One day my mum got a call from a man claiming to be from Microsoft. He said there is something wrong with the computer and tried to make her install TeamViewer to "fix" it, but my mum didn't manage to install it for several hours until he gave up.
Sometimes knowing even less can save your PC.

!Rant

Support Call:
”our PC stick isn't booting up! Come and fix it! (angry)”

Me:
”The PC are meant to boot up whenever power is delivered to them. Are you sure your TVs are powered on?”

Support Call:
”Yes! I just pressed the power button on both TVs and it didn't turn on the PC sticks.”

Me:
”So you can confirm the TVs are on? Can you change the input and see what happens?”

Support Phone:
”Stop wasting my time and send someone down to fix it now! I told you it isn't working!”

Me:
”Ok, we will get someone out to you as soon as possible.”

Then a support guy drives 2 hours to their store.

When he gets there he realizes that the TVs power is connected to a light switch and they has the switch off!!!

He said ”can we turn on some lights so I can see behind the TV?” and then all the fucking TVs came on.

These are times when I fully understand the concept of “firing a customer”.

The customer sent an email saying ”the downtime for your product was unacceptable.” even after it was explained to them that the problem was them turning off the power.

These fucking idiots actually expect us to deliver products to display on TVs without fucking electricity to run them.

Sent an email out in work informing everyone that we had pushed updates out to all Windows PC's.

Got the following phone call 10 minutes later:

"Hi, I can't log into the banking account app on my iPhone. Did you do something to it with your updates?"

"Nope. They were PC updates."

"Well, I'm sorry but you're wrong. It must be you! It was working yesterday."

"Again, it's not us. What's the error message you're getting on your app?"

"Invalid password"

".....then could it just be that you're entering an invalid password?"

"No, I know the password. I only changed it yesterday!"

"So it was working before you changed the password?"

"That's what i said!
I'm telling you, it's your updates."

"Okay but before we go 'troubleshoot' it, how about ringing your bank firs-"

"Oh look, it doesn't matter if you don't want to help, I don't have time for this!
I'll ring your boss and he'll uninstall the updates for me and fix the app." *hangs up*

- What is exactly your job
-- I am a developer
- So, what does it mean exactly?
-- I create software, applications like those you use on your phone and PC
- So you can create phones and PCs?
-- No it is not that :|
- Can you fix my Laptop?
-- here we go

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

Making a programmer fix your pc is like making a professional painter paint your fence

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

I haven't told anyone I know yet but yesterday I got a call from a user and she asked me if I could come down and take a look at some software I support. I did and fixed the issue.
She then asked if I could take a look at her computer because help desk and PC team had tried to fix and couldn't.

5 minutes later I fixed it (every site she went to gave cert error in both chrome and ie). I stood up and there was a couple seconds of me and her just facing each other not saying anything. She was smiling ear to ear the whole time. (This issue was weeks old I think). Then she walks towards me......

And hugs me.

"Oh, you're a developer? Then you cannot fix my PC", said no relative ever.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

Dad calls:
D: Hai, so, um, my pc's not booting up.
Me: So?
D: What do I do now?
M: You tried fixin' it?
D: That's why I'm calling you.
M: I'm 400km away from you. Does it do anything by pressing a power-on button?
D: No. But I touched it, it's really hot.
M: When was the last time you cleaned that shit up?
D: I have to clean it?
*PC is located at dusty environment at work. 5 years old and is being turned on 6 days a week*

Clean. Your. Pc.
Oh, and yeah, it overheated, burned the mbo, power suply, and cpu cooler stopped spinning.
It's like Satan threw a curse on a pc, and took a piss on it.
The best part? He's mad because I "never help him nor have time when he needs something to be fixed".
He can fix the PC in a pc shop that is across the street.

So, you doin' any better this week?

Story.
Did you know logging into chrome will auto sync all your fucking bookmarks to that other person's account??
I DIDN'T!!
(I use Firefox mainly and chromium for testing.)
I use chrome only for porn. Got shit tons of bookmarks. I login to my friend's sister Gmail on my chrome(for remote desktop - to help fix her computer. Somehow,remote desktop doesn't work on chromium)
Was browsing her pc via remote session and suddenly all of my porn bookmarks appear at the top bar.)
Had to manually select each bookmark in the bookmark manager and delete since CTRL+A won't work during the remote session. Don't know why.
FML.

Today I got to my new office. After booting my PC I noticed, that my phone-client isn't working.

I wrote an Incident to our helpline, telling them my phone isn't working.

After one hour I got an mail:
"Dear XYZ, we couldn't reach you at your phone. Please call back so we can fix your issue"

FUCK YOU WTF! ARE YOU GUYS RETARDED? READ YOUR FUCKING INCIDENTS! MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!

I am a programmer, and if you ask me to fix your pc, I accept the challenge... After all, I can Google a problem and implement a solution like no other, you are right to have come to me.

*goes to the local town hall to get my new ID*

A week ago:
Clerk: Sorry sir, our systems don't work anymore, we can't process your request!
Me: Epic. Is there any sysadmin in here that can fix this pronto?
C: No it's a centrally managed system. It's managed by the people in ${another town}.
M (thinking): Well how about you fucking call them then, fucking user. Screaming blood and fire when nothing is wrong server-side but doing nothing when there is. Fucking amazing, useless piece of shit.

One week later, i.e. today:
M: Hey, I'd like to renew my ID card. I've got this announcement document here and my current ID card.
C: Oh no I don't need the announcement document. I need your PIN and PUK code letter.
M (thinking): What the fuck do you need that for.. isn't that shit supposed to be my private information..?
*gives PIN and PUK part of the letter*
C: Alright, to register your new ID card, please enter your PUK and then your PIN in this card reader here twice.
M: Sure, but I'd like to change both afterwards. After all they're written on this piece of paper and I'm not sure that just destroying that will be enough.
C: Sure sure you can change them. Please authenticate with the codes written on the paper.
*Authenticates*
C: So you'd like to change your codes, right?
M: Yeah but I'd like to change it at home. You know, because I can't know for sure that this PC here is secure, the card reader has a wired connection to your PC (making it vulnerable to keyloggers) and so on.
C: Impossible. You can't change your PIN at home. (What about the PUK?!)
M: But I've done that several times with my Digipass for my previous passport.. it is possible and I've done it myself.
C: Tut tut, impossible. I know it's impossible and therefore it is.
M (thinking): Thanks for confirming that I really shouldn't enter my personal PIN on your fucking PC, incompetent bitch.
M: Alright, I'll just keep this PIN, try at home and if it's really impossible because the system changed to remove this functionality (which I highly doubt, that'd be really retarded), I'll come back later.
(Just to get rid of this old stupid woman's ignorance essentially.)
C: Sure sure...
Me: I'd also like to register as an organ donor. Where can I do that?
C: That'd be over there. *points to the other room in the town hall*

FUCKING THANK YOU LORDS OF THE WICKED RAVEN AND THE LIBERATED TUX, TO GET ME AWAY FROM THAT STUPID FUCKING BITCH!!!

.. anyway. I've got my new ID and I'm an official organ donor now 🙂

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

Non-dev friends are the best rubber ducks.

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

I’m gonna make this profile picture on my Viber and WhatsApp.

So. My grandma (280 km away) gave me a call.
Grandma: "Hiii. I have a problem with my PC."
Me thinking "ok. Just an ordinary tech support call from granny..."
Me: "Ok. What's the issue?"
Grandma: "Windows tells me there is no space left on drive F, non-stop"
Me: "As far as I know there is no drive F on your PC"
Grandma: "Would you be so kind to have a look?"

I agreed to log on via team viewer.

To cut an already long story short, there was this April Update which sent a bug all around the globe.

This bug exposed an internal drive Windows uses to do its Windows stuff - whatever it is.

Regularly these kind of drives are hidden from users eyes...

I finally solved it by applying a rollback on Windows.
The update is gone and with the next update there will be a fix from May to hide this drives again.

Microsoft!
I do you scare grandparents all around the globe?!??

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Me: ooh my eyes hearts, I have to sleep now, I fix this tomorrow morning.

(go to sleep)

Inner Me: hey
Me: ...
Inner Me: pisst! wake up
Me: what?? leave me alone I'm tired
Inner Me: remember that issue you had?
Me: yes?
Inner Me: this is how you can solve it
Me: great thanks, I'll fix it later
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now
Me: I'm tired, I'll fix it first thing in the morning
Inner Me: no no you'll forgot it
Me: no I won't, let me sleep
Inner Me: no no you'll forget and I won't tell you again
Me: look I write it down in my phone now leave me alone
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now.
Me: *crying* for God sake...

(gets out of bed and try to turn on PC and it's not starting, realizing that the power is out)

Me: you happy now, I fix it tomorrow.
Inner Me: no no stay awake till power is back on.
Me: SHUT THE FICN ON PICK OF CRAPE. Did SHDUHDBD DBDJDB

TL;DR: Fuck you Apple.

10:30 PM, parent needs iPhone update to update Messenger. How hard can this be?
Need to update iPhone from 9.x to latest, which is so outdated it still required iTunes. Fk.

