Me: *hours of coding, develops a feature*
Code: I'm working..
Me: Oh good.. will monitor you for sometime.
Code: Ok, I'm done. I'll stop working now.
Me: WTF

Me: *sits for hours to solve bugs*
And when almost done,
VPN: Someone's having a good day, I'll disconnect you now.
Me: WTF

Me: *tries switching on/off VPN couple of times..*
When it starts to connect,
WIFI: Oh wait!! It's my turn to bid goodbye now. Have a nice day sir
Me: Of course !! The wifi

Me: *restarts router/ troubleshoot etc*
When wifi says connected...
Battery: Good job with wifi.. I'm down now..what you gonna do?
Me: Are you fucking kidding me???

Me: *connects charger, wait for laptop to switch on*
Windows: Updating....
Me: *jumps out window*

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

What I did wrong during my home office cleaning session this morning:
- put soap on my mouse mat
- snapped my enter key
- vacuumed up my F8 key
- absent-mindedly cut my ethernet cable
- lost my zero key
- dropped my backup hard drive (data was recoverable, but I need a new drive)
- lost one of the nose pads on my glasses
- got a cocktail stick stuck in a USB port
- exploded my mouse by using the wrong type of battery

Things I did good:
- nothing

Me: I'd like a new phone please.
Manufacturer: Okay, what do you look for in a phone?
Me: Well as long as the other specs are good, it's important to have a headphone port, SD card slot, and removable battery.
Manufacturer: Okay, fingerprint scanner. Got it.
Me: What?
Manufacturer: The only thing you want is a fingerprint scanner?
Me: No I don't care about that, what I want is-
Manufacturer: A fingerprint scanner, we know. Every device needs one.
Me: But-
Manufacturer: Shhh... Don't worry, we know our customers.

The good thing about being a mobile developer is that your phone's battery never goes below 90%

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

Good morning everyone. May your phone battery always be above 50%.

Good fucking God non-technical iPhone owners are such a fucking cancerous group

"You're just mad because you're broke"

"Lol broke boy."

"That potato ass camera though"

"Shut up before I take your battery out."

Like fucking Christ what an autistic buncha fucking brainless monkeys. We should have a Holocaust for ignorant cunts like them.

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

*wondered for 4 years how a bootloop looks like*
Nexus: yOU wAnE kNoW wHaT a BoOtLoOp LoOkS LiKe?!

*bootloops itself to shit*

Well I guess that I know what I'll be doing tonight then. Flash that new StatixOS build because the phone shat itself.

*tries to reflash the recovery*
*still bootloops*
*tries to flash the stock OS*
*still fucking bootloops*
*finds a post on XDA saying something about fucked big cores that need to be disabled*

Fucking piece of junk. So not only the battery is shit, but also the CPU is shit, huh. Certified pieces of shit.

*flashes the patched boot.img that disables the big cores*
*phone loads Google logo.. good*
*BOOTLOOPS FUCKING AGAIN*

MJHUIETHNIUBESZPTUIBG ESVGU d

FUCK!!! Fuck you Google, fuck you Nexus, fuck you Huawei, HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO DESIGN A FUCKING PHONE?!!!

So yeah. Looking for suggestions for a new phone. Anything of which the kernel source is released and of which the battery is halfway decent (unlike this fucking piece of shit) should do.

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.

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

I love it when a fellow "dev" asks about some interesting security topic (full disk encryption) and I'm like "yeah I use LUKS pretty much everywhere".. and then takes an entire arm when given a hand.

Performance in LUKS? Yeah sure you can benchmark it within cryptsetup. Here's how to do it and choose a good cipher for your CPU.

D: Oh also how do I check my battery life?
M (thinking): you lazy fucking piece of shit.
M: FUCKING GOOGLE IT
D: Obviously that means that you don't know it.
M (thinking): so not only lazy but also disgustingly ungrateful, fucking twat.
M: acpi. Next time fucking Google it.
D: You know what? Never mind.

As if I'm the one that's fucking wrong now!! But you know what, never mind indeed. Because you've successfully wasted my fucking time instead of fucking googling "check battery life Linux" like a sensible dev would.

