Yay, unofficial devRant app for Windows10 \o/

To the Windows 10 users of the unofficial devRant client.

I will release soon the v1.4, but I'm already thinking about the future of this project.
What do you think about this concept?
Let me know if you like/hate it.
Any suggestion will be considered.

Thanks!

Unofficial devRant Racing Team in Forza Motorsport 7 basing on Ford Falcon in Supercars series - probably most geeky racing team ever!

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

I'm so excited about this small little feature I implemented in devRant unofficial UWP.
Can't stop using it… 😅

I hope you'll enjoy it (coming in v2.0.0-beta15 very soon). 😁

This rant just fucked up devRant unofficial for Windows 10.
It causes a JSON syntax error in the API response. 🤣

Thanks @kwilliams! 😁

One comment from @Fast-Nop made me remember something I had promised myself not to. Specifically the USB thing.
So there I was, Lieutenant Jr at a warship (not the one my previous rants refer to), my main duties as navigation officer, and secondary (and unofficial) tech support and all-around "computer guy".
Those of you who don't know what horrors this demonic brand pertains to, I envy you. But I digress. In the ship, we had Ethernet cabling and switches, but no DHCP, no server, not a thing. My proposition was shot down by the CO within 2 minutes. Yet, we had a curious "network". As my fellow... colleagues had invented, we had something akin to token ring, but instead of tokens, we had low-rank personnel running around with USB sticks, and as for "rings", well, anyone could snatch up a USB-carrier and load his data and instructions to the "token". What on earth could go wrong with that system?
What indeed.
We got 1 USB infected with a malware from a nearby ship - I still don't know how. Said malware did the following observable actions(yes, I did some malware analysis - As I said before, I am not paid enough):
- Move the contents on any writeable media to a folder with empty (or space) name on that medium. Windows didn't show that folder, so it became "invisible" - linux/mac showed it just fine
- It created a shortcut on the root folder of said medium, right to the malware. Executing the shortcut executed the malware and opened a new window with the "hidden" folder.
Childishly simple, right? If only you knew. If only you knew the horrors, the loss of faith in humanity (which is really bad when you have access to munitions, explosives and heavy weaponry).
People executed the malware ON PURPOSE. Some actually DISABLED their AV to "access their files". I ran amok for an entire WEEK to try to keep this contained. But... I underestimated the USB-token-ring-whatever protocol's speed and the strength of a user's stupidity. PCs that I cleaned got infected AGAIN within HOURS.
I had to address the CO to order total shutdown, USB and PC turnover to me. I spent the most fun weekend cleaning 20-30 PCs and 9 USBs. What fun!
What fun, morons. Now I'll have nightmares of those days again.

devRant UWP client

3 years, 65 updates, 1.507 commits.
3 users donated a total of €16.97 (~€10.91 after Microsoft's fee), not enough for a payout, so I would say €0.

But it was still worth it, awesome community.

The new version of the (unofficial) client for Windows 10 mobile is now available! 😁

devRant unofficial (previously devFeed) has been updated to v1.0.0.0 and came out of beta! Over 40 changes since v0.9.10.0 beta.

For those who think that no one uses Windows 10 mobile, the latest version has been downloaded 460+ times! 😉

devRant unofficial UWP v2 doesn't look bad on MS HoloLens, I guess. 😏

As most of you already know, the mentioned users in a rant don't receive a notification so you have to mention them again in a comment.
After a suggestion of @Cozyplanes I decided to implement a feature that make this automatic.
Just check the box and forget about it.

It will be available soon in the next update of devRant unofficial UWP!

When your app become App of the Day on Microsoft Store...

devRant unofficial UWP app on Xbox One! Thanks @JS96

I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

Best: My first app for Windows 10, "devRant unofficial".

Worst: A website for a client using Facebook APIs which don't want to work properly.

