So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID

Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?

Designer: yes, use it in all other apps

Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?

Designer: nope no error

Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?

Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?

Designer: Yes, to test edge cases

Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that

Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode

Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings

*Deep breath*

Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time

Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this

Me: ... tough luck then, not happening

Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊

Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.

Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

RANT:
Google is just a steaming pile of shit!!

I've recently installed LineageOS onto my phone and wanted to degooglify my life.

So my current Smartphone doesn't have any GApps installed and I get along fairly well.

Should I need anything, I should just be able to use it in my browser right?
RIGHT?

Nono!! As soon as I want to log into a third party Service using Google (older acccounts with the other choice only being Facebook) I need to "verify my identity". And the only option are my old smartphone who still have Gapps on it but are slow and don't accessible when I'm away!

For those who say: "Google is just beeing secure. They don't want anyone to steal your account.". I USE 2FA AND HAVE BACKUP CODES.
BEFORE DEGOOGLING MY DEVICE IT NEVER ASKED SUCH A THING!!! WHAT A PILE OF SPYING SHIT!!!

And the best part, after I remotely started my PC at home and just want to take a screenshot of the message for this post before just using a working session, the message didn't appear.
Somehow google decided that me logging in 15 mins later (same ip) proves my identity?!?!?!

IF THIS CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO AI. FUCK THIS SHIT. GOOGLED SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE AN ONLINE CASINO BECAUSE THE CHANCE OF JUST GETTING LOGGED SEEMS COMPLETELY RANDOM!!!

(I also had this prior when using my smartphone browser. There I couldn't "circumvent" this and I was at home. But having this shit on my browser which should've a session is unacceptable.)

I think I made someone angry, then sad, then depressed.

I usually shrink a VM before archiving them, to have a backup snapshot as a template. So Workflow: prepare, test, shrink, backup -> template, document.

Shrinking means... Resetting root user to /etc/skel, deleting history, deleting caches, deleting logs, zeroing out free HD space, shutdown.

Coworker wanted to do prep a VM for docker (stuff he's experienced with, not me) so we can mass rollout the template for migration after I converted his steps into ansible or the template.

I gave him SSH access, explained the usual stuff and explained in detail the shrinking part (which is a script that must be explicitly called and has a confirmation dialog).

Weeeeellll. Then I had a lil meeting, then the postman came, then someone called.

I had... Around 30 private messages afterwards...

- it took him ~ 15 minutes to figure out that the APT cache was removed, so searching won't work
- setting up APT lists by copy pasta is hard as root when sudo is missing....
- seems like he only uses aliases, as root is a default skel, there were no aliases he has in his "private home"
- Well... VIM was missing, as I hate VIM (personal preferences xD)... Which made him cry.
- He somehow achieved to get docker working as "it should" (read: working like he expects it, but that's not my beer).

While reading all this -sometimes very whiney- crap, I went to the fridge and got a beer.

The last part was golden.

He explicitly called the shrink script.
And guess what, after a reboot... History was gone.

And the last message said:

Why did the script delete the history? How should I write the documentation? I dunno what I did!

*sigh* I expected the worse, got the worse and a good laugh in the end.

Guess I'll be babysitting tomorrow someone who's clearly unable to think for himself and / or listen....

Yay... 4h plus phone calls. *cries internally*

Quick Tutorial: How to find a missing bug.

0) Wake up & have breakfast
1) Goto work
2) Do your job until the end of the working day
3) Make a backup
4) Shutdown your PC
5) Stand up
6) Go to the office door
7) Grab the door
8) Now the phone rings
9) Turn and go back
10) Take the phone
11) Now you get the bug report

This is a well approved method.
It always works!

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

So I was trying to root my Xperia Z2, starting by unlocking the bootloader. I rushed through the confirmation boxes to get the code, I entered it on fastboot... And realized I haven't made a backup. Phone restored to factory state. At least I had saved my photos on the SD card, but all the files, settings, configs and apps were gone along with my IM conversation database that I hadn't backed up for a month.

And I still haven't finished rooting that device.

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 ?

My laptop charger is dead and my laptop can't work without it. So, basically I can't even look at code.

Colleague calls, says there is a problem with package.json and it requires my immediate attention as the APIs need to be deployed.

Me enters Sherlock mode, and remembers that I have a git hook which took a backup of my code every time I pushed and saved it on my headless tiny CHIP.

I get excited, and do an SSH from my phone, hoping to see the faulty code/file. But all I see is an outdated repository because I am an idiot who forgot to turn the fucking CHIP on after I shut it down for cleaning.