Fellow "dev", if you're on devRant I hope you read this. You can seriously go fuck yourself.

BEEP-BEEP
Every now and then, periodically
BEEP-BEEP
and then quiet. Get into working mode, concentrate again, a...
BEEP-BEEP

wtf is that.. Took down my smoke alarm, prolly the battery is getting low. Put it next to me, waiting...
BEEP-BEEP
nope, it's gotta be smth else. How can I hunt it down when I can't even tell which direction it's coming from?!? I know. Play smart. Measure the period.
BEEP-BEEP
it's been 3 minutes 5 seconds since the last BEEP-fucking-BEEP. Now I can plan my time ahead. Go to one room, wait fo..
BEEP-BEEP
Nope, it's not there. Carry on with all the other rooms, waiting for that annoying beeping.
BEEP-BEEP
I think I at least know the room. Good, narowed it down.
BEEP-BEEP

this is getting really annoying. I've been playing with this nonsense for an hour already. Alright, it's in my kid's room. The PC is off, toys are off. What could it be....? Binary search the f
BEEP-BEEP
uck out of it! aight, I first try to identify from which part of the room it's coming from. Stand in the middle and tu
BEEP-BEEP
ahh, right, it's behind me then. Fine. That's the PC corner. But it's off, it can't be making sounds. Esp when it has no speakers plugged in - it's got only Bluetooth speakers which haven't been turned on for what, a year already? but then w
BEEP-BEEP
hat could it be... Sounds like it's indeed coming from the PC corner. Checking all the LEDs -- all are off, nothing's turned on. Move the speakers away, try digging around to see if the kiddo didn't leave his toys behind the
BEEP-BEEP
PC. Wait, the sound has moved behind me... And I've only moved my BT speakers. Which are turned off. That's odd... could it be? Put one to one ear and another one to another and wait for the remaining 15 seconds
BEEP-(you are a fucking idiot)-BEEP
whispers in my left ear.

Turns out, some BT speakers can make low-battery sounds even when they are turned off.

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

So I had to buy a laptop

I had a Lenovo G50-70 (2014) it was really good, mid-range i5, 6GB of RAM and to speed it up I've installed an SSD. 3 years (and some formatting) later it started being slow, I couldn't even play Minecraft anymore (and the battery was dying)

This year we're learning and using PCs for the first (real) time, so I needed a good laptop.

I started searching everywhere, Google, shops, Amazon... (Excluding HP and Acers for good reasons 😂) so I've found this Asus, which isn't really famous, but the model is UX510UX.
FHD display, Nvidia 950M, i7-7500U, really good battery, 8GB of RAM, 1TB of hard disk

I bought an additional 128GB M.2 SSD from WD (I'm sorry but I can't live with a HDD 😂)

All of this for ~700€
I'm very happy for the purchase, the laptop is all metal (pinky bronze, but I like it)

It's really powerful, I can play GTA with mid-high details without any lag. (Remember, I play GTA on the desktop with a 1080 Ti so my standards are high)

I'm happy 😄!

My headphones just died because the battery is empty!
Not a good start!
I forgot the cable at home!

Bye bye peace, productivity, and focus

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

Microsoft are you serious! You are installing a major update that will take a while, specifying that it will restart my computer many times without even asking if I want to proceed with it now or later! I don't have my charger ! What would happen if It goes out of battery! Damn you Microsoft !! Isn't there any good OS or what! Windows is sometimes buggy ! Linux distros don't make use of GPU! And I don't even talk about Mac.. God damnit we're on year 2017 and made so many astonishing work and still there is no fully operational and good OS! 😬😬😬

Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.

Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.

Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.

Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.

As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.

All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.

Apple... Isn't it obvious?

They once built machines and software that were tested and ready for customers but they went into a direction where saving money and generating more income has the highest priority.
The more recent the version (hard- and software) the more unstable it became. On top of that the crap they produce gets more expensive each iteration. I do own a 2015 MB Pro, that's it. I used to own:
- iPhone X
- MB Pro 2017
- Apple Watch
- Apple TV
- iPad Pro
... All at the same time ... But I sold everything and switched (back) to Android and Linux and no tablet at all. The MB Pro I own is just my travel notebook because of battery life.
I'm very disappointed of Apple's strategical direction and that's why I'm boycotting it as good as I can.