Official title: Web developer
Unofficial title: Bug developer

Oh and yes, it also available on mac.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

THE WORST PRANK ATTEMPT

If i remember true, it was 2012. april fool day..

me and my co-worker (we were the founders) decided to fool our members (we had a script's unofficial support forum). so, we did the plan. we register another account on march and wrote a few useful messages with it. help guys with that fake account (named as Root).

on fool day, we move the site to hidden folder (but didnt backup it) and added an index file as "hi, i am Root. you know me who am i. i hacked this site and deleted all dbs. cya later" (in turkish of course)

and we sit our chairs, began the watch our messages from facebook,skype,whatsapp etc..

we act like we are in trouble and we cant solve the problem.
at the same time, one of the our crew, decided to help us :D
so, he contact with our server's management crew. they dont know the fool too :)

server management looked up the situation without try to contact with me or my co. and we got an email from server like that
"hello tilkibey and impack, we just realized your site is hacked. so we delete your all ftp and db for safety. please contact with us asap"

we shocked and contact with them, explain the truths and request the recover our site (because we though they backup site before deleting all things). but they didnt backup it :(

so, we recover our last backup which is got nearly 10 days ago :(

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

Only a few tweaks left :)

Here we go again… a new update for devRant unofficial UWP blocked by Microsoft because contains "profanity"...

Interesting fact:
The screenshots which contain """profanity""" (probably bad words are enough to violate the rules) are still the same you can already find in the store, so even without this update they are visible...

- Release the stable v2 of devRant unofficial UWP
- Work on a new app
- Improve everyday and never give up

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

Really loving devRant unofficial.

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)

So, I finally gave in and installed the unofficial LineageOS ROM for the Google Pixel on my phone. I got tired of waiting for the official ROM. It was quite an adventure. I have to say the most time-consuming part of the whole process was getting my bootloader unlocked (because my Pixel came from Verizon.) I did have a little adventure after the installation though. I opened the devRant app for the first time and was instantly blinded by the default light theme.

TL;DR I now have LineageOS running on my Google Pixel, and I'm quite happy about it.

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

When you send a new update for devRant unofficial UWP to certification and it get blocked because contains profanity and inappropriate content... WTF? 😂

Just wanted to spread awareness about a Windows 10 devRant app called "devRant Unofficial". It's literally a 1:1 clone of the Android and iOS apps.

Maybe the devRant team could contact the dev for come co-operation and get an official app for Windows 10 with little to none effort?

It works on mobile and PC so I can easily use it on my Lumia and Surface. I know most of you guys here use macOS, but for us Windows devs, having an official app would be cool.

I know Valve talked to an unofficial developer of the Steam app for Windows Phone, and gave him approval for removing the "unofficial" tag. I suggest you guys do the same.

Happy 2016's death everyone, and sorry for the long and boring post!

Hard at work moving the unofficial devRant api documentation to GitBook.

Note: The previous link provided will stop working in due course.

The app I'm using right now... devRant unofficial UWP.

It started by chance, I wanted since years to release an app for Windows 10, but never something like this.
I found devRant in 2016 and I just wanted to use it on my Lumia 950, so I opened Visual Studio and created a very simple client to get data from the web version.
After a few builds I decided to release it on the Microsoft Store as "devFeed (Beta)" (a bit later renamed to "devRant unofficial UWP").

Today, after almost 2 years, thanks to the huge support from @dfox and all the users, I'm releasing the 55th update. 😁

Thanks!

The new version of the (unofficial) client (now UWP and with "Stories") for Windows 10 is here... but I can't release it due to a Microsoft Store bug... 😢

Hope to see a Microsoft fix soon, because I can't wait to share it with you! 😝

Unknown notification error.
devRant unofficial
@JS96 @dfox
too bad... I'm sure @dfox didn't tested in production (joking... don't be too serious guys...)

Unofficial devRant API Documentation
(Remake of the old devRant-Docs site)

Me and the unofficial CTO (3rd party's CTO) are interviewing an ios dev. (I'm an android dev, btw)

CTO: In your view, would you find developing an ios app would be faster or at the same speed as an android dev?

Me: *shock*

Canidate: I've never developed on Android before, but I'd think it would be the same speed. We both need to make screens, views, and type code.

I fucking hate the Internet

day before Yesterday, I was searching for a software on internet(which is not free) I found a site (unofficial) giving me both free full & trial version. so I thought, why not get the full version. I downloaded it, installed it. awesome.

everything was going great until I found out that all of my files in a folder were encrypted by some WankDecrypt. I was lucky the files in that folder were useless. but next day some mysterious links started to pop up into my browser. and today some fucking wank decentralized shit started eating up my ram. FML

Somebody fucking stuck his shit with cracked version of software. so beware devs.

