3 person help desk shop for 450 users. One of my tasks is procurement.

Customer: we need a portable monitor that takes up less desk space than the one you typically have us buy

Me: at the conference last week we displayed the upgraded model of that portable monitor which takes up half the desk space. It’s $250 instead of the $150 that you normally would pay.

Customer: that ones too expensive, find me something else.

Me: unfortunately not too many companies make portable monitors and since AOC is unreliable in quality we have been recommending Asus, who only makes those two models that I’ve shown you.

Customer: I want the AOC one anyways. You shouldn’t have shown the more expensive one because now my staff want it and I can’t get it. If everyone can’t afford it you shouldn’t have it available.

Me: I understand your frustration, we have recommended that more expensive one as an option for people who have special accommodations for eye care and as an alternative if people dislike the current model. Since it’s not required that you purchase it and since we do have a much less expensive option we will continue to recommend it. As for the AOC one we will allow you to purchase it but will not be supporting or repairing it.

Customer: Can we get this instead? *sends link to $989 pre tax off brand version of Razer Project Valeria*

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

It's impressive how much root can actually get you, that's debian running xfce on my lg g3 and chromium.

It's always nice to know that you can have a portable server etc. straight from your phone. I even used that kind of setup as a portable laptop some time ago and it worked quite well.

What things did you do via chrooted linux on android devices? would be interesting to know if somebody maybe is still using it as some kind of laptop as I did.

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.

Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.

Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.

Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.

Tried installing Antergos on an external 1TB SSD to give it a try after having checkout Mint, now my laptop won't boot from it anymore after having removed and reinserted the disk and it skips to Ubuntu's grub on my HDD or windows.

Ubuntu's grub does show antegros whenever the ssd is plugged in though, and then I get this error while trying to boot it. Also changing the boot order doesn't do much and it skips to the next thing on the list.

I'm probably going to overwrite antergos and try to use portable antergos on it, perhaps it wasn't made to hoot from a removable drive. Ubuntu and windows still work fine but ubuntu is on my hdd because the internal ssd is full of windows, and super slow.

So now I have a partitioned ssd that doesn't work and a grub entry that gives an error ugh :/ (and a slow ubuntu but that's not as bad)

Anyone else have any idea of what happened? I have definitely seen antergos work before packing up and removing the drive, so the installation was succesful.

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

I need your help please !
I'm about to buy a netbook to use it as a portable dev environment ; it should be able to run Eclipse, some code editor, GCC, and a virtual machine.
I've found a Lenovo E135 with 8GB RAM for only 100€ but the main problem is that his processor is an AMD E2-2000 (only 1,75GHz, and AMD)... Will it be enough to do what i want ?
I've also found a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 with a Core i5 (2,6 GHz) and 4 GB RAM for only 170€ but the problem there is the battery (the core i5 consume much more power)
Which one should i buy ? (Knowing that i have only 100€ but i could manage to get the missing 70€ for the x230)
Thanks for your help !

As regular as it is, it's pretty hard to be a programmer and a pc gamer at the same time... You need a good easily portable laptop yet you want a powerful rig so you get a gaming laptop and curse yourself everytime you need to get somewhere with it cause it's fairly heavy and also curse yourself when you paid so much yet you can't play on that much of a high config...
The only good alternative is if you're rich enough to get a slim laptop and a powerful desktop at once

because I lacked a portable storing solution (pockets weren't allowed), I couldn't find anything better than using my own skull as a storage box. It turned out it had way more room than expected. The brain itself is quite small, and the whole frontal lobe & the space around the brain is completely empty. Initially, opening the skull was scary and cumbersome, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Once upon a time, when I tried to pop an acne on my forehead, the hole was revealed, and it led to the storage space beneath. I have no idea how it happened, but apparently the skin is too thin. The bone also looks much thicker from the inside. There were two wires — red and black — leading to a standard PC speaker every old computer had. I wasn't a cyborg, mind you, I merely put that speaker there for storage. The acne hole healed with those wires exposed, leaving a permanent mark due to the wire coloring pigment dissolving in my skin.
I used that storage space to hide the contents of some parcels I was processing back then. I was stealing things. Eventually, my coworker — Bruce Willis — confronted me, and I had to strangle him. My arm became very flexible, and I was able to wrap it around his neck several times during a chokehold. It didn't end well for both of us.

