Woohoo! 32k achieved!!! Finally I can post some new rant without risking some sudden overshoot 😁

So putting celebrations aside for a minute, a while ago I've noticed a tingle when I stroke my finger across metal areas of my tablet, or the sides of my phone (which probably has metal near it too) while it's charging. And it's been bugging me ever since.

Now, some things to note are that it only happens when my feet are touching the ground though slippers, and that the frequency is so low that I can actually feel the tingle when I slide my finger across the material. This to me at least seems like electricity flows through me into ground, and touching the ground directly provides a path so easy for the electrons to run away that I don't feel it at all. But if I lift my feet off the ground entirely, I just get charged up and after that, nothing else happens.

So those are my ideas. The answers on the subject on the other hand.. absolute cancer. Unsurprisingly, most of them came from Apple users. Here's some of them.

https://discussions.apple.com/threa...
- I've not noticed it, but if you're concerned bring the phone to Apple for evaluation.
- Me too facing same problem.. did u visit apple care?
And one good answer at least...
- google emf sensitivity, its real. You are right, there is a small current flowing through your body, try to limit your usage. The problem with this issue is those who aren't affected (lucky ones for now) will tell you these products are 100% safe. To a degree they are, i used my ipod touch for about 2 years straight vwith virtually no symptoms. then the tingling started and it gets worse.You will get more sensitive to progressively less powerful things. I dont want to scare you but just limit your usage like i didnt do 🙂

Overall that discussion was pretty good actually, aside from "bring it to the Genius Bar, they'll know for sure and not just sell you another unit". But then there's Reddit.
https://reddit.com/r/iphone/...
- Ok, real reason is probably that the extension cord and/or outlet is probably not grounded correctly. Either that or you are using a cheap knockoff charger.
Either use a surge protector and/or use the authentic Apple Charger.
- It's not the volts that hurt you, it's the amps
- I think you are in deep love with your phone. That tingling sensation is usually referred to as "love" in human language.
- Do less acid, I would advise.

Okay, so that's the real cancer. Grounding issue sounds reasonable despite it being wrong. Grounding is actually not needed when your charging appliance doesn't have any exposed metal parts. And isolation from high voltage to low voltage side actually happens through things like routering holes into the PCB, creating spark gaps, and using galvanic isolation through things like optocouplers. As for a surge protector? I'm using them to protect my PC and my servers, but the only purpose they serve is to protect from.. you guessed it.. voltage surges, like lightning bolts hitting the grid. They don't do shit for grounding or reducing this tingle! What a fucking tool.

It's not the volts that kill, it's the amps.. yeah I'm sure that the debunking of that is easy to find. Not gonna explain that here. And the rest of it.. yeah it's just fucking cancer.

Now what's the real issue with this tingle? It's actually a Class-Y rated (i.e. kV rated) capacitor that's on the transformer of any switch-mode power supply, including phone chargers. If memory serves me right, it helps with decoupling the switching noise and so on. But as it's connected to the primary side of the transformer, if the cap is sufficiently large and you are sufficiently sensitive, it can actually cause that tingle by passing a fraction of the mains electricity into your body. It's totally safe though, as the power that these caps pass is very small. But to some, it's noticeable.

Hope you found this interesting! And thanks a lot for bringing me to 2^15. I really appreciate it ♥️

This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715

The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.

So I snitched first.

The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.

Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.

I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.

On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.

"Damn, if only he just... did the work."

Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).

And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.

"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.

Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.

So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.

Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s

So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.

The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"

... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.

Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.

</rant>

P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.

This app (https://f-droid.org/app/...) is bugging me for months. I have the feeling that one is possible and the others are just jokes.

I need to write something using https://nuget.org/packages/... because it’s bugging me. But I don’t know what.