Boot iTunes on Windows 10 pc that is at least 10 years old.
Completely unresponsive
Crash in task manager
Launch and is completely unresponsive. (Also starts playing unrequested music.. Oh joy..)
Fuck this, go to apple.com to download iTunes exe
Gives me some Microsoft store link. Fuck that shit, just give me the executable
Google “iTunes download”. click around on shitty Apple website. Success.
Control panel. Uninstall iTunes. (Takes forever, but it works)
Restart required (of fucking course).
2 eternities later. Run iTunes exe. Restart required. Fk.
Only 1 eternity later. Run iTunes, connect iPhone.
Actually detects the device. (holy shit, a miracle)
Starts syncing an empty library to the phone. Ya, fuck that.
Google. Disable option. Connect phone. Find option to update.
Update started. Going nowhere fast. Time for a walk at 1:00 AM punching the air.
Come back. Generic error message: Update failed (-1). Phone is stuck installing update. (O shit)
1x hard reset
2x hard reset
Google. Find Apple forum with exact question. Absolutely useless replies. (I expected no less)
Google recovery mode. Get into recovery mode.
Receive message: “You can update, but if it fails, you will have to reset to factory settings”. Fuck it, here we go.
Update runs (faster this time). Fails again. Same bullshit error message. (Goddammit, fuck. This might actually be bad.)
Disconnect phone.
… It boots latest iOS version. (holy shit, there is a god)
Immediately kill iTunes. Fuck that shit.
Parents share Apple account
Sign in, 2FA required.
Fat finger the code.
Restart “welcome” process.
Will not send code. What. The. Fuck.
Requests access code on other parent’s iPhone.
No code present. What???
Try restarting welcome process again. No dice. (Of course)
Set code on other parent’s iPhone.
Get message “Code is easy to guess”. Ya. IDGAF
Use code on newly updated iPhone. Some success.
Requires reset of password.
Password cannot be the same as old password (Goddammit)
Change password.
Welcome process done.
Sign in again on same phone after welcome process done in settings. (Nice.)
Sign in again on other phone with updated password
Update Messenger.
Update hangs. Needs more space.
Delete shit.
Update frozen in App Store (Really??)
Restart iPhone.
Update Messenger.
Update complete past 2. Well that was easy.

Apple, fuck you.
Some call Android unintuitive, but I look at the settings app on iPhone and realize you aren’t any better.
This company hasn’t been innovative since 2007. Over 1000 USD for a phone? Are you fucking kidding me?
Updating an iPhone from iOS 9.x is probably uncommon anymore. But this is a fucking joke. Fix your shit.
Shit like this is why I’ll never again own an Apple product. I have HAD IT with the joke of a business.

Thanks for reading.

Friend brings over a Windows 8 all in one laptop.
Friend: Can you fix my laptop
Me: I'm a programmer
Friend: I thought you worked with computers.
Me: I do... but I'm not tech support
Friend: Please?
Me: (reluctantly) Fine.
*many hours later after attempting to get the PC to boot from a USB. WHY DOES THIS PC NOT HAVE A KEY TO ENTER THE GOD DAMNED BOOT MENU AND HAS NO BOOT ORDER SELECTION?????!*
Friend: Have you fixed it?
Me: No
Friend: You suck at computers
Me: ....

Never spoke to him again.

so my mom wanted to write some word document, but she didn't use her laptop for like ~5 years, it didn't boot up so she asked me to fix, now here is what I found :
>the laptop had a 240 gb hdd
>the hdd was literally broken
>bought her a new 500 gb hdd
>installed windows 7
>took 10 mins to install
>took 19 minutes to boot up
>removed windows 7
>installed win xp
>took 30 mins to install
>took 3 minutes to boot up
>opened windows
>checked pc specs
>see picture below
>[insert wtf gif here]
>installed drivers
>took 20 minutes to install drivers
>[insert epic music here]
>tried installing office 2016
>insta regret
>tried installing office 2010
>memory farted and I couldn't even move the cursor
>installed office 2007
>mom started writing document peacefully
>after 2 hours bsod
>mom asks me to fix
>opens laptop to check internal components
>the cpu had a black hole inside
>the fans weren't working due to the circuit being burnt for some reason
>kills laptop
>kills mom
>kills self
>live peacefully in hell

My son loves...loves Star Wars, so when Star Wars Battlefront (on the PC) went on sale, he jumped on it.

To my shock (I'm not a big gamer), the game is filled with hackers/cheaters that are able to give themselves 'god' mode, so they can kill in one shot and take no damage.
My son (and others in the game) keeps 'reporting' them, but it looks like an issue EA is ignoring.
My son keeps asking me "You're a programmer, can't you fix the game so they can't do that?"

Good lord...I could care less about russians "hacking" our election (moronic press, doesn't even know what that means), but hacking my son's favorite game!...hmm..wonder how long it would take me to drive to EA headquarters and find that SOB dev manager in charge?
I get it, cheaters are gonna cheat, but fix your friggin' code! Aren't you embarrassed!?

Don't give me any of that "we don't know how they are doing it..." nonsense. This is devrant, not <insert media outlet you hate>.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

"So, what do you do in life?"

Me : I work on enterprise level mobile, web and server applications. Basically programming and database stuff...

"Sweet! So you can fix my PC right? It's getting slow I don't know why..."

Me : mmm well, ugh... yea kinda, I guess... sure. I could take a look 😑

'your good with computers right'?

Me: I work with one every day so I guess...

Can you fix a problem I have with my pc? (relatively old man, and I feel bad for him so I agreed)

Next day he had me fix 4 laptops (from his kids) and a Macbook of his own almost all had shady malware and were WAY behind of their windows updates... Like sub wannacry level...

Rip one of day of my vacation 😠

Why people keep installing shit on their computers and then asks me if I can fix their PC that "randomly" stopped to run as fast as before?

If you, fucking retard, installed combos of 2 or sometimes even 3 antivirues, the worst ones by the way (e.g. Avast + Norton + Avira), some bullshit utilites like BoostMyFuckingPC 9000, SpeedMyGPU, etc. it's normal that it doesn't work, especially if you have a low end laptop with Intel i3 and 4 GB of RAM…

And it's not true I'm a magician if I make it work properly again, I just undone the fucking decisions you made when you started to search on bing how to increase FPS in LoL…

Fuck you, and fuck me because since we're friends/relatives I HAVE to help you little bastard.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

About a year ago I switched my job.
At the start everything seemed like magic. I was the It director, I've finally was able to call the shots on technologies, on new software architecture.
First step was to check the current state of the company.
"qqqq" as each pc password? Ok
No firewall from outside? Lovely
Servers running on Windows Server 2008? Spectacular
People leaving pc on after work and left the machine unlocked just not to type the password? Hell yeah
The IT dude playing games instead of working? But ofcourse
Plaintext passwords publically accessible eshop? Naturally.
The list goes on and on.
After all this time, I'm working to fix every hole like that like crazy and because it doesn't show results, I'm soon to lose my job. Well better luck next time as an intern I guess :')

When ever someone asks me to fix their PC I ask them to sit down next to me so I can show them how I did it. First thing I do is open up Google search the problem then look them dead in the eye and smile 😂😂😂. I Then proceed to implement the fix from the first page of results. I don't get many repeat requests... I'm Such a passive cunt.😂😂😂

When you are a programmer but someone ask you to fix their PC ;)

Me : I'm a software developer.
Neighbor : Hey could you fix my PC it's not starting.
Me : *goes*
*Finds monitor cable disconnected*

*Facepalm level==69*

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

DISCLAIMER: UNPOPULAR OPINION

I'm tired of the Linux community, they effectively discourage me of taking part in any discussion online

I'm currently making Windows-only soft, some game stuff, some legacy DirectX stuff you got it.

Everytime I go online, this shitty pattern happens, when I stumble upon a problem in project I don't know how to fix and I ask for help
These are responses
- HA, HA, WINDOWS BAD, HA, HA, GET REAL SYSTEM
- In Linux, we can do X too. I mean it has 4x less functionality and way shittier UX and is even harder to implement but it can probably work on too Linux, so it's better, yes, just move to Linux
- btw you didn't like Linux before? Try this distro man, it's better <links random distro>

Is there anything valuable in the Linux community? I feel like these people don't like Linux anyway, they just hate Windows. Every opinion, tip is always opinion based. Anyone who works on internals knows how much better and how well thought is Windows kernel compared to Linux kernel. Also, if someone unironically uses Linux distro on desktop PC then he's a masochist because desktop Linux is dieing. So many distros ceased work only this year.

Is it a good tool for servers and docker containers? I don't have my head stuck up my ass to admit that yes, it's much better than Windows here.

This community got me stressed right now, I fear that when I go to bathroom or open my microwave there's gonna be a Linux distro recommendation there

😠😡😠😴

oh god. I just heard an abrupt noise emit from a pc I was told to fix that could only be described as R2-D2 fucking a 56k modem

Upgraded my Ram, Broke the Tape...
How to totally not fix your PC

My father's PC is almost dead.
The PSU is damaged and it turns on correctly 1 time out of 250 or more.
There are days that he tries to turn it on at 8am, and it can finally use it at 8pm.

