Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

So I'm a UX Designer and my husband is a Mobile Engineer so obviously he makes more. I swear my field doesn't get enough credit it deserves (considering we're the ones figuring how the user will use the app/site/whatever device). My mother in-law decided my work isn't as important as his and that I stand below him. Gee thanks for the biggest insult, even when I had to go to grad school for 2 years, worked full-time at the same time so that we could help his family with some stuff considering we're the only couple who is capable of it. :/

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

20+ years of experience and I hate where this industry is headed. Sure, we have second year grads telling us that they're "Full Stack" developers - but, imo... that's a "Full Stack of Bullshit".

I started developing online properties in 1989, at the ripe age of 17. Bulletin Board Systems. I knew the user experience before it was tagged onto some fuckwad's wonder-filled LinkedIn profile.

When I say, "Don't use that" - it's not the result of a control freak mechanism that seems to be built into every Facebitch/Twatter/SnatchChat fool in existence.

I do so, because I care enough to guide team members in the proper direction so they aren't driving themselves and others off a goddamn cliff, drooling onto mobile device like it's God's penis.

So, of course they do the complete opposite. Fail miserably. Finger point like the typical douche bags. And, slowly destroy the income of everyone around them.

At this point, I'd rather be homeless than to deal with anymore toxic bullshit. So, I'm done. Set up an exit strategy, and walked away from the highest paying position I ever had.

Fuck them and the full stack of bullshit they rode in on. Onward and upwards, fucktards. Enjoy finger-pointing into the mirror.

Back to Earth, in... 3 - 2 - 1.

(Takes a sip of coffee.)

So, how's everyone doing this fine morning?

Apple at its finest. Sold the iPhone I used to own. Wanted to remove from iCloud. Open chrome on my Android device and was greeted with unsupported browser. Funny thing is it works if I tick open as desktop website.

Ffs apple. Your safari browser is the new IE of browsers. Yes my device is supported. Yes for Christ sake it can render stuff. It's not an old Nokia... Who even thought it was remotely a good idea to restrict mobile access...

The time when I've felt like a badass, was when I was bored at a Birthday party at restaurant.

I didn't want to use my mobile data, so I tried to use the wifi of the restaurant. I didn't want to ask the password of the wifi, so I tried to get access by guessing. At first try I got it by entering "nameOfRestaurantCurrentYear".

Then I was browsing Play Store and there was a recommendation of an app (forgot the name) that analyses which the device is connected to wifi. So that got me interested that I installed on my phone.

So I played a little with and discover several Samsungs and iPhones connected to it (Some of the them had their real name next to the brand. It would be funny to yell their name out loud and they would be looking around.)
But there was one device that I didn't recognized. I searched on the web but found nothing. So later as I go to pay my part, I noticed that the credit card device had a wifi icon on it. So I looked over to the cash register and saw the name of the brand. It was the brand I didn't know of.

So basically they were using transfer payments over a public wifi.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

I've got a client that is complaining a long sentence is on multiple lines on a mobile device.

You literally cannot make this stuff up. They are literally saying, "move this specific word up to the line above."

--- UK Mobile carrier O2's data network vanishes like a fart in the wind ---
One of the largest mobile carriers in the UK; O2 has been having all manner of weird and wonderful problems this morning as bleary eyed susbcribers awoke to find their data services unavailable. What makes this particular outage interesting (more so than the annoyingly frequent wobblers some mobile masts have) is that the majority of the UK seems to be affected.

To further compound the hilarity/disaster (depending on which side of the fence you're on), Many smaller independent carriers such as GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile piggy-back off O2's network, meaning they're up the stinky creek without a paddle as well. Formal advice from the gaseous carrier is to reboot your device frequently to force a reconnect attempt, Which we're absolutely sure won't cause any issues at all with millions of devices screaming at the same network when it comes back up.

Issue reports began flooding DownDetector at around 5am (GMT), With PR minions formally acknowledging the issue 2 hours later at 7am (GMT) via the most official channel available - Twitter. After a few recent updates via the grapevine (companies involved seems to be keeping their heads down at the minute) Ericsson has been fingered for pushing out a wonky software update but there's been no official confirmation of this, so pitchforks away please folks.

If you're in need of a giggle while you wait for your 4G goodness to return, You can always hop on an open WiFi network and read the tales of distress the data-less masses are screaming into the void.

Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.

Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.

Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.

Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.

Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.

Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.

Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.

Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.

Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.

Designer: Unlikely

Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.

Designer: … Ok then.

-

It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.

When you are a mobile developer and your company cant afford more Android devices, so you use your own Android device for testing and then they don't give you wifi access

FUCK :|

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

I was assigned a ticket which was about a drop down menu which was not aligning properly.

Turns out the drop-down was positioned absolutely and my co-worker (read bestie) had written media query for every 10 pixels to match the position for mobile and desktop devices (from 320px to 1040px and beyond ~150 lines for a drop-down). No one noticed any flaw for few weeks until one of the QA had to check the site in landscape mode on mobile device.

I replaced it with 4 lines of JavaScript.

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

Dev: (Watches user print out screenshot of maintenance app to do list, walk across facility to printer. walk across facility to equipment and check things off on paper, then walk across facility back to their terminal and copy the findings over.)

Dev: We made the app responsive so they could do that on a mobile device. Why are they printing?

Manager: Printers are cheaper than getting more tablets.

Dev: …

Dev: Can we at least get a printer at each terminal so they don’t waste so much time walking across the facility?

Manager: That’s too many printers to maintain. It’s easier to just have one.

