2019 resolutions/goals recap: (non-personal ones)
1) Improve diet (did; e.g. ramen and fast food to clean keto)
2) Lose weight (did; lost 24 pounds!)
3) Find a good job (did, twice)
4) Buy a harp (did not; large and expensive, no place to put it, and I have small children who would absolutely break it)
5) Keep house clean, even if it's by myself (did, somewhat; I cleaned some, managed to get one other person to clean semi-regularly, and another sporadically)
6) Work on social awkwardness (did; read and applied Dale Carnegie's The Art of Public Speaking, which netted me my last job offer. Still pretty awkward though)
7) Move out of the desert (did not; not enough money, and job didn't allow remote work)
8) Stop bloody waiting on people (did not; still very guilty of this...)

I don't remember the rest 🙁 didn't write them down last year. But I still accomplished 5 out of the 8 I remembered, with one being a pass, so 5/7!

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2020 resolutions/goals:
1) Finally move out of the desert
2) Invest 20% of my income every month
3) Reduce bills by 20%
4) Solve/address some health issues
5) Make a schedule so things regularly get done around the house, e.g. cleaning
6) Find some friends and make time for them
7) Replace Debian with something else
8) Revamp my backup system
9) Be proactive and stop waiting on people
10) Build a (stationary) coil gun for fun

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

The last year my school installed MagicBoards (whiteboard with beamer that responses to touch) in every class room and called itself "ready for the future of media". What they also got is A FUCKING LOW SPEC SERVER RUNNING DEBIAN 6 W/O ANY UPDATES SINCE 2010 WHICH IS DYING CONSTANTLY.

As I'm a nice person I asked the 65 y/o technician (who is also my physics teacher) whether I could help updating this piece of shit.

Teacher: "Naahh, we don't have root access to the server and also we'll get a new company maintaining our servers in two years. And even if we would have the root access, we can't give that to a student."

My head: "Two. Years. TWO YEARS?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU RETARDED PIECE OF SHIT?! YOU'RE TELLING ME YOU DON'T HAVE TO INSTALL UPDATES EVEN THOUGH YOU CREATE AN SSH USER FOR EVERY FUCKING STUDENT SO THEY CAN LOGIN USING THEIR BIRTH DATE?! DID YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IN YOUR LITTLE MISERABLE LIFE OR SOUNDS 'CVE-2016-5195' LIKE RANDOM LETTERS AND NUMBERS TO YOU?! BECAUSE - FUNFACT - THERE ARE TEN STUDENTS WHO ARE IN THE SUDO GROUP IF YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!"

Me (because I want to keep my good grades): "Yes, that sounds alright."

1) Install Debian 9
2) Select GNOME
3) Hate GNOME
4) Uninstall GNOME
5) Install LXDE
6) Love GNOME

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

Me: I've been using ubuntu with i3 for 6 months. Is awesome. Everything works great.
Brain: Have you seen debian or arch linux. They're better than ubuntu. Just try' em
Me: Brain shut up. I don't have time to reinstall everything + I'll 100% fuck my pc up. I'll do it another time.
Brain: Trust me. I know what's better for you. Try it now
Me: No.
Brain: Pleeeeease.
Me: Ok fine.
Me: Now windows doesn't work, debian doesn't work. I need to format my hard drive and do this shit all over again.
Brain: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hey. Install arch linux.

Have you heard about the Embrace, Expand and Extinguish idealogy? lets think about it:

Javascript 5 (embrace) -> Typescript and Class syntax to Javascript 6 (extend) -> JS (extinguish) with WebASM.

Atom/Electron (embrace) -> Atom fork named "VSCode" (extend) -> Atom (extinguish) as it was developbed by Github company.

NodeJS (embrace) -> incompatible Node Windows fork with IE/Edge JS engine "Chakra" (extend) -> NodeJS (extinguish soon) with chaos of Typescript, Javascript 6 and Github.

"R" lang (embrace) -> incompatible SQL Server 2016 R lang extension (extend) -> R lang (extinguish soon).

Android -> CyanogenMod (embrace) -> CyanogenMod (extinguish) as M$ "sponsored" Cyanogen Inc to destroy CyanogenMod

Linux (prejudge) -> sponsors RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Alpine and Canonical/Ubuntu (embrace), forces unstable backdoored "systemd" -> Linux (extinguish soon)
Reusing the last image I did because I didnt wanted to make more OC stuff cos the few ++ gained arent worth it

Why the FUCK does this bloated Ubuntu rotten swamp corps of a former beautiful Debian always, really ALWAYS, FUCK UP distro upgrades!! Which retarded spoon shagger at Canonical came to the conclusion it were a good idea to release every 6 month, regardless of the inability to actually update this crap?!? My other systems run Arch since their first install back in 2009, still clean and up-to-date systems!!!!

some recent discoveries of mine:

- DOS FDISK has totally-undocumented CLI (partitioning with auto-format and OTF drive mapping... like one OEM used it for their machine recovery discs and no one else even knows it exists) docs coming soon (this is a lie i found this a year or two ago but forgot till yesterday)

- nuitka is a fucking blessing and the man who made it deserves so much love for it

- my existence is one massive waste of time

- apparently some B450 boards require you to hit a button and test your fans' min/max values and it takes like an hour and IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM VISIBLE FROM THE OS ASROCK YOU FUCKS

- the new Ryzen took my latest project's compile time from 30 hrs to like 6 because I can compile 12 things at once instead of just 4

- installing debian sucks ass now, they forgot to push part of apt to the 10.3 stable installer so you just can't install shit through apt until you fix that, though dpkg works

- apparently they pushed a grub-efi-amd64 version that breaks all efivars??? i know debian sid is like meant to be unstable but a bug like that should never have even been rolled into a package till it was fixed like ???????????

- depression sucks ass

Which linux distro is best?
1. Ubuntu linux
2. Manjaro linux
3. Pop os
4. Deepin os
5. Linux mint
6. Kali linux
7. Open SUSE
8. Garuda linux
9. Debian linux
10. Arch linux
11. Kde neon
12. Fedora
13. Redhat linux
14. Elementary os
15. Chrome os

If you know other best distros, let me know

First try on Debian to deploy dev environment, can't fix the grey screen cross cursor vnc issue with gnome regardless whatever solution on the internet.
Screw this shit wasted plenty my time. Reinstalled back CentOS 6.

Spend like 3 weeks in mem-checking with valgrind and ASAN, because there seemed to be some leaks. So painful and scary. You loose all confidence in your software, the checking tool, your own sanity.
Some spurious result prevailed, could only move it around. Boss could not reproduce the problem on his machine; Ubuntu 18 with GCC 7, mine was Debian 9 with GCC 6, so I tried older Ubuntu with GCC 5. Also no problem.
Fuck it, I'm switching to clang.