So, idiot me decided it would be a good idea to never get around to configuring my UPS to gracefully shutdown my server after a powercut lasting more than x duration...

Long story short, we had a powercut that lasted 4 minutes or so longer than the battery in the UPS could keep the server up for...

UPS died, server went pew, and after rebooting itself once the power came back on, my raid array wouldn’t mount anymore...

After Googling around, it seemed like running e2fsck would solve the problem.

Didn’t seem to do the trick... and tired me at 3am decided it would be a good idea to poke around.

Pretty sure I ran a command wrong, or two, because now I can’t even mount the fricken array in read only, and fsck complains with a shit ton errors...

Been researching for hours, and no dice...

Test Disk shows the ext4 partition, but fails to list any files...

I may have destroyed the tables or something... I’m a noob at this point.

I’m able to access files with the RStudio tool, however this doesn’t help with file names and directory structure 😭

Is it all over for my 5 years worth of photos and other bits and pieces that I don’t have any backups of ? 😂😭😭

If any of y’all are pros with data recovery and can help a fellow boi out, I’d be more than happy to pay for ya time !

I walked into the office.
Following the usual morning words spit out, more undead then awake.
"Good morning, jada, jada."
I'm placing my backpack on my desk.
Now opening the case with the notebook.
I grab the notebook as usual.
*crack*
Shit.
Now I'm holding the battery pack in hands. My notebook still chills in my backpack.

FUCKING FUCK SHIT WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? CURSES ON THE MANUFACTURER OF THAT PIECE O' SHIT!

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Should I care about privacy anymore ?

I had to switch to windows from Ubuntu in my laptop because of driver related issues.
Everytime I use Windows , I feel uneasy because of the data it collects but at the same time I am happy that I can play a couple of video games , my battery life is better and my display is better.

I own an Android phone , and no matter how many add ons I use , or VPN , I know that Google gets sufficient amount of data to know a lot about me.

It's getting harder and harder to keep my data private and it's becoming inconvenient as well.

In my country almost everyone I talk to uses Whatsapp. I removed my Whatsapp account for a few days and I barely talked to anyone and it was not a good feeling.

My point is , is fighting for privacy worth it ? How much inconvenience are we ready to accept ? Can I do anything to keep my data private and still use convenient services ? Please enlighten me .

Guys seriously why would you buy a macbook if apple will support it for like 7 years then you won't be able to upgrade to newer OSX versions? whereas a good laptop machine could run Linux for a lifetime, you could even change distros if you got bored.

Let me dive into it, If I buy a brand new macbook and use it rarely, its condition will barely change however one day I will get the message you need a greater version to install X app, seriously apple?

Real life scenario: I have an ipod touch 5 i rarely use it, one day i decided to install an application and boom no you can't buddy you need to upgrade the iOS however the currently version of iOS is the latest version i could get for that ipod touch model, so the thing is, I have a perfect condition product that is unusable unless for some music playing and what i already installed as apps, does it look fair to you? I have the same issue with an ipad mini, its condition is perfect, battery life is decent, I can't receive anymore updates, the youtube app stopped working, im stuck again with a product that i can use only to read some ebooks or use youtube through the browser, apple wants me to buy a new ipad which is absurd.

I will never buy an apple product again

Fuck you Apple

What's the best laptop for programming?

Not looking for graphics, looking for portability, long lasting battery, good display, SSD

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

The battery of my good old Huawei Y300 is slowly dying. So I thought it was time to cut the battery consumption a little. What a delusion. A new battery costs < $5 btw, but I'm too lazy to order :)

I've tested 16 highly acclaimed (of about 20,000, didn't count all of them) battery apps - they're all!, and I mean all!, total crap. There is not a single app that does what it promises. And all totally fucked up with advertising - including some of the paid apps. Most apps consume more power than they actually save.

The winner of all this shit was the app "Battery Repair", which supposedly repairs broken cells. Well, well.

All that junk should be thrown out of the store. But, no, these crap apps have ratings of 4.5 - 4.8 with millions of downloads. I don't get it.

