My parents didn't really care what I was doing, they were just happy I wasn't hanging around street corners.

They were also kind enough to buy me a computer or peripherals at Christmas. My sisters were not impressed with their Barbie houses and Sylvanian Families! 😂

Sisters: "Why does he get a computer?"

Mum: "Cos he doesn't ask for new clothes all year!"

Finished setting up my little war machine at the new desk. Posting picture as proof that this table was indeed tidy at some point in time.

So here goes my home setup. The leftmost screen is the first computer screen I ever had about 13 years ago. The right one came next and I upgraded it this year with a monitor arm to make it vertical. The center one is 27" 1080p (1440p was too expensive).

The wooden thing on the left is a ghetto stand for my laptop. Another salvaged thing is the fan on the middle, it's just pushed to a cut usb cable, not even soldered, but it works.

Peripherals are pretty standard: Cheap mechanical keyboard, Logitech g502 and a drawing tablet. My headphones are the shp9500 (best thing I ever bought).

Little by little it came to this and Im pretty happy about it.

PS: Say hi yo my dog.

I've never had a problem with helping junior devs but when their keyboard and mouse looks like they bought it used from a primary school - glossy and covered in food etc... All I can think is burn it..... Burn it with fire.
Seriously... Keep your peripherals clean... They get nasty pretty quickly.

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

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

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

"Back in the days, you had to put a lot if effort into getting WiFi working in Linux.
Today, you can take a Linux notebook, slam it into its dockingstation with all kinds of peripherals attached to it, and it just works"
~ my boss

Old-ish pic from my setup (back then when you could actually see the desk under all that clutter).
Usually I work from the desktop, but there's also a dockingstation to connect the laptop to the screens and peripherals.

(and yeah I know the speaker placement is horrible)

Get yourself a proper set of peripherals (mouse, keyboard and chair), you will be using them quite a lot, so don't skimp out, it's you livelihood, so take care of it 🙂

I wrote some code using microcontrollers to control peripherals and robotic extremities using an armband called the MYO. It was a fun project I did 2 years ago in high school, I even won a couple of international awards for it!

Computers and their peripherals are constantly advancing, but keyboards... keyboards never change, We pretty much just stole the idea from typewriters and moved on.

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.

Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)

Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.

Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.

ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing.

Random story, I was working on a project a few years ago that had a very tight deadline and a lot of code to write. I had been working late in the office most evenings but one night myself and a colleague had stayed later than usual as we got carried away with supporting peripherals​ in the epos.
The cleaner came in on evenings and we had seen her that night, but had not heard anything for a while so when it came time to leave we figured we best lockup the 2 offices.

After making a quick pass through the building we couldn't see her so proceeded to lock up. Fortunately before setting the alarm we spotted her motorbike in the adjacent car park and decided to have another look.

I'm not quite sure why I decided to look in the tiny supply room/closet but fortunately I did as I found the cleaner standing in this tiny room​playing games on her phone 😂

I felt like being the cause for “that dreaded legacy code“ and wrote 250 lines of C preprocessor macros for generating bitfields in a large header file automatically, with the goal of simplifying and clarifying register access for all peripherals in the end. Then, I found out that SDCC's optimisation for bitfields is absolutely awful (if existent at all), and I don't really want to use these abstractions if they have a performance impact.

Did I deserve that?

This Book....

Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.

Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.

Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.

I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.

I defied my HelpDesk technicians by buying my own mouse and a keyboard.

Vanilla generic peripherals seem to prevent me from expressing my creativity.

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

The fact that I was just able to unplug my phone because it was fully charged and just swap the cable to my Chromebook just makes me way too excited for the future of tech peripherals!

(Yes I love USB-C and Bluetooth and am one of those people who are happy and excited to see the headphone jack die)

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

Get a 3d printer to make peripherals for my pc and tabletop rpg games.

Please explain to me Mr. Windows 7 why it took about 10 minutes to "install" a cheap $10 mouse

Fucking exam on Electronic Building Blocks... (aka Arduino). Program this thing ON GODFORGOTTEN PAPER! And then these retards put in that assignment line: max 5 lines of code, for a function that does nothing more than divide two shit eating numbers! And half of my apparently vegetative class fails this! When you were allowed to use your book and notes!

Oh and also, here's a seemingly pissed over image of an arduino with some peripherals, draw the wires. Draw! How the fuck do I keep 21 cocksuffocating wires on a page without overlaps or unclarity?

I've got a report that one of our machine-learning purpose computers broke down suddenly. I took a look and saw that the thing was stuck at the BIOS screen. The thing that was off was that it did not prompt for any keystrokes. Like, if there were a BIOS problem, there would usually be a prompt to press <F1> to ignore or something, right? But, nope! Even BIOS did not do jack s#!+.

