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

Just added Kotlin plugin to my new android project and what do you know, CPU went to 100% of usage.
Aaand the winner is: Fucking Android Studio!

!Rant
Yassss 🙌🏼 I'm dying. Your dog 🐶😂🤣

"Get your devRant custom cartoon avatar on stickers! We can now print glossy sticky-back 1.75" (4.5cm) circles of your personalized avatar to place on your laptop, your refrigerator, your dog, wherever!"
@dfox genius

After over 2 months of not opening devRant, here I go again.

My dad's laptop is dying so I decided to give him my old one (because I ordered a new laptop). I asked him if should I keep Linux on it, or should I install Windows. He said "ehh, keep the Linux". So there it is! Linux Mint on top of Dell Latitude E6320 and another person converted to Linux!

Also sorry for not posting just a SS.

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

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 😄!

I work 3 PM to 1 AM as a daily office job. Then go home and try to learn programming. Wake up next day at 8:30 AM for kind of another work until 1PM. Doesn't pay as much but I have to try. Then if I get free time do some freelance on UPWORK with whatever little graphic designing I know to help pay the bills.

And the fact that even my laptop is dying is a huge blow. Don't know when it might give up. Has 1st gen core i5 dual core, takes ages to load Adobe softwares. I have wanted to hulksmash this shit, but can't.

If I'm lucky, I get a stress free 6 hours of sleep a few days a month. And my depression doesn't help. More sleep should ease me a little, but I can't afford to waste any time. But this is life, isn't it.

I don't know which one is worse.
Freezing of laptop while am important demonstration or battery dying in the same situation.
I forgot the charger back home and the only thing client could make out was that the software we made bricked my laptop right after opening it and that I was making excuses to cover it.

Either Windows pulled some shit, my laptop's dying or my SSD's dying.

Either way, I just lost a lot of work I didn't wanna do in the first place but gotta redo now.

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

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.

TLDR; windows sucks donkey balls

Sometime ago I started to get battery issues on my laptop using windows. Even with 100% charge it would soon display 0% when unplugged.

A few months back I switched to linux on my laptop and on my desk station. And to my surprise, battery issues dissapeared while using linux (manjaro i3). Anybody had that same problem?

Anyway I dual boot win 10 and linux just in case I'd need windows, and this week I noticed my root parition didn't have any space left.

For the next few hours I'm in a car so I thought hey great time to reinstall linux with a bigger root partition. I already had reinstalled windows, and with all the bloat removed, I could shrink my windows partition to make more space for linux.

Now all I need to do is prepare a usb stick with the manjaro iso. I could do that in linux, but since reinstalling windows killed my grub bootloader I couldn't boot up manjaro.

Right, so in windows I go and want to create this bootable EFI usb stick from the manjaro iso. Now the battery issue kicks in again, stating 0%. But with luck, the usb creation finished without my machine dying. Now I just need to restart my laptop and boot from the usb and .... Crap. my Laptop doesn't boot up anymore
-_-

Now i need to wait for a plug to be able to power it up again. Once I boot from the usb I'm sure I could use the laptop some more hours until the battery is actually dead. Fuck windows

After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa

What laptop do you use for your Linux work machine? My Lenovo is dying after just 6 months.

You know you are broke when you lower video quality not because of internet but to reduce the suffering of your 8 year old laptop and dying hdd.

Environment setup with a dying laptop :/

Since my XPS battery is dying I'm flirting with an idea of a new laptop. Requirements:
- 13" display
- 4k display (I'm so used to high-res that x1080 looks like accessibility mode)
- 16 (worst case), 32 (OK), 64 (possible?) GB RAM
- long battery life
- i7 or Ryzen equivalent (I need lots of ram, lots of computing power)
- plays nice with Linux
- GPU preferably integrated (don't need a separate GPU)
- ultrabook (small, compact, light) (I don't like to exercise while carrying it. God forbid I'd grow a muscle... )
- purrrrtty :)

So far the best candidate I've found is... XPS13 again :D The setup I'm after costs ~1.6k€ which is not that bad, really.

Is there anything else in the market that'd meet the criteria? Anything worth looking into? Better deals?