The only app that actually works is, hard to believe, Kaspersky Battery Saver.

So if someone else wants to "optimize" their battery - forget it, it's not even worth looking for it.

Batteries and power.
Hey guys. I have a question I have to rectify so I can think without doubts.
Let's say I have a sistem with solar power, a 1 lipo battery, one lipo module and arduino + shields and I want to power only by the 🔋.
My question is: is it good practice to charge while discharging at the same time with a lipo module? Won't it damage the batery and incrise the chance of fire? Thank you

Hi everyone, I've a desktop and in my area power cut is quite frequent. Although we've backup power, but sometimes it takes ~15 mins to come back.

Is UPS only option for desktops? Laptops nowadays have so long battery power, why there is no good option for desktops. UPS usually stays for 5 mins. Could you please suggest something better, as I've seen lots of desktops in posts? Thanks.

Somebody, anybody, tell me what I'm missing here that makes this get mass-produced.

I've always been a bit if a pyro, and ive certainly made random, pointless texh for no valid reason beyond "why not?'. I also have dealt in international OEM sourcing and manufacturing. I even missed the selfie stick boom back before anyone knew they existed... muktille faxriries I've done signing business with were selling them(dead stock) below cost due to lack... silly me thought they were too ridiculous; one of my hudiness cards literally says ".Really cool stuff you almost alwats want... but never need". Most nonsense novelty is the majority of one if my businesses

...but seriously... who thinks a rechargeable battery, compact soeakers, and lit gas canister is a good idea??

I think I may need to re-rank my mental list of most asinine things I've encountered this week... wsl GUI capability built-in with default images and the reminder of pointoess features like passwords for groups, seem less worthy now.

The iPhone is only good for consuming apps, that's it. If you want to use it for anything else, good luck.

Its keyboard is miserable.

Its browser is the new IE.

If you connect to a share folder, at random you lose all networking and you have to restart the phone.

You don't reliably get notifications so good luck explaining to your boss or client or girlfriend why you didn't reply back for hours.

Once the battery permanently dies, you're just expected to spend another $1k for the privilege of this suffering.

It took over 25 edits to get to this point in the message. I had to restart this status symbol 3 times in the last 24 hours in order to restore its ability to communicate. It is agony to use this substandard pile of garbage and it has objectively made my quality of life worse in the 18 months I've had it.

It's an iphone 12. I bought it new from the store. I thought Apple only intentionally made older phones unusable through updates, but this has been unusable since the beginning.

This is actually really helpful!
Thanks for letting me know, operating system!

Lenovo T series laptops are amazing. I've purchased one in 2010, it was too good to be true and used for 5-6 years, forgot about it after I upgraded to Mac. Didn't touch for ~2.5 years, turned on today for my nephew. It is still working like charm, even the battery holds charge for 2hours, I'm impressed 👍

OMFG, Dell, why can't you be normal and make your batteries die like any other batteries - by simply switching the laptop off immediately when the charger is unplugged???

Guess what it looks like when a JD25G (XPS13 9530) battery is dying (still 88% health)!

Constant screen flickering (yes, even in BIOS). Good thing I'm not an epileptic - my screen is fucking strobing!!!

I know it's a battery, because I had the same issue some years ago when I replaced the died original one with a cheapo made by GreenCell. Boi that was fun - I saw my laptop do miraculous things I never would've thought of! Screen flickering was one of them. As soon as I replaced that turd with an original one all these magic powers went away.

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

this is the speed my laptop thinks is good when the battery is low

It is approximately 42 degrees C outside. And guess whose fucking compressor just went to shit? Mine. Fucking piece of shit. I absolutely fucking hate this shit. Finding the time to go to the shop is pointless when I can fix it myself, but IN the fucking event that the compressor is actually faulty and needs to be replaced then I would have to struggle to wait for the fucking part to get here. If my luck permits and this is an issue that is fixable through a simple relay change then fucking hooray.

But I know how fucking shitty my fucking luck is and its going to fuck me in the ass probably. I will troop through the heat, no problem, but I am the one that carries my 2 year old daughter everywhere and I am not about to put her through that bullshit.