Dev: …

This has been said countless times before me, and way better than me that’s supper tired, but I need to rant out

And what I’m ranting out today, is Apple. Its essence, its core, the reason it still exists: the ECOSYSTEM!

The problem with Apple ecosystem is that it’s the ecosystem of a fucking PRISON!

People like it because it works well together , but it’s sure that in a prison, the path from your cell to the cantine is pretty optimized; you get forced there! And you might try to get your food elsewhere, but the walls of the prison are made to be difficult to cross. Especially on mobile, where they’re making it harder and harder to escape, to make a jailbreak (pun-intended). Keeping you the loyal little sheep, or the forcing you to it.

That prison is also made private, a little club, to attract people to it. They even got their own little system to talk to each other, but oh god protect them from their little messages to pass the walls of the prison.

And all that prison is guarded by the warden, watching from high in the cloud. Forcing you to report yourself to him to be part of that prison.

That prison, also, can only be entered with specific vehicles, provided by the prison, to ensure maximum compatibility and efficiency. Good luck entering with a disguised vehicle if you find the official ones too pricey for their parts.

They also provided pressure tubes to send things from one cell to another. While being only simple pressure tubes like any other, they’re acclaimed because they’re apparently easier to use than the other 3rd party pressure tubes that can send things to the outside. Why? Because, oh yes it’s already in everybody’s cells (of that prison, outside is dangerous) and the other tubes have been conveniently being placed somewhere harder to reach.

Another thing they have are those windows that can view the outside. While being maybe less clear than some other windows, they are ok. But if you ever consider going mobile to enjoy that safari with lions, then man do they love bringing you back to that window.

Ok so I’m done with the prison metaphor, or I won’t sleep.

The ecosystem is probably the major reason Apple is still there. You buy from there because you’re a prisoner (I guess I’m not finished with the metaphor after all).

This is a prime example of RMS’s quote “If the user doesn’t control the software, the software controls the user”

AirDrop isn’t some sort of revolutionary tech, it uses a well established protocol that other implementations use to do the same thing. They could really easily open source the protocol and allow everyone to profit, but they won’t, because that would mean you don’t have to buy Apple.

That’s why I militate for open source, decentralized and standardized protocols. Because that way, we control the software, and it doesn’t control us.

All the things I said aren’t so bad because when you buy Apple, you make a choice. But I don’t have a choice, I am typing this on an Apple device, because I need to (I won’t elaborate on that) because of that fucking *ecosystem*

I am really tired, so half the sentences probably don’t make sense, but thanks for coming to my stupid TED talk.

Having to review an offshore C++ codebase made in Romania that the company I worked for they bought to control a wifi module on a complex RF mobile tech device that I can't legally give more details on.

If I could legally post this masterpiece, or should I say masterpiece-of-shit, all of you C++ dev would instantly get AIDS and all the existing types of cancer upon browsing it for 2 minutes.

It's laughably bad and unmaintainable. One of my colleague called it "the perfect example of human obfuscation" and it fits perfectly.

Think of a 100k LoC main function with nested loops and ifs with random sleep values, 1000 values of hardcoded 32 bits arrays declared globally in the first 10k lines for unknown reasons. Comments in Romanian mixed with english. Somehow, this shit works by some miracle.

The worst intern you can think of, while being piss drunk, could do better and it's no joke.

Any mobile device compiler....they take FOREVER

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

While attending a class for mobile app development a couple of months back, the day the teacher (T) unveiled the class project:
T: You must build an Android app. You can do whatever you want.
T: Don't overcomplicate though. For example, online servers won't be valued!
T: But don't make it too easy. For example, don't make a tic-tac-toe. That won't be valued!
T: And remember, you must use device sensors, like the camera, GPS, accelerometer ...
T: But don't just throw the sensor functionality if it doesn't make sense in the app you're building. That won't be valued either!
T: You have one week to think and send me a proposal.
Me: What the fuck do you want me to do then?

Putting chatgpt to some good use. Writing a complaint mail to the idiots maintaining my banking app in the style of shakespare.

Hark thee, App Support Team,

With grave disquiet and vexation doth I write to thee concerning thy recent update of the application. As a software developer, the option to enable developer settings on mine own mobile device is of paramount importance for mine work. Yet thy latest update hath impeded mine access to mine own bank account until I disable this setting. Upon launching the app, it doth redirect me to a browser tab, where I am compelled to deactivate the developer setting to avail of thy services.

This conduct of thine is most unacceptable and unprofessional in mine eyes. It doth seem a transgression of privacy, for thy app doth dictate what settings I may or may not have on mine own personal phone. How canst thou deny me access to mine own bank account information merely on the grounds of having enabled developer options? How doth this option interfere with thy application, such that thou must needs coerce thy users to forsake their phone settings to utilize thy app?

I beseech thee to rectify this issue with all due haste, so that I may access mine own bank account without hindrance. If thou art incapable of doing so, then prithee, might thou recommend a more user-friendly banking application to which I may gladly switch?

With frustration and discontent at this time,
A locked-out person.

Backstory : So recently one of my banking app stopped working and forced me to update to their latest version. As soon as i opened the newer version , it shut down and redirected to my browser with a shitty html page with just one message : Disable developer options on your device to continue using our app. I was extremely frustated and couldnt understand what kind of idiots were maintaining this app.So i decided to write up an email hoping to find some solution for this.

You know that the mobile ecosystem is completely fucked when you have to open up your device just to do a hard power cycle.. and what for? What's the fucking difference between a connector inside of the device, and one that's outside the device? A couple of cubic millimeters? If it's even that much?

