The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

So a friend of Mine asked me to check their Mail server because some emails got lost. Or had a funny signature.

Mails were sent from outlook so ok let's do this.

I go create a dummy account, and send/receive a few emails. All were coming in except one and some had a link appended. The link was randomly generated and was always some kind of referral.

Ok this this let's check the Mail Server.

Nothing.

Let's check the mail header. Nothing.

Face -> wall

Fml I want to cry.

Now I want to search for a pattern and write a script which sends a bunch of mails on my laptop.
Fuck this : no WLAN and no LAN Ports available. Fine let's hotspot the phone and send a few fucking mails.

Guess what? Fucking cockmagic, no funny mails appear!

At that moment I went out and was like chainsmoking 5 cigarettes.

BAM!

It hit me! A feeling like a unicorn vomiting rainbows all over my face.

I go check their firewall. Shit redirected all email ports from within the network to another server.

Yay nobody got credentials because nobody new it existed. Damn boy.

Hook on to the hostmachine power down the vm, start and hack yourself a root account before shit boots. Luckily I just forgot the credentials to a testvm some time ago so I know that shit. Lesson learned: fucking learn from your mistakes, might be useful sometimes!

Ok fucker what in the world are you doing.

Do some terminal magic and see that it listens on the email ports.

Holy cockriders of the galaxy.

Turns out their former it guy made a script which caught all mails from the server and injected all kind of bullshit and then sent them to real Webserver. And the reason why some mails weren't received was said guy was too dumb to implement Unicode and some mails just broke his script.

That fucker even implented an API to pull all those bullshit refs.

I know your name "Matthias" and I know where you live and what you've done... And to fuck you back for that misery I took your accounts and since you used the same fucking password for everything I took your mail, Facebook and steam account too.

Git gut shithead! You better get a lawyer

At the airport.

Security: Please put all your electronics in the bin, including your watch.

Me: No problem

<goes through scanner>

Me: there was an Apple Watch in here and now it is gone.

Security: Oh, you lost your Apple Watch?

Me: No! I put my Apple Watch in the bin like you instructed and YOU lost my Apple Watch.

Security: It must be in the spinners.

Me: So my $500 Watch is in the spinners being run over by bins?

Security: you have to put the small things on the bottom.

Me: It was on the bottom and I did as you asked, this is entirely on you. Do not try to shift the blame to me again please.

Security: As I said...

Me: As I said, Do not try to shift the blame to me again. This is entirely your responsibility once you separate me from my electronics so you can perform security theatre. Have a nice day.

—————

Fuck this god damn security theatre. Fuck the dumbasses they hire. Fuck your country. Fuck your god damn feeling of insecurity. Fuck Your ineffective security theatre.

Sick my fucking dick until you choke and gag you worthless pieces of shit. Homeless people the street provide more security than you incompetent, under-educated assholes. Fuck you

And yes, I have 2 fucking laptops. I have a real fucking job where I provide actual value and for that I need a work laptop. I don’t come to work in a stupid looking outfit with a chip on my shoulder looking to inconvenience people. I come to work to provide real value to someone.

Fuck you and your worthless bullshit

I genuinely am lost for words on this one.

I just asked a user to press the wifi button on their laptop so i can check their wired connection was up and running okay.
They couldn’t find the blue ‘Fn’ or ‘aerial’ symbol that i described, so sent me this picture to see if they were pressing the right button.

Like....

What?? No!
What is wrong with you?? Seriously???
*cries*
Working on a helpdesk is destroying my soul!!

Lamer rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fkk...

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time I was teaching high schoolers Unity/C#. Noisy boy asked me if it was possible to create a robot in C#.

I told him to take printer, take it apart and turn it upside down in the way that printing drum would touch the ground, and then to put a laptop with his C# program on top of it.

When the program will launch, printer will try to print and the whole thing will roll slowly. Isn’t that a robot? You just need to think wider and define what robot is at first.

He was lost in thoughts and completely silent to the end of the lecture.

Me: Hey, my laptop (with stickers on it) is in for repair, can't get any work done.
Friend: Oh, that sucks, we going to be delayed launching our app!
... few days later ...
Friend: Hey, did u get it back yet?
Me: They ended up giving me a brand new one cause they couldn't repair it.
Friend: That's awesome man, you got lucky!
Me: F*@$ that, I LOST MY STICKERS!

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

A few days ago, I had a trashed laptop, lost my wallet with University ID and my debit card, a thesis and a poster not started, and no real content to put on either. I'd need money to get a new univ ID but no debit card. Same ges for buying a laptop. Also homework and shit due. Which required a load of Python.

Fast forward a week.

Laptop on its way, thank PayPal. Got new univ ID. Library loans out laptops. All homeworks done. Even got the replacement fee on my debit card waived by being nice to the customer service person.

I'd like to thank devRant for keeping me sane. And I'd like to say I'm fairly proud of my adulting abilities. They're not stellar, but they're pretty okay.

Spent nearly a day to get this tiny laptop-tablet to work.

I got myself a second hand Asus T100TAF but Linux compatibility was far to be found. Online resources said I'd be very lucky if I'd even get the touchscreen or the WiFi to work.

I've been installing distro's all day and I finally have a working version!

Lubuntu with Budgie as desktop environment. Touchscreen works out of the box and some random person on the Linux mint forum linked to a github thing. Lost all hope already but this made the fucking WiFi work.

