Someone steals my external monitor.
me: That's my monitor
thief: No its mine. See all my desktop icons are there.
me: speechless

The most famous ranter in devRant (maybe) rants now due to cleaning.

LG Ultrawide 29" monitor
Logitech bluetooth keyboard K380
Logitech wireless mouse B175
Rubber ducky

LG UltraPC laptop (not in pic)
- Intel core i5 7th gen
- 8gb ram
- 256gb ssd + external 1tb hdd
- NVIDIA GeForce 940MX

So turns out,using my external monitor as my primary monitor and my laptop as a second was an excellent idea.

So this was going to be a comment but damn!!!!

Windows is seriously about making life harder for power users now, every fucking update lately is moving more easy to change things and fucking hiding them inside hidden menus or stupid links that don’t make sense. I mean fuck I just want to turn on dual screen with my laptop (because for some bizarre reason, just showing the desktop on the plugged in monitor is so hard to do automatically, especially since I just plugged a hdmi cable in) and the fucker was gone with nothing but a “detect screens” button before it would use an external screen.

Fuck I’m so close to pulling the plug on windows, but Linux just doesn’t sell me for daily use (yet... it’s getting there though)

The fucking forced updates (yes I consider a random bsod due to a system interrupt, then as it reboots magically has updates awaiting... a forced update) are starting to get to me, the fucking thing half crashing and not responding due to a network transfer of files (the fucker was 5GB)

If it wasn’t for my gaming needs and someone can show me a very good alternative to MS Visio (I haven’t really found one yet) then I would swap over and just adjust to the not so great (imo) desktop environments.

Honestly remote work allowed me to stay productive but to make it more better:

* I usually isolate myself from the rest of the family so I can focus on work

* Taking breaks between sessions so I don't over-exert myself.

*Calming music (I don't know how calming Symphonic Metal is but it is to me)

Other than that, these are just my ways to keep myself efficient, aside from the additional setup my home setup needs which are a new external keyboard and a additional monitor (I use a laptop)

Additional notes: If you get burnt out too easily, try not extending your sessions for a entire day, you'd risk being devoid of motivation easily

So I have the new Mac book pro for 8 months now, always thought that the butterfly keyboard issue will never happen to me.

Until three days ago I noticed my space key is kinda sticky.
I have an external monitor so I don’t recall any time I spill water or food directly on the keyboard.

So I made an appointment for a walk in.

BUT this morning, I was like: man, fuck this shit and smashed the space key.

Now it’s fixed.

Good

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

So this is my setup,
An over heating partially broken laptop with external Monitor.. 😭😭

Show yours 🤔

Saw a fellow developer at my company was having a rough day last week. Hes only been a developer with the company for about 3 months and came in green as grass. I asked him what was wrong and he said he cant get access to the file he needs because his ssh program (winSCP) is "broken" I look over at his computer and see his window was stranded between the two external monitor screens where the only clickable area is one small pixel line against the window. He unplugged the monitors and the window was still off the screen. Apparently, he had done this, and stopped attempting to use winscp and tried another program he didnt know and was resigned to leaving the window floating in no man's land instead of googling how to get the window back into the screen.

We need a better recruiter.

My laptop is screwed. The laptop's monitor doesn't light up at all. An external monitor works with heavy artifacts.

This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).

Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.

A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.

In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.

All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.

Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon.

When the small display of the notebook has the double resolution of the big external monitor...

You know what you shouldnt do? Leave your bag with your work laptop at the stairs.

Woke up as normal today and helped the kids down the stairs without checking. Then I just heard how I stepped on something.

Lets say its a big crack in the middle of the screen and you see shit. But gladly it work with work with external screens so its just the screen that are damaged. So tomorrow I must either:

- Work as normal with an external monitor and simply wait to call the boss for fix until after christmas.

- Or call the boss and tell him how stupid I am and hope its okay and I van get a new one/fix this.

Right now I feel for the first one.

Fed up with f@_#-$&@_ Microsoft bullshit, computer refused to install IIS without a reboot first. Rebooted, got bluescreen with some error like APC_Index mismatch since it was hooked up to an external monitor (this has happened before, but only when booting into Windows, not Ubuntu), god knows why now since it was hooked up to same monitor before reboot and worked just fine. All this because some stupid school related task requires Visual Studio and a web project-solution that takes ages to run/debug which I would rather build and devug through attaching remote debugger to the running IIS-process. Instead I get into a boot-loop when the screen is connected, and when I connect the screen after a normal boot it restarts itself. Why is it always like this? Most of the time is spent just to setup the environment or making Windows work. F#&#_ this and the assignment, goodnight.