So I call my wife and explain to her the situation, I don't need for her to do fucking anything, I can take care of it myself, but I tell her NOT to have me go out on random bullshit with the girl while the car is like that, I did it to make her understand beforehand because every day is an additional 1 and a half hours of driving around the city to take her do bullshit. I told her that in the event of me needing to go pick something up then it would have to be after the fucking sun goes out(which in this fucking bullshit ass town it happens after fucking 7 or 7:30pm) and she would have to stay home with the girl. What does she do? she gets upset. Of course she got fucking upset. Like if I need that fucking bs right now. OH and my fucking main Linux machine is apparently having battery issues.

OAN my manager gave me my performance review yesterday. The she made are outstanding and my score is perfect. The board is going to give a raise to everyone of us that got an high enough score so that got me in a good mood. I am holding on to that feeling before I lose my shit. Every single fucking time some bs puts me in this mood I am constantly wishing that a motherfucker would.

Fucking bullshit man. Can't have a FUCKING break anyfuckingwere.

This just in on an episode of Murphy's fucking law.

Opinions on the current gen iPad mini/air (apart from "reeeee Apple")? iPad 4 was a brilliant device, loved it, looking for a similar thing. Can't find any decent Android tablet and honestly, not sure if I want Android at all.

I basically want a companion device with superb battery life, a larger screen than my phone, and good and useful apps (used Garageband, Magellan, and Voice Synth quite a bit on the old iPad). Will be going to college in a few months so something useful for carrying around too that's more portable than my laptop.

Considered a Celeron laptop, but it's basically useless for anything but text editing and basic browsing.

Visual Studio Code + Mac = not lightweight, really not that good performance

I mean the battery is burning. Literally, i plug my mac out and after a hour the battery is dead

Who fucking thought its a good idea to disable the bluelightfilter in the battery saver mode on lineage os?! 😶

Just got myself a Pixelbook and man is this thing a sweet little machine! Excellent battery life, a pretty decent backlit keyboard and I can work on my personal project using VSCode and the integrated debugger!

Google is doing a good job with making Chromebooks developer friendly.

That nice feeling, when your laptop battery has 10% of charge left and you *know* you still have a good half an hour to do whatever you're doing before you have to worry about it.

You're more likely to finish your task than run out of juice.

This brings all kinds of satisfactory feelings 😌

Side projects are one of the biggest battery booster you can have.

For me it's common to get burnt out with fixing a bug or refactoring some pretty old logic, and working in side projects is a nice break to recharge the batteries without necessarily getting your mind totally out of programming. It doesn't matter if they are yours our someone else's, they can do wonders.

(Also, it's good to learn different stuff from what you are used to, like frontend developer working on some back-end logic in a side project)

Fuck. The random and annoying screen flickering is back.

It was a good year without it.
Damn.. do I really need to replace the battery again... Damn it!

Anybody have recommendations for a laptop? A want a laptop to finish high school with but more importantly something that can be my primary computer in college for school, coding, and gaming (doesn't need to run really intense games like CoD)

I want:
•15 inch screen
•i5 or i7 processor
•500 gb storage or more
•6 gb RAM or more
•decent front webcam
•good battery life
•$600 or less
•NOT a MacBook

Thanks :)

I now have further proof that Android 9's fancy Battery Management is shit:
The compass on my new (flagship) smartphone uses the air pressure sensor and the air pressure at sea level to display your current elevation. The air pressure at sea level is fetched from the weather app. And of course, the weather app has its battery policies set to auto-managed.
Can you guess what happened? "Weather app could not be found" and an elevation of -17m
Because no one thought the battery manager could decide that the weather app should not be launched by other apps. Has no one thought this through? Good thing I figured out what was happening pretty quickly.

Any mid-class phone recommendations?

I want a good battery and relatively okay performance. Any android device, between 150-350€ maybe.
(Idc about camera etc)

Batteries don't like me anymore

Yesterday late evening I was out to bring a festive parcel to someone. I left home with 29% batt, went there and still had 27%. Made 3 short (~1min) calls and headed home. Opened Firefox and my phone crashed. WTF, how could FF crash Android? OS separation failure? I turn my phone back on and it says LOW BATTERY: 0%. wtf... With 27% I should have been good until the next morning with no problems! And now it went 27%→0% in a blink (literally).