Real story, I'm not kidding you.
But I wouldn't believe it, if it hadn't happened right now.

Customer calls, one device gets no mobile data connection.
I checked everything ... no errors to be found. Just no connection.

After half an hour we found the reason: Someone inserted the SIM the wrong way.

*facepalm*

How the hell can someone put in a SIM the wrong way? There is only one way it'll fit in.
I don't get it.

Vodafone, 2019
This is simply ridiculous

"Welcome to The United Arab Emirates. Warning - you have activated your mobile device overseas. Significantly higher charges may apply. While you're here, it will cost up to $20.89/min + 40c connection fee to make calls, $5/min to receive calls, $3.50 to send a TXT and data is charged $51.20/MB. It's free to receive a TXT. (...)."

Not Shure if other carriers are better, but with roaming on this rant would have, probably cost like 10$ :D

So, today a client said: "If you are a web developer, well you can make me a damn mobile app. It's the same fooking thing, you just write code and make it go on my device. I want a whatsapp-like app for my company."

I really, really wanted to punch him on his godamn face... At the end I spent tbe rest of the meeting explaining that I don't develop mobile apps since I'm a web developer and that it is NOT THE SAME THING. He went angry and said "Well, I think I'll find a better dev somewhere else. You are a useless one"

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

When you are a mobile developer and your company has only 3 android devices shared between Mobile, Testing and Design teams :|

And all teams fight for the device time

What the fuckin fuck..

Any Subtitle is a project that enables the user to watch a movie in a theater with a subtitle of any language on his device as assistance.

The user places his mobile handset on the holder on the seat in front of him

First rant here, and it's going to be a query to the more professional and experienced members of society (most of you).

I am currently a Sys Admin for a major company, and I develop at night. My primary employment at the moment is the sys admin job (and I code for extra money at nights).

I wanted to start a development department at the company that I am working at, but it was turned turned down. It was stated that we are not branching in development, and that we should stick to our server implementation and support. This was a prompt to me wanting to start studying officially (I wanted to get qualified in JAVA, so that I had some paper behind my name when I looked for another job). HR and my directors outright denied me the ability to study through them (they pay for studies for employees) and I was more than fine with this.

I took a loan and paid for the studies myself. Can't crush a dream, you know?

The director caught wind of me studying, and now has demanded that I develop him a mobile application for the company. I told him that I am not a mobile developer, and that it didn't fall into my key performance areas.

Note, I do my coding on own time, on my own device, and never at work. It's fully my intellectual property. It also in no way interferes with my work during the day, and has NO conflict with my contract this side.

He sent an email yesterday, this is after two months. He is now stating that I WILL do the application, and he has CCd HR and two directors.

I don't want to do the app for this company, I spoke to HR previously about this, and she said that I should try and quote it under my own company name (which I did, but it was denied as it was "too expensive").

Now I am being forced to do something that is COMPLETELY out of my roles and responsibilities, something that this company has ABSOLUTELY no desire to go into further on, and he is basically letting me know that if I don't do it, he is going to start messing with my pay.

I really don't want to do this, and I cannot afford to make my secondary job my primary at the moment. The problem is, too, that I don't have the time during the day to develop AND do my sys admin tasks (I manage more than 300 servers, and 5000 devices).

What can I do in this instance? Or what would you guys recommend, in your experience?

Sorry for the noob question, but I don't know what to do.

[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?

Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible

Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device

Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw

> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010

I'm fucked.

Me: *Trying to get the mobile banking app*
App: Nope, you have a rooted device
Me: *disables root access for apps and adb*
App: Nope, you have a rooted device
Me: *Maybe a xposed module would help*
Xposed: Nope, you have android nougat
Me: *Maybe there's some LineageOS marshmallow rom for my phone*
LineageOS: Nope, just android 7.1

fml

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

New mobile challenge I created:

... treat this as production code and show us your best practises and thought processes ... please list and explain any third party libraries used.

First submission:

I've used library X, although it has a major UI defect when rotating the device, it should be good for a simple test.

... wrong

MTP is utter garbage and belongs to the technological hall of shame.

MTP (media transfer protocol, or, more accurately, MOST TERRIBLE PROTOCOL) sometimes spontaneously stops responding, causing Windows Explorer to show its green placebo progress bar inside the file path bar which never reaches the end, and sometimes to whiningly show "(not responding)" with that white layer of mist fading in. Sometimes lists files' dates as 1970-01-01 (which is the Unix epoch), sometimes shows former names of folders prior to being renamed, even after refreshing. I refer to them as "ghost folders". As well known, large directories load extremely slowly in MTP. A directory listing with one thousand files could take well over a minute to load. On mass storage and FTP? Three seconds at most. Sometimes, new files are not even listed until rebooting the smartphone!

Arguably, MTP "has" no bugs. It IS a bug. There is so much more wrong with it that it does not even fit into one post. Therefore it has to be expanded into the comments.

When moving files within an MTP device, MTP does not directly move the selected files, but creates a copy and then deletes the source file, causing both needless wear on the mobile device' flash memory and the loss of files' original date and time attribute. Sometimes, the simple act of renaming a file causes Windows Explorer to stop responding until unplugging the MTP device. It actually once unfreezed after more than half an hour where I did something else in the meantime, but come on, who likes to wait that long? Thankfully, this has not happened to me on Linux file managers such as Nemo yet.

When moving files out using MTP, Windows Explorer does not move and delete each selected file individually, but only deletes the whole selection after finishing the transfer. This means that if the process crashes, no space has been freed on the MTP device (usually a smartphone), and one will have to carefully sort out a mess of duplicates. Linux file managers thankfully delete the source files individually.