Also the other HW components are old, so I tried to convince him to buy a new PC, there was an offer where they also give you for free a new 24 inches monitor (now he has a fucking 19 inches old one).
But he doesn't want to invest in a PC.
Even if he spends almost the entire day by surfing on internet and watching movies!

So, I recommended him to change only the PSU, the same identical model costs only €39.
But he doesn't want to invest in it... he prefers to lose the entire day trying to use his fucking PC.

I really don't understand why some people just don't want to spend a bit to improve their life!
The comfort is worth it... the time of life you're wasting to use that fucking PC is more important than €39.

I tried different times to find other possible issues, but it's clearly a PSU problem, so obviously I can't fix it using magic.
Not in my father's opinion... "You don't know anything about computer science... nothing! Go to your fucking university (I'm studing Computer Engineering), and study how to fix it!".
While he was saying that sentence, he was beating the case, because he's convinced that it's a better way to fix it.

I want to leave this fucking house right now.

!rant

Me: sudo apt-get update

PC: Noope. There is a problem with a package.

Me: Ugh... ok I'll fix it. *20 minutes later* Fixed. Sudo apt-get update

PC: Noope, the package cache file is corrupted.

Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF LINUX OMFG.
Oh, I fixed it.
I LOVE YOU LINUX.

Devrant...
... give me the serenity to accept code that don't work
... The courage to fix code I can
... And the wisdom to find the typo before I throw my pc out of the window.
Amen.

Recently I fucked up my laptop's rootfs USB stick again by tugging on it with some wire.. I think it got detached during runtime. Doesn't boot anymore.

So I attached it to my server to chroot into it and see what's wrong..
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdf2 cryptroot
> Unlocks without errors.
# btrfsck /dev/mapper/cryptroot
> Nothing wrong.
# mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
> Mounts just fine.
# chroot /mnt (some other filesystems like /proc, /sys, and /dev were mounted first but meh)
> Enters chroot just fine.
# pacman -Syu
> Upgrades just fine.
# su condor
> Switches user just fine.
$ vim -p some files
> Enters the editor just fine.

Mounted it again to my laptop and try to boot, because it clearly seems like everything is just fine..
> Not gonna boot up. You can unlock your cryptroot and then I'll just fucking stall without saying shit.

MotherFFFFUUUUCCKKKEERRRRRRR!!!!!!! Fuck you HP for making such horrible USB connectors, and fuck you Arch for not giving something more verbose related to the issue, so that I can actually know what's wrong with you, and fucking FIX IT!!! Fucking pieces of junk! Do I really have to build my own PC and build my own LFS, just to have something halfway decent?!

Lead Dev: Could you please make blahblah for us to use while making blah?

Me: Sure, np
Me: (to friend) hey could i test the connection for blahblah on ur pc

Friend: Sure, not doing anything anyway

Me: Thanks!
Me: Finds issues, fixes, and finishes blahblah

Me: Can i just borrow ur pc one more time

Friend: Ok... looks like its working

( i leave the room to fix small bug )

Lead Dev: (Friend) just showed me blahblah,he really did a good job on it

Me: ... Oh, yeah, he didnt rlly do anything though.. I just needed his pc to test it

Lead Dev: oh yeah, but, yknow he really did a good job on it, im sure u did too..

Me: ...

When you fix your mates PC and upgrade windows on it and month later he comes back because his scanner is really slow, his wife doesn't understand English anymore and cat decided to leave his cat life to become full time florist at local bakery shop.

Today at work I saw 2 tech guys (Russians) that tried to fix an audio system at my hospital clinic.

The PL-3.5 cable was unable to transfer any sound to the speakers from the secretary PC.

So they tried to plug it into one of their phones, to rule out the possibility that it is because of the PC headphones plug.

(The speaker volume currently is on *maximum* btw)

1st guy said "Let's play something nice and relaxing, so the patients (mostly old people) won't get an heart attack"
The 2nd ask "So what should I search in YouTube?"
Then the 1st said "Metallica"

When I am telling non-tech people that I am studying Software Engineering:

They: What do you study at university?
Me: Software Engineering
They: Oh, so you're an engineer! My *some random person* is also an engineer!
Me: No, not that kind of engineer. I am a SOFTWARE engineer. I don't build things.
They: huh?
Me: I write code. Programs. For computers. I a programmer.
They: oh, great, very perspective! Will you fix my *PC/printer/whatever has on/off button on it*?

😶😶😶

Today my raspberry pi media center bricked itself (at least it won't boot properly. Than I thought I just format the SD card and reinstall everything. But than my windows pc won't boot properly because it's still running on old hdd and I suck at building PCs. Than I tried my ThinkPad with antergos and remembered that it is also dead because the last update broke something. And now I'm trying to boot my windows at least into safe mode and my ThinkPad to boot from the live stick to chroot and fix it. Still waiting since 15min for any progress.
Now is my old Oneplus One with an outdated nightly of a custom Rom my only working connection to the web.
I'm starting to think that waiting for the last minute to fix problems might not the best way for me.

/* rant */

I freaking hate it when people call me to fix their 9 gazillion dollar ultra extreme enthusiast alien technology pc just so they can play a a god damn freaking son of a damn bloody bitchy fb game on 9000 fps in 4k while some people struggle to have 6 tabs open at the same time so they can code+compile+preview+consult the interwebs. And lets just not mention the amount of monitors mmkay?

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

Customer: can you fix my flashdrive? I think it's corrupted or something.

Me: sure no problem

*plugs in flashdrive in pc*
*tried to format*
*Disk is write protected*

Me: ... not you again.

Worst part:

Either "Can you fix my PC, it won't start"

Or "Can you hack <some instance here> for me because <some stupid reason>

FUCK Y.O.U. windows 10 for making my pc not recognize mics on the front port.
Seriously i usually dont mind windows that much but really ?! Oh hello i noticed you changed your os version THEN LET ME FUCK UP YOUR DRIVERS SO YOU FEEL LIKE A RETARD NOT BEING ABLE TO TALK.
Worst is i feel like an idiot because i have no idea how to fix this shit apart from buying a new PC, aaaaand im pretty sure while trying to fix it i made it worse
FUCK IM A SCRUB. FUCK PEOPLE ON INTERNET AND THEM "It works". NO IT DOESNT !
And now i feel like a worthless dev because of w105

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

Bloody Windows kept waking up after a few seconds of being suspended. Someone here mentioned it could be the mouse, so I disabled its function to wake the pc . And you know what? That piece of trash windows still kept waking up for no reason. Makes me angry.

So I found this magic command 'powercfg/lastwake', which shows the reason for the last wake. And look at that! The fucking realtek network shitcard is allowed to wake windows.

Why would windows enable that on its own? Why? Because I for sure did not make this change and suspend was working for me until a few months ago (yes, these kind of problems take me very long to fix, even though it would tske only two minutes).

Friend :- so you went so deep into programming.
Me :- yeah but not too far.
Friend :- can you fix my laptop infected by virus?
*handing me his lapi*
Me :- of course. is your windows is original?
He :- yaa!! I mean you know I like original not like your pc.
Me :- *deleted win 32 file *

one of my friend has a golden finger👈, he could break your system with one touch, once he borrowed my laptop to update fb status, I saw him literally hit the enter key once, the pc got a blue screen and then rebooted with error, I have to reinstall OS to fix it. I asked around, he did this trick many times😱😱. I guess he could get some profit from this gift😂😂😂

DISCLAIMER: I don't remember this, my parents told me the story

So, when I was 3, my father brought a computer back home and I instantly loved it. It wasn't our computer, he brought it home to fix it. It had Windows 95 on it. After he fixed it, he oppened up MS Paint, or something, drew a line and handed me the mouse, where I proceeded to draw.

Mundane and boring, yes, but a week later, my parents bought our own PC, and explained how to install Win98, a process I actually understood 13 years later.

WARNING: There is a dangerous malware out in the wild, and chances are, you have it installed on your computer.

It's called Windows Update, and it is marketed as a software that "delivers security patches to your PC". Wrong. What it actually does is hard-reboot your computer at randomly picked time intervals without asking for your consent, or even showing any type of warning, basically deleting all unsaved progress that you've made in your programs or games. It also deletes/undoes all registry tweaks that you might have made (e.g. to the context menu), it deletes your nvidia display configurations, uninstalls any custom themes that you might have installed, possibly even downloads another malware disguised as "Microsoft Edge" and shoves it in your face on next boot without giving a possibility to close it. Oh and it might also make your computer unbootable so you have to go to the advanced recovery settings to fix it manually.

Yes, everything I just mentioned above happened to me about an hour ago. This LITERALLY classifies the software as a malware (Google: "software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system"). If we throw in all the data collection that happens without your consent, Microsoft actually manages to check not only one, but all three boxes in the "malware" definition.

Pleas, stop using microshit, and switch to linux as soon as possible if you can.

"I got an issue on my pc, can you have a look?"

Sure, I'm afraid I don't know the solution to that, just google xxx and I'm sure there'll be something to fix it

"I don't know how to do that, that's way too complicated. Nevermind I'll take my old pc"

y tho...

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

So, my last post was about dual booting to Linux. I haven't had problems with Windows. However, after an apart partial update to the Creaters version, I can't open anything without an error that says "ceip.exe was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142)." I can't even run command prompt.