Can dock and undock it and it works great.

Thanks to all open source devs for this!

I fried my laptop's lithium-ion battery by overheating it too much when gaming for 1.5 years now. Was only getting 20 minutes on a charge. Bought a replacement battery to install.

My laptop is full-body aluminum, and when removing the difficult-to-remove backplate, I sliced my thumb deeply on the razor-sharp internal edge of the backplate.

Hurt like hell. Took a while to get the bleeding to stop. I had to finish what I started, so I swore I'll be careful the rest of the time.

Yet somehow, my hand eventually slipped and I ended up slicing my OTHER thumb, on the exact same component! And the gash was even deeper and hurt even more! And took 3x as long to stop bleeding! I lost so much blood... 😫

Moral of the story: Be careful when dealing with full-body aluminum laptops. They're fucking evil and dangerous. Also, don't let your laptop reach temps above 82-85 degrees Celsius.

Thankfully, no tetanus from any of this. 😓

My laptop had a full meltdown and wouldn't turn on. It tried to start up then the screen went blank. It's happened before so I lost hope pretty quick.

Just spent the whole evening trying to fix it reinstalling windows and now I spot the problem. The HDMI is plugged in to a monitor that was off. My laptop was fine the whole time. Fml

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Fuck yes for data hoarding! Wanted to start on a project again but thought I lost everything.

Code is sill in git, (took me a while to find but whatever) database is still on my own laptop (due to ex/importing my entire local host as for databases every time I do a new installation).

Let’s get this fucker going again 😎

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Best:
1. Get into Linux
2. Quit Med studies after 5 years and jump into the IT train.

Worst:
use windows tools to resize partitions on a dual-boot laptop. Lost all my data on Linux parttn. :(

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.

"Did you not see (x important announcement) guys?! It was posted very clearly in the group teams channel and everyone was tagged!"

"No, we turned off notifications for that teams channel so didn't see it."

"What?! Why on earth would you turn notifications off, everything posted there is incredibly important! You must turn them back on now!"

Channel history:
- @everyone "HEY GUYS IT'S FRIDAY! Let's celebrate by everyone posting their favourite gif! Go go go!"
- @everyone "Choo choo guys it's the training train! How about we all share our best training experience for a bit of positivity?"
- @everyone "Hi I lost my laptop can anyone help find it"

Yeah... I wonder why...

Yep. So the dev teams boss says it's fine to run a production environment on a single Windows instance with the db on that same instance, which they already totally lost once from a reboot after an auto update before I came along tasked with fixing the cluster fuck they created.

This from a man who somehow runs a dev team while using gmail via the web because he can't use an email client, uses email to track tasks but can't because they get lost amongst his 3000+ unread emails, has a screen dirtier than a hookers vag on half priced Tuesday, and got a new laptop but had to get his daughter to set it up and transfer his data because he couldn't.

But ok... you have a degree, You must know what you're doing.
It's ok though, I'll keep covering your incompetent ass while you keep raping the company because no one listens.
Peoples ignorance and arrogance astounds me.

.. for the first time I permanently lost access to one of my GPG keys that were actually in use. No revocation certificates, nothing in the keychains on any of my hosts... Keychain flash drive that got stolen had a copy of both, my fileserver used to have a copy of that flash drive until I deleted it to make room for a filesystem migration, and my laptop used to have one.. until I decommisioned it and shredded its hard drive to be deployed somewhere else...

fuck

I can't sign my git commits anymore, and I can't revoke the key either.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

So I landed this interview with a company that provided military simulations, to work as an android intern (mobile). And man was I intent on getting it, I could only dream of my first job being as a dev, for a company that developed cool software. 😯

I show up, pull out my laptop, go over some of my projects (crap at the time, since I was 16, but ChessAI ftw) and also show them an android app I developed.

Then, I pulled out my calculator and showed them a clock I'd made on it. That's probably when I lost them... ☹️

They asked me a couple questions about software development, like if I knew what agile was, or if I unit tested my code (didn't even know they existed at the time ☹️ ) , etc.

I had done research on the company and asked them questions about specific software and so on, also asked about what working there would look like, etc.

They never called.

I called.

They never answered.

😭

Ended up washing dishes. Honestly, fuck my life.

*open laptop as usual.
*lost literally 5 hours for shitty update

I cannot even begin to describe the rollercoaster of emotions I just went through. I'm on the train, the prompt says next station !my_station. By then the sign says my_station. So I rush off the train. I feel the lightness of a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders... And realise I'm missing my laptop bag, the heavy weight that should be on my shoulders. So I rush to the station office and describe everything about my bag and what's in it and the seat I was in. The guy can't get through to the conductor but the train will be back at this station in 30 minutes. I head home quickly because it's nearby and my fiance offers me a lift back to the station on her car. Suddenly we're running late. She's running red lights. I'm not going to make it. It's 2 minutes past arrival time. But the train is 3 minutes late! I'm running along the platform looking into the carriages for my bag but unable to see much, panicking. The platform is empty. The train. Is going to leave. Except for one lonely figure walking down with a bag in their hands. The conductor gives me my rucksack, tells me it's really heavy and heads back to his duties. I thank him and head back to the station office to thank the man on duty also. Fuck me that was scary.