Also, for each file transferred from an MTP device onto a mass storage device, Windows has the strange behaviour of briefly creating a file on the target device with the size of the entire selection. It does not actually write that amount of data for each file, since it couldn't do so in this short time, but the current file is listed with that size in Windows Explorer. You can test this by refreshing the target directory shortly after starting a file transfer of multiple selected files originating from an MTP device. For example, when copying or moving out 01.MP4 to 10.MP4, while 01.MP4 is being written, it is listed with the file size of all 01.MP4 to 10.MP4 combined, on the target device, and the file actually exists with that size on the file system for a brief moment. The same happens with each file of the selection. This means that the target device needs almost twice the free space as the selection of files on the source MTP device to be able to accept the incoming files, since the last file, 10.MP4 in this example, temporarily has the total size of 01.MP4 to 10.MP4. This strange behaviour has been on Windows since at least Windows 7, presumably since Microsoft implemented MTP, and has still not been changed. Perhaps the goal is to reserve space on the target device? However, it reserves far too much space.

When transfering from MTP to a UDF file system, sometimes it fails to transfer ZIP files, and only copies the first few bytes. 208 or 74 bytes in my testing.

When transfering several thousand files, Windows Explorer also sometimes decides to quit and restart in midst of the transfer. Also, I sometimes move files out by loading a part of the directory listing in Windows Explorer and then hitting "Esc" because it would take too long to load the entire directory listing. It actually once assigned the wrong file names, which I noticed since file naming conflicts would occur where the source and target files with the same names would have different sizes and time stamps. Both files were intact, but the target file had the name of a different file. You'd think they would figure something like this out after two decades, but no. On Linux, the MTP directory listing is only shown after it is loaded in entirety. However, if the directory has too many files, it fails with an "libmtp: couldn't get object handles" error without listing anything.

Sometimes, a folder appears empty until refreshing one more time. Sometimes, copying a folder out causes a blank folder to be copied to the target. This is why on MTP, only a selection of files and never folders should be moved out, due to the risk of the folder being deleted without everything having been transferred completely.

(continued below)

Make a script which can basically tell you what is happening on your server from your mobile device basically server analytics

I reset my mobile (Wileyfox Pro Windows 10) today and I had to open my old Lumia 535 to get a code for an app. The moment I turned it on the sensation of meeting a friend from old came back to me. I didn't realise I would be missing my old device.
It's kind of sad that Microsoft decided to pull the plug once again on their mobile platform. I liked the minimalism they brought to the interface and the integration they were trying to add between different devices.
All is gone now and I am left to wonder with the possibilities that would have brought.

that moment when I browse the Internet via mobile phone and have to request the desktop version (chrome) because that fucking mobile view sucks AF

What a big fail if I choose the desktop view over the "responsive" one on my small device

This week's huge fuck you goes to... Drumroll please...
Slack!

You earned this prize for your stupid auto-sleep if there is no interaction for x minutes!

I don't want to install your crap software on my system, so i am forced to alt tab every 15 minutes just to press space and then delete, because God forbids i am being productive on my freaking IDE, second computer, test device and/or meeting!
Also lovely how phone notifications are not sent on mobile unless you are on sleep mode... How could I ever ask for urgent notifications if i take a small break? Oh, right! I should go to sleep mode, so people will think i didn't touch your shitware for 30 mins every fucking time i go to the toilet! :D

Please get your prize whenever possible!

I know its been quite a while since ive posted last but it is safe to say that i am back! And boy do i have some stuff to bitch about.

This semester, Im taking mobile app development as a class. I chose to take this class over the introductory c# class, so that i wouldn't need to work with Windows or really do anything else to touch Windows. Well the joke is on me. Here i was thinking that we would be using a bit of Java from time to time while only really learning best practices and concepts.
Never did i think that this class's curriculum would be entirely based off of Xamarin.
Seeing as I need either this class or the two c# classes to graduate, I had to bite the bullet and just accept that my semester would be full of irritation during this class.
Its been about seven weeks in, and i have turned in 8 assignments.
All 8 of those assignments have been Windows Form Applications doing simple shit like dividing two numbers.
We have not made anything for multiple devices. We have not made anything for even one mobile device. We have not even discussed how to do this in the class.
This wouldnt bother me so much since these are typically easy programs that take about 30 minutes to make and test and submit for grading. It does insanely bother me, however, that it takes Windows so FUCKING LONG to boot, or when it freezes every 2 minutes because i clicked into another program, or it just HANGS ON THE UPDATING SCREEN AT 36% FOR THREE DAYS, or when it took 4 different reinstallations of Visual Studio 2017 before i could actually open without an error code.

College, Ive learned, tests my patience way more than it has ever tested my knowledge.

It's absolute insanity when your mobile recharge expires, in India if you use Jio.

Every hour you get two SMSes, one in English and one in the local language asking you to recharge.

Flash SMS messages take up your screen if you have something on ur device out of nowhere.

If you call someone 3 days before your recharge will expire you get this automated voice lecture about how your recharge is going to expire within 3 days.

Insanity.

I can't be the only one with a parent so inept with technology...

My father was an architect. He doesn't do well with any tech device, computer or mobile - all my attempts to teach / explain to him how to do one thing or another (concept of an account in app store, for starters, or how to find the app store icon on his iPhone) are viciously blocked out, and his defense -
"Listen, you know I don't understand, these things, I'm not a pro. If you'd asked me about how to mix I'd answer because there I'm a pro"

We live in different countries, btw, so have to teach him by phone.