I have nothing on my PC that I can't replace (everything is backed up in at least two places) other than the programs I need for work. I can get them on Monday. But I'm on call the rest of today and tomorrow. And i need them because they help me test system health.

Trying to run the update again to see if I can repair it that way, otherwise, any suggestions for a temporary fix? Thinking my switch to Linux is sooner than I thought, but I have to be able to work.

So, I got my very first gaming laptop on March 2015. Took a break from the almighty PC Master Race.

It's an Asus ROG G751JT. It was doing great, running my favourite games at 60FPS on high-ultra settings.
Few months after purchasing it, I've been getting a lot of BSODs with the same error (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)

As told by the guys at a local forum, I was told to try replacing the RAMs and I was stupid enough, I did. It has 4x 8GB HyperX Impact DDR3L.
The error still won't go away until I changed my SSDs. Which worked for a while until a week ago.

Getting the same BSOD countless times. This time I decided to directly talk to an expert, which is a friend of mine and guess what. It was the motherboard after all. Spent a lot of $$$$ to fix ONE BSOD.

Now I'm stuck with an Asus T100TF for about a month because I had to send it for warranty claim.

smh jfc anasmy y u so stupid for a year and a half. 10/10 worst experience (since it involved a lot of money)

What do you think of my stupidity? Comment below (10 marks).

"Can you fix/update/speed up my pc/laptop/phone/toaster/potato?"

I don't mind too much doing it for my family though, but sometimes it can get a bit annoying.

Parents had asked me to assemble some furniture, fix the pc and so some other "brain" work

Furniture
Me: *Stops to check something in the manual*
Parents: Are you stuck? Maybe try assembling the door upside down
Me: No, it is the right way
Parents: *Ramble, ramble*
Me: Just let me work, shut the hell up

PC
Me: *Checks cables, checks logs, ect*
Parents: Maybe it is the problem with (insert random tech word there)?
Me: No.
Parents: W h y?
Me: Let me finish, it isnt that, (tech word) isnt even correlated to that
Parents: But, but, you never talk to me... (ramble ramble)
Me: Get the hell outta the room
*Argumemt breaks out*
30min later

Me: *Finnaly manages to fix it after the heated argument*
Me: I finished, everything works
Parents: Great, but you are mean
Me: I managed to finish the work in 15 min, you dont even have enough strengh to call for a specialist, (but knowing me i wouldnt allow it anyway because a lot of them make a poor job), so in order to make it properly and to relieve you from learning how to fucking google i want you to stay out of this so i can just finish my job. Your interruptions waste time and i dont need your help at all. Everytime you tried to fix stuff you always managed to fuck shit up when you tried to do anything.
Parents: (ramble)
Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP, LEAVE MY ROOM
Parents:
Me:
Parents: *Leave the room*

1h later i get 25$ for the job perfectly done

Sometime i wish they were tech independent, so i can save my sanity and time but money is nice.

If anybody tries to argue that i should respect them:
I tried talking to them nicely countless times through years, but they always force themself to a project and they always fuck shit up because of it. I tried telling them about my problems and they tried helping me but after it didnt work they retured to the old: "it is the pc fault" and similar. Even if they couldnt help me i juat wanted them to understand my situation, but no that didnt happened.

First i fix my life then i will fix the relationship

But but greeeeeg, relationships should be cared for always!
Eat shit. There is time for family and there is time for me especialy when my life can suddenly colapse due to my problems.

My setup: AMD Phenom-2 1100T with fat cooler for silent PC, 16 GB ECC RAM, AMD Radeon HD-6850 passively cooled, WD Blue 1 TB HDD. One 22 inch monitor with 1650 x 1050.
The mouse is a bit broken because the click switch under the mouse wheel doesn't work anymore. The empty bottle in front of the PC is necessary for lying on the room light switch, or else it won't work. And the black/yellow tape is a fix for the worn out seat cover.
But the best, under the monitor, is the little green troll that serves as rubber duck.

BOSS: Hey we should start implementing this thing in that program

ME: Yes but everything that is required for that at lower level is not yet done

BOSS: Just pretend it's done

ME: that is stupid, even if we have a general idea on how it will be done what's the point of writing code that relies on something that is not yet defined, I need to read that stuff and I don't know how we will structure that data

BOSS: Just make a guess you will fix it when the lower level stuff is done

ME: But it makes no sense! We will basically have to rewrite ground up everything

BOSS: also can you check the printer n°3 it doesn't connect to my PC

😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄

In attempt to fix a problem in my project I restarted my pc now its dead. Best fuckin day ever.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

<rant>
I really don't enjoy visual studio

Is not bad but it's not worth the disk space it takes up..

Also, if your disk is starting to fill up and vs is filling the most space, YOU CAN'T <swearword> UNINSTALL IT FROM YOUR PC

To remove the shit, I had to upgrade to Windows 10 (our school PC's are not allowed to have Linux) and delete my whole fucking disk, just to get it removed

Fix your shit ms

</rant>

Meanwhile at my place (Translation L-R):

"Wow! Are you good at hacking?"
"Please hack my neighbor's Wi-Fi"
"Download me some movies!"
"Are you good at math?"
"Please fix my phone!"
"Can you remove the virus on my computer?"
"How many hours do you sleep in one day?"
"Put some cheats on this game!"
"Please hack my boyfriend's Facebook account!"

Yep, my family and even the entire neighborhood are ignorant of what I do as a dev!

FFS I'M NOT A PC REPAIR MAN!!! 😤😤😤😠😡

who hates when friends or coworkers/family pretend that you fix his/her pc for free or just a 'thanks'??

Him: my PC doesn't want to connect to the internet.
Me: Are you doing IT ryt?
Him: Yes
Me: Then fix ur shit.

I remember the first time I had a code block, I sat on my desk for up to 18 hours trying to fix it. In the end realizing that my impatience is not helping me. It was all in vain. A tired mind did not help.

I finally came to realise that I was lacking on knowledge and a tired brain did not help. I did it the next day but learnt a huge lesson. When it's just not your day, it's not you day. A fresh mind will help next day. Relax, do anything apart from code.

Too much of code can drain you of ideas and smartness. You need to let your mind breathe. Life away from the PC is important too.

I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)

That happiness after you are so close to open the closest window and throw the pc, but you manage to fix the problem.

FUCK YOU GRUB I WON!!!!!!!!!!!! SUCK IT!

In 11th grade I had a shitty teacher who would make students go away from this one computer he always used in the computer lab. It was pretty annoying because he only ever used it to watch YouTube videos of fuckall Bollywood news and other garbage like it.
It was extremely annoying and inconvenient to everyone.
One day, I went to his PC, when he was not there, and reallocated the default way to open all .exe files to nothing, using the Windows Registry.
He came back and saw that none of his applications work and his PC is basically unusable now.
It was extremely funny for a few days to watch the IT guys try to fix but they weren't able to.
Now I don't know what they told the school but a month later they bought a completely new CPU and placed it instead of that one.
So fucking stupid.

#justdevthings
That moment when you're so engrossed in your project that you lose track of time. You begin to SEE code irl, not just on screens. Things like hunger, environment and a sense of time fade away. That feeling when the code just works, but better when it doesn't and you figure out a smart fix. Oh gosh ill pay to feel like that all day.

I wrote a shitty layout for an android side project. It haunted me. I could still SEE the shitty xml long after the pc was shut down. I had a nightmare about it and woke up sweating, and all I could see was xml. Fkin xml man. I redid the layout at 3am and boy was i so satisfied.
I think that was just the tetrix effect taking its toll on me.

I always got screwed by parents for being on that machine all day, back in school. But none of that matters now. I can now feel the code running in my veins and flowing into the machine. I can now feel my heart throbbing at the sight of such beauty. They ask how i manage my social life. I say everything goes well until i start a side project, that's when social life gets fucked hard. I think I'm gonna die one day after performing the final commit.

They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *

They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.

Microsoft, do you even care what your shitty updates are doing or have you just given up?

Not only did the update start immediately after waking up from standby, it also had to brighten up my day by deleting everything afterwards.

Turns out the anniversary update gets confused by dual boot systems and then just deletes all partitions. And apparently they didn't manage to fix this for months now.

Can't wait for the coming "Creator's update", always wanted to see how an exploding PC looks.

Not sure if that qualifies as prank...

Had an pretty incompetent CS teacher and used to simply unplug her PC when we had enough of her shit. Usually took her about 45mins to figure out what was wrong with her PC and another 5 of ranting why we'd do that. Eventually she started to check the cable first which reduced the ”downtime” to about 15mins.
However, we soon started to flip the power switch at the back of her machine instead. She never figured that out and called IT several times to fix it.

Thinking about it, it's probably worse than a prank 😅

Friend : Hey man lets watch world cup at 5.
Me: Sure why not, we will have a great time
Me: Leaves office early tho having bugs to fix
Me: starts watching the game at frds place slowly pulls up my pc
Frnd: Are you even watching the gamean, it was a goal now , did u see that , come on man
Me: ohh yeahhh goallll, goes back to vim
Game ends and he switches off the tv and stares at me for 20 mins,
Me: what hpnd man did the lights go off?