Today I decided to stay on my lappy for the morning. YT videos to catch up to, dR posts to scroll through, etc. A few hours later laptop battery is drained down to 29%. I step away for a few minutes for a cup of coffee and when I come back - the battery indicator LED is glowing amber and OS says it's got 6% left

29%→6% in a few moments of idle. Riigghhhhttt.... And I thought I won't want anything for this Christmas.

I wonder what's the significance of 27/29% there...

Aaarrgghh! Stupidity of some webdevelopers! Ordering new battery on e-shop and got in my mail devilery report from one freemail service. Checking what kind of spam it is and those lazy bastards are taking my full order and sending it with my e-mail addresses in From to their freemail account. Which correctly rejects it based on SPF as the freemail suprisingly does its job well. Who the hell thought this would be a good idea? Grrrr!

It drives me nuts when people compare iPhones to Samsung, not realizing that Samsung did not invent Android, nor are they the only phone manufacturer or Android OS distributor.

If you're comparing iOS to Android, that's one thing. Or if you are comparing iPhone's hardware to a specific Samsung phone's hardware, I get it. Heck, I'm cool if you compare the iPhone X to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, because they're similar in price. But don't say that Apple is better than Samsung when you mean you have an issue with Android, or your battery life on your $300 Android device wasn't as good as your $700 iPhone. Apples to oranges guys! It's like comparing Visual Studio 2015 to Python.

I don't care who is right or which is better. At least know what you're comparing!

Thanks.

I will need a laptop for uni and I thought you guys could give me some tips on good brands/models. I want it to have at least 16GB of RAM, preferably a newer generation of i7 and dedicated NVidia graphics. The bigger the screen is the better. I don't care too much about the battery but I would like to have a few USB type A ports and some HDMI/DP outputs. The maximum price (shipping included) should be around 1000 - 1200€

I'm thinking of moving on from LineageOS. It's pretty good on my S3, but the battery life is laughable and there's some in built features missing I'd love to have.

Maybe make my own? I have trouble finding ROMs for my phone (that I like)

After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.

I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?

Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...

On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...

Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...

Ok, OnePlus nice fucking job!
I receive all of my notifications even during night and I lose around 4% per night - this is almost iPhone level!

Currently I own a Lenovo Thinkpad which I bought in 2013. As it is aging, I'm thinking about a replacement. Where would you buy a new laptop, constraints:
- Swiss keyboard (or Option to swap it for one)
- compatible with Linux (prefered if there's a option without Windows pre instaled)
- NVMe SSD
- good battery live
- abillity to upgrade the RAM in the future

I've been looking at System76 now for a while, but since I've worked with Swiss keyboards for the last 12 years, I don't want to switch to an en_us layout...

So where do you buy your laptops?

Got an XPS 9365 and decided after some time to remove dual boot and switch to Arch Linux entirely.

After a week or so I realised this piece of shit doesn't support supend-to-ram properly!
in s2idle the battery drains in about 20h. Also I have to run the SSD in AHCI mode to boot Linux which is slow as fuck!

Seriously Dell, a 1.5k laptop that has a great screen but can't even suspend properly or make good use of the pcie SSD? Fuck you!

Need a replacement ASAP.
Suggestions welcome. 13-14" QHD screen, 8th gen CPU, good battery...

I'm looking into buying a new laptop. I want something speak and ultrabookish, but dedicated graphics are a must.

Will be mostly for work, so a good CPU and RAM are important, but probably will do some gaming. Battery life and cooling are pretty big too. I've looked at the Aero 15X, the XPS 15, Razer Blade, etc. I just can't decide. Need to get it this year for the the tax deductions for my contracting income. Any thoughts? What's the best one out there?

Battery Health -> Maximum Capacity

Not good for my overthinking overanalysing obsessive mind.

my phone is dying. Very slowly, i see the first signs of decay, i probably have months or even more than a year, but it will die on me. I knew it will happen.

