My morning bowl of serial 😂😂

Huhh!!

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Developers sound like psychotic sewing serial killers.

Always taking about strings and threads or killing parents, children and detaching heads.

I get through tough devDays like this:

1. Brew coffee more black than a serial killer's soul in the midst of the Gotthard Base Tunnel without electricity in the midnight during a solar eclipse.

2. Flush the blackness down the throat.

3. Load the Playlist: Mostly Death/Doom Metal

4. Put on over-ear headphones (the ones your coworkers can see from a distance telling them to fuck of with their questions).

5. Code through without pauses (except for releasing piss)

6. If you're paid by the hour: $$$profit$$$

Upon suggestion of @platypus I went to the cafe and just took my tablet there (unfucking the laptop's rootfs flash drive took too long, and ArduinoDroid's avrdude didn't seem to work very well), so just doing some chatting in IRC and trying to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to make a serial link to a Proxmox VM from the host (thinkstation on the top left pane).

Attached below is the screenshot of that.. much turminel, very h3xx0r! But so far nobody has come up to me calling me "evul h3xx0r" yet.. very intriguing! I expected things to be much worse.

A glass of Duvel in front of me, tastes great! Cheers!

Nobody :
HRs on LinkedIn : A guy applied to us, he was a serial killer in the past and cooked the victims body and ate them. He was rejected by every company. But I gave him a chance. 4 years later ..he is the highest performing employee and my husband.

When I was in college, our email was on a Unix server. We would login via serial connection or telnet over the network, and get a korn shell. The server was poorly secured. Everyone's login device was world writable. So people would just see who was online, see the username of someone they wanted to mess with, take note of the pts(network) or tty(serial) device their connection used, and cat ASCII penises to it.

cat animated_dong.txt > /dev/pts/4

It was a simpler time.

I decided to start a new web project tonight. I'm a serial starter-never-finisher, but I thought, "No @AnonymousGuy, you'll work on that android game that's genuinely almost releasable aside from the shitty makeshift UI you gave it while learning Unity."

Fuck yeah. Motivated, I picked up my laptop and put it on my lap. I grabbed my phone, opened DevRant, spent 2 hours reading rants, commenting, +1'ing, and looked down at my laptop. Put it back on the floor. I'm too tired now.

Fuck me and my total lack of self-discipline. 😑

Too easy!

2 things arrived in the mail today, still not my serial cable though. How fucking stressful, what am I gonna do!?

When the stack reveals the serial
MUAHAHAHA!!! :)

So the teacher made fun of me today stating that knowing what USB stands for is pointless :/ I thought it was just basic knowledge for a geek like me. This statement of my teacher really infuriates me!!!

Some time ago I had ordered a LCD display I wanted to use in a project. Ended up with a vague datasheet and no clue of how to use a 8bit parallel interface. There was also little help on the internet cuz most ppl use a serial interface.
So after HOURS of reading I finally managed to get it to display something!
I sometimes wish some stuff was better documented.

Hey android devs!
How can I keep receiving bluetooth serial data?
I did what is said in android developers but the app stops receiving data after 12600 frames without any error or exception thrown.
The data is sent with sample rate 2000.

Thanks in advanced

My first Drone
Arduino nano + L293D + hc-06
Objective: learn how to use Bluetooth with Arduino.
V 0.1 (no direction, commands by serial terminal).

!rant
Be me, reading the slides of the courses I missed for my semester abroad, when I hit this slide :
"Always code as if the person maintaining your code was a serial killer who knows where you live"
I think I'm going to enjoy my semester in Mérida, México 😀

AAARGH ELECTRON IS SO FUCKING...decently pleasant to use?

So I've been working on a FPGA based synthesizer on a Xilinx Arty A7 board (that little Artix 35T chip is surprisingly capable), and since I hate typing commands into a serial stream for anything even decently complex just like any sane person should, I needed something to build a UI for controlling it and other synth projects while I make the Eurorack compatible enclosure and knobs and stuff. I chose Electron because they said it was simple and easy to make cool looking stuff, fast.