After each unsuccessful attempt from my side he proceeds to ridicule me saying "Well and I thought you were a pro at these things"

Sigh.

as an Android dev of a few years, I HATE iOS. Coding on XCode vs Android Studio is a nightmare. The error logs are terrible in comparison to Java. Obj-C is a nightmare. Swift is cool, I'll admit, but I could probably build better interfaces that scale per device on an Etch-A-Sketch. Instead of creating a layout in Interface Builder that worked for all devices (freakin' impossible) I instead opted to save myself some time and get a reference of the constraints and adjust them PER DEVICE. If that's not shitty code practice, I don't know what is. when I code iOS apps I feel like I'm in college again, just doing whatever the hell I can to get a project done with. the problem with mobile dev is that, when you can, you want to target both OSes. typically I do Android first and switch to iOS. I probably should do iOS first and then work on the Android version

I think the worst thing about android programming and deploying directly to a device, is that you can procrastinate in both the pc and the mobile...

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

Yesterday night!

Yeah it was Saturday night but not for me. I was at bus stop and my jiofi device was in back pocket and after some time I was coming back to my room and thinking let's switch on wifi. After that my mobile was not connected to jiofi so I thought may be jiofi out of charged. Later on when I was checking in my pocket I realize that I missed it on bus stop!

Actually this jiofi device is my first salary's garbage:D

That's why I was little bit worried.

So I went back to stop and saw nothing was there. Disappointed but wait, suddenly devRant notification came and mobile vibrated so I checked and I seen that my mobile connected to jiofi and then I checked carefully, it was there!

Actually jiofi was placed in opposite face so that light was not visible but I got my jiofi back.

Thank you devRant notification:D

The default USB voltage hould have been specified to 6 instead of 5 volts.

Six (6) volts would allow for longer cables than five (5) volts do, since the spare voltage compensates for the resistance of cables. This is even more crucial for USB hubs. USB hubs are highly dependable upon these days due to laptop vendors dropping the number of USB ports down to two or even one. I am looking at you, Medion.

If several devices are connected to a USB hub, the voltage can quickly drop below 4.5 volts due to the resistance between the USB hub ports and the computer's USB port, causing some devices to restart themselves even if the computer's USB port is not over capacity. If it were over capacity, it would just regulate down its output voltage to prevent overcurrent.

Lithium-ion batteries need at least 4.3 volts arriving at the battery terminals to fully charge, and mobile devices are typically not equipped with a boost converter. Even if they were, they are rather inefficient, meaning they would produce significant heat and waste a power bank's energy. Other USB devices such as flash drives and peripherals might power off below 4.5 volts. However, 6 volts have solid 1.7 volts of margin to 4.3 volts, more than twice the margin of 0.7 volts that 5 volts have. On the way from the power supply to the end device, the voltage has to pass several barriers which weaken it, including the cable, connector endings, and the end device's internals such as the charging controller.

Sure, there are quick charging standards such as by Qualcomm and MediaTek which support elevating voltages to nine (9), twelve (12), and even twenty (20) volts. However, they require support by both the charger and mobile device. If six (6) volts were the default USB voltage, all devices would have been designed to accept this voltage, and longer cables could have been used anywhere. Obviously, all USB devices should be able to run on five volts as well.

Six volts would have been more stable, flexible, and reliable.

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

So I just installed Windows 10 and decided to download GeForce Experience and got this through Microsoft Edge.
I tried Opera, same result. My friend told me to zoom out with Opera and then suddenly it worked. WHY?!?!? Since when is a newly installed Windows with bad resolution a mobile device or something? Can you please explain?

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

I am in need of a new Technopoly/Chinese pocket surveillance mobile device. Since I am obligated by work to own a pocket surveillance device, and I have been an iPhone user for a while now and all my stuff is there, does anyone have a recommendation in the “11” range of those devices? Any bad experiences with them? Looking to spend not more than $500 for a used one (looking on Swappa.com).

🔥👽🤘🏻
I've been CRUSHING it lately, so stoked!!!
**Also, this means that in the near future something will crush me because I have a few subjects on deck I need to lock down.

1. Deno

2. TypeScript(deep dive)

3. CPP (currently 75% done with my 2nd masterclass, first one complete)

4. Multi-platform local device storage (Sqflite/mongoDB/shared preferences/Hive)

5. REST/api/requests/json management && application

6. Implementing Firebase authentication using Apple, Twitter, and mobile OTP

7. Cloud functions && server scripting/automation

8. Intro to embedded systems/OS/kernels

9. Steadily improve my code style, design strategies, and build patterns that are team friendly && provide easier code base maintainibilty

10. Influence, teach, and/or spark the interest of someone new to development in any possible- all that matters is getting new people on board, making sure they are stoked about, and last but not least making sure they feel welcome in the community and are able to start off in the right direction.

cheers, ya fockers!!!!

Working for a startup building a device / app that let you answer your landline phone on your mobile, and get notifications of missed calls etc.

While developing I purposely didn't secure the endpoint that controlled push notifications.

I waited for the boss to sign up, went to the DB and stole his token. From time to time i'd send a request telling him he missed a call from his wife or son.

... then kicked back and watched the madness and frustration ensue.

For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?

Can anyone give me a logical explanation?

P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.

So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...

P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.

The moment when your company customer is a major mobile provider and you reply to their support question: "Device you mentioned was not included in the bundle you got, but we can include it for 4.99/m + vat if you're on contract."

;D for all the times they said it to me...