My productivity is dying for want of a second monitor. I've been hooking up a new-ish HP external LCD to my brand new HP Spectre laptop. Every time I do this, the laptop soon locks up. Won't launch programs, won't even let me click the Windows button to restart. Have to hard reset and go back to single 15" screen. THEY'RE THE SAME BRAND?! WHY ARENT THEY COMPATIBLE?!

TIL: new M2 MacBooks officially support only single external screen. Not even the Pro class supports dual. It supports single 6K monitor, but I've failed to find any userfriendly ways to get good tiling which would be equivalent to multi-monitor. The only native tilling is left/right split. TB3 can handle 3x2K or 2x4K, but Apple said "fuck you and your multi-monitor setup".
I ain't mad tho. The guy upgrading to M2 sold me his dual monitors for a really good price.

Can't fucking stand my tiny desk!!! It's only 23" x 45" (approx 58cm x 114cm)

I can hardly fit my mouse, keyboard, and laptop on the damn thing let alone an external monitor.

The only reason I can't get a larger desk is that we don't have any goddamn room for a decent sized work station in this shitty 800sqft apartment.

but luckily for me, I get the privilege and blessing to live in california! So this fabulous 800sqft; in all it's hickory-smoked horse taint glory costs over 2K a month in rent. Golly-Gee I sure am glad to be getting raked over the coals every month. IT FEELS FANTASTIC!!! /s

You haven't lived until you've experience the sheer power of a CRT monitor, hooked up to a 286/12, with a 2600 baud external zoom for m00fing the shit out of other users in chat, so your friends with leech accounts can help download the 38 pkzip files via ZMODEM.

Shit... gotta go! iCE just released the latest pack on Sanctuary, and my ANSI art is being featured as the welcome screen on Pair O' Dice.

305, bitches!!1one

I usually use external monitors. After I disconnect all monitors, why do some applications pretend it's monitor is still connected and appear outside the main screen?

A very tiny ant got inside one of my external monitor screen. How do I get it out? Also any suggestion to keep ants away from electronic stuff?

It seems like very version of Ubuntu I use at work has jank. Ubuntu 18.04 would have file managers that just die. After locking/unlocking the screen it would move windows between monitors. One window would seemingly cause other windows to have discoloration and I would see phantom objects text overlaid with what looks like transparency. This was all Gnome. Lots of little quirks that I just got used to.

Now I am running 22.04 and while a lot of jank went away I am getting new jank. Every once in a while if I move a window or bring a window up after hiding the window. The window will oversize across the screen like I zoomed in. Noticing this with Firefox. It goes back to normal size real quick. But it is kind of wild. Jank that stayed is my external monitor I have attached through hdmi takes its sweet time to reactivate after being asleep. This might actually be a weird hardware issue. This is also Gnome.

I just find it wild that this jank is there and we are like: "Oh well. At least it ain't MS Windows jank..."

Today I tried running Plasma Wayland again after a few months...well...I tried

What did I experience?
- Mouse cursor size jumping from small to big randomly
- Can't remember fucking window positioning between multiple workspaces, so when I reboot, all windows are in the last workspace
- Random freezes with external monitor plugged in
- Firefox scrolling is absolutely terrible, 5 fps at most, but only when external monitor is connected
- Mouse acceleration can't be completely turned off? Or the setting just didn't work? IDK
- Sometime I get the infamous window trail effect known from older Windows versions, but on mouse cursor

Are there some good external portable macbook pro monitors that have the vertical/portrait functionality? Also, it should be rechargeable and should not get power from my laptop when there's still a charge. (I use MBP 15" 2018 model)

We are agile at work (all use laptops, no permanent seats) and I need an extra portale monitor because there are no provided external monitors to use.

I was thinking of buying and iPad pro as a portable external monitor via catalina sidecar but it is laggy somehow and very expensive. Thanks! 🙂

Have you ever use Ubuntu (or any Linux that use Pango to render text) for a significant amount of time that you notice that text in Mac OS is just not that crisp? To the point that it looks blurry, even more so in non-retina display.
I want to justify buying new Macbook for that sweet M1 silicon, but I don't think I can live with the blurry text. I rarely use built-in display on a laptop, but it is hard to find external monitor with Retina resolution (200+ dpi) with decent size, or ultrawide for that matter.

Grr.
I have been struggling with schema compare and editing anything SQL related in Visual Studio for a couple of weeks now. Cursor constantly flickering, can't click on anything, and actually running the compare results in Visual Studio disappearing in puff of smoke.
I'd put it down to an update, but then this week's update didn't fix it.
Turns out it is a "feature" that Microsoft has been refusing to fix for over a year now, where none of the SQL stuff in VS works properly on a 4k external monitor. And of course I only started trying to use that stuff on my 4k monitor since I have been working from home.
Dragging VS across to the laptop screen solves the problem (and is the Microsoft fix), but I think I now need to visit the optician to get new glasses to see WTF is going on.

