I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

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.

*sees that the high voltage generator kit got delivered today*
Cool, let's build this thing and integrate it into my old bugzapper! Mosquitos beware 😈

*starts building the kit, all is going very well*
Oh wow, isn't it Monday? But it's taking only 15 minutes of soldering and everything goes super smooth.. what divine power is giving me such good luck?

Alright, last thing, the transformer and then this circuit is done!!!

*solders in the transformer without realizing that the wires are coated, and the solder isn't protruding through*
Fuck. Time to desolder this shit and blast the wires with my lighter to flash that coating right off!

*engages solder pump and solder goes off extremely easily, because it only adhered to the pad*
*takes off transformer*
Me: "Nnngh..!!! Get off you piece of junk!!!"
Transformer: "Hmph!! I will stay in here no matter what!"
Me: "Get the fuck off already!!! 😡"
Transformer: *leads break off* "Alright, but these leads stay here!!!"
Me: "MotherFUCKER!!!"

Yep, it's Monday after all.

An entire night I've spent on this shit.. preparing wires, soldering them on the motherboard, and finally connecting everything up to current meters, my PC's USB port and a lithium cell from my old Doogee phone that I still had laying around. All in the hopes to get an adb shell. But all in vain.. the turd doesn't even want to boot up. What a fantastic waste of time 😑
(Apologies for the terrible picture quality btw, this tablet's camera is absolute garbage)

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

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

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

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

TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!

*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*

But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎

But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?

*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?

*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!

*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*

Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?

*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.

*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<

*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...

Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.

Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.

What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.

5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.

And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒

Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.

Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?

Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑

I fucking hate holidays. Every goddamn time when it's a holiday, that's when I need to go to the store and get something, only to find out that they're closed. And what for.. holidays are - to me at least - no more than an excuse for people to not go to work for the day.

So, now I ran out of booze, and can't continue developing and testing my breathalyzer until Monday.

Then it hit me.. what if I take all my Arduino equipment (laptop, jumper wires, ...) to the café and deploy my build environment on a table there?

Eh, no no no. I don't want some idiot to come up to me saying "YOU EVIL HEKORMAN!!!" and have to explain that just like when you call a banker who's working with the money vaults a thief, it's wrong to call someone that's developing shit an evil hacker.. one should strive to not throw mindless accusations out of unknowingness. Not that I'm a good example of that though. But still.

It's probably that or some stupid bitch coming up to me asking to hack her boyfriend's Phasebuk.. that said, that could probably be an opportunity to get in her pants. But then, I don't wanna insert my meat in an idiot like that... ._.

So, no booze it is then? Thanks national holidays!

"Ok Google, remind me every day before a holiday because I really couldn't care less about them!!"

I just completed my first live soldering project...

Converted my son's mobile (dangly plush animals and music not cell phone) from using 4 X C batteries (LR14) to using an AC-DC transformer

I hardwired it at 6v and it worked, and I didn't burn myself, and I cut a little gap for the wire and it's really snug so the solder is under no tension.

I tinned the wires beforehand like I knew what I was doing and for once I didn't fuck it up!

Sorry, just had to tell someone. The wife's asleep and she just won't understand.

Is the software at your company so bad that it's a miracle that anything works?

Does it feel like this colossal pile of broken electronics from the past 30 years duct taped together and patched with multiple tiers of adapters, wires spliced together with scotch tape, and someone on stand by with a fire extinguisher?

Do you feel like getting your product to work is like how we used to get things to work back in the eighties? Not just turning things off and on again, but things like hitting the tv to make it work again, blowing into cartridges, and the feeling of pulling on the starting cord on a gas powered mower over and over again to no avail?

That is exactly what my company's codebase is. A huge amorphous, heterogenous pile of shit that somehow works and occasionally has to be massaged to make it work again. Fuck my life.

When working with hardware some mistakes can be literally painful. Thankfully this was all during undergrad and I'm only around computer hardware now lol.

>Misprogrammed a software kill switch so a sensor that should not have been sending data was actually sending data which caused the system to activate a piston that went WHAM! into the face of a teammate working on replacing some part of it...

>Misprogrammed a controller so it drew too much power from the supply and the puny supply wires literally burst into flame and fell across my arm.

>Spun a 9000rpm CNC spindle the wrong way and caused an attached screw to go rocketing upwards instead of downwards and almost break the (pretty expensive) thing (uh...we were trying to use it as a power screwdriver essentially but I set the rpm to about 100x what I wanted and the direction wrong so yeah).

>Switched a -1 with a +1 in a robot's control system sending it careening into a teammate's leg... let's just say mecanum wheels are paaaainful.

My wife's phone started having power button issues. Then it broke completely with spastic random presses, causing the phone to boot loop. It's a 3 year old Nexus 5 so I was mostly concerned with backing things up, not rescuing it.