"Mobile optimized" themes, templates, websites etc that are looking completely broken on an actual mobile device are fucking ironic, especially those "css framework" websites.

Is there any plugin/script for chrome that allows to automatically take all device screenshots and name them accordingly? (4k, laptop L, mobile L, ..) I don't want to rely on using external services and wouldn't want to write some quick hack with a chrome wrapper.

So couple days ago I posted my meme website: meme4meme.me

Now after some constructive suggestions I have finally redesigned the thing, now it is:
Better with mobile device
Link is unique for each meme so you can share
Can download content

Please enjoy the memes I collected over the year and let me know any suggestions you have

I have two questions to WhatsApp

1️⃣ Why does WhatsApp store a copy of ALL images ever sent? LOCALLY? I thought it is a cloud service. Why would I want to keep gigabytes of data on a device with limited internal storage?

2️⃣ Why no proper multi-device capability on Mobile? Why no voice call on Desktop?

Bruh WhatsApp is so limited and awkward it is a shame it somehow got so popular

I want to talk about media queries.

THERE ARE SO MANY FUCKING VIEWPORTS TO SUPPORT.

Seriously, why hasn't this shit been standardised; why does every new device *have* to be different dimensions from the rest?

Couldn't we have a S, M and LG scale for mobile, tablet and desktop????

Then we've got the fucking pleasure of DPR, as if it wasn't hard enough to be comprehensive for your shitty iPhone 5s.

Fuck you.

OK.... I don't mind ads but when I'm on a mobile device n you just redirect without opening a new window...

You leave me no choice... You just earned 100% IP level blocking.

Being a native Android dev for most of my college days(yet to start a full time professional life), i often feel scared of my life choices.

Like, i chose to go into a field in which am totally on my own . Android is not a subject taught or supported by colleges, so a virtual shelter that every fresher gets, i.e that of a "he's just a college passout, he wouldn't know that" is not for me. I am supposed to be a self learner and a knowledgeable android dev by default.

Other than that , idk why i feel that am having a very specific skillset which would be harmful for me if am not the best at it.

I feel the same for entire Android dev. I mean, its nothing but a very specific hardware device with a small screen and a bunch of lmited sensors. Our tools and apps are limited to just manipulate them to do little fancy stuff offline. Other than that everything (and sometimes even this too) could be achieved by a website/webapp of a web dev.

A particular native android dev don't know how the ML/AI stuff works, don't know how backend stuff works don't know how the cloud stuff works, jeck we don't even know how those unity games work!

We are just some end product makers taking data from somewhere handled by someone and printing them in fancy gui.
(But we are good at ranting about stupid mobile hardware manufacturers, i tell u that)

So am not sure if being an Android dev is a going to be good for me in the future. I mean , a web dev always gets to interact at every level of products, but we can't.

I always feel my future will end up being limited to being good in Android, later shifting to IOS to being completely unemployed because everything is controlled by js and web dev tools and native programming is no longer a thing anymore :/

what apps you recommend to install on developers mobile device(s)?

2005 called. It wants its numbered file names back.

While I am mostly satisfied with "celluloid" as a worthy successor to xplayer, the first major disappointment I stumbled upon is `celluloid-shot0001.jpg`. Are we in 2005?

Just like xplayer, Celluloid, the new default media player of Linux Mint, should use proper, i.e. time-stamped names such as `celluloid-2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` or `celluloid-video_file_name-2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` for screenshots taken from videos, to eliminate the possibility of file name conflicts if files are moved into other directories, to make screenshots searchable by video file name, and to retain the date and time information if the files are moved to a device that does not support date and time stamp retention such as MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), and to allow for date range selection using wildcards in the terminal (e.g. `celluloid-2023-04*` for all screenshots from April 2023). Besides, PNG screenshots should be supported too, but that's out of scope here.

As a reference, the gnome and mate screenshot tools also pre-fill time stamps into the file name field.

Numbered file names were useful in an era when there was no VFAT and file names needed to have 8.3 file names that could impossibly fit a date and a time, and compact cameras used such names, but those times are long over. Just like the useless and annoying pull-to-refresh gesture on mobile apps and the Media Transfer Protocol, numbered file names belong to the technological graveyard.

If numbers are really desirable, at least `celluloid-shot0001.2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` should be used, to include both a number and a date. The command to get this date format is `date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S"`. For compatibility across operating systems, dashes instead of colons have to be used to separate hours and minutes and seconds.

Numbered file names are a thing of the past. Use time stamps.

Iconless menus – another effect of the toxic minimalism trend. Icons in menus such as the mobile web browser and device settings help finding items faster!

In 2014, Samsung removed icons from the upper right menu of their mobile Internet browser. At some point, roughly 2017, they realized it was a bad idea and brought them back. Could've told ya that earlier. 😁

da fuq.

My manager wants me to write specific test cases for status quo behavior (without turning on new features) on mobile web.

and TEST IT ON DEVICE NOT SIMULATORS

Does he know it's the 2020s?

and does he know all our changes were already out since we deployed it the first time? aka customers already tested it for us?

I'm not gonna tell him and open another can of worms lol

Made a root only app: enable/disable GPS, mobile data, airplane mode and etc. work on not rooted device(yes all these functions work too).

How: Desktop app which downloads cross-platform ADB drivers, unzips them, executes a few commands, deletes the drivers and voala.
P.S: I use local ADB TCP connection(yeah I ported a part of the drivers for java android) and write_secure_settings granted with 'pm grant'.
And everything is user-friendly with screenshots explaining how to enable ADB and how to click a 2 buttons.