Ok, I’m over windows. Done with it.

I have been a long time windows, I’ve used most versions since 3.11, and have used Linux for a few years on the side (not as a daily but have needed it for work and servers) but with yesterday’s update, not only have I lost audio for the countless time again, as far as Windows is concerned there’s nothing fucking wrong with it, besides the lack of sound and all.

Drivers are reinstalled, deleted and reinstalled, redownloaded from manufacturer, different drivers installed.
Ran a system restore back to before the update and just dropped the hdd into another laptop (it’s identical model) and still no fucking audio (to exclude the audio chip as failing)

So fuck it, I’m spending my weekend finding a distro that will work, I’m fucking done!

Windows u suck.
i lost all my data after restarting my laptop!!!!!
😡😡😡😡😡

Where I work we develop drivers and command-line software for embedded systems. The contracts we have with our customers tend to be in the £100k-£500k range and are usually completed in 6 - 9 months; our team is made up of 20 developers. You would think that it would be worthwhile investing in the department. But no, instead we have to deal with >10 year old build servers on their last legs; limited numbers of development boards with wires soldered on so that we can keep up with new board revisions; no room for R&D into new products; and to top it all off, not one of the executives has a laptop on par with the placement students in the next department. It's like the company is trying to kill the department, we've seen our staffing dwindle with no new graduate (or higher) positions being made available in the last 3 years while we've lost at least 5 people to other places. I just don't get it!

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I was working on a site just moments ago and everything was fine. Then I move my laptop from my living room to my bedroom and on refreshing​ the page everything seems broken! Disorganized cards, and everything looks 10x bigger. I panic because I was supposed to deploy it on Thursday and I was just doing some final touches and angular has given me one hell of a time. I fucking rolled back all my commits to yesterday and cleared chromes chrome's cache....still nothing works. Then I realized there's a new button on my address tab and on clicking it is showed I had (accidentally) zoomed in by a fucking 175% when moving the laptop *facepalm*. On resetting it everything was ok. Now I have lost all of today's commits and my chrome cache. One box of tic-tacs down and I still can't overcome my rage... So I wrote this rant 😠😩😩
I need a stress ball😩😩

My car window got broken this night and they robbed some of my stuff.. Well I lost around 100€ in stuff so it's meaningless, but I have to get my car repaired, and most of all, they stole that old shitty laptop that I use as a seed box and for file syncing. It was my first own computer too, it had about 7 years :/

Had a stupid sales dude. Lost his driver's license due to reckless driving (and this was a few in a row including drunk driving) for 6 months. As it was his job required to drive around he got instantly fired.
So he had to leave laptop, iPad and phone with us (IT). His next stop was finance for the lease car but he was pissed, left the building and drove off.

Apparently rules are super shitty for the theft of a lease by the registered employee. So we could not really mark it as stolen. We alerted the police anyway and he was caught next week for driving without a license. So he went to jail and we got the car back

Hey guys, you won't believe what happaned to me, I left my laptop open in a hacker coffee shop and went to take a piss, and when I returned I fou d out that someone stole all my crypto CockRingCoin 😭😭 I lost a million and a half Shekels but then remembered my brother has a cousin who knows a lawyer who's wife is a friend with a wolf who knows a real matrix hacker who can hack CIA using only his toes, I contacted him and you wouldn't believe it but he got all of my cock coins back to me, I don't know what I would've done without him. If anybody needs help recovering crypto I can more than reccomend my dear holy saviour LeHackerCockSucker
WhatsApp: +972-50-EATMYASS-0
Email: ciahacker@cock.gov

But then as I was happily looking at my crypto returned I notice a few payments I don't rwmember making, turns out, my wife was cheating on me! And using my crypto to buy her lover stuff!
So I contacted the afformentioned lawyer who's a friend of the cousin that my brother has, and he helped me file for divorce and punish my cheating wife, for anybody needing a marriage lawyer:
WhatsApp: +972-54-DeliciousPussy-6
Email: eatmypussy@lawyers.porn

I am now happily married with the wolf who's the friend of the lawyer's wife and he fucks me in the ass every night. If you want a good life like mine you know who to call.

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.

Mandatory long rant warning

Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.

When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.

Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.

I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.

If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.

I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.

Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.

Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?

Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.

FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION

ARRGH!!
That moment when your laptop crashes just before you save the changes to that working prototype... lost for ever.

Short: Still supported after 10 years

First Chromebook sent to testers.

Long: Lost my voice recently so need to use text to speech on my phone but to many typos so slow...

If only I had a keyboard... Wait a laptop... Hm... Chromebook...

Looks for cheapest on Amazon

But go.... Wait I already have one.... That I installed Ubuntu on and then somehow corrupted.

And never got around to fixing it because didn't really need it... Or have a 8gb USB stick around at the time.

Well now I saved $100 assuming the battery still works too

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

I just fucking hate BGAs* that unsolder themselves.

So, thanks to my laptop slowly breaking apart I decided to reactivate an old netbook my father gave me back in 2014(?) when it failed, to have a device on standby if necessary.

Wasn't really planning to repair it and kept it for spare parts mostly as the whole device is a fucking design failure concerning heat dissipation.

But yet again, I thought I'd give it a try one-two years ago. I soon found out it was said heat problem that caused the error in the device and it'd probably only take some reworking using a heat gun, which I did. Netbook worked for some hours, then was dead again, same error. Lost motivation and stashed it until this week.

