A friend of mine who just started work as an Applications Developer. One of his duties is to I quote "Create and maintain inventory, which may include hardware, software and various items such as toners and peripheral equipment"

We had a good laugh together.

Sort of a meeting, sort of an informal interview, I've dialled in from the home office and my audio setup includes a standalone mic and some noise cancelling headphones. It's going really really well when all of a sudden I see something in the preview window of my webcam feed.
Behind me, looking very concerned and confused is my 73 year old Nanna who'd decided to pop in and see me as she was passing by.
It's common for me to keep the front door locked, but my Nanna has an emergency key and knows I don't always hear a knock at the door, so let herself in.
So she's now in the house, calling out to me and she can hear me talking, so follows the sound of my voice thinking maybe I'm on the phone. Walks right into the office, where the door is behind me, eventually puts two and two together to work out that I can't hear her and finally sees herself on my monitor. She panics and goes to hide in the corner of my office, almost underneath my workbench because she's old and doesn't know where she would or wouldn't be visible from.
The rest of the meeting went really well, but overran by at least half an hour. Meanwhile I can see my poor Nanna hiding away in my peripheral vision.

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

Copyright free mouse.

My old mechanical keyboard broke, so I had to buy a new one. I'm Brazilian, so the local market for mech keyboards is either limited or very fancy (fancy as gaming keyboards).

So I got this amazing Logitech G610, which unfortunately is not sold with blue switches here, only brown ones. Very solidly built, well made, good extra keys and whatnot.

BUT OH MY, who ever thinks those LED effects are good for normal usage after 5 minutes of playing with them??? VERY distracting! <o>

Three syntax elements, pixels on screen.
By Unknown (for privacy), 2021

In this installation, the Author's desire to prove the whole world that stupidity is achievable with just 2 syntax elements is... self-evident!

Observe! The finely crafted letters composing this installation in their beauty! While the middle element is purely a distraction (one could argue it's there to be sure a critical issue doesn't happen even if the default value is already `true`), the sides of the installation reveals the true horror.

As the vision of the observer is attracted to the center, the peripheral vision sends the informations to the subconcious, making the observer slowly realize both that the Author willingly compiled `.less` files with postcss and that .less files are in the css folder, proving that stupidity is demonstrable in just two syntax elements.

A masterpiece.

Not a rant per se,
But is anyone else experiencing weird peripheral device dropouts on windows?

For example, if i turn off my BT headphones and reconnect later, no audio will play through them until I reboot.

Although this doesn't seem to be limited to Bluetooth but USB devices aswell.

I'm thinking some service has shit its self.

With all the stupid fucking animated shit on websites: videos that popup, advertisements that flash (really?), things that popup if you move your mouse, headers that move weirdly relative to your scrolling, and more... Its like the 90s all over again with animated gifs, popups and other garbage. Is there some stupid web designer course saying animating shit is a good idea? The videos that move around are the worst. They totally fuck with my peripheral vision and make me want to rage quit the site.

4am writing an assignment about the ethics of anonymity tools (TOR, VPNs, brown bags to put on your head)
I love the subject – I picked it – but these written assignments for peripheral classes are the most soul sucking part of studying software engineering

Since I quit binge-eating sugary stuff, my body became capable of feeling true hunger. Not in my stomach, as that kind of feeling in my body is probably fucked up forever, but in my head.

When I feel hungry, it’s probably too late. This is exactly what I feel:
- dizziness
- FOV slightly decreases
- tunnel vision, things in peripheral vision become blurry and obscure. I “see” them, but my brain doesn’t process them quite as good
- colors become less saturated
- it’s very difficult to combine and analyse multiple concepts to derive a conclusion, basically the thing I do at work that wins me bread
- thought process becomes “single-threaded”. I can follow just one thought at a time and cannot go deeper than 3-4 levels, my brain just drops it by making the whole thought feel like some kind of slimy clay that cannot be comprehended, let alone expressed with words
- difficult to express thoughts with language, I have hard time talking, especially explaining
- want to sleep, but can’t, as brain is frantically trying to stay awake

It’s probably the mechanism developed evolutionary. That single thread remains active at all costs to allow me to find food, and brain doesn’t let me sleep, as it thinks if I fall asleep I’ll die. It’s amusing to see my brain actively killing thoughts that are not “important”, I feel like a real-time OS or an Erlang application. Perhaps thinking is really a very costly process in terms of how much energy it takes.

When I finally eat something, especially if it’s a proper meal, I feel a very pleasant sensation, probably it’s my brain telling me “thank you”, releasing dopamine to actively reinforce that “finding food is a very very good thing and it’s very important”. FOV pops back into place, peripheral vision becomes clean and sharp, thoughts awaken, eager to occupy all the treads that became available.

I think the mouse was the dumbest peripheral created...

I tried, I really did.

But I cannot get the hang of not having a numpad. I have a peripheral numpad, but even that is awkward.

I even tried to mix things up and do the numpad on the left but thumping my mousehand thumb on my desk trying to hit enter 100x a day is just too much.

I think i was like 7 or 8 yo. When school vacation started, my mom joined me in this computer centre near her workplace.

I belive it was a Windows 95 system powered probably by Pentium 2 and i remember playing Aladdin, mario and a fun racing car game.

I remember i liked a lady teacher there and being scared of the male teacher from whom I learned about basic computer peripheral terms like CPU, floppy disc drive etc.

My Bluetooth mouse kept disconnecting from my computer, and it's been years since my delicate hands have touched a mouse as crappy as the "temporary solution" my boss offered me

:help

I'm trying to learn to touch type for probably the 5th time and I really want to get a mechanical keyboard to use at work and home.

I'm looking at the cheaper options on Amazon, up to £50. I'm not sure which switch type is best, whether I should be fitting o-rings to keep colleagues happy or whether I'm just over thinking this whole thing.

😵