!rant

When connecting your laptop to an external monitor do you place your laptop to the left or right of the monitor?

🍷 Wine Q:

No, not about the drink, you alcoholic! About the Wine Is Not an Emulator.

When I run a full screen app (a game) on my MacBook with an external monitor, how can I run the game on that monitor? It starts full screen on my MacBook's screen and can't be moved to the other screen. Well, I can move the 'window' (it's borderless) to the other desktop, but it immediately minimises to the dock. Opening the app again moves the window back to the first screen.

So in other words: how do I properly do display management in Wine?

Every day is tempting to me..tempting to use some solutions i am not sure that i can handle it.

The Company i work for has an external IT Partner that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to our infrastructure, like installing servers, doing the installations and such. I mostly monitor it and do basic maintenance. Its all windows.

Recently i thought about adding a fifth Hyper V instance for an intranet webserver...based on some linux distro (probably ubuntu cause that is what i am familiar with). But i am not THAT familiar with ubuntu or any linux distro..buts its just the intranet and i already installed nginx and apache with success, what could go wrong?

today i sketched some intranet websoftware our production might find useful to collect data input from our workers (we are somewhat small so there is no big ERP software as of now). When thinking how to realize the data input i thought that maybe a basic raspberry and some cheap 1280x800 10.1 inch touch panels would be best..its very tempting, but on the other hand i am not sure i am ready for that, my experience is shallow and only based on my own RaPi that i 99,99% run headless. On the other hand it would be a very small and space safing concept..and cheap..compared to the use of Laptops (the go to company solution when computers are needed).

It also had the risk that i am the only one that could unfuck anything if things go south..it also has the advantage that i am the only one who could fix things when it goes south...

so much temptation

So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.

But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.

In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.

To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:

1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset

I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.

Why, Apple? WHY.

After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?

And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.

Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.

I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.

People of devRant, I need your help! I am finally buying a new laptop - ive been using a Dell N4140 for the past 4 years and I absolutely love it. But it's about time to retire the machine and upgrade.

I'm a programmer, I don't play games and haven't used windows in the last 2 years. Im looking for a 4-8GB RAM under $1000K. I plan to replace the HDD with an SSD. 13' is too small a screen and i feel 15.6' is slightly on the large side. I have a 21' external monitor anyway. My old dell was 14' and i loved it. And looks really matter for me. Alsooo, I dislike having a number pad. Its useless for me.

I know I'm picky. I can't afford a MacBook right now (about to graduate from university), but if you could help me in finding the right laptop, I'd be really grateful!

The texts appear a gazillion times better on the external monitor when I am running windows 10 on Bootcamp compared with when I am running MacOS.
Monitor settings (like resolution and size and connection) exactly same in both cases. 🤷🏻

Thinking very VERY seriously about pushing the button on this.

iMac 10-core Xeon W, 64GB DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64X, 2TB SSD

$6,727 plus tax $403.62 and then another hundred for shipping before fucking December in 'rona.

Could sign up for Apple Pay and do $600 payments for 12 months 0 APR... shouldn't be too bad of a problem provided the world holds together that long... And if it doesn't, then this is my last computer... and I guess it'd be nice to go into the afterworld with a freshly upgraded rig.

IDK, Please talk some sense into me about how stupid this would be.

Also to factor in... I need to buy a new machine one way or another SOON. Or else I need to wipe my main and be out of commission for at least 3-4 days which could cost me a few grand on its own... and then also still buy a lesser mac for my daughter.

Why an iMac and not a cheese grater similarly priced? If I get the iMac I can give my current iMac to my daughter for school. My old 2015 iMac isn't holding up to my use anymore, but should be fine for a few more years for a high schooler to work on. If I get a cheese grader fine, but factor in at least another $300 for a minimum 27" 2K monitor.

Any reason to even think of a refurb trash can design? Are they too old now?

General thoughts on why this entire rant is retarded? Like. I too dislike Apple, but I need them. It's love/hate. But god if I do this I'm buckling in for the next 5 years... tax write off would be nice I guess.

Can't really back down the specs any because I dual boot windows and do some gaming. Need 2TB so I can give Windows and Mac a TB each (and I still have 8TB external).

Don't really want to go lower than the Vega 64X because even that benchmarks poorly against many cheaper cards... for gaming (but does do better for some other tasks)...

Ugh... talk me into or out of buying another god awful expensive mac.