Reworked with a hair-dryer this time and it worked! Well, until this morning - same error. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to run a VM and then shut down the device right after that.

I will now try only one more time, this time just baking the whole damn main board thoroughly.
Either it works or it's really dead after. Either way, I'll be somewhat happier then.

* Ball Grid Array - package type for electronic components like ICs/uControllers

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

>Got Snapchat streaks with my crush (good so far
>Sends me selfies and whatnot (also good)
>Sends me pic of her macbook (could be worse)
>On the macbook, safari is open (can't hate a non tech savvy for that)
>Goes on her father's Windows laptop and opens internet explorer (aaaaaand I lost interest)
>Sends me pic of iPhone collection (what did I see in her that was so special?)

Story of my life

OK. This might sound incredibly stupid. But still...
I decided to help a friend of mine with asp.net assignment. I just know c# and he didn't attend classes. So he came to me with some pizza and beer. So we managed to finish the assignment. In the end we had to add audio to web page and I didn't know how to do it(I've never used Javascript until that moment) . So naturally I googled and tried literally 10 different methods to play audio and none of them worked. I lost my mind and hit the table a bunch of times. After 2 hours I realized that I was wearing my second headphone that is not connected to my laptop and audio is playing on my primary headphone as expected)

A friend of my mom asks me transfer some files from her hard disk to her pendrive because I am supposedly *good with computers*.

As an obedient son, I go to her house to do the needful.

I switch on the laptop and plug both right in. At this point, I am wondering if this really my life is for.

Lost in my thoughts, I accidentally format her hard disk. Now I freak out. Seeing no possible way out, I remove both and say her work is done.

I quickly leave the house and never look back. To this day, I have never gone back to her house.

A good life lesson:
1. DON'T DELETE FILES YOU MAY WANT TO RECOVER

And if you DO delete them and then recover them, then
2. DON'T SEND THE RECOVERED FILES TO A·N·Y·O·N·E

Today I found a lost µSD card in the street. I did what every sane person would do -- plugged it into my laptop :)

There I found a directory with recovered pictures. I figured, some of them may contain the author's info in metadata, so I ran a quick plaintext search for @gmail.com.

Turns out, inside some of the recovered picture files I could find embedded company director's emails in plain-text. I mean, open the picture with a text editor and read through those emails - no problem! And these emails contain some quite sensitive info, e.g. login credentials (lots of them).

Bottom line, if you delete and recover your files, then do your best to keep them close: don't share them, don't lose them. You might be surprised what these recovered files may contain

Laptop broke.

Some personal game projects were lost.

I've been struggling with some financial issues lately. I haven't told this to my family bc I am helping my mom with money, hat wouldn't help.

Sadly, I got two general tickets for WebSummit 2019 and I thought "okay, I am nearby Portugal rn, somebody of my circle could go with me and have some fun, I feel so blue..."

No one. Not a single one. Nobody.

"Maybe with those Telegram groups of JS developers..."

No one.

Maybe it sounds like some fraud or something, so they didn't answer. I even mentioned to an old entrepreneur friend of mine, and he didn't even answer me.

Disheartened is the word for today. I don't know, I am not expecting that people can join this adventure just bc is awesome, we all have bills to pay, but at least an answer would be fine.

I know it is not a fun story, and there are people in worse situations than mine. I just wanted to do some catharsis bc I lost my laptop.

I still have bills, two tickets, and a new kind of miserable mood.

Thank you for reading.

Created Linux instalation flashdrive on my notebook like thousand times before. Simple dd if=img of=/dev/sdb . Tried installing system from it but somehow doesn't work. And the it hit me. I have both magmetic drive and SSD in my laptop! So insted of flashdrive, I have bootable beging of my SSD where my encrypted lvm used to be :-( Luckilly I lost just EFI, boot, swap, rootfs, few git repositories and ccache.

One time I was with a +1 monitor in my laptop and they ask me if lost my files becuase of the second monitor.

can i work in any more horrible company than this?

> got a shitty macbook air as official work laptop. i am an Android dev btw, nd fuck knows how long it took to build apps on this, but it was still okay

> after 1 year some keys started getting slow to respond but still working fine

> recently a Senior dev raised request for better laptops and somhow we all got macbook pros woth good ram/processor

> returned my old laptop, got a mail after few seconds that my laptop has liquid damage! (in retrospect , i think i knew it as my bag once got drenched in rain)

> few days later, a mail chain starts where some guy is asking for $300 approval of fixes from my boss's boss!

now fuck knows how is it going to get paid, but i cant afford it on my monthly salary.

i am already on a tight crunch as my dad recently lost his job and i am paying emis for a car loan as well as a hand fracture loan, but i am surprised that am getting notified about this.

afaik,
1. the laptop's whole value is around $350 (some corporate quote that i once saw) .

2. the laptops should be fucking insured (we ourselves are a fuckin general insurance company) as its an obvious norm in corporate equipments. i shouldn't be penalised for this

3. i was working fine with this laptop and i can still work on it if given back.

4. this can be deducted at the time of fnf or from gratuity fund that these assholes hold onto until a guy completes 5 years and take it all for themselves if he doesn't.