What a fucking weekend. Tried to clone an existing windows hard drive onto a new unused one with the same size. Oh the adventure that I got myself into. 😭
Old hard drive corrupted in the middle of the process (how???). Not bootable anymore (until at the very end).
Then an odyssey started to try to rescue the old data using my spare linux drive onto a USB stick. Fucking with uefi settings and apparently a boot sequence with incorrectly named drives (?).
Had to reflash a usb stick I had for linux installation to windows installation.
I had multiple drives attached to my PC and didn't want my own ones to be overridden, so I needed to detach all drives except for the target one.
The target one had already fucked up partitions from the failed cloning, so I had to research the tools to fix it manually, not knowing what I was doing.
At the end it worked out, windows installed, data copied onto the target.
The old drive was able to recover, but I didn't give a shit about it anymore.

Was a sleepless night, spent wayy too much time with this...

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

What a day. Teacher told if I can fix few school PCs. Well, quarantined few hundreds of malware and installed Gnu/Linux on one PC just for testing. Only thing left to do is make AutoCAD somehow work and I hope the school can switch from Windows XP to GNU/Linux.

Windows 10 Rant:
Windows 10 has so many frustrating issues. Most recent being when my computer, if the PC goes into sleep mode, or sits unused for 40 ish minute period of time (screen still on), when I return; awake the computer from sleep or sit back after being away, the WiFi stops working. Turning WiFi on and off again doesn't fix it, only way is to restart the device, which is damn annoying if you have multiple windows, chrome tabs, or programs running. Having to open and set everything back up is a complete pain.
I must point out, this issue only started happening when my device (auto) updated itself to the Anniversary build of W10.
Thanks Microsoft.

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

yeah I am a software engineer.
yea I am a programmer too.
yeah I am behind my laptop all the time..

but no I don't want to fix your computer.
I have no interest in changing your windows, installing antivirus on your pc and so on..

just understand it , God damn these shit people :(

Don't you love it when you're in a full-on creative mood but the whole universe is somehow working against you doing anything productive?

Woke up in the morning with bright ideas for my app. But my PC restarted and my IDE crashed. After getting the IDE up, the project no longer builds. After spending hours to try and fix it, reinstall IDE and ............... voila............... everything works. I mean WTF?

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

All of the USB ports on my PC have suddenly stopped working...

And how am I supposed to fix this exactly given I no can no longer use a keyboard or mouse...?

Brilliant.

Found a 70-year-old retro PC enthusiast who's never heard of the drop fix.

are people forgetting that exists or

bought a cdp ups, because energy service can be shitty in the town I live.

Everything is fine and dandy with the ups, has a nice lcd but it also has a usb cable and dvd with a so called "upsilon 2000" software. One week after buying the ups I decided to venture with the mother fucker software.

Installed the software, looks awful, like a software that made his way from the 90s to this day... it doesn't show the ups... I left it like that... nothing unsual, then my fucking curiosity picked up and I look into the software options and here you go, changed the "communication type" from serial to usb, and ups was recognized, and even nicer, windows started showing a battery icon like if this desktop was a laptop. I was thrilled... until I restarted my pc for whatever reason

gpu decided to break, like if the drivers weren't installed, was laggy, my second screen didn't work, in device manager the video adapter was shown as "generic video adapter". 😡, immediately I blame nvidia cuz I just updated those drivers the day before.

So I started my journey to get the fucking video card working as it should again. installed DDU, reinstalled newest drivers again... didn't work, used ddu again, installed last known drivers again... didn't work, used ddu, installed drivers from windows update... nothing... after some panicking time, I remembered that besides from updating the nvidia drivers I installed that upsilon shit recently... So I decided to uninstall it, and that was the fix, fucking shady software.

It was very naive from me to not blame that upsilon before blaming everything else.

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

Fucking microshaft! I bought a custom controller from their shop as a birthday gift to my brother. Fucking first thing the website crashes with 500 with my main account so I call support. Said them its a backend issue and they should let the devs investigate. Support says they can't even contact them in anyway shape or form. Fucking great!
So since my account seems to has broken their backend I create another account using some random email while support tells me to fucking log in and out again (yeah man I tried that). OK wonderful new account worked I can buy the controller.

Now one year later the controller just fucking stops working (probably why its called Xbox one! controller). Wonderful I paid 90€ for that shit thing and now it won't connect anymore. Tried everything and searched countless forums, nothing helped. Fuckers say: JuSt ConNeCT iT tO YoUr XbOx oNe and it might magically work (TM). You fuck I bought it for PC why the fuck can I not just fix it using a PC. Do you want me to buy a fucking Xbox for 500 bucks just to get the fucking controller to work!? You shitfaced monkey!

OK then lets try that support again because that worked so well last time. I put in the serial number and... Fucking unrecognized number. Unrecognized number my ass. Go suck on a spiked club you buffoon!

Now I'm fucked because I don't have the fucking receipt anymore and the email was send to that fucking temp account I don't even know the email address for anymore (ノ°益°)ノ

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

Week80: Not my family or friend, but last time I used my notebook in a bus to school when I had to finish my homework (because as always, literally evrything is more interesting than programming class homework) random woman came to me, nocked on my shoulder and asked when I had terminal open when compiling "Sir do you know that this is not legal?" pointing at my screen. 😂

My familly thinks that I am a magican that can fix their printer and recover their desktop icons "because I did something wrong with it" after not touching their PC for months. I wonder who deleted those icons (*pointing finger at my father*)

My friends think that I am some magican nerd who can build websites for them all for every single stupid "teen business idea" they have and I can hack all their ex's FB. 😂😂

Android Studio is by far worst development environment I've ever seen. Slow as fuck, messed up and cumbersome, not much better than eclipse. Menus are hilariously fucked up. On top of that, clear new setup (on Windows) may as well melt up your PC if you have that shit running overnight: after a weekend I came to the office and my MBP is fucking screaming and breathing hot air... I was WTF is that, and when I logged in, this fucking garbage android studio was taking 100% of all 8/16 cores ... WHAT A FUCKING HIDEOUS PILE OF SHIT FROM GOOGLE. Google: please kill this project, no need to improve or fix it, it's garbage. Start over.

So all my friends keep calling me a negative person because I always correct them on how easily they can be hacked.
Friend: Hey (my name) I am going to buy a new computer and I will make you happy and not download illegal games on to it.
Me: That's a really good idea. Now shouldn't you also buy a virusscanner or at least make a full system back-up in case you get hacked.
Two days later
Friend: Yeah I got my new pc and can now finally play Kerbal Space Progran on it. It's stupid though that this dlc costs money so I downloaded it illegaly. But don't worry. I'll stop doing that from now on.
Another two days later I am spending my whole day trying to fix his computer because he downloaded a Trojan Horse that took over his computer and he had no virusscanner or back-up.
The problem is that I am 99 percent sure that such a thing is going to happen again and he'll be standing on my doorstep to fix it for him. Just let the doomsayer that is good with computers fix it and repeat the whole process all over again😒.

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""

The CI infrastructure and external tooling at the company I work at is a complete joke. Feels like it was designed by an intern left alone.

95% of the time a build fails or hangs, it's because we are getting race conditions or a hanging VM with our crappy Windows jenkins slaves. Quite possibly because we are not using proper tooling for monitoring those VMs as well. Anyways, I don't have access and control on it and it's not even my job to fix it.

Though, I am being asked to monitors these pieces of junk jenkins jobs outside of my work hours because company devs all over the world use it... but there is no fucking way to know it failed unless I log onto jenkins every hour and check everything manually... which is stupid as fuck for a software engineer.

I can't even implement slack hooks to get notifications or something when it fails because we will stop paying for it soon, so I have to connect to my freaking VPN on my PC and check everything.

And what's the fucking ghetto solution instead of fixing it properly? Restarting VMs and rerunning a build. Because someone in management wants to see a passing build, even though it means jackshit. Half of these jobs are tagged as unstable, so what's the fucking point?

Pisses me off when people work like morons and pressure others to do the same.

In from of a cinema. I was doing my BSc thesis involving a GPS receiver. The pointcloud on my pc had to be synchronized with where the receiver was, so it had to be tested outdoor. I and my teacher drove around some streets to see if my code worked, and everytime it didn't we had to stop in a parking lot (the one of a cinema). I couldn't code inside the car because the GPS receiver my laptop was connected to (via USB) didn't get a decent signal there, so I had to fix bugs sat on a brickwork in front of the cinema. My teacher kept looking at my monitor constantly, it was summer with 28°C, the sun hitting on me and my monitor, I couldn't see shit, the sweat of my hands flooding the keyboard. After a while I was saved by my laptop's battery which gave up. Thank you laptop <3

Finaly I write my first rant about dev stuff.

My mom works as a shop clerk in the optic shop (they sell glasses). It is a small shop run by family buisness (not by my mom, she is only employed there). She had been constantly complaining about the poor pc performance and how the program there are using for inventory managment always hangs.
Her boss decided to "upgrade" the pc's by buing macs, but he was stopped by me and my mom. (I was helping them with some IT stuff so i had a bit of a influence over that).
The program they are using was written by some amateur programer that is a boss of a similar shop somewhere in the country.

So i recommended to them to install SSD's to speed up their pc's, and it did nothing. Of course i blammed the poorly written program next.