I tinkered around the peripherals for an hour before finally finding something odd - why the f*<k does this computer have a screen hooked up via f*<king D-Sub????????

Yup, somebody hooked up a screen to the base motherboard via D-Sub when they rearranged other computers, even though that machine needed to have a screen hooked up to a GPU via HDMI.

🤦

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.

Run dual boot Mac Catalina and Win 10. Got a bunch of Razer shit from wife for Bday... super stoked. Big mat, mouse, keyboard.

Works like a charm on Win.

Works for fuck all on Mac. The app to manage device is no longer supported.

Went waaay down the rabbit hole trying to sniff the packets that were being sent to the devices via USB to sync their colors and patterns.

Finally give up that route.

I have now built a VM for windows to run synergy... then a VM for Linux for Polychomatic because the keyboard is older and not supported by synergy.

And I found if I boot them both then quit them both the settings for the peripherals stay until the next reboot.

But JFC... I literally have to boot three operating systems to pull it off.

Talk about some gift of the magi shit... I was so happy with the gift and at this point it has wasted dozens of hours.

Fuck fucking Razer. Looks cool. Doesn’t work.

Best way to program on the go with only non-rooted Android without peripherals?

So yesterday I installed Arch. Well, sort of. So far the GUI isn't configured so it's literally less convenient than an equally unconfigured TTY. But I'm getting there, today I connected to a secure Wi-Fi network. Tomorrow I expect to install something for power efficiency and start configuring stuff/creating a proper DE. Last time, when I stripped down Ubuntu and installed i3wm there, the first thing that bothered me was the lack of a wallpaper so I never got to issues like the keyring not unlocking, the x11 default font being two physical pixels tall, or added peripherals not being handled. This time my plan is to solve every issue as soon as I get there. For this reason I'll use a queue for managing my tasks rather than a stack like Google Keep.

Itd be cool if we could get something like Schenzen.Io going, but you build the chips from the gates up
Maybe package them into modular units, and connect those at a higher level or abstraction, ad infinitum.

Then add access to virtual LCD output, and other peripherals, or even map output to real hardware, essentially letting you build near bare-metal virtual machines.

Dont know about that last part, but the closest I've seen to the rest is circuit simulator and again, schenzen.

On the machine learning front I figured out I need about ten times as many training samples as validation samples, or vice versa. I'll have to check my notes. Explains why I could get training loss below 2.11

Also, I'm looking at grouping digits, and trying different representations. I'm looking at the hidden variables for primorials to see what that reveals. And I realized because of the amount of configurations and training that I want to do, even a personally built cloud isnt going to be sufficient. I'm gonna have to rent someone else's hardware and run it "in duh cloud."

Any good providers that are ridiculously upfront for beginners to get started with? Namely something cheapish.

!dev
Needing to (re)move all my organised crime, uh, notes and stuff for the cleaning lady.

And having to tell them everytime they don't need to clean my damn keyboard and mouse as they'll ruin the traction pads and fill up the keys with fluids..

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

OK, I've got a foot pedal I've used for transcription work and other projects on and off for years. In order to be able to use it outside of the context of my transcription software, I used ControllerMate for the better part of a decade.

Unfortunately, having moved my work over to an M1 Mac it seems that it's no longer compatible, even in the hobbled state it's been in with the past couple versions of OS X.

Been trying to find an alternative for a while and not finding much. Does anyone have anything they can recommend for programming the behaviors of USB peripherals?

Programming embedded systems from scratch. All hardware, memory, timers, peripherals, etc, must be set up correctly at startup, and if you set even one single bit incorrect in any of the sometimes hundreds of 32- or 64-bit configuration registers, you are screwed. There is often no terminal that prints error messages to help you, but if you are lucky you have an (often very expensive) hardware in-circuit debugger to step through the start up code.

I prefer to have lesser things to my desk except my monitor I connect my laptop to and my speakers and peripherals.

I like my desk to be absolutely as clean as it can get.

What keyboard does everyone use?
I switched to a Logitech Orion G610 with Cherry MX Blue's and I'm loving it.

I have a USB 3.0 hub that works mostly. However, sometimes it freaks out and starts disconnecting things attached to it. It also causes my gaming mouse that updates 1000 times per second to operate wrong. Yes, it was a cheap usb hub to begin with. I am using a laptop and I want a decent hub to use with my gaming peripherals if possible. I have an old belkin hub I am going to try that usb 2.0. But I really want a decent usb 3.0 hub. I need something that is not cheap pos made by no name like most of amazon products. I want something good that I wont regret getting later. It also needs to have been tested with a 1mS update rate device like my gaming mouse.

Does such an animal exist?

Is the Apple Magic Keyboard 2 worth it? What was your experience with it?