!rant && advise
I have some expirience working as full stack developer, but focussed latly mainly on backend (php/java). However for one project, I need a desktop application and I was wondering, if you would recommend electron for it.
Pros:
- I could reuse some of the webapp stuff and cache it offline using web workers
- Styling done via HTML/CSS
- Portable between Linux/Windows/Mac
Cons:
- I haven't worked (much) with node js so far, but that shouldn't be a too big problem

What are the pros and cons from your point of view? Would you recommend electron? Why yes, why no? If no, what would you reccomend as alternative?

My knowledge so far:
Good: PHP/Java (without GUI)/CSS
Quite good: Javascript
Meh: Python (I can hack things together but wouldn't say I'm good with it...), C++

After trying to print colored text to the console using a portable Python 3 interpreter on Windows I came up with a "solution". I tried pretty much everything possible (I could think of): curses couldn't be loaded, ansi didn't work and installing libraries wasn't really an option, because it's not my device. Fuck portable interpreters and have fun with the "solution".

Def color_print(text, color):
text = text.replace("\n", "\\\" \\\"")
os.system ("powershell \"$host.ui.RawUi.ForegroundColor = \\\"" + color + "\\\"; echo \\\"" + test + "\\\"; $host.ui.RawUi.ForegroundColor = \\\"Gray\\\"")

It's slow, unreadable, only works for on Windows and requires powershell and is probably the worst piece of code I ever wrote, but it works 👍.

Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..

I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...

Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..

Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.

I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.

On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.

Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.

Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.

And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.

I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.

And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.

For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.

This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.

I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.

1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution

2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.

3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory

4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.

I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.

This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).

Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.

Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.

For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.

I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.

LOVE YOU ALL :)

I wish I could invite the me of 3-4 years ago to my room and prove him wrong.

Basically, the me of 3-4 years ago thought: "What do I need a home PC for? I got a laptop."; hell, he always forgot to put the laptop with the plural 's', because understandably, for his study life, he took low-cost PCs that would only last like one year.

But my boy, laptops are cool and all, but have you ever experienced the complete comfort of a proper desktop? In addition to the bonuses of a home PC in terms of performance, it leaves a much better space for work than just a portable terminal in front of you and pretty up close to compose. The accessories didn't even cost me much. And it feels great to have everything in its own, right place: the screen at the bottom, the phone standing on its holder, the earphones on your head, your left hand on a mat with papers potentially on it, your right hand on the mouse, which is on the mousepad and also on that mousepad, that character you adore so much, when both said hands are not on the keyboard, beneath the whole table, or on it when no papers are on the way.

Seriously, that pleasure I longed for was something you could have started, me of 3-4 years ago, right when I began with my studies.
But I have no rancor over you, I'm still onto my studies, so this is still something I can take profit of, during my student life, thankfully ;)

I'll just take note at your stead, of not being too stubborn over things that can do oneself a greater good, objectively. :)

sorry, search engines were not helpful. does anyone know of a lightweight browser that doesn't need installing but stores everything in the os user directory?

i have no it-permissions but want to provide my department with a suitable browser. we have ie and edge, but the latter deletes everything on closing which makes it unusable for my usecase and the it is not willing to set this up different.

ff portable can not be run from a read-only-folder and any other scenario either needs installing on every terminal or does not handle different profiles which is essential. i read that this is the case for any portable browser.

i'd like to set it up properly with neccessary start page, favourites, adblocker and so on but just in one network directory for maintainance reasons.

we run a web based application strictly local but each windows-user-account must have their own setting in this app (cookies or preferably webstorage).

am i asking too much for?

That GPD Pocket looks nice. Just needs to reformat to Linux and it's perfect. Beats Samsung Galaxy S8 and Dex Station all the way