The program hangs when you type in the find field. I wanted to check if my gut feeling was right so i asked them to have task manager open when they type. And my feeling was right.

When you change anything in the text find bar, the program sends a crap ton of requests to the local server and that server sends a crap ton of packiets back, enough to saturate the local connection...

I will try to rewrite the app myself, just for the challenge of it. I want to check if i can write a better one than this one pos. They still want to buy better pc's but they wont be any help to them... Well i will help them with that anyway (having good pc's is good anyway). I hope i can create the app that will fix their problems...

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

So... about how I fell in love with coding

I was 12 years old when I went to mom’s work because I had nothing else to do. There was an iMac. At that time I used to have a PC at home with a Windows OS. When I approached MacOS at my mom’s office I had no idea what to do. Right before my mom had told me that I shouldn’t delete anything, all the documents are really important on there. So guess what I Did? In order to download Counter Strike 1.6 game I decided to install Windows OS on the iMac which deleted everything that was on the computer! Absolutely everything! So.. my mom told me to fix this after, and then I started to do some research and somehow learned python and javascript in next two months. Thanks to my mom!

So last year I sent my PC to get a motherboard replacement, as I couldn't be arsed replacing it or even research what motherboard I should get(was dealing with more urgent personal matters).

Anyway, I get it back and everything works good but not the front USB port.. I always found it weird, but also didn't bother to open the case and double check, so I let it go and assumed, since the motherboard was fried, that the USB wires were faulty.

Time passes by and I decide to open the case for annual cleaning job... Turns out the motherfucker didn't connect the port, why?? Fucks knows why... Obviously the wires were "short" and he didn't even try to pull it out further!!! You little piece of shit,for a full year I've been living with a missing usb port, the fucking front facing mother fucking usb port. Fuck.

Moral of story? Don't be a lazy ass and fix your shit on your own!

Lately programs have been crashing a lot on my pc, I've tried different things like disabling SWAP for a sec, BIOS changes, remove firefox and use Google Chrome, try different commands, it kept happening.

Obviously along the way I started investigating what was causing these crashes, looking through bug reports and my syslog. There was no consistency, except for 1 thing: SIGENV. Everything that crashed had a segmentation fault, now I'm not an expect and I don't know what this means or how to fix it, so I went to Google to ask for answers.

Then I downloaded memtest and ran a memory test, error palooza. Then I went to Windows and ran memory check, error palooza.

This is week 3 of this high-end gaming pc which was a huge investment AND IT HAS BEEN FUCKING WITH ME BECAUSE OF BAD MEMORY HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS HAPPEN I ALMOST STARTED TO DOUBT UBUNTU BUT IT WAS A FUCKING FAULT IN BRAND NEW MEMORY MODULES WHAT THE FUCK.

Obviously I'm pissed off. Today I'm gonna call the store that assembled it to voice my complaints.

Thank you for listening to my TedTalk.

- Started learning python
- New semester's about to start in college

...and laptop got recked.

Shows the post screen and crashes and reboots repeatedly. Tried to fix it and now the display doesn't light up and the Hard-Disk makes screeching noise. I didn't even touch the display. HDD maybe.

Removed the HDD and tried to recover it from my friends PC, but it turns out it was already dead. All my data from 1 month ago is gone (thank god for external HDD) and I cannot learn python anymore cause I don't have any backup computer.

I don't even know if I can afford to get it repaired if they say they have to replace the entire motherboard in the laptop.

FUCK!!!

<rant class="sysadmin">
Fuck you windows, haven't touched my PC in 2 months and I boot it first had to restore basic functions after that a Windows update came that broke everything in Windows, now I'm learning PowerShell to fix my broken windows and to install updates in the hope I get a working installation back.

"You do stuff with computers, can you fix my pc? "

-.-

My boss don't give me any information about the project in 2 months ... Then the application need to run in 1 week ... Im the only developers in this faculty .. suprise ! I said to him the project cannot be delivered in such small time ...

Boss : but you having so mutch time to do it !

me: but you tell me to fix some PC screen and printer and is not my job to do that im a programmer.

Boss: but you have certification in programmation and tech support

Me: yes but you hire me to code your project not to fix your forest !

Boss: if you don't want to work just say it

Me: never mind ...

Results: i change faculty in the university

The bug I never fixed isn't a bug in code I wrote, but rather an OS problem I've given up on fixing.

I dual-boot Windows and Linux on my desktop PC. Every time Windows updates, it switches from grub to the Windows bootloader, making it impossible to boot into Linux. I've fixed it three times (each time requiring a different fix, from disabling fast startup to reinstalling Grub from a live USB), then gave up. My desktop PC is now a Windows machine. I'm upgrading some parts soon (including replacing my boot drive with an NVMe SSD) so I decided when I do that, I'm just going to reinstall Linux on the new drive and see how long I can last without installing Windows at all.

I was working on an annoying bug in my genetic algorithm for about two hours when i realised it's late and decided to call it a night. Turned off my pc, shut everything down. Just as I was brushing my teeth I got enlightened by the code gods and suddenly i knew exactly how to fix the bug. Toothbrush in hand i booted the whole system again and successfully fixed it in 2 minutes.
Thank you code gods, i may now sleep in peace.

You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.

And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.

He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.

He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him

He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.

You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.

I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.

I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.

The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .

He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.

You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.

I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .

Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.

I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”

I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.

You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.

I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread

So, i decided to Start making an Android App (quite a big Project to me), so i we're Reading books und Programming Yesterday for 12, today for 10 hours, everything worked Out perfectly, i fehlt great.
(But, Thats the rule, never feel too confident)

So i wanted to Put the Last Activity in my App, chanhed the XML etc.
At the end i thought i should run it one Last Time before i shutdown my PC.
Well, Error in my XML, tried to fix it for 1 hour (quiet a Long Time for 8 lines of Code), didnt Work.
I pressed Ctrl+z until it reached the Point where it Last Time worked... Still doesnt Work.

So, i am quiet pissed Off, and sleepy.
My Dilemma, eat and sleep? Or try to fix everything...

My mother still doesn't know what I do with my laptop, she thinks I either watch youtube or movies. The last day when I faced a code block and stared at the screen for 12 hours, she finally realised I am either insane or something is driving me nuts.

My Brother thinks it's one of the good decisions I have taken in life. Because he sees my interest when I talk about it to him.

Others think I can fix a broken PC or install softwares for them or do typing to get paid.

IIS curse you and your nuances!

I launch my local web application (which was working fine) and now get CORS errors and 404 not found. Wtf. I clean the solution rebuild, same thing. Then I restart my PC and try again. Same thing.

Then I use Firefox instead if chrome and it magically works. Wtf!

It's hard to fix broken things when they fix themeselves afyer trial and error

I was told by my aunt that my niece (who also lives in Colombia) would call me (I live in the Netherlands). When I asked why she would call my aunt responded saying that she did not know. I was happy, it is not very often that my Colombian family calls me.

So I waited.... and waited... and waited... finally she called very late. Turns out she wanted to ask me which Smartphone was better.... :-(.

That was a disappointment... Normally if I go visit my familly there in Colombia they bring all there devices and ask me if I can fix them or install a certain program on it. I dont mind doing that. It can be very interesting. For example: a few months ago another aunt asked me to look at her computer to find out why it was so slow... turned out she had a very old PC with Windows XP installed on it. I fixed the problem by installing light linux distro on the computer. (she only used the browser so that was not a big problem). But yeah... I played for a while with good old Windows XP.

Okay back to the beginning. It is awful if family just calls you to ask witch phone is better.

Thats all... :-)

My dad got me an old windows 98 (Still relatively new) with flight sim. I downloaded limewire to download limewire pro. I was surprised I got viruses on my pc, had to ask his colleague to fix it. Good ol' times

I spent the last 2 days, my father's birthday, and my birthday working on a bug for the game in developing for mobile. And I've done everything to try and fix it. Optimize the vertices, deleted assets not in use, organized all my assets into separate folders, and you know what. Fuck it. If "app not installed" I'm going to port it to PC.

In high-school we had comp science classes which obviously hardly had anything to do with real stuff. In fact, our teacher was really clueless, so we decided to fool her. I made a tiny app that took a screenshot and set it as its background while being full screen and with hidden cursor. So it basically looked as if the computer was frozen. I also made it so pressing alt+f4 would set the background to a fake BSOD image. Next class we fired it up, the teacher tried everything to unfreeze the computer. She obviously failed, so we told her to try alt+f4. BSOD came up, she tried to fix it by hitting on the side of the PC. That didn't work so she unplugged it from the wall socket. We barely managed to not burst out in laugh, it was absolutely hilarious 😂

Was checking what my coworker was up to. He was given a computer to fix by another coworker and the PC belonged to his child.

”Oh I just uninstalled Steam. It’s a bad software with loads of viruses that slow down your computer!”

So basically I am the computer guy in my office. If there is any hardware or software related problem, I am the guy who fix it or try to fix it in my own time.

Little bit of more backstory. Two month ago we got react native project from a client. My boss asked me if I want to do that project. he knew that I don't know react native but I want to learn it. So I said yes. I have worked over 12 hours per day to work on that project while learning react native ( I committed the final version to git today.)

