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)

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!

My first Android app which is clone of devRant. I hope the read only API available on github is not illegal!

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!

So.. We probably have thousands of rants on git and muggles here's one from me.

I've been roped into this ongoing project, guys with 1-1.5 years of experience are already working on it.

When they shared repo with me ...
I see 195 branches WTF! What are these idiots up to 🤔
And only handful of people working on project.

This one time I was merging branch with master ( branch #196) with master, guy sitting besides me asks me what I am doing I said it's good practice to pull before you push, right?(the line I remember reading here on devRant, I thought let's bee cool 😎 😋) And I explained him that I am merging 'em locally and will push once everything looks good ( I realized later that I shouldn't have wasted my couple of minutes explaining him)
He says don't waste your time and download (clone) the project folder(repo) from github and then paste or add your change to it.
Fuck you man, you should go fuck yourself instead of telling me that I'm wasting my time.

Sometimes I wonder, What do these guys think of github? Assholes, chutiya saale

Many people adviced me to clone apps so I can learn more about Android development. So I started with my favorite app, devRant :)

Rust noob Q:

Given x a variable on the heap, e.g.

let x = String::from("Hello, devRant!");

Then, given some function that I didn't write (from a library) that takes ownership of its argument:

fn some_function(y: String) -> bool { ... }

How would you handle this situation:

if some_function(x) {
another_function(x); // not ok, because x has gone out of scope in the line before
}

Is it idiomatic to just clone() x in the first call? That seems bad practice, because it's the second (or some other additional) call that needs x. What should I be doing instead?