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

!rant
BIG FUCKING SHOUTOUT: THANKS!

Thanks Devrant for being the only app (for entertainment on my device) that works well with fucking 64kbit/s when out of data mid month.

Fuck YouTube watching over mobile data instead of wlan when at home.... F*** me

ANYONE WHO ANSWERS IS A HERO! Im having a CSS issue and yes I’m a CSS noob! I have a flex box with two columns of data and I want the divs to stack when the screen gets narrow enough. The issue is that I want them to stack ordered by a data attribute. I wrote a media query like this

@media (max-width: 767 px) {
.row { flex-direction: column};
.row div { order: attr(data-ordinal) };
}

I want each of the divs to be ordered by the data-ordinal attribute (a number) when the screen gets at most 767 pixels or on a mobile device. I was banging my head for a while on this assshole. Can anyone find the issue here? I may have left out a few details but does this CSS at least LOOK ok? I’m new to media queries. PS sorry, whats the bot that does the highlighting? I forgot it, but luckily this is simple enough to read

Three Layers of Security
As InfoWorld notes, all smartphones have three basic
elements of security. Your first major task as a mobile
user is to become aware of these layers and enable them
in your devices:
1. Device Protection: Allowing remote data "wiping" if your
device is ever lost or stolen.
2. Data Protection: Preventing corporate data from being
transferred to personal apps running on the same device
or personal network
3. App-Management Security: Protecting your in-app
information from becoming compromised.

I was trying to set up my own "cloud" for iot experiments. I planned to use Intel Edison with mqtt broker (using mosca) and a node js app for providing API for mobiles and browser. And also to do other book keeping.

I spent the half day trying figure how to expose these servers to internet.

I configured ddns in noip.com and ddns settings configured to it in my router.
Port forwarded to the local server services I needed.

And then tested. Worked perfectly on any device in my router connected network. Tested on mobile network. Bam! It fucking doesn't work.

Then connected another router.
Double port forwarded. Again worked perfectly on router network. And failed on mobile.
Tested if ddns is right. Did nslookup it was fine as fuck.
Then disabled port forwarding. Did dmz. Nope. Nadda. No luck.

Then scratched my head so hard that I lost more already losing hairs.

Then remembered about router hardware firewall. Disabled it.
Tested
And there it didn't work.
My dreams shattered like a fucking deer hit by car on highway.
Didn't work.
Then I see the IP pointing to my router in nslookup. Its 172.20.xx.xx. Its a fucking private IP.

My Asshole ISP is running another private network behind firewall. Which I fucking can't port forward
Now I think how much of a noob and idiot I am. Fuck this shit. Fuck all of these shit.
I am going for SaaS option for mqtt broker.
(Or help me?)
Once again.
Asshole ISP.
Fuck your firewall.
(PS: I had test the next day. FML)

Site runs beautifully on desktop. Runs shitty on mobile. Working and reworking these damn lightboxes to hold videos in them. Sigh. You’d think I’d learn by now to check things on an actual mobile device and not an emulator (i know. This is my fault). Welp. There goes my vacation

I've been given two months to make an AR app that gives information on buildings seen out of the window of a client's skyscraper office.

So off I go, smash together some Ar.js in a few days because it looks easy. Yet I quickly find out that the compass on mobile phones are completely trash. Every device I try has true north randomly chosen from anywhere between 10 degrees wrong or full on 180 degrees the opposite direction. It's a miracle that none of these devices have managed to stumble onto true north by luck. I'm getting suspicious that ar.js is actually just mapping coordinates based on north instead of true north or something ridiculous. This likely won't be helped by GPS interference from the skyscraper.

It isn't helped that ar.js is a steaming pile of bugs on top of bugs, many of the examples taken straight from documentation straight up don't work.

I'm trying to get ar.js with three.js now in the hope that I can figure out some kind of true north calibration controls as an offset to whatever the phone says north is.

If anyone has any suggestions for a better solution that would be grand.

I'm building an Android app from ground up targeting to have functionalities added without much effort in succeeding phases.

What I'm pissed about mobile development at the moment though, is its lack of structured code base that is easy to follow. Unlike web where codes are modularized and well placed, in mobile, I kept going back and fort in different modules to see how they are used in all places in the project which made it tedious as time goes.

So I kept a notepad keep track of detailed flow. However, once I go back at the notes to place them on top of your head, the almost spaghetti-like structure just becomes very hard to track. For me it doesn't follow a pattern and that developers are free to do what ever they wish so as long as it can run in the device or emulator.

For instance, implementing concurrency as well as dependency management and a Clean architecture is such a pain. I hope i can relate to someone here.

If only there is a standardized way of structuring codes in android in Java or Kotlin (haven't tried this), there would be hope for me. So if anyone can provide a good, readable, reliable android project that I can start building my project on top of, your help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks for reading.

So I went to a service center to repair my cracked mobile screen. I thought that the process would be completed in a few hours so I didn't took any backup.

Guy: You need to hand over your device for 2 days.
Me: Okay, no problem just fix it. (At this point i was desperate because a bunch of shops already told me that the complete model needs to be replaced)
Guy: You also need to remove any screen lock from it.
Me: But why?
Guy: We need to test once we fix the display. The repair util can be accessed by an inbuilt app.
Me: *Internally screams, my pr0n collection, my browsing history...*
Me: Just give me a minute. *Uninstalls a bunch of apps*.
Me: Handing the device to him. *crying internally and thinking if anything was left*.
Me: While returning, Fucking fuck now how am i gonna suppose to book myself a cab.. *facepalm myself with a fist*

Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.