Yesterday there was a meeting in our office about project deadlines and issue with current work and stuff. In that meeting one guy asked (this guy had personal beef with me) in rude way like why I am taking parts of pc and given other people. ( If there is any hardware issue, I use other parts from pc which are not currently in use. So basically a simpe resource allocation.)

I knew it was a targeted questio toward me but before I say anything, All people took his side. (I did all those repair after taking permission from my boss, so he did not take that question seriously.)

I spend lots of time fixing those problem so people work does not stop and this is the thank you I got in return. I did this over one and half year. Right now I am asking my self if I continue the work or not.

Note: I wrote this whole thing to get my anger out of me. Sorry for typos. I am little bit drunk and I am not good with English.

Can't believe I got grief yesterday cos I didn't fix a users pc networking fast enough. For a start I am a bleeding developer and then I wasnt told which user had a problem oh and I wasn't the first dev asked either.

Two days ago on my linux partition python was being weird, and I couldn't fix it no matter what I tried. Logical option was to backup /home and then reinstall linux

Two days later I want to die, for whatever reason I can't properly boot from a live USB without getting "input/output error", and I've already erased my previous linux installation at this point.

Anyway, I still have windows, and I think that the problem might be faulty RAM (I get i/o errors with any live USB) so I booted into windows, let it do some updates and now I'm checking my memory

After this, I'm going to open up my PC and check that the RAM sticks are all in properly

Having ram problems with my x299 system. When ever i put 2 8gb sticks in my pc just bluescreens on startup. But if i just put one in, in the b1 slot then it works just fine. But if i put the 2 8gb sticks in one in b1 and one in a2 then take out b1, then the a2 works. This works with both of the sticks so i dont think either one is dead. They are compatible, but blue screens whenever installed together. My bios is updated. Any ideas how to fix?

Don't you guys think, developers should narrate their own life in biography books ?

Trust me my neighbours will stop asking me to fix their broken PC

After some time, planning to install Linux again for personal use and some dev work at home. My current pc is getting too slow sometimes and it irritates me a lot.

My current pc 2gb RAM, Dual core Intel, 32 bit.

Main criteria, os should be fast, I can compromise on GUI, should be stable, should support my old configuration. I like to work on Java/Scala, python, js and sql. Eclipse will be there since I use it at work.

Short listed Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS,
mint (huge confusion on gui),
Opensuse, elementary OS and arch. I had Ubuntu, mint for some time as secondary OS. Arch will be totally new world for me. I have tried few OS in USB boot but couldn't fix one.

Right now I am confused about which one to choose, since everything looks fine but I want the best choice based on my criteria.

The prank happened last 2 years ago. Me and my office mate we love to prank inside the office using our technical skills. One time while our target is on break we took an exact screenshot of his desktop and we manage to hide both cursor and his entire desktop exept the screenshot of his desktop.

After half an hour, the target approach us to fix his issue he restarted the PC multiple times and we laugh so hard because he said his PC keeps hanging or freeze. Hahaha LMAO.

Then after we laugh we reveal that his PC is fine we just replace his desktop with a fake desktop image. He even laugh on our prank hahaha.

Did you prank your office mate the same prank we did? Haha I would advice choose carefully who to prank.

What do you do when the bsod bsods? Apparently one of the ram sticks died while the pc was running so windows died with it. It's a lovely thing to fix at Christmas at relatives.

When Ubuntu 15.10 upgrade process fucks your nvidia drivers install halfway through the upgrade. You then have to force restart your PC, potentially corrupting you drive, and continue the installation process in the command line before being able to fix the display drivers.

So this morning, I was having problems with Explorer.exe. So I did a sfc /scannow to fix it.

After booting, my PC would not boot. I thought I did something to break it. I kept turning it off and on. I was scared that I broke my computer again.

I plugged out my keyboard. It booted.

Then I realized--it was my stupid broken keyboard being weird again.

WHy

Spent 2 days installing different versions of nvidia-driver, nvidia-cuda-toolkit, cudnn.
Disassembled pc due to some ram memory problems and pc not starting after freeze.
Looks like sometimes plug out and plug in various components on your motherboard fix pc lol. Destroyed PC casing that collapsed due to me sitting on it.

All of this to just find out tensorflow error and all crashes are from graphics card overheating after keeping it for some time at 82 celsius.

Added time.sleep to python code and looks like it's working, keeping temperature below 65 celsius.

Still ~100 times faster than cpu training so I can live with that.

I study and analyse all these intricate things and you think all I do is fix PCs? How dare you!

Today is thursday. Oh no.

At thursdays I have a 8h30-19 schedule (I have 1h30' of free time to go home and cry after I finish a class at 15h30 though) and there's this one class I DREAD. It's a 2h class at 17h and it's an exercise class. This wouldn't be so bad it I actually understood the code behind the exercises, because they don't teach us code in the theory classes (btw it's C. I hate that language because of all this). The teacher pretty much tells us "do this exercise", waits like 10' and then starts to (try to) explain what we're supposed to do. Oh my god.
The other day he was like "write "exec ( ... "text" ... )", compile and execute". It didn't work. Of course it didn't why would it? I was switching around between terminal, manual and text editor, to no avail. In the end he explained but I don't think I got it.
Every time I think about this class I die a little inside and start to become somewhat anxious to be honest. The theory is not that that hard, the practice part is what is killing me (I have test in 2w but I'm just gonna start studying earlier so I can go watch this match LoL).
Does someone know a good book (preferably online, if possible) or a good website on C? I really need to read that, that language is killing me.

Bonus: the other day I had to do a homework that was to be delivered. We had to write a program that read the program and its arguments like this:

./program_name
numArgs
arg1
arg2
etc

I wrote the code, had some bumps in the way, asked a colleague for help because we needed to have a custom function made that was to be done in the class but that I couldn't make because of the reasons above. Then it came the time to test. My VM broke (I think I'm gonna format my PC to try to fix that. Have installed some other versions of the VM but the installations fails or the machine doesn't start) so I sent it to said colleague to test. She said it did OK and so I sent the work to this website we have to send our works to.
"2 errors".
What? What happened? She said it worked just fine.
Looked at my code, couldn't see anything wrong.
Asked the same colleague for help.
Turns out I missed a space. A SPACE. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. A presentation error in Java is a good thing, at least we know the program works fine, it's just the output that's wrongly formatted. But C? Nope, errors all around, oh my god. I'm still mad about it.
And I owe her a chocolate.

Why am I so curious?

You are always talking about Arch linux. Well, I got a second hand (very old) laptop to use as a backup, as I am going to working from home and I just have a desktop pc. So I decided to install Arch on it just to know how does it works. After this first experience, I would change it to a lubuntu (I am talking about a Celeron with 2GB RAM).

Well... I managed to install Arch. It is up and running. Lot's of problems to fix yet, sound, native wifi (I am using a wifi adapter that just works on any linux distro) etc but I am fucking in love with Arch! And I can't use it to work, as it is very unstable and I really need everything always up and running to work. I cannot have any glitch with the computer or I can lose a deadline.

Dude in my Calc 2 class just bitched about iPhones having "shitty software" referencing that bug from around ~6 years ago, when a specific iMessage text would reboot your phone. IMO, 99% of what Apple does well is software. UI is subjective, but final cut pro is unbelievable in terms of functionality for its price, their software is so well optimized that iPhones have been able to use comparably tiny batteries and still compete. They are consistent throughout their company with software design, while companies like Google are so stratified it took years before their material design had been implemented in all their services, there are still a few that aren't (not to mention the meme of Google killing off all their projects). I hate tablets, but the iPad pro has the best software/hardware implementation of any I've ever seen. Apple's interconnectivity between devices is unbelievable, whether it's Continuity features or the setup process just recognizing group devices around and pulling data to create consistent account info and saving you taps. Siri is shit, but apart from that their software isn't bad enough that you should complain about that instead of...

Their Macs are fucking pressure-cookers, and their fuckin marketing department is like a different company all-together, and their anti-fix-it-yourself policies are so user hostile that they're toe-to-toe with being as abusive to customers as Oracle.

TL;DR the biggest scam Apple has pulled off is not that the sheep still think Android and PC users are living in 2010, but they've convinced the sheep that they know what shitty software is. At that point they're too many levels deep and there is no red-pill strong enough for them.

So a bit ago I posted a rant saying that I would be getting ElementaryOS onto my computer and trying it out, buckle up kiddos because this goes to shit in just a moment.

I did everything right, used Rufus correctly and didn't destroy my computer nor my installer, good! I set it up, get everything going and everything is running smoothly. One problem... I couldn't download **any** programs that weren't from the Ubuntu Store, which really annoyed me because I like to use Brackets, and I couldn't find it in the UStore...

So I messed up **really** bad here... I didn't *format* my Elementary Installer, but tried to delete the files like a pleb and stick an Ubuntu ISO in it's place, I didn't even think on going through Rufus again, I just slapped that shit in there without a thought.

I restart my computer, I read a forum stating that I would get an option that allows Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) to take over the partition of a previous distro. Neat! Another bloody problem is that I decided to use "Win + R" and manually delete the Elementary partition **myself**... What is even wrong with me...

