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Search - "battery indicator"
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Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.
Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...
Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.
While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.
That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.
Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.4 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
2012 laptop:
- 4 USB ports or more.
- Full-sized SD card slot with write-protection ability.
- User-replaceable battery.
- Modular upgradeable memory.
- Modular upgradeable data storage.
- eSATA port.
- LAN port.
- Keyboard with NUM pad.
- Full-sized SD card slot.
- Full-sized HDMI port.
- Power, I/O, charging, network indicator lamps.
- Modular bay (for example Lenovo UltraBay)
- 1080p webcam (Samsung 700G7A)
- No TPM trojan horse.
2024 laptop:
- 1 or 2 USB ports.
- Only MicroSD card slot. Requires fumbling around and has no write-protection switch.
- Non-replaceable battery.
- Soldered memory.
- Soldered data storage.
- No eSATA port.
- No LAN port.
- No NUM pad.
- Micro-HDMI port or uses USB-C port as HDMI.
- Only power lamp. No I/O lamp so user doesn't know if a frozen computer is crashed or working.
- No modular bay
- 720p webcam
- TPM trojan horse (Jody Bruchon video: https://youtube.com/watch/... )
- "Premium design" (who the hell cares?!)14 -
Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.
Mandatory long rant warning
Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.
When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.
Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.
I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.
If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.
I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.
Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.
Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?
Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.
FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION6 -
Batteries don't like me anymore
Yesterday late evening I was out to bring a festive parcel to someone. I left home with 29% batt, went there and still had 27%. Made 3 short (~1min) calls and headed home. Opened Firefox and my phone crashed. WTF, how could FF crash Android? OS separation failure? I turn my phone back on and it says LOW BATTERY: 0%. wtf... With 27% I should have been good until the next morning with no problems! And now it went 27%→0% in a blink (literally).
Today I decided to stay on my lappy for the morning. YT videos to catch up to, dR posts to scroll through, etc. A few hours later laptop battery is drained down to 29%. I step away for a few minutes for a cup of coffee and when I come back - the battery indicator LED is glowing amber and OS says it's got 6% left
29%→6% in a few moments of idle. Riigghhhhttt.... And I thought I won't want anything for this Christmas.
I wonder what's the significance of 27/29% there...3 -
IOS 13 for my Ipad broke its battery indicator it's been stuck at 59% for the entire day. Just really hope it doesn't give up the ghost during the day...1