I currently have an asus phone (ZE552KL), it is technically DualSim or SD-Card, has a camera that is..badish and sometimes the bluetooth wont start and then it reboots. Also the camera has a pure software bug where it isnt able to ever focus properly, but with tricks you can get it to work again. The asus forums constantly refer to sending it to a repair station (wherever one is in germoney). That annoys me.

Back to dying. For now its definetly the battery.
I remember when you could change the battery on a whim. Great times. My last phone died duo battery aswell (well, the gps module broke aswell so it wasnt all flowers besides the battery).

My current asus phone was something around 300 € and according to reviews 2 years ago it has a good bang for the buck ratio.

I havent looked into the market, just a cursory glance. But apparently if you want a phone that has a decent battery life, is not basically a tablet, has an sd card slot and a camera that is not total rubbish it gets hard. Its hard to balance those things, and if you want a swappeable battery all hope is lost.
Further i have started to misstrust chinese phones, the asus software support is wacky and some stuff is weird. I suspect its as bad with huwai and all the others. Also its apparently kinda hard to get any resemblance of quality in accessoires for non-mainstream brands (i mean cases and display protection)

So i dread the future, the future in which i need a new phone that is somewhere in the mid price segments and fits my needs. In the end i will take something suboptimal and be unhappy with it till it dies.

I despise the phone market.

Do you want to use text to speech huh? Ha ha ha here’s a low battery pop up to completely derail what you were saying and make you repeat the last 10 seconds.

an actual good design would have waited until the text to speech function was complete to pop up the message or at least don’t stop recording what’s being said. But I guess I don’t understand innovation.

Think different indeed

I generally do not like google for many reasons, but if they added this feature to android "disable app notifications by default", I would love and kiss them to death.

Notifications these days are just about the most abhorrent feature of smart phones. I have never owned an iPhone so cannot say anything about that, but on Android its just bad. The system itself is good, but its being misused by developers. Today I checked out this app called "CPU Cooler", its one of those apps that tricks people into believing they should close apps in order to save battery life. Anyways, I opened it, I "cleaned my phone" and closed it. About an hour later I got this notification "heeey, you haven't cleaned your phone in a while".

Fuck off, uninstalled.

If it ever becomes socially acceptable, I would buy a Nokia brickphone in a heartbeat. My cousin said we would be much better off without smartphones and he is (possibly) absolutely right.

Anybody has a good recommendation for a laptop for mostly full stack web development?
I think I should look for following features:

- minimum 16G ram
- Althought is 2021, just in case, I add: usb C to connect to a dock with two screens and SSD
- I'll run several docker containers at once
- time to time I make non-exhaustive work on c++
- good screen dpi
- I use linux
- portable. No need for the lighter in the market but easy to carry in a bag. Good battery.
- not too expensive

I can save on:
- I don't need the latest processor, just a good one
- I'm not a gamer. I not need the latest GPU. However, some GPU is appreciated. I don't need colorful leds neither.

Do you have any recommendations on laptops and/or features to search for/avoid?

[Question]
What type of amplifier circuit would I need to power a 60w 8ohm speaker or can you recommend any prebuilt amplifier boards ?

[TLDR;]
I spotted the below stuff while cleaning out my junk cupboard and thought it might be a fun side project to convert them into a portable bluetooth speaker since the earphones are shit anyway and I've always wanted to learn more about amplifiers.

The only question remaining is how to amplify the headphone output signal enough to power the speaker. I plan on either using cells from old laptop batteries or a motorbike battery as a power supply so input voltage would be roughly 10-12v.

The speaker is from a set I salvaged from an old 80's hifi and has excellent sound quality, would mounting the components inside it have a large negative effect on it's sound?

Also although I would prefer to make my own amplifier board as a learning experience the goal is to have a portable speaker with good sound quality... is this something I'm likely to get from my first attempt at an amplifier or should I rather get a ready made board?

When you've been ignoring the low battery light on your mouse for a few weeks, finally it dies while you're working and it's really frustrating to have to either go find batteries (good luck) or fish that wired mouse out of the bin of spare things.

To top it all off, it's only a 3-button mouse and I can't get used to going back. (No pun intended lol)

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

Looking for a new phone with good battery life, 6"+ screen, medium end...

What do you think about xiaomi?
Any other recomendation?