So I restarted it, and before my father left to go shopping, he said I should go into the BIOS to change the boot order (Now this is where I **really fucked up**. Thought what I said before was bad?).
Cool, so I boot my PC and go into the BIOS, now I couldn't figure out on my computer where the boot order was, when it was right in my face the whole damn time... I managed to almost destroy my entire BIOS with the fucking file in my USB stick, because I was being an idiot...

I restart, GRUB opens up with a black screen and white text in the top left corner, know what the most important line is in that small block of words? "unknown filesystem"... Of fucking course I fucked it that bad, GRUB didn't even give me the option of just using Windows 10 instead, just quietly gave me the middle finger since I basically nearly fucked everything.

What's funny is that I had someone (who lives with us, let's call him Jeff) look at my computer because I was done being a dumbass.
He told me that I still had my BIOS (which was a bloody relief, because I thought I basically destroyed my computer doing what I did) and that all I need to do is fix the installer I tried to use.

I gave him the USB and just started to play on my phone.
Then I remembered something maybe an hour or so ago... I had an older installer that I used on my shitty laptop awhile back, if I can find it again I could just use that instead of waiting on Jeff. I dug around my room and found the USB that had a working Ubuntu ISO on, correctly placed inside this time.

I basically walked up to my computer, plugged it in and started it up, and it worked. I got Ubuntu and Windows 10 back, and I was basically laughing like I just saved a man's life.

Moral of this story: Don't be like me and do something stupid, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're attempting at...

All i wanted was a toolbaritem which i can hide depending on a propery in my viewmodel (xamarin forms). that shithead does not have a damn IsVisible property so i had to make some custom shit for this. Result is that my page does not load anymore. no fucking error visible in output window.

could not resolve a bug in time as i have to pick up my girlfriend and do some social shit.

now i am on the road. all i can think of is getting back to my pc and fix this.

My family bought a Windows XP pc when i was around 12. The first thing i did was play a game called F22 Raptor. While playing I pressed some keys due to which the screen rotated 180 degrees. No one knew how to fix it. I wasn't allowed to use the computer after that.

I'm calling you out, Asus, fix your absolutely shitty piece of software or I'm never buying a motherboard from you again.

A little explanation: my PC woke up from sleep like this. On another occasion before I could take the screenshot, the CPU was sitting almost idle at 45 degrees C. The CPU fan senses that it has to spin up, but never actually does so.

I've had the opposite thing before - a case fan spinning up not wanting to spin down even if the temps are fine - which is preferable because it only causes a little bit of noise. But this here could potentially cause damage to the CPU if I put some load on it without looking at the temperature. I've partly remedied the issue by writing a batch script that kills and resets the fan control service and is triggered by Task Scheduler on resume from sleep - a thing every average Joe should do, right?

It's a shame for top-notch hardware to have to go together with such crappy piece of software. This is the X99 Sabertooth that cost me 450 EUR originally.

!rant

I hate when my coworkers that work at call centre think programmers can be summoned to fix printer or PC in company. We have tech support for that.
I can fix the damn printer if I need to but dude dont go in like a stampedo of angry bulls.

My boss saw this and placed the do not disturb sticker on door of our section.

Let me tell you about my wonderful weekend. It all started with a game that doesn't run in wine and it ended up in the biggest nightmare of Windows Update and EFI configuration.
1 - let's boot on my Windows partition to play trackmania 2.
2 - Windows Update interrupts me while driving a track.
3 - Update keep failing over and over again.
4 - I keep trying things to fix Windows Update, but with no success.
5 - Let's try system restore, failed
6 - Let's try to do a reset. "You don't have a recovery drive". Oh, right...
7 - Let's try to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 10, just because. Nope, "we could not determine if your pc can run Windows 10". Wait what....
8 - I guess I'll be reinstalling this trash. "Nope, can't. Don't like that partition I just formatted". Of course you can't...
9 - Had to delete the partition and let it create new ones. It created a new EFI partition. Just why???
10 - Okay that worked. Let's fix grub now.
11 - Maybe not, let's try rEFInd, because it looks fancy.
12 - After rebooting on the live USB for about 50 times and reconfiguring rEFInd without any luck, I realised the install script didn't install fs drivers for ext4. Oh, right... That's why you didn't find any Linux kernel...
13 - It can't boot windows, they're using a different EFI partition. Let's move rEFInd to the new EFI partition windows created for me.
14 - Finally everything works again. So much effort to play a freaking game without being bothered by windows update. And rEFInd abience theme looks beautiful.

I've got to say though, I learned a lot and the Arch wiki is awesome!

My pc suddenly restarted. And i found that my hdd is broke while all uncommited project still there. I spent 3 hours to fix it. And its still not working.

I hope i can get my project back. Also my games :(

Company just gave me a laptop running windows 10 that doesnt get to the login screen because of a bad AVG upgrade - of course its urgent hence they cant give it to the guy whos fucking job it is becuase he will take week.

Firstly just found out you cant access safe mode without a disk if you cant hit the login sceen - Windows your fucking kidding me right?

Now I've been watching a spinning fucking circle for an hour while it's "attempting repairs" without even saying what its trying, oh ya and of course formatting this peice of shit is out of the question.

I'm motivated want to work on my Projects.
My PC doesn't go on. Needed 4 Hours to fix, now demotivated.
Yeah Sunday

When is Slack finally going to fix their broken notifications on mobile? I am so pissed everytime I turn on wifi, hundreds of notifications are raping my phone and tablet. But when I actually want to get notifications on my phone (and leave PC running) I get fucking none.

I'm a freaking web developer, I can't / don't want to fix your PC.

everytime when i meet with my friends and they ask me if what course i'm currently taking and of course i'm gonna answer back "IT"

(~) what i say in my mind

statements that will suddenly pop into conversation

-"can you (reformat, fix, update, etc.) my pc/laptop"
~.......

-"wow smart"
~oh stahp it, youuu

-"don't forget to treat us when you graduate, i heard jobs in your field have great salaries"
~gezzus i'm still a student and i am struggling, then you want me to treat you.

-"hey man, can you build me a website (for free)"
~yea dude, let me ask genie to snap that wish of yours

-"oh so you must be good with computers?"
~yea i treat them well, i tell them bedtime stories and feed them with milk and cookies

-"nice....."
~the long silence makes this even more awkward

-"hey man, i code and design too, maybe we can work together"
~for sure

-"how many coffee?"
~i truly found my mate.

these are some of the statements i've encountered, what's yours?

Spent all afternoon and night, trying to get Windows reinstalled on my old college laptop because my dad needed another pc since I'll be using his personal laptop to wfh.

1. DVD Drive is faulty, slow/faulty reads
2. I don't have product keys (they're all stores on a USB disk, I should make a backup... that I didn't bring back to their place) except for Vista and Win 8 but Win 8 key already used by another PC. I have a burned Win 7 disc
3. Apparently it had a virus which was never removed, fresh reinstall never done. It hides the DVD drives and kills the internet and makes the installers think there's only 400MB.
4. I followed some wiki that said to Mark the C drive as Active... Which fixed the issue but then I decided to do the full install from boot... Except on reboot, apparently this fcked up the MBR
5. Tried googling how to fix the MBR, eventually found some USB app that supposedly fixes it. Create a USB boot disk, not recognized
6. Finally try the DVDs and release it recognize them somewhat when booting... Win 7 one kept hanging on the load screen
7. Somehow Vista got thru and actually installed...

Now IE and Chrome both complain about HTTPS issues and how they don't support Vista...

But at least my dad now had a laptop he can use to do non-work stuff while he uses his company laptop to do work.

!rant

I had that installation of windows 3 to 4 years now.
I'm using a third party software for backup so everyday at 23:00 the backup service starts. The image is stored on a second HDD.
First i want to point out that i set up the windows maintenance around that time too. So any updates should occur then and i remember finding my PC at login screen couple of times meaning a restart had taken place.
Everything was fine all this time.
Couple of days ago i returned home late around 2 am to find a blue screen saying that the computer did not boot property the last time. Had two options, just restart or try to fix.
Of course i will fix it, come on.
Everything failed. Everything. Even safe mode won't boot.
Who cares i have the back up system image. Boot from the bootable usb stick and restore. Well nothing is happening. It's just freezing at 5%. Cancel. Try again. Cancel. Verify the image. Success! Try again! Nothing.
Damn. Im really tired, off to bed.
Woke up tried fixing and restore but to no avail.
Fuck it i will just install Windows fresh. I was set up after an hour or so installed the necessary drivers and such. Let's see that image of any file i want to get back.
Image is corrupted. What the fuck? How? Damn it. Mount and recovery also failed.

That's it. I did not lose any important files. I save everything on a different drive and also the backup.
But I'm wondering what had gone wrong.
My guess windows rebooted when the backup was running. If that's the case shouldn't be a check if such service is running?

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

Good poem i read :

“OK” said Fuen, “but why is Hydra howling at the moon.”

“He is just a bit upset at his PC breaking” replied Red.

“Can’t he fix it?” asked Fuen.

“Doesn’t look like it” said Red. “He keeps getting stuck during the trouble shooting.”

“Which bit of trouble shooting?” asked Fuen.

“The last bit” replied Red. “He says his keyboard doesn’t have an ‘any’ key.”

Fuen winced.