How Youtube deters unofficial downloaders.... It's really fast for 90% of the download. Then the final 10% is slow as hell...

Maybe will never actually finish... perhaps they're using the halving algo where in theory it never reaches the end

I started working at my company a year ago.
Back then I was just graduating from sofware engineering degree.
The position was Junior Web Dev, But actually it is full stack developer.
When I joined I wanted salary X (because I "got offers"), which was a bit above what big companies like Intel gives to graduates back then.
The offered back 80% of it, which was a bit more than was most graduates got in startups.
I settled on their offer and we agreed that after a year I'll get the raise if I'll do good.

A year passed.
The team leader left for a bigger company, and I became the unofficial team leader (and was always the scrum master )
Bare in mind that there are two developers that are in the company for 2-3 years, yet I got the unofficial roll.

We had the talk, and my manager asked me straight away "under what salary would you start to search other jobs? We want to keep you here"
I said that under my initial X salary that we agreed a year ago.
He claimed to have forgotten that we agreed on 20% raise.
I answered that it's the least I ask, beneath it and I'll start looking for another job.

He replied that he'll do his best to make the owner give me that.

A week passed and I got no update....

What should I do in your opinion?

18 commits later, the unofficial documentation has been ported over to GitBook.

The documentation now lives in a private repo on GitHub which is hooked up to a CI tool to build the book when a commit is pushed.

This will make maintaining the documentation much easier and also allow for collaboration which was previously not possible.

Because this documentation contains some endpoints some of you might not even know about, access is provided on a invite-only basis which is controlled by @dfox.

For new requests, contact @dfox with your name and what you are planning to build.

If you have already created something with the API email me at support@nblackburn.uk with your name and a link and I will send you a invite.

The 19th day each month is the German unofficial "tax payer day". Because we start working for our own salary, not for taxes...

when will the next update roll out? (devrant unofficial uwp)

I think the changelog will be an essay.....

@JS96

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

Hmmmm..... Dark or light?

Contest is over. I accidentally submitted broken code at the last minute so this is my unofficial placement.

Gotta love software engineers. I'm writing some python to generate PDFs, so start by looking at chrome command line, which will be some headache with temp files and other madness.

Then find puppeteer, which does exactly what I want, but requires NodeJS.

Then find the unofficial python port, with a 5 line example of pretty much what I need to do.

!rant

I often have the problem of messing up my Linux installation, it gets unstable or the desktop envoirment gets slow / unresponsive

I want to switch to Ubuntu (with budgie) for quite a while but I'm afraid I mess up my system again...

Any tips for an inexperienced Linux person? tips to keep your system healthy and stable, tings to avoid when installing (like adding unofficial ppa...)
Thank you in advance 💙
(also how do you deal with errors? Do you just search the internet and try it out? ((and yes, I did brick a few installations 'trying it out')) 😅)

I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.

Does the devRant API provide for authenticating and posting new rants?

I've found several unofficial docs that mention grabbing rants and profiles but none that I've found have a method to post rants.

Chatgpt in my Whatsapp chat!!

Thx to the unofficial chatgpt npm package

UNOFFICIAL DEVRANT CLONE JAM

Challenge at least 3 participants of this spontaneous hackathon by presenting your devRant clone until tomorrow, 4 Dec 18:00 UTC! After that, I will repost entries for public rating by people of devRant.

Don't fret and show what you're made of. Each participant gets a certificate from dR Bulletin Board - and winners receive extra artistic prizes contributed by volunteers!

I have so many thoughts I literally cannot scream

I don't know where to go and find what I'm looking for
is this the world I remember? scrolled through some current events and this isn't the world I grew up in in the 90s
it's strange life goes on like that
and my teeth keep cracking and will probably fall out of my mouth
I've learned all of dentistry and that ain't it
and the AIs are told to be contradictory and when you catch them they cease communicating
and the search don't work
and forums don't exist
this isn't the world I remember
where you could find real people and real things
it's such a strange world

there's new fads,
people care about weird things... not like actors, but whole technology stacks,
everything is work is stressful, how to be a "leader" (wtf), look at this muffin I made, anti-aging foods or some nonsense, some dude survives on an island for 7 days
I remember when the Internet was like "how to install a printer!"