5 i can buy this shitty laptop back and use it as my personal device, or get it repaired for less.

i don't even claim to have damaged it, why are they putting it on me 😭😭😭

So I did a clean Windows 10 restore recently on my laptop from Insider program to just Anniversary Update . Went away from my computer for a day or so by the time I got updates completed and Visual Studio up and running. So earlier today I went to start back up development on a project of mine to come across the emulators not working. The thing is that I lost 6 hrs of production to figure this out. I tried everything possible so I gave up and reinstalled VS to just remember I forgot to turn on my Hyper-V in BIOS setting. So I'm half way in VS reinstalling and I can't do anything about it. GOD FUCKEN DAMMIT W10!

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

✓ running server on windows 10

✓ running postgresql server

✓ running ngrok server

✓ running android studio

✓ running 15 chrome tabs

✓ running ubuntu virtualbox

✓ scraping a website with python in ubuntu

✓ laptop freezes

✓ gently slam the laptop so it can go to sleep mode

✓ try to login so it can unfreeze

✓ get a purple screen of death

✓ system crashed and has to restart

✓ get a blue screen of death for memory diagnostic tool

✓ all unsaved work is lost

✓ gtx 1060

✓ i7

✓ ddr4

✓ 8gb ram

✓ acer laptop of $2400

✓ regret buying acer laptop

Took the weekend to finish my phase out of Windows on my desktop and laptop.

Finally going Linux full time!

Goodbye constant forced reboots, awful updates, and lost files!

Fucking fuck shit monkeycocksucking gargling wtf!

I was getting some stuff done in my accounting software and it bugged me that the fields were dark and the fonts as well, thus seeing fucking shit. This was clearly a bad choice of a gtk3 dark theme, thus i switched to the fucking default adwaita, suddenly gnome session crashes.
Ok, i just log out and log back in.
Logout.... Nothing happens.... Ctrl-alt-backspace , nothing happens (and i knew i enabled that in the settings)
Ok let's do it a bit more forceful and restart the display manager... Gdm starts... I insert my credentials... It fucking crashes.

WTF!!!

I desperately try to debug it, xsession error msg'es? Nope. Something in /var/log/messages? Nope. Something, anything at all, nope sherlock nopedinope!

About to go batshit crazy, purging and reinstalling all of gnome, thibking that, what ever setting lust have broke it, it will be fixed now.

No fucking fuck desktop!!!

I lost my nerve and replaced gdm with lightdm, and i finally, after three hours wasted on my machine, i get my gnome desktop back... But in a state of mess! Extensions don't work and make it crash again, user themes? Nope, go fuck yourself with plain default.

I'm really losing my shit, business is almost non-existant, and now ly FUCKING desktop refuses to work like i want to. Everything is fucking broken to shits !!

I'm gon a go to my gf, and relax a little, at least i still have a working laptop.

Question is, for how long???

Fml

Have you ever lost faith in coding while reviewing someone else’s code?

I did that mistake today! So annoying! I threw my laptop in the corner and picked up my phone to write this!

So I actually got an update for my PC at work, proposing me to postpone it or to do it later. I postpone it to one hour later, since I'll be buying food for lunch, it can update and reboot.

When I came back from lunch, laptop is asking me to postpone or do the update right now. So I sigh because the laptop just stayed locked without doing anything, and ask it to do the update in 4 hours, when I'll be leaving.

2 minutes later, it forces me to update with the "30 min left before rebooting", so I sigh again, closes everything and reboot.

Since it's a Windows, it's slow on booting by definition. Plus launching Slack, Eclipse, Firefox, VLC. Takes time. Plus launching the server. +1000 files to compile then deploying.

I lost 20 minutes because of that edgy bitch called "update".

Go fuck yourself Lenovo,
Your ideapad-batteries are shit.
My ideapad 320s didn't have a giant battery-time to begin with, but now, after having it for 14 months, it already lost 9 percent capacity, and the loss seems to get faster.

Every time I check upower, after I charged it, the max-capacity is a little lower.

If it will continue like this, my laptop might be pretty much unusable in about 2 months.

I'm in a small company so they don't have a big budget.

The previous I.T guy went full retard and decided that it would be a great idea to buy a shitty 200$ laptop with a soldered eMMc hard drive for accounting.
Since they NEVER use the cloud and just pass around excel files, the files aren't really saved anywhere but on the USBs and the computer.

Guess what ? The motherboard fucking fried and almost 6 MONTHS of accounting work was lost. Out of warranty of course, not that it would help since the eMMc chip is also fucked.

That's what you get for trying to cheap out on hardware and not choosing the right stuff.

!rant
So...i have lost the count of the number of posts ranting about W10 sudden restarts because of the updates. Many people lost their valuable work and many more were just annoyed by this occurence...
But it has NEVER happened to me. Every time there was a pop-up message asking me if it was an appropriate time to update. On some occassions i would postpone the same update for numerous times, and it still did not force-restart my laptop.

Question: Is my machine buggy or do people do not know how to set working hours on their machines and postpone their updates?

