
iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.
True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.
I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.
Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.
Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.
Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.
Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.
It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.
Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.
Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.
Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.
Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.
Before I switched, I defended Linux.
My life was a lie.
I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.33 -
Wtf? Why so much space at Left?
Someone at google don't know how to use css...
I think that is a wrong padding-left
Rendered in firefox Desktop
In full screen window
Chrome is the same
But the view is good in responsive mobile/tablet view
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Hello, world!
Okay, guys and gals... I need your creative minds. I need a concept for sort of a property manager for my game.. I have an idea of my own, feel free to tear it apart or throw it out the window.
So basically.. You'll no longer have one Computer System (and you wont instantly hit the login screen for that System on startup) Instead, you'll have a lot of things. They will probably only be represented using text and menu's (likely no 3D or 2D environments or anything.. Though, a setup like News Tycoon would be epic, but I think that would be too much for this game.) You'll basically start off with a small space (probably a basement) with x amount of free space. In that space, you'll need to add things like a desk, chair, and a laptop, or tower + monitor. You can also buy things like server rigs with a ton of space, but those are pricy and bulky. Each item costs X amount and takes up X amount of space. Also, you'll need a desk for a monitor (or multiples..) and other things.. (Like your rubber duck collection ;P JK) You can also rent and manage servers. (renting is more exspensive in the long run, but things on your server are not on your property. But, if you own a server on your property you can rent space to to NPCs) As well as manage your devices, properties, stocks, etc..
Also, there will be in-game time. Depending on how "comfortable" you are will determine how long you can stay up in a day. In-game events will take place later on at specific times so staying up (or not..) will need to be managed well. Especially if you're being targeted by a rival (NPC) hacker.7 -
So I decided to install a third OS on my laptop and oh boy, I never thought I'd have to deal with so many issues!
First, I had to make space for the new OS, so I did the only feasible thing - Shrunk a windows partition (Used for gaming only), then installed the third OS into it. (For clarification, one OS was Windows, the second Debian for work and the new one was Kali for a course at school about security and ethical hacking)
Well... After I installed and tried out that the Kali worked... My Debian began to make problems. It would hang for almost a minute during start as it tried to mount a (for some reason) no longer existing Swap partition.
After it gave up and I found out... I, fortunately, fixed it after just a bit of googling. At least I learned to repack the ramfs.
It worked all fine and dandy... Only... My Debian now shared the swap with Kali.
Few weeks forward, last friday, I tried to boot up Kali at class... Only for it to... Stop at a black screen, weird.
Some minor detective work later, I found out nothing was... Wrong really.
But... For some mysterious reason, my complete GDM just.... No longer worked.
One LightDM and XFCE instal later (Thanks god that at least TTY still worked fine), it finally worked again, and this time, I booted back into Debian, shrunk the Kali partition a little more and dedicated it's own swap there. Setting and resetting everything, and finally had a working triple-boot laptop...
My only question is... Why?
Does sharing Swap really affect the system so much, besides hibernation ofc.3 -
I seriously hate the spacing scheme of material design. So much of precious screen space wasted. I like the Macs way but their menus and other things are too squeezed. I wish there was a middle ground with normal spacing.
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Not too long ago I bought 3 monitors. Now I have my IDE on the center, console and debugger (and devrant) on the left, git and music on the right. Still figuring out the best arrangement for all windows but this already feels awesome!3
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I wish I could invite the me of 3-4 years ago to my room and prove him wrong.
Basically, the me of 3-4 years ago thought: "What do I need a home PC for? I got a laptop."; hell, he always forgot to put the laptop with the plural 's', because understandably, for his study life, he took low-cost PCs that would only last like one year.
But my boy, laptops are cool and all, but have you ever experienced the complete comfort of a proper desktop? In addition to the bonuses of a home PC in terms of performance, it leaves a much better space for work than just a portable terminal in front of you and pretty up close to compose. The accessories didn't even cost me much. And it feels great to have everything in its own, right place: the screen at the bottom, the phone standing on its holder, the earphones on your head, your left hand on a mat with papers potentially on it, your right hand on the mouse, which is on the mousepad and also on that mousepad, that character you adore so much, when both said hands are not on the keyboard, beneath the whole table, or on it when no papers are on the way.
Seriously, that pleasure I longed for was something you could have started, me of 3-4 years ago, right when I began with my studies.
But I have no rancor over you, I'm still onto my studies, so this is still something I can take profit of, during my student life, thankfully ;)
I'll just take note at your stead, of not being too stubborn over things that can do oneself a greater good, objectively. :)
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