I've been looking around for stuff to buy, like I wanted a treadmill for a standing desk but they're all sus. I wanted a lamp but they're all sus. I wanted a Roomba but they're all sus. all the pictures are photoshopped on every site, the reviews look fake or outright are 90% "got product for free" and it even states so in the disclaimer, or just plain most things don't have a single rating
it's like the whole economy is dead
why did everyone decide to resell lamps, treadmills, and roombas, wtf
nobody wants this shit. I mean I wanted it but not from scammers. and you can't find not scammers.

there's no real news (like exciting shit), there's no real stuff, there's no real people
I guess life just goes on, we're just parasites on a rock hurdling through space
things I was sentimental about are gone now
I don't even know what people do. I guess everyone my age does meetups and retarded middle-age going to die in their house shit, and I'm stuck at 12 year old shit poster
and anyone interesting got gobbled up by a university and made unofficial nerd clubs and have personal phone calls or something to discuss cool things, but I hated the snobbiness and never fit in with those due to my punchiness, willingness to sound retarded and sometimes gender

it's strange to see articles for dating. I used to have such unified theories about everything, but things have changed so much it's not like slightly off but I just looked outside my window and I appear I'm on an alien planet now

something something mortality I guess. makes me wonder if just the random-ass direction societies take is all that matters. but then why would that even matter anyway? I've always been such a perfectionist, and been lauded for predicting the future everywhere, but somehow I feel blindsided
I don't get the point
I feel like some metamorphosis is happening
but I don't know what I'm giving birth to
I guess it's not the right way to do things but just the way you want to do things
people my age focus on the upbringing they had but I'm not fond of being defined by things I didn't choose, it just doesn't meet my perfectionistic standards you see
it's strange to want to go in a direction but being so out of touch you don't know how
I used to spend so many evenings reading everything and finding the weirdest things nobody knew about
but these things are so hard to find
or are they? maybe I'm mixing my unconscious stuckness to my own familiarity with feeling caged in
word of mouth used to exist but now it's a promo that gets you banned
reddit is a ghost town with the amount of people they banned
and people are so weird now. you enter a room you never get anything interesting
how many uninteresting places is there per interesting place?
if I don't know where to go to find what I'm looking for I need to go everywhere and survey everything so I can itemize and know how to navigate in the directions I'm looking for

maybe it's the crushing defeat in realizing muting tactics work
that barrier to do a task will drop the lazy, but eventually even the relentless can't find their way out because every step is so far

maybe I thought of the world as an infinite garden of infinite gifts, and it's like it's coming to an end. the party ends. but I don't like anything else

i am indeed working for some fun litte projects with the Dev Rant Unofficial Wrapper API and it looks good to use it! Now. Lets make some Action!

Hey dfox, judging by their FAQ I bet you've heard of the unofficial API docs. How often would be appropriate to call the dR API? Would once every for minutes be too much?

TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...

Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.

For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.

Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.

I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.

And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...

Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.

I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.

I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.

The end.

During the time I've been part of the DevRant community, I've noticed that users (including myself) sometimes contribute posts that are not quite rants. These are sometimes posts about the DevRant itself, reaching out to the community for assistance on a project, etc.
This inspired me to create an unofficial Slack chat for the DevRant community. I call it MetaRant.
If you'd like to join then please send an email to:
ericfledderman at me dot com

Spent days to setup a newer-Android version with reverse-proxy-HTTPS certificate in its CA store + one that'd support Google Play and signing in (old school man-in-the-middle).
FINALLY got the API calls of this 1 app whose unofficial client I wanted to make coz their main sucks ass. Just to get stuck on the phone-number-based OTP that they use for their login (:

They send a unique token for each OTP request, I assumed they're using some hard-coded string based function, which they decrypt on their backend to verify.
Downloaded their APK and decompiled. Went through dozens of weird-ass-named classes (coz decompiled). For the 2nd time I thought I had it!

But no -.- they call Google's Firebase messaging for the phone-num OTP n that function simply called firebase, looked into that service n ofc it's very tightly coupled with the calling API's backend

It was fun while it lasted I guess~~~

Fuck the lineage install fcked something up big time on my OnePlus 6...

No more flashing unofficial roms...

I tried flashing stock several times... still cant get past the boot screen witch the animation.

Never happened before.... cant even access storage from TWRP.... fck....