Cleaning didn't work, tapping the switch didn't work. This hack worked.

Backup complete.

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

Fffffuuuucccckkkkkkkkkk!!

My team and I had a presentation scheduled and we worked on it for more than a month.

A bloody fucking month long preparation.

We went through multiple reviews with stakeholders which weren't necessary and no other team does.

I put on some music to lift up my energy levels while I waited anxiously.

Show time.

We have one of the largest city festival going on this week.

The community in neighbouring building started reciting prayers out loud on a PA system just when the presentation began.

~40 folks and me struggling on video to not lose my cool and fuck my luck, I went nervous because I couldn't focus.

That's when my big boss pointed out that there some background noise and I had to explain it to them.

My very first presence and I forgot to even introduce myself. What a nut head I am.

I am annoyed and angry at myself. I perform well impromptu over planned and preparedness.

Thankfully my team mate who talks a lot and my designer, handled things well and saved the day.

Massive respect for them and kick in nuts for me.

Uuugggghhh!!

Also my neighbour is renovating his entire house and since I am using it as my workspace, I literally sit in between junk and cement and wires all around.

What a messy wasted day it was.

You do know that "why do I need you if I can copy-paste code from SO?" joke floating around, right? Today I had a real-life situation perfectly illustrating it.

So I bought a set of parking sensors. Cheap ones, from AliExpress. Prolly the cheapest ones I could find. Installed them w/ engine turned off. All seemed fine. Cleaned it all up, got ready to go, started the engine and beeeep beeep beeepeeeeep beepp ..... beeeeeeeeep.

fuck.

Tried unplugging/replugging them one-by-one to find the faulty one. Nada. Apparently they all were false-alarming. They must all be bad, bcz they seem to work well w/ engine turned off (ignition on) and only false-alarm when engine is on.

Allright, I'll get a new set next weekend, a more expensive one and replace them again.

There goes my €20 and another week basically w/o parking sensors (car length is >5 meters, so sensors do help a lot).

Today I spend a few hours removing my rear bumper again, replacint all the sensors, wiring, etc. Tests show promising results - all sensors seem OK even w/ engine on! Close it all up, start a car again and.... beeep bep bep beeep beeee..eeeeppp.

MOTHER FUCK!

Another 30min-hour goes by while looking for a possible culprit. And I found it. The fix could did not take longer than 5 seconds. Apparently a wire feedint the sensors' controller was too close to sensors' wires. All I had to do is to push that wire a lil further from the controller with my index finger.

I could have saved €30, a week of time, half a day of work if I only knew what wire to [literally] poke.

shit...

was trying to present a project to an audience.

Apple VGA adapter got jammed.

my friend was a little too strong in pulling it out and the adapter wires got ripped out.

i see hot glue on the parts where the output wires connect to the circuit board.

yes! hot glue! now you know why it came out so easily!

i think you guys can imagine what happened to my presentation..

Thanks Apple!

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

and the wires emerged like tentacles from their sockets and you don't know what goes where.

fml

What boss? I quite enjoy being my own boss, and just dicking around with whatever projects I feel like doing at the time 😋
The salary on the other hand is just as nonexistent as my boss 😥 but I don't want to inherit some douche's "server" contrivance with spaghetti wires dangling all over the place...

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.

The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.

I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.

I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.

We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.

"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"

"Duh of course -- but let me check..."

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the years I slowly bought more Arduino boards and stuff. But then RadioShack closed shops in my country. So my inventory has remained relatively small.

But now I have been given a ton of stuff. Boards, sensors, wires. More than what I know what to do with.

Someone, please give me a cool project to make.

So last year I sent my PC to get a motherboard replacement, as I couldn't be arsed replacing it or even research what motherboard I should get(was dealing with more urgent personal matters).

Anyway, I get it back and everything works good but not the front USB port.. I always found it weird, but also didn't bother to open the case and double check, so I let it go and assumed, since the motherboard was fried, that the USB wires were faulty.

Time passes by and I decide to open the case for annual cleaning job... Turns out the motherfucker didn't connect the port, why?? Fucks knows why... Obviously the wires were "short" and he didn't even try to pull it out further!!! You little piece of shit,for a full year I've been living with a missing usb port, the fucking front facing mother fucking usb port. Fuck.

Moral of story? Don't be a lazy ass and fix your shit on your own!

Client emails and asks why a certain element appears on particular page of their website. I respond by saying that they'd asked me to place it there. I then find and forward them the email in which they requested that I place the element on the page. Client replies to forwarded email, "What is this in relation to?".

I must stress that this was all in the space of about two minutes and no other emails were exchanged in-between; there was zero possibility of crossed wires.