!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/

>Client: Hey, I lost my Facebook password but it's saved on my old laptop
>Me: ...alright, i'll look
>Laptop: won't boot - "No bootable devices found!"
hoo boy
>opens 'er up to pull drive
this is really heavy for an SSD, Corsair, and especially for only 64GB
>plugs into other PC
nothing
fuck me
>sees jumper pins
>jumps them
>BAREFOOT-ROM RECOVERYMODE SSD DEVICE - 128GB
that's twice the size of the disk, wtf?
but ok, i'll take it, any data?
>Win10: *crashes because driver chokes*
>Win7: *crashes because driver chokes*
>WinXP: *doesn't see it, TestDisk doesn't run because Kernel32.DLL issue*
>Linux: *Issues the instant SSD plugged in, they stop instant removed*
fuck it
RMA

My uncle's photos dating to 7-10 years. It was a massive collection of family photos. My brother took his laptop for learning development. Then we decided to install Linux into it. But it never came to our mind that there were that kind of a photo archive in a folder somewhere. So eventually were installed linux by removing partitions and creating them from ground. Everthing is lost. It's been more than month and we don't have the guts to tell him the truth.

Spent an hour trying to figure out why Chrome wouldn't work at all. Even IE was working on my laptop.
Restarted the whole thing.
Now it works.....and I already lost most of my motivation to code. Just great...

- working on a personal project
- got angry at windows for sucking so bad at running fucking vs code of all things
- banged the palm rest on laptop in rage
- windows freezes
- restart
- harddisk died
- lost my collection of notes from college
- lost all my photos
- but most importantly, lost my progress on a project that I was working on and hadn't git push
- FANTASTIC

Lession learned. Always have a backup. ALWAYS.

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

PC desktop at work is failing, so i had to take my personal laptop last week. Almost lost a working day because of that ..
Took the desktop home to try and repair it on the free day, but for now i can't even plug it on one of my different home monitors ..
Gonna be fun !

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

I've been running Xubuntu for a while now and decided to try out Ubuntu's latest release.
So I backup my home and workspace directories by compressing them into archives and deciding to move them to another partition.
Long story short, I wiped my partition and did a clean install only to realize a little later that I had moved the backups in only my mind and not on the laptop 😭😭
That is how I lost all my local projects (the ones I hadn't pushed)
Well fuck me😒

Me and my family had gone to Paris and Switzerland for vacation. We took alotta photos, there's was about 10GB worth photos in our iPad. The iPad was not working properly, so I backed up the photos to my laptop and gave the iPad for formatting.

Unfortunately, one fine day, my laptop shut down and never switched on again (long story short). We gave it for fixing, but it's still not fixed.
And so we lost all our photos, now there's no proof that we went to to those places 😆

A few months ago I lost my laptop that had my school project and our start-up projects. Hadn't learned about version control by then. I had a rough time explaining to the time where the projects were as they were due in a weeks time. Spent the next 5 days rewriting the project. It came out more neater and faster than the previous one :)

Transferred a lot of important files in between PC with a 32 GB thumbdrive. One time, when I needed it the most, it couldn't read. It had the original up-to-date information on everything. Backup files were old and found in either emails, in another PC somewhere else and on an ex-colleagues laptop that, due to poor office management, lost track of where that laptop is.

It needs to be outright illegal for laptops to have fewer than four USB ports.

If the purpose of law is to improve the quality of life, why not outlaw the time-consuming annoyance of laptops with few USB ports?

The purpose of laptops is portable computing. Depending on a USB hub makes it less portable.

If it was legally mandatory for laptops to have at least four USB ports, there would be no more competitive disadvantage for laptop vendors sacrificing unimportant slimness for important practicality.

And to the very few people who consider slim design more important than USB ports and who are going to whine online about the extra 3 millimetres of thickness: Sorry, life is unfair. Your preferences don't matter. Practicality is the purpose of computers. You are the reason laptops are ruined for the rest of us. Get lost.

In college doing A2’s, working solo. Building a companion app for Trivial Pursuit bet you know it edition. Laptop got hit by virus/malware, stopped me from copying files, lost 2/3’s of my project 3 days before submission.

Fucking hell my insights are late ones...
So I am working with fluid dynamics simulation. I went home fired up the laptop and started the calculations. This is how the events went:

9 PM: starting the calculation
10 PM: checking on the graphs to see whether everything will be alright if I leave it running. Then went to sleep.
2 AM: Waking up in shock, that I forgot to turn on autosave after every time step. Then reassured myself that this is only a test and I won't need the previous results anyway.
5 AM: waking up, everything seems to be fine. I pause the calculation hibernate the laptop and went to work.
6:40 AM on my way to the front door a stray thought struck into my mind... What if it lost contact with the licence server, while entering hibernated state. Bah never mind... It will establish a new connection when I switch it back on.
6.45 AM Switching on the laptop. Two error messages greet me.