This is the most anti climatic ending I have been ever part of.

So I am broke and can't buy a vds, I installed Termux on my android phone instead. Now I have a portable server that is capable to recieve calls and transmit sms for logs.

BUT, then I had to go to customer support due to case makes the phone get short circuited şn random times. Obviously they deleted all info and Samsung Cloud doesn't backup other users' data. (Termux emulates a terminal running on another user, which is not root by default)

Can anyone teach this teenager how to use tar properly? :D

The amount of energy spent to just write ‘Hi’ and click a send button is so big that we should consider banning of sending hi messages.

Instead of just saying “Hi!” we are now using analog to digital preprocessors that convert it to bunch of 0 and 1 to send it over communication layer and deliver it to other human being that will convert it from digital to analog by reading it but that is simple.

By sending message using phone we also:
- save it to local phone
- convert it to couple protocols
- transmit it over air so make connection to internet provider services that would generate logs on this provider as well as whole routing table before it gets to the target person
- save it on messaging provider disk
- probably be processed by filters by provider, sometimes be reviewed or listened by third parties and also processed in bulk by artificial intelligence algorithms
- finally delivered to target phone and saved there where that person would just change this text to their inner voice and save it
- sometimes encrypted and decrypted
- sometimes saved on provider
- sometimes saved on phone manufacturer cloud backup
- don’t get me started on people involved to keep this infrastructure in place for you just to say hi

There are also some indirect infinite possibilities of actions for example:
- emit sound and light that can lead to walking from one room to other
- the floor in your house is destroyed cause of it so you need to renovate your floor
- sound can expose your position and kill you if you’re hiding from attacker
- sound can wake you up so you wake up in different hours
- it can stop you from having sex or even lead to divorce as a result simple hi can destroy your life
- can get you fired
- can prevent from suicide and as a result you can make technology to destroy humans

and I can write about sound and light all day but that’s not the point, the point is that every invention makes life more complicated, maybe it saves time but does it really matter ?

I can say that every invention we made didn’t make world simpler. The world is growing with complexity instead.

It’s just because most of those inventions lead to computer that didn’t make our world simpler but made it more complicated.

Decided to get myself a new phone as the 2013 model is getting morally obsolete. I can still flash Lineage/Android10 and it will run it. But the apps (e.g. Google Maps) nowadays are such a performance hog it can't cope.
So I've searched through gsmarena, prioritizing smaller phones, picked myself a candidate and had it on my desk after few days.
The 2013 mindset still the same "do the backup before touching the phone in any way". How do you do backup? Unlock bootloader, boot/flash TWRP, run backup.
I've realized only after the unlocking and some googling, that the unlock automatically deletes TA partition and stored DRM keys. So advanced licensed features of the phone are gone. Also there is no way to lock the bootloader again, so I've lost the SafetyNet validation too.

tl;dr: I've fucked up my new phone as a first step after I got it.

A little story which happened my SECOND day on the floor after getting hired to do customer-facing phone support for my current job (can't mention the name, NDA). Customer from Detroit calls in:
Me: "Thank you for calling (company), my name is Guru, how can I assist you?"
C: "Uhhh, yeah. I need to get back into my ID. I can't backup my tablet or phone, and y'all are kinda holding my data host-" <Loud gunshots>
C: "oh! Shit!" <sound of running feet>
Me: "Everything OK sir?"
C: "Fuck! Naw! Hang on!" <more running, jumps a fence, skids to a stop>
C: "Ok, I'm safe, I'm safe... So what I gotta do to get y'all to let me back into my shit?"
*MUTE* Me: "First of all, what the fuck are you doing on the phone with me when you should be either A) calling the cops because, I dunno, just maybe some trouser stain is attempting to kill you, or, B) FIRING BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!"
*REAL* Me: "OK, first you gotta… (outlines step 1,2,3... etc)
C: "OK, that sounds easy enough. I'll try it when I get to the office, I'm on my way there now- shit. Hold on again..."
(talking to someone on the street): "what, him? That dude? Over there? That dude... In the shirt?What the fuck!? Are you sure? Hold on, sir! I'ma call you back..."
Last thing I hear before the line lets go is a large BOOM!

Sometimes it's best to just sit back and sip your coffee...

My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.

Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.

I just fucked up real bad:

My phone was giving some error about not being able to install an update. Fair enough, i think to myself, so i try rebooting. Still nothing...