Quick Question.
how many of you uses Logitech's MX master?

spent a few days trying to track down the cause of a thermal shutdown in my workstation. intel 4790k with no overclock would spike to 95C on one core (core1) whenever maxing out all 8 threads, be it real work, mprime, anything with 100% cpu being used. I quadrupled my RAM from 8gb to 32, because its cheap and id like to have all data in memory sometimes, not because I thought that was the problem. I reseated my watercooling block. I checked out the PSU. I unplugged all unnecessary peripherals, drives, etc. It turned out to be a bug in Gigabyte MOBO BIOS (causing temps to be read incorrectly i think, still not exactly sure...) updated from version 5 to 10 and poof now temps are back in the high 50's at full load. it only took 2 days to figure out and i think i learned something

Amazon is the most significant e-commerce business in the world with subsidiaries in several countries. Amazon.in of course the big daddy of internet shopping in India has a broad selection of products from the top brands throughout the globe for the categories like Electronics, Home Appliances, mobile phone, notebooks, cameras, books, musical instruments, Clothing & Accessories, watches, and shoes, Furniture, home decor, home improvement goods, Amazon pantry, Health, Personal Care, Luxury Beauty, Baby products, kindle store, Amazon devices and e-Gift Cards. Amazon customers enjoy great savings every day on Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals, Amazon Prime Day sale and in Addition to through Amazon Cashback
Amazon has a vast electronics department where you are able to find a dedicated Mobile segment, Television, Laptops, Computer Peripherals, DVDs, video games, personal care appliances and a lot more at the discounted price. You also get Amazon cashback and mind-blowing supplies on Netrockdeals on the above categories. Do shop online with the most recent Netrockdeals coupon codes and earn extra money back so you will be able to save thousands of money on your shopping!
Amazon Fashion’s End Of Season Sale

Buckle up, Men! Amazon Fashion has just launched the biggest “End of Season Sale" where you can grab unbeatable offers on 3 lakhs styles from 1000+ leading fashion brands. In the purchase price, you receive the top deals and huge discounts on almost any style compared to other eCommerce sites. This Shopping marathon has launched from July 1st, 2020. Shop at the Amazon sales via Netrockdeals to earn an Additional 7.38% Cashback on top of the Sale price.
Some Of The Hot Prices Of Amazon Fashion End Of Season Sale 2020:
Free delivery on your first order. Prime members may enjoy unlimited free shipping and premature access for the sale.
Puma with all the reduction rates at 50 percent and Fastrack with as much as 40% discount.

Don't overlook the huge discounted cost on Women's Fashion up to 40% OFF on watches, up to 50% OFF on Jewellery and bags. Latest Women's clothes at up to 70 percent OFF.

Daily essentials like vests, boxers, socks, handkerchiefs beginning at Rs.69.

Do not miss the daily deals on the Clearance store with a minimum of 50% reduction at Amazon India's Fashion earnings.

In the Amazon Fashion Sale, use the Amazon Coupons available at Netrockdeals website for an Excess discount.

Pocket-friendly deals with huge discounts! Pay only up to Rs. 399 on T-shirts, Tops, slippers, watches, backpacks, sunglasses, and many more.

Amazon Pantry Cashback Offers and Promo Codes
Stay back and relax in your home while your Groceries get delivered to your doorstep. Order your groceries at the lowest prices from Amazon Pantry and appreciate excellent savings at around 30% discount. Also, you can even save with the latest Amazon Grocery Cashback deals via Netrockdeals. Don't forget to enjoy discounts on cooking staples like rice, dal, atta, flour & packed meals, snack & drinks and household supplies.
Amazon Fashion Online Shopping Offers
We all know you love style. Get Amazon prime exclusive voucher codes and double money back benefits in your favorite fashion brands and fashion accessories for both men and designer fashion for women, and kids where you can save cash by using Netrockdeals newest Amazon Cashback offers. Buy all your favorite products on this Amazon clearance apartment 70% offer on men's and women's clothes and footwear, Shop for fashion accessories such as handbags, clutches, watches, wallets, belts, sunglasses, jewelry, backpacks and much more from the top brands.

You can also find sportswear items equally for the weekly gym enthusiasts and professional sportsmen directly from budget ones to premium top brands. Women's lingerie and nightwear department have a huge collection of bras, panties, shapewear, and nightwear things from a vast range of prices. Make sure to buy using Netrockdeals lingerie prices to save on your online buy.
Get a minimum 25% discount supply on Haircare, skincare, beauty products, Personal care, Diapers, Baby product, Baby food and much more. Thus, take out your phones and purchase today on your cellphone through Netrockdeals and shop using the Amazon Pay. Amazon prime associates get up to 15% additional cash back and Amazon coupons.