1. Lost contact with license server.
2. Abnormal exit.

Looking on the tray the paused simulation is gone. Since I didn't enabled autosave, I have to start it all over again. Well. Lesson learned I guess. Too bad it cost 8 hours of CPU time.

some call
- yo bro do you have some time ?
- quick cause I'm taking a dump
- I think I have been hacked, got black screen kernel panick, linux freeze seldomly I have to reboot, no internet connexion
- save your stuff and reinstall linux
- I don't have enough stockage to backup
- Then buy one and save, probably either OS is fcked up or you have some hdd problems

Time that it will take: ~30min to reinstall whole shit
Peace duration: ~2years

Later on the same day
aunt
- I can't log into windows
- Did you change the password ?
- Yes but it does not work anymore
* looking at shit
* logs successfully. Reason: interface changed after automatic update.
* wait.
* wait some more so fucking windows fucking starts
* Desktop is ugly as fck.
* Some stupid settings messed up (like high contrast set, black theme or so)

aunt (the same)
- I can't log into my (other) laptop either
* logs
* wait more more more

Guess what: automatic updaaaates. Freezes 100%cpu

* Being a very experienced user: wait before reboot because this suckass os will probably fail to boot otherwise
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates...
* reboots
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates continuing...
* finally boot (feels like a miracle windows succeeds lol)
* still slow
aunt now sleeps
* look at running process and install programs
* sees shits like camera recognition (vendor installed), candycrush
* occasionnaly get adds

time lost: 2h
peace duration: ~3month

FFS I am a dev, not a fucking trash lover
It is already pain to fix someone os, but windows is the cream of cream

It brings no ease of use for novice user
It is so insanely slow
It has stupid settings set up by default!!!!!!!! Who FFS wants candycrush and ads
The maj are so fcking hazardous. It is 2022 pretty much the same as 15y back then. Updates take fucking eternity. And needs reboot. and are not even finished!!!

I swear I am gonna stretch my ass and install linux and any fckin other toolsuite needed so they can use Micro$$ word, which is the only fucking usecase they need windows for in the first case anyway
I SO wish this OS would die

I mean, even more than safari

When dogecoin went out, I was a little curious kid. I knew small to nothing about cryptocurrencies, so I started mining some for the lulz on my shitty laptop. Holy fuck no one was using and mining this shit, so I was earning 500-600 DC by night. I did it for a few weeks, let the miner running when I was at highschool.

I stopped after one month since its value was inferior to the used electricity cost.

From time to time, I remember about this story about a 70000+ dogecoins, and I instantly want to chop my balls off and put some super strength bleach on the wounds while slapping myself with spiky plants.

I lost the wallet.

Hello ranters, I have to send my beloved laptop to acer support to get somethings fixed and I'm worried for my stickers. I don't want to get them damaged or lost (maybe they need to change the screen back plate or maybe they send me a new laptop all together). Is there a way to peel the off and reapply them with new glue?

!rant but tips

TL;DR consistent commitments form a habit.

I didn't write any code or do any major tasks past 5 days. Rest at home 2 days and went to short trip for remaining. Answered a few business calls. Made few important calls. Didn't bring my laptop with me and used my gf's one for less than 2 hours. (Majority of that 2 hours was spent on changing her W10 Japanese display language into English.)

This morning I found it hard to gain the productivity and concentration I had past few months. I thought I have lost it and got back to my old lazy 🐒 self.

Couldn't able to touch, well didn't have the mood to touch to be precise, my major tasks. I did my best to sit at my desk and finish minor small tasks that I can find the whole morning. That's the best I could do and probably the wise one I did.

After lunch time around 2pm, I gained my concentration back. I worked on my major tasks till 7pm. And now going home happy.

So my "productivity-is-a-lot-like-intercourse" analogy belief became stronger. As long as I commit to my desk and keep my work routine, I won't be losing my concentration and productivity for a long period.

One Windows is being a bitch a won't boot. I forgot the login password of another one of my windows laptop. Internet at home is not working at all.

Also to top it off, i think i lost the pendrive with my cryptos

Not the best day of my life.

Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.

Well fuck...

Korora 26 finally came out and I wanted to install it on my new laptop. I'd previously put Ubuntu MATE on there, with Cinnamon kind of tacked on, but it wasn't great, mostly because it wasn't Korora.

Unfortunately, Korora (and Fedora) still have a bug in the installer where it will complain if your /boot/efi partition is not on /dev/sda, which in my case it was on my M.2 drive. However, I was able to eventually get it working.

But when I booted it up and tried to log in, it would take me back to the log in screen. I logged into a TTY, where I was reminded that when I had set up my Ubuntu install, I had chosen to encrypt the home folder.

Not knowing how to set up the eCryptFS with an existing encrypted home folder setup, I opted to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch--I had a backup of most of my files from the Ubuntu installation. However, I lost some very important documents that I'd set up since then.

Fast forward to today where my laptop won't boot unless it is either a.) unplugged with just the battery or b.) plugged in without the battery, with a different power cable from the one I got with the computer.

Thankfully the people responded quickly after I mentioned I was having issues. Hopefully it doesn't get worse...

The lost his I've worked in a row were 74 hours straight had a deadline and a project to finish back in uni. So I only got off of my laptop for lunch and dinner and natures call. I slept for 12 hours the next day...
Got an A on the project and got through the deadline....

Good old days

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

My Laptop recently lost his mobility. I think my battery died ;_;
i3-status-bar shows me a nice 0,00% and as soon as my charger disconnects, it shuts down. Hope My insurance is still active...

A few months back I tried to get the company I work for to invest in software to located and recover lost/stolen devices. I brought a few offerings to the table but I was told we didn't need to worry about that because it never happens and we already have software in place.

Fast forward a few months and I'm looking at the software we're using and it seems we haven't actually configured the computers to allow for tracking. I send a message to our CTO about this and point out that, in the event of a missing device, we can't actually relocate it. Not 5 minutes later a manager comes in to let us know that his computer is missing and may have been stolen because his car was broken into the previous night.