And they were right. In like two hours, with Electron and p5.js, starting from zero since I don't know jack about frontend, I had a pretty nice UI driving the hardware synth and effects modules. Not bad. I should use this more often.

->buying fake arduino from ebay.
->have to install separate drivers, because the manufacturer uses a cheap usb to serial chip.
-> driver page is all in chineese, only the download button is in english
-> installed the driver(at this point there was no going back)
-> rebooted
-> instand kereal panic
-> fuck_me.png

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

Woohoo.. thanks @arcadesdude

trying to do anything on the PS2 is almost fucking impossible

i imagine a board meeting where they were designing the hardware

"how can we make this insanely hard to use?"

"let's make decentralized partition definitions, allow fragmenting of entire partitions, and require all partitions to be rounded to 4MB. If you delete a partition, don't wipe the partition out, just rename it to "_empty" and the system will do it for you, except it actually won't because fuck you"

"let's require 1-bit serial registers to be used for memory card access and make sure you can't take more than 8 CPU cycles to push each bit or it'll trash the memory card"

"let's make the network module run on a 3-bit serial register and when initialized it halves the available memory but only after 8 seconds of activity"

"let's require the system to load feature modules called "IOPs" and require the software to declare which of the 256 possible slots it wants to use (max of 8 IOPs) then insert stubs into those. Any other IOP you call will hang the system and probably corrupt the HDD. You also have to overwrite the stubbed IOPs with your own but only if you can have the stubs chainload the other IOPs on top of themselves"

"let's require you to write to the controller registers to update them, but you have to write the other controller's last-polled state or the controller IOP will hang"

of course this couldn't make sense, it's

s s s s
o o o o
n n n n
y y y y

How do u validate the license key of your offline application ?
(In a way that a cracker would have less chance to find the serial like this )

Can't believe we still use fax in 2021. Instead of migrating it away for our customers, we virtualize it.

Instead of the old ISDN fax cards we will use virtual serial fax modems. 🙃

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

Just talked to a guy who codes microcontrolers in assembler. He wants to use a raspberry pi as an interface device between TCP and Serial port. He asked me how fast that would run over internet and I told him that it depends on the connection an other things it takes at least some milli secs to transmit.
He is like:
What the fuck do you mean milli secs?
I poll data on my 20 mhz controler every like micro sec or so and that Pi got 1Ghz.

Me like: Yea go fucking code that shit on your own with ASM.

!rant
I'm developing an OS. I tried running it on the laptop that's on the ground. Everything works fine except text mode. There is no output when running it in text mode(not the high resolution one shown on image). Since the OS sends all data that is printed to the first serial port I might as well read the output from the serial ports. Since the laptop I use for development doesn't have any serial ports I had to use the older Windows 98 PC. For unknown reasons I could not get any output from the serial ports so I gave up.
tl;dr I wasted some time trying to debug my OS.
Image of my debugging setup(taken with the latest potato).

Does 11 hours a week make me a serial ranter, a rantophile or both?

Well, I'm still in 1981 Hell as far as serial connectivity goes, but we got boobs on the screen, because when we're working with DOS 5.00.2 BETA and 4 colors at a time, why the fuck not?

"Practicality is the serial killer of dreams." - Rasha Hamdan

Operation PiBM 5150 XT is continuing this morning!

Raspberry Pi B+ 900mhz
Raspbian Pixel Linux
LG 21:9 2560x1080 monitor
HDMI cable
/boot/config.txt updated for 21:9 monitor
Nyko PS3 USB Compact Flash / SD Reader
4gb CF card as HDD in 5150
4.77mhz IBM 5150 in like new condition
CGA Graphics and Monitor
Late 2012 Macbook Pro
HyperTerm app
USB to DB/25 (RS-232) serial adapter
Devrant Sticker

You know what's rocket science? Serial ports.