I then remember that i at some point OEM unlocked it for some testing, so i start up adb and see if i can connect during the update process. I can't. This is bad: I can't get into my home environment, nor can i connect with adb

Then i try booting into recovery, but instead of booting to ACTUAL recovery, it boots to some custom made "E-Recovery" made by huawei (my phone is a huawei p9 lite), which only gives me the option to download the update, which crashes, and no way of resetting. However, from here, i am finally able to connect to my internal storage via hisuite to make a backup

Next up: Bootloader
So i next load up the unlocked bootloader to try and manually flash the update. That works great, but it still wont boot normally. So i figure: it must think my device is in fact a different device. At this point i'm pretty fucked: Even though i have my data backed up, i can't manually download the update from huawei's site because i don't have the right keys, and i can't download an OTA because their site sucks and half of the downloads don't work, including the one i need. So now i'm stuck here with a bricked phone because EMUI doesn't know how to install an update.

I then did the stupidest thing i have done to date: i wanted to flash a custom recovery image over the "E-Recovery" in order to do some troubleshooting, but instead of writing
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash recovery recovery.img"
I wrote
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash boot recovery.img"
Meaning i flashed my BOOT partition with a custom recovery image that turned out to not be able to run. Great! Now i've totally fucked my boot sequence

I can't call their support line either, because as soon as they realize i've tried to restore it myself, and therefor had my OEM unlocked, they basically just hang up.

Well my last job was nothing but a call center with AT&T, but I will tell the story of how I got my current job which is also my first job as a developer.

I was living in Texas. I just moved out of a house I was renting and my girlfriend at the time moved back to Missouri and she was about 5 months pregnant.

She wanted us to all be in Missouri because that's where her family is. No big deal for me, but we didn't have a place to stay yet in Missouri and it was difficult to find a job in a city that has very little to offer in what I do, and of course, wants experienced people despite what said they were looking for.

For 5 months I kept looking for a job while I stayed with my parents and worked at the call center and she with her mom and stepdad so I could save up to not only make the trip to Missouri but to be able to make a payment on a place which we were also having trouble finding.

Even if I didn't have a job or if we didn't find a place, I was not going to miss the birth of my child. So, within about 3 weeks of her due date, it was time for me to make the trip to Missouri. I still haven't found a job but at least we were going to have a place ready for my child within the week. With all the money I saved, we could get through a couple of months of rent, bills and necessities, but still needed to find work.

After only a week after we got the place, I almost gave up so I started to apply at restaurants as a backup after I found a couple more places. The restaurants were quick to respond and I had interviews scheduled for the week that I applied. I knew I was going to be miserable working at a restaurant, but I needed a job, any job. As a last attempt, the day before my first interview with one restaurant, I found a new posting for an entry level position early in the morning. I quickly sent in my resume but didn't expect anything until weeks later. It only took a few hours for a reply and he wondered if we could do a phone interview. I said yes, of course. After the interview, he said that he had one more person to interview but he would let me know. I thought, great, there goes my chance. After only an hour of waiting, while I was looking for more places to apply, he calls me back saying that he wants to hire me. Immediately after I got the job I cancel my other interviews and I started the next day.

It was great I got the job, but it was a far drive. However, they did offer telecommuting, but I had to come in every day until they felt I understood their work flow. I did inform my boss that my son would be born really soon but he was okay with letting me take off when it was time.

I started on a Wednesday in May of 2014 and made the 1.5 hour drive every day. After only working 10 days, my girlfriend calls me at work saying that it's time for the baby to come but it would be a while so I could finish my shift and then come straight to the hospital.

I get there but still no baby. It was a long labor which ended up in C-section at 4 in the morning the next day. My son was finally born on a Wednesday and it was the greatest thing in my life.

But now, I am a single dad(about a year now and it was mutual) and I am the only developer as of a couple of weeks ago. Despite how they handle things and my annoying coworker that sits next to me which I have ranted about in a previous posts, I do enjoy working there trying to improve and move the company forward. After all, I work from home 3 days out of the week now. The rants will still come lol.

Sorry for the mood kill at the end but that's my story. 😁

My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball]

i need an adult. I know noone who would understand my worries, so you guys need to be it.

i have a nextcloud running on my raspberry pi. performance is horrible, dont ask, but it works.

i mostly use it to backup the photos of my phone sd card every night when my phone charges. Internally this works good. If i am elseplace it wont for obvious reasons.