Well I'm laughing because this is just the kind of thing I needed to happen, and the manager is freaking out because he's afraid the CEO is going to be furious. I get a few emails from other members of the leadership team requesting we set up a meeting to go over our security and asset protection procedures.

So I finally get to start implementing some actual security protocols around here. And fortunately the lost laptop was actually recovered because it was left at a bar and not in the car when it was broken into.

My HDD broke last night. Woke up to something making squeaking sounds. It was the HDD. When it broke, my laptop also acted weirdly. My laptop wouldn't even shut down. Let the battery drain, but lost the HDD. Something is broken, internal. Cannot recover the data myself because it no longer rotates. I now have to spend hundreds of dollars to get it to a data recovery company.

FML

Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy.

i am 24 and i feel like i am making some very bad choices with money.
my last few regretful stuff:

- i bought a phone when i found my current one (less than 6 months old) to be slightly less peformant. what's worse is that i don't even like that phone i purchased a lower end phone just coz i felt like experiencing a new phone brand!

- i bought an earpods when i lost my old one. whats worse is that they are lost somewhere at home, and i might find them once i life some beds and other heavy stuff ( although i searched significantly)

- i bought a freaking macbook some months ago. i guess that's not a majorly had investment but its being rarely used as i can't play any games in it(feel like it's a good thing though) and i have to sometimes vsit my old hp laptop to run some softwares as m1 sometimes sucks

- i got into an argument with my dad and recently slammed their phone on floor, then bought them a new one . i regret my angry self that day

- i got myself a personal trainer at gym for additional fees even though i am a beginner. our gym has 4 trainers and they provide basic directions for free of cost , i did not needed that guy.

- i recently bought a few track suits which , although i don't regret buying, i felt that i could get them at cheaper price at my local markets.

plus there are many other stuff that if i look into my amazon or flipkart history , i will regret more.

i need help with this shit. i am spending like 5-20% of my salary on regretful stuff, so its not a bad ratio but i still need to control.
send help :'(

Lenovo IdeaPad Y700 (and possibly (m)any other NVidia GPU laptops)

framerate fluctuations in any game - runs silky smooth for few minutes, then drops to borderline unplayable framerates for a few minutes.

Thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of internet forums having this problem for years, since the thing was released.

I personally lost at least 20 hours trying to solve it, and had the laptop in gaming-unusable state because of it for the past half a year.

...yesterday I FOUND A SOLUTION!
1. Download NVidia Inspector by Orbmu2k
(some hobbyist hacker type)

2. use its "profile inspector" to flip an internal setting in nvidia driver.

3. flip "Enable application for Optimus" to SHIM_RENDERING_MODE_ENABLE to basically tell the "Optimus" crap to fuck off.
(not sure why the value is called this, because it's clearly disabling the thing)

4. the thing works flawlessly silky smooth again.

...thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of forums...
...i could be their Lord and Savior...
...if only I weren't too lazy to hike across all of them and register just to post the solution.
(tech forums really should have some "I HAVE A SOLUTION but if i have to register I won't bother")

also...
WHY
DO
WE
KEEP
LETTING
HW
MANUFACTURERS
WRITE
SOFTWARE?!?

Ah ffs, its 1 AM and my tube light stopped working all of a sudden.

Climbed on a table to check the tube, the tube didn't glow and I lost balance and BANG! I fell. I hope I didn't wake up dad. Man, I should seriously lose some weight.

I hope I didn't break my laptop. Too scared to check. Plus leg hurts. Bruise.

Feels like I shall have a swell leg in the morning. But again, I wouldn't have to go out. So that's a plus.

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.

Wow I just thought I had lost my good old friend forever - my laptop did not want to turn non anymore and since the main fan is somewhat broken, I thought I'd never see him alive anymore and that he died from overheating thus I opened it, plugged it to the power connector and voila, it works again - whew, that was a shocking moment for me and I guess it's finally time to replace that fan.

Confession : I swear -> my sweet Arch Linux was freeze in my laptop in my super lightweight tty env + tmux after about to quit demonstrate my friend about vim in vimtutor on yesterday.
(1st freeze after 1 half a year of using it. Maybe something wrong about my rot potato, but hey -> its a things ;)
(no data lost after hard reboot after all.)
(First time it failed without me thinker it ;) -> Its not my fault Jim~)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why, Apple? WHY.

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

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

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

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

..... I'm on the verge of saying fuck jy and spending money I don't have on a new laptop

As it is that is somewhere like God I've lost count laptops owed John boy here including three brand new ones already purchased here

already these little fucks gave the idea they think they're going to lay claim to property that is NOT there's.

they can have this laptop if they like, with a ssd drive in it. just not this ssd drive or any of john's other hard drives, as HE PURCHASED THEM ALL.

also stop humanizing laptops, fucking freaks !
its a plastic shell with silicon chips in it that conducts electricity through a cpu that does stuff.

wasn't put on this earth to give chomos shallow lives to mimic with some added idiocy embedded into their lines.

and hand over all the old photos from the real times periods and those that came after and stop trying to touch what doesn't belong to them.

this includes the hdd's cotents 'lost' in chicago, which appear to have mostly reappeared.

your work laptop (or environment) get's stolen/lost/broken, when it's the last time you backed-up ?
and as a side question, how long will it take to get everything back up and running ?