Thank you.

Can someone suggest me a good, cheap phone with good battery?

I think at least 4000mAh and around 200€
My Touchscreen broke and I don't have enough money for a good flagship...

I'm looking to get a laptop, and I want your opinion on which one to get, because I'm a dev and don't care about whatever most reviews are looking at. Here is what I want from it:
1. I'll be running linux on it
2. I need it to be powerful enough to go through heavy development
3. It has to be decent sized 15" and below
4. It needs to stay cool under light load, under heavy load I've got a good cooling pad
5. Battery is not that important, and discrete graphics are not that important

I will be hooking it up to a keyboard/mouse/monitor setup when at home or work

Any suggestions? I've been looking at lenovo thinkpads for their ruggedness and dependability and Dell laptops as they've been around for a long time. Ultrabooks (like the XPS) are appealing but I don't know how well they deal with heat and thermal throttling under heavy load?

Looking for a new laptop where I can boot Linux. Any recommendations? Has to be light, a good battery and be my primary.

“ Your smartphone doesn't need a large battery! Just use your power bank! ”

Oh really? Then your smartphone doesn't need a good camera. Just use your DSLM camera!

Is a used ThinkPad T440/440s (or T430) worth it right now? Assume that it's powerful enough to run whatever I need, and weight isn't really a concern because it's going to spend most of the time sitting on a desk or in the library where the extended battery will come in handy.

I'm eyeing it because build quality and keyboard, and because I can get one for a pretty good price (if I buy a new laptop at the same price I'll get a shitty celeron or low end i3 based thing)

Following are the only real problems I had with my XFCE Manjaro (I guess essentially XFCE problems). My question is, is it just me?

Touchpad problems:
The synaptics deprecation kinda f'ed me up.
I tried sticking to synaptics, but I had an issue where if I connected a usb mouse the touchpad would sometimes stop working (it's deprecated after all).

So I switched to libinput. The default movement feels good (synap felt kinda slippery)... but then... NO COASTING/KINETIC SCROLLING in a lot of apps? WTF?!
Would kinetic scrolling work in general if I switched to a wayland based DE?

The alt tab has a delay:
you would expect one of the most lightweight DEs to have near instant switching. But no, I have like almost full second delay, and for the life of me I can't find the way to customize it.

Thr battery management is kinda stupid. Even though I set the thing to hibernate or sleep in low battery it never does.

I have a microUSB B? portable battery but it's taking really long to recharge and the connection is always faulty. Need to push down on the cable to get it to even charge.

Had same problem with my first smartphone and that's why it was replaced but it's there a way to fix it? Without opening it up or replacing the port?

The battery itself is still good...

Shopping around for a used laptop for development, Basic specs core i 5+, with good battery life,15inch. Recommendations please.

OK Guys I need your advice. I got an (I think it's about 8 years old) Aspire from Acer. Windows 10 is installed after upgrading from Windows 7, which was the worst decision because now it runs at speeds below good. I want to clean install a new OS. But which route to take?

Windows or Linux?

What distribution? I have my knowledge in Debian. Or could I go with RemixOS because it's most user-friendly and best for work abroad? But is there an IDE for Android based distributions?

You see what my dilemma is don't you? ^^

May some of you could help me

Specs: 4GB of DDR3, 500GB HDD, a shitty battery and an AMD Dual core with something about 2.5GHz

Any recommendations for a portable laptop (~1.5 kg) with good battery life(6:8 hrs) , great display and with 8th gen i5 or i7 costs less than 1k $?

I'm kinda looking for a new phone, should be super cheap (so a used one would do), I wanna modify it to be secure (proper encryption, VPN, etc.), very good battery time and not very big (more like 4"). I have been looking at the Lenovo P2 a lot, but I'm afraid my current phone will die before I have enough money for that one (I'm a broke trainee yay).

So what do y'all have or can recommend?

I currently have a Surface Pro 3 and am wanting to upgrade. I'm a software dev student at my college and I'm noticing the performance is just slowly getting worse and worse. I recently reset it to start fresh, still slows down in overall performance and battery life.
Any good recommendations? If possible I would like to avoid the Pro due to the kickstand gimmick.