!dev. Been working on a simple and 'cheap-ish' enclosure for my resin printer to evacuate fumes out a window. 100% not the best or cleanest looking method but I like it. I don't usually do things with my own two hands so this was kinda fun. Probably will do a V2 in the future with my brother teaching me to do more hands on skills. And a MUCH cleaner end result. This was him telling me what i needed to do and me figuring out the how on my own lol

Now to finish v1 I just gotta put the fan controller outside where I can physically touch it. Cut holes for its wires. Then foam anywhere that stick on door foam didn't work that air can escape. Ohhh and attach the actual duct and window parts

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

What is with me and my headphones ? 4 headphones , all broken after 4 to 5 months of use and one recent headphone rendered unusable after 1 month . I am going to ditch wired headphones for good ! That fragility of the wires near the connector .. I suspect they are intentionally made fragile to frustate the customer and make them buy a new one !! :(

I was trying to recover an external hdd, which was not spinning at all.

I started by changing the enclosure, using the SATA port, using another enclosure, now the only possible culprit is pcb.

On testing with multimeter I figured TVS diode was damaged, and since I don't have immediate access to a new pcb, I opened one of my old hdd and desoldered pcb from there and using wires I attached this salvaged TVS diode to the pcb.

It didn't work.

During the research, I came across the fact that different manufacturers make different pcbs, what the hell, I wish there could be some standardisation so people could just swap things easily instead of finding another hdd of the same model just to salvage the pcb.

Did they fire Jony Ive and we all missed it?
Seriously, I'll have to stick to my iPhone 6 one more year, with every single android fanboy making my life miserable for having an outdated phone!
And those stupid airpods...
What the hell, cutting off the bloody wires doesn't make them exactly the next big thing, more like the dumbest!

going to redecorate my room with a plasma/glowing/physics theme to the best i can afford. i've a lubbeen plasma ball, some lasers, a smart mirror. gonna try to get (or make) tesla coils. gonna glue my rpi to the wall and put the wires alongside it. what else would you guys add?

i want to add a projector maybe. is there anything else you guys would add? maybe a cool lamp? also, any ways to add in another rpi/arduino other than the smart mirror that you guys can think of?

Before he began dropping the 20K proposed to remodel my flat, I told my father I much preferred a contractor who was recommended by someone I knew, as opposed to using a big corporation like Home Depot. FAMOUS LAST... a neighbour in my building highly recommended the contractor we chose. And, week 7 [or is it 8?] of what was proposed to take no longer than two weeks has begun afresh!
On Friday the fellow who is the owner of the contract remodeling company was here touching the paint. He was here because I forbade the two painters he sent to do the initial painting job.
My internet cut out suddenly around 1300 Friday. He set to leave for the weekend shortly after that. I mentioned the outage to him. The essence of his reply was that there was no way it could have had anything to do with him. The following day, my internet provider sent a tech out to diagnose the problem. What was the problem? The head of the remodeling firm removed a face plate from the wall where there were telephone wires and disconnect them when he tore the wires as he replaced the face plate.
Although the tech told me he wasn't going to charge my account the $85.00 fee for his services because the outage was caused within my flat, I wish to be sure of this. Which brings us to the punchline.
My internet provider is a lame ass business model, dreamed up by a squint-eyed ex-circus monkey, never well endowed in the top story, and now just plain sad.
There were some 911 outages in Washington State last Thursday night. All during the day Friday when you dialled their freephone #. the recorded announcement, before saying anything else, told you they were experiencing heavier than usual call volumes, and my wait would be greater than `10 minutes. Fine. What fried my La Croix silk was that after their customer service dept closed for the weekend, that outgoing message remained.
Today, I wanted to contact my provider to see if they would know if the $ was going to be charged to my account. After pressing the 'send' key, my computer came back with an error message, saying they were having technical difficulties. So, I went on over to the 'chat' page. There's nothing to click on to take me to this enfabled location. So, can't reach them by phone unless I want to hear, every 30 seconds whether or not I wish to, how sorry they are for my delay.
A few years ago I would've used this as an excuse to have a technicolour meltdown. The reason I'm posting this is that I am now able to see beforehand what I'll be doing to myself getting upset over the circumstances. When I do reach somebody, I'm going to tell them as lightly as possible, that if they were an airline, I wouldn't board any of their aircraft. Ever.

What Is the Standard Gauge for a Chain Link Fence?

Chain link fences are comprised of woven metal wires. The gauge of a chain link fence is the diameter of the wire that is used to build the fence. The higher the gauge number, the thinner the wire’s diameter, and conversely, the lower the gauge number, the thicker the wire’s diameter. Generally speaking, wire gauge ranges from about 6 gauge (.192” thickness) to 11 gauge (.120” thickness). The standard gauge for residential and commercial chain link fence is 9 gauge.

11-gauge chain link fences are used for temporary applications, such as concerts, parades, sporting events, or around construction sites. And, 6-gauge chain link fences are commonly used for high-security applications, such as around prisons or facilities with high-price items or materials onsite.