Long live Laragon. Its been a good tool for the last 3 years but some things are proving a little difficult to do... especially working with Laravel 11.

I've been burnt by Docker before - even after attending £££ docker classes. Containers just randomly dying, containers can't talk to each other, taking 150% of my laptop resource, slow AF... I give up.

Back to XAMPP it is :(

I wish I could just get a mac, but people don't build the desktop powertools I need on macOS.

ARGH!

6 days lost to the infinate loop of debugging docker and slow development. Never again.

!dev && dev_workflow

Hey guys, what are your favorite truly wireless headphones?

For context:
- my OSes: Android (phone), MacOS (laptop), iOS (tablet).

- my getting in love with wireless audio story: I have been using some Chinese ones off AliExpress just to test out the truly wireless waters, their sound quality and pairing experience especially on Android is pretty shit but the ability to forget that you have headphones in your ears and just listen to music obstruction-free is 🔥 but they are now dying so I am looking for a replacement.

i5 vs. i7?
My old laptop is dying and I've started to look for a replacement. I am used to have an i7 processor, my dev env consists of either vagrant and a VM or a docker-compose env. Plus I use JetBrains IDE. Mostly I do webdev, so not that much compiling going on, however often I need a VM with Windows to have Photoshop or Illustrator running...

So I guess the question is: Is there a notable difference between an i5 and an i7 for development?

My dell's battery is dying and refuses to charge unless I fuck with the damn wire (charger works perfectly on my brother's dell). I know how to and have replaced dell batteries for similar models before on multiple occasions when I was a tech assistant in high school only 3 years ago but my dell warrenty won't mail me a battery for me to replace myself. Instead requiring I send them my laptop (can't since it my laptop I use for college work and can't go without it for a week or two unless I want to fail out). So guess I have to fucking find a battery on Amazon and spend money doing what my warrenty should cover

I understand why they don't allow users to do their own repairs. I'm just annoyed at having to find the battery online and spend money

Dear Thieves.
So I was looking at some guy who's job I designed today.
He was sitting there with the new laptop I bought during one visit here.
It was an hp with a silver keyboard and handrest because supposedly normal people stopped owning laptops when you all decided to embrace schizophrenia and create inane rather stupid meanings that are associated with literally everything but sense or sophistication.

comparing oneself to an animal for example doesn't focus on positive or spiritual values, its something perverse.

ordering food is not about enjoying new things or savoring flavors, its about something perverse.

going to school is not to learn things, its to crash and burn later because the powers that be refuse to update the system from the 1970s.

living, is not living at all, but working to pay bills and get old bitter and fat.

well.

shit.

retards.

anyway. doesn't explain people like myself who made things when we could and were enthusiastic about our jobs at points.

oh. and supposedly the guy who stole the job was 'I".... and it was a job that would become 'outmoded'......
i believe that was the word often used. let;s check. yup, close enough.

then all these people talking about 'new' jobs because noone could trust the group of monsters they made with too much spare time. since you know. they thought it was funny to steal human beings lives since they were not human. subhuman.

anyway.

where suddenly everything meant something else and a whole new world of retarded people emerged from the shadows because the trash children of a former generation got sick of being lectured about morality when they were in fact just bad people who should have been shot.

i don't care how else the whiney bastards explain themselves. i really don't.

you can say that in desperate fucked situations involving psychological torture, rape, etc that a decent person *raises their hand* might do TERRIBLE things to their captors in order to escape, but THEY caused that while whining that someone from the 1940s or earlier made them evil and they had no choice but to steal jobs, money, retirement funds, public institutions, the morals of a generation, i'll bite: toddlers, spread their legs like psycho whores to get pregnant, so steal people's unborn children, turn every fund available that could have gone towards people that needed things to money laundering and in general gleefully fucked our whole country up with the lack of foresight that psychopaths commonly display.

great job.
was it worth dying ?

how about going crazy and letting another group of evil people make an excuse to drive everyone into an endless idiotic loop ?

but hey no, keep lying. works so well.
well at least fedora 37 is released again.

give the stolen photos back.
just want to know what i looked like, and don't want to talk like a retard to get people who understand english to pretend they finally comprehend.

fucking bastards.