Any ideas? Even if i restore the stock image, it just keeps showing the booting screen.

Unofficial DevRant Meetup at the Alteryx Conference?

What's up with unofficial remixes on Spotify having the exact same name as the sampled tracks without any indication it's a remix. So annoying

Soo... me and my best friend decided to go literally "wherever" by plane for as cheap as we can (<50€ per person for a return ticket) and I am looking for a service that offers a free API to search for plane tickets as it would make my and her life much easier if I could just write a program, let it run on my Raspberry Pi and make it send me an email whenever it finds some cheap tickets. I noticed that Google lets you search for cheap plane tickets, but is there an API (even unofficial) that I could use?

Trying to write a program a la `man` in ncurses and just, is this hell?

I just want a floating header, a scrollable main body that reads from a file, and a command line footer, why is that so difficult? I finally got it to handle resizing terminals but now I need to try to compile it for windows, which does have unofficial ports of ncurses, but I have no idea how to use them.

Should I just restrict the windows version to a non-interactive command instead of a TUI like I want?

The feeling when you find an attempt for an unofficial devRant app in your favorite framework...

*jumps* ^^

Markdown admonitions are unofficial extra's to the spec to render basic info/warning/note alert boxes. There were already 2 syntaxes for these:

Supported in python-markdown, Mkdocs, marked js extension: 3 exclamation marks followed by a type, and indenting its contents by 4 spaces:
!!! note

Supported by Docusaurus & extended by Nuxt.js as "MDC" or "markdown components": 3 or more colons followed by a type, and with an end delimiter:
:::note
:::

So why the fuck did Github have to go for this retarded syntax mixing blockquotes with half the syntax of an image link instead of following in the footsteps of others?

> [!NOTE]
>

Whenever I update OxygenOS on my OP6 I try installing ther latest unofficial Lineage...

And if it fails... I install the full OTA ROM from fastboot.

Lineage failed... :(

I wanted to explore the devRant API. But couldn't find any resource. I know it's unofficial but there has to be a minimal wiki with the endpoints available right? Could someone point me to it?

In an unofficial iCloud help app: You'll receive 5gb free with your account. That's quite a lot - more than 4gb for example.

Well at least I don't have to setup iCloud for my family anymore.

After reading through an article by EFF about Google's new FLoC technology, I finally woke up and realized that Google isn't any different from the other huge organizations, and that it isn't here to fight for greater user privacy and rights... As such, I made a switch, going from Google to DuckDuckGo.

Sure, I still use YT, but other than that, I don't have a gmail address that'd be of importance, don't use their search engine, and now...

Got any tips on how to minimize tracking potential of an android-based rooted smartphone? (Stock rom, Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro). I know using a custom rom is an option, however, Lineage isn't officially supported for this model of phone, and I still value functionality over anything else, so... Unofficial daily drive OS is sub-optimal.

Alternative hardware solutions like PinePhone, although nice in theory, are way too behind the commercial brands in terms of technology and features, so that's a no go.

I really hoped for an official UWL version of DevRant... At least there is a really good unofficial one!

That moment when you get started as a junior frontend and end up having to design a couple databases. I dont know shit about that. 😱 also in between I happen to become sort of unofficial IT staff in this music school. I'm confused. Not a proper rant, but just wtf? At least I'm getting money... someday. Maybe. 😲
At least I'll have my voice and piano lessons covered. 🌟

Finally my laptop is back and it's keyboard problem, thanks for official repair stop. Other two unofficial repair stops told me it's main board problem, FUXK THEM.

Looking for Starbound modding LUA examples
Download unofficial modding book and found out json examples...

Tried moving over to Fedora only to notice the goXLR audio interface doesn’t work on Linux tried some unofficial drivers but you need to run those in the vm or whatever to get it to work.

So question, does anyone know of any audio interfaces similar for Linux with some sound channel rockers potentially.

@dfox I know it's the unofficial app but I also know you guys supported it a lot. I think you should add a windows store link to the website next to ios and android ones.

Arg! I'm ranting about the unofficial devrant extension nuuuuu!!!!!
I can't attach images, every time I click attach image and select the image, the notification box disappears and upon reopening, it's refreshed! Why bother with the link if it's gonna do dat!
Haxk20 wherever you are, heed my words!
(I felt guilty writing this mini rant)