In my youthful joy of doom i opened port 443 and forward it to my raspi. I get internet via cable and my ip is pretty much static (it was the same for 10 months). So external access is provided.

Now i thought, its stupid that i cannot sign an ssl certificate cause i dont have a domain. Lets buy domain. But before i do that i did some try runs with duckdns to test the principle.

Some back and forth, it works now. Pretty god, i could even make a cron job on the raspbi to renew (that should work right?). Only problem. randoname.duckdns.org doesnt work internally. Or should not at least.

So i googled a bit and it turns out that my router (a cable fritz!box i bought myself) can be a local network dns. Or cannot. Regardless what i try, it doesnt accept the changed config file.

Now the problem.

It works anyway. randoname.duckdns.org points to my external "static" ip and resolves to that from my internal network..so it works on my phone or laptop. if i traceroute the thing it goes via two hops out and finishes in less than 1ms.

Now to the problem:
I have no fokkin clue why. The expected behaviour would be that it shouldnt work. If i do what i intended todo on pc in the hosts file tracert works correctly, directly pointing to the internal ip.

What i cannot figure out, is it the fritz!box being smart? Is it my ISP being smart?

Reason to rant: i have absolutly NOONE to ask, i know not a single person who would even understand what troubles me. I want to learn, i want to know WHY not just some mindless russian patchwork of "if it works its good enough".

thats depressing.

I can't wait for the release of Snips Air sometime in 2019 so that I can stop using my Google home. It's not even the privacy concern that bugs me, it's the stupid shit like alarm management. To preface, I've had a Google home since late last year and since I got it the alarms have been nothing but trouble. More than half the time when I ask it when my next alarm is, it will respond with "You have an alarm for Friday at 7pm that is going off right now" (At the time of this response it was Tuesday). Then snoozing sometimes just doesn't work, I told it to snooze for 10 minutes, it worked just fine. Then today I made the mistake of asking it to snooze a second time which responded with "Sure, snoozing for 5 minutes", I wake up 45 minutes later, and ask "Hey Google, when's my next alarm?", it responds "You have an alarm today for 7:00 snoozed until 7:15". I have an exam today so luckily I didn't sleep in too late but againg this isn't the first occurence. To prevent this I normally just have a backup alarm on my phone and the one on my phone will wake me up in case something happens. On top of that though I've had rarer cases where it will delete all my alarms and I'll have to go command by command reminding of each alarm. That's just alarms though, I also have it control several IoT devices, and me having to use IFTTT requires the utmost precision in my phrasing otherwise it won't understand ( although this issue is mainly due to how the assistant service trigger on IFTTT is configured ). It still does much better than Siri ( at least my home can set alarms unlike my mac ), I have yet to try Alexa though. Of course my last problem is the hotword, saying "Hey Google" is much better than "Ok Google" but it's still excessive when I have to repeat it for each individual command. This is why I'm so excited for snips air, a set of devices that look pretty great, hackable, and as a bonus much more private that the current options. I realize that I could get a dev kit or set up snips on a pi but the dev kit isn't exactly visually appealing and I doubt I could get something that looks or functions half decent on the pi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why, Apple? WHY.

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

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

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

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

I finally got around to setting up my own cloud with nextcloud on my own dedicated server.

Just setting up Nextcloud alone was not really the challenge ( I've set up at least 2 Nextcloud instances in the past ).
The actual challenge was to install /e/ OS on my mobile phone and get it to work with my Nextcloud instance.

It's not all performant, buttery-smooth or super-fast yet, but for a one-person / user-cloud, I think it should be just fine.

There's still room for improvement in terms of server-side performance, but it's working fine with the basics at least.
I need to figure / iron out some issues like social federation via ActivityPub not working, Nextcloud SMS not syncing up my SMS, Mail app crashing because I used a self-hosted Nextcloud instance, etc; but those are things I could work on slowly, in the course of time.

No, the server is not physically controlled by me, yet ( it's a dedicated box server though. Still, hosted and physically controlled by a provider ).

I intend on setting up another 'replica' on a RaspberryPi which I will then make primary, connecting to the internet via DynamicDNS.
I'll probably keep the server as a fallback / backup server just in case my home server loses connectivity.

Taking back control from Big Tech is something I intend on pursuing actively this year. I've had the idea in my head for too long that it has started to fester.

This is only a first step, of many, that needs to follow, in order for me to take control back from Big Tech.

Yes, there still is some room for improvement, but I think for now ‒
Mission Accomplished!🤘