When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.

If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.

Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.

It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.

What are the first set of apps you install after you purchased a new mobile device?

Mine is:

- Gmail
- Chrome
- Bank app
- VLC

Why is it that search engines behave differently when you're using a mobile device versus a computer? I get far better results using a computer. On the mobile device the meta characters don't seem to work very well. For instance, I will use a minus sign to exclude a word or phrase and a whole lot of the results come back with that word or phrase in them. All you're doing is sending a string up to the cloud where the lookup occurs. What's the difference between sending a string from a mobile device or a computer?

!rant

Anybody in the house running Ubuntu Touch on their mobile device?

Just noticed my profile said I was primarily a mobile device. People, rest assured, I am no robot! *beep boop*

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.

Fucken great.

Managed to "finish reparing" my second Razer blade 14, swamped around some ssds and now both don't boot from my ssd.

So, I just disabled my mobile workstation.

Great.

3 days twiddling with it later and I still haven't managed to boot it.

Linux from a usb boots fine, Linux from the ssd, nope, no chance.

Csm looks good,
Bios sees the drive, should be good.

But I can only boot it legacy, which goes nowhere.
No uefi mode for the SSD.

But it worked before, so what the heck.

So when I boot grub of a usb stick, the live image runs fine.
I can also boot the ssd with the usb grub.

Most craziest thing for me right now is, I now have an nvme in the blade, but the blade doesn't fully support nvme as boot device.

And the external grub can boot it, and it seems to work properly once grub and the kernel take over, has full "support".

Just a side note, the other drive is a sata m.2 that worked fully before so i still have no reason why it isn't working.

So I thought I could now use a usb stick with grub to boot the nvme.

But nope, can't boot the usb stick anymore.

What the fuck is going on?!

And for all those realising that the nvme will not be running at pcie 3.0 by 4, yes, but it's not a high-end drive, Samsung pm951 so that doesn't matter.

How did mobile development manage to take off and survive up till now? Numerous aspects of its existence are a huge drawback to web apps and the Web, in general. When using an app, you:

- Can't select a term and press "search" from the context menu
- Can't have multiple app pages open
- Can't save pages for a revisit
- It Requires installation
- Takes up memory on installed device, not to mention accumulated app data
- It requires updates
- Development can get horrifying. From setting up optimal dev environment for device SDK, gradle differences, publishing an installable build despite sometimes stubborn dependencies, waiting for approval from app stores

It's literally an inconvenience, however you look at it

Pussies banned me from Reddit subreddit. Is there a way to bypass this ban on mobile device? Creating alt account does not work since app has two accounts at the same time and they obviously know. I can bypass on pc easily but app…

Is there a way to purge my account history on app? So I add fresh account. Do you track device mac maybe?

How much of a security risk is it to serve static data from a json file on flask? Values are posted from a mobile device to a server to groom objects to return. My coworker is giving me a lot of shit for it as the file is accessed through a relative path, but the file names are checked and sanitised. He says the objects should be in a database.

Android 13 will Unlock Certain Device Controls even when Locked
Android 13 is the newest operating system that will be available soon. The OS comes with a range of new features, one of which is unlocking certain device controls even when the device is locked. This is a game-changer that will significantly enhance the user experience.

Introduction
The Android operating system has undergone numerous changes since its inception. With every new release, users are treated to new features that enhance the overall user experience. Android 13 is no different, and it promises to revolutionize the way we interact with our devices. One of the most exciting features of Android 13 is unlocking certain device controls even when the device is locked. In this article, we'll take a closer look at this feature and explore its implications for users.

What is Android 13?
Before we delve into the details of Android 13, let's take a moment to understand what it is. Android is an operating system designed primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It was developed by Google and is currently the most widely used mobile operating system in the world. Android 13 is the latest version of this operating system, and it comes with a range of new features that will make it even more user-friendly.

Device Control Access
One of the most exciting features of Android 13 is the ability to access certain device controls even when the device is locked. This means that users will be able to control various functions of their device without having to unlock it. Some of the controls that will be accessible include the flashlight, camera, and voice assistant.

How will it work?
The process of accessing device controls when the device is locked will be straightforward. Users will only need to swipe left on the lock screen to access a new panel that will display the controls. The controls will be easy to use, and users will be able to activate or deactivate them with a single tap. This feature will make it easier for users to perform certain tasks without having to unlock their device.

Implications for Users
The ability to access certain device controls when the device is locked will have several implications for users. Firstly, it will make it easier for users to perform certain tasks quickly. For example, if you need to use the flashlight, you won't have to go through the process of unlocking your device and navigating to the flashlight app. Instead, you can simply access the flashlight control from the lock screen.

Secondly, this feature will enhance the security of the device. By limiting access to certain controls, users can ensure that their device remains secure even when it is locked. For example, the camera control will only be accessible when the device is unlocked, which will prevent unauthorized users from taking pictures or videos.

Other Features of Android 13
Apart from the device control access feature, Android 13 comes with several other exciting features. These include:

Improved Privacy Controls
Android 13 comes with improved privacy controls that give users more control over their data. Users will be able to decide which apps have access to their location, contacts, and other sensitive data.

Enhanced Multitasking
Multitasking has always been a key feature of Android, and Android 13 takes it to the next level. Users will be able to view multiple apps at the same time, making it easier to switch between them.

New Messaging Features
Android 13 comes with new messaging features that will make it easier for users to communicate with their friends and family. These include the ability to react to messages with emojis and the ability to schedule messages.