Every freakin' datasheet states RX/TX but not from which side of the connector. Some look at it from the inside (RX for own receive), some from the outside (RX for receive of the counterpart). But never ever try to explain what is what, that would be too easy.

On literally any first attempt of connecting devices in my life it was wrong. And then you switch 'em and it's still wrong. Then you switch again, and it may work. Or you have to switch a few times more, you never know.

Those freaking bastard interfaces from hell.

Dear coworker,
when I asked: "So, how does it work?", I didn't expect the answer to be: "Well, you push this button, wait three seconds and when it's finished, this LED turns on."
I was hoping for a more in-depth description (like, the way you'd consider me to be seriously interested in your work or learning from you) along the lines of "Well, you see, I have written this CLI-Tool here, which connects to the adapter and parses the contents of the file via serial interface to the on-board controller. This controller performs an integrity check of the device and then decides whether to flash or not. The testing unit itself checks if its being programmed with the right parameters."
Of course I know how a programming device works but I was interested in your solution in this special case ... so I think I'll just check the doc later if there'll ever be some.

I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.

The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"

Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.

To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.

...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.

Rantberry PI

Thinking about making this into a terminal that accepts a serial connection from my IBM 5150 PC for that Chroma Green authentic text based experience. ;)

Seriously though. How awesome would it be to use a circa 1981 IBM 5150 as your terminal? Lol!

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

I had two teachers in school, who even after finishing the class, continued to program with interested students. For example programming a robot or communicating over the serial port of a computer using Java.

Solved a major scalability issue today.
I'm starting to think I might actually be as good as what I told the recruiters I was.

This hadoop-ecosystem job used to take about 2h40min and cost about USD 1.00/GB.
Now it takes 36 mins. At about 0.85/GB.
Fixed some over shuffling, restructured some bottleneck serial stages, used lots of weird words.
Folks in this company I just entered were struggling with this formerly unwieldy process for a year.
Now it's nimble enough to run every hour.

Maybe that whole "experience" thing people were always yammering about wasn't completely bullshit.

*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...

List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)

am i missing anything?

Arguing with a co worker.... he is writing a serial data plotter, and wants me to send the data as text. I’m like ugh no I’m not wasting bandwidth for text data, you are getting it as binary, as my embedded system has a lot of other stuff todo than send debug info, so the quicker I get the data to you the better... plus his program is running on a pc there is no issue regarding resources handling binary data.

He tells me I’m am wrong, and is trying to defend his stance, then all the electrical engineers and other software engineers all stand up and said why in the hell would it be faster to send text than binary? He has no response.

Fuck. The entire day to do this shit.
The screen was my first experiment, but because of a bad module (i2c) it didn't worked.
Today I finnaly got it to work.
Starting making everything almost like in the picture, everything mounted (and lots of black hot glue, no wires showing...
Didn't work.
One hour breaking everything apart without damaging the screen... Was a loose wire.
Started again... Didn't work...
The pot is also damaged, sometimes it works, others need to turn it hard.
New pot.
New set of wires.
Soldering everything right, testing all wires so no mistakes this time... But it takes so longgggg... Making everything in modules this time (to reuse without having to sordering again. And finally... It works.
By this time I should have 3 or 4 learning projects finish (I really wanted the screen to adapt all output in text, no serial, no blinking less, everything in modules, code prepared so, when I get my 40+ packages from China I already have a prototype tester ready.
10 hours... Fuck I'm really addicted, or else I would just solder everything together :D

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

Yesterday evening my family were watching his favourite tv show. Have nothing to do i too sat there with them.

The scenes on television were going like : The leading lady of the show were trying to convince her family that her husband is not involved in the molestations which police has charged on him. Person can be look alike of her husband. In fact my husband was some where else when the molestation was happening. She also had a proof and that was CCTV camera footage in a Compact Disk. So she started playing it in the TV presented in room with CD player. But it turns out that CD can't be played because villain hired a hacker to corrupt video quality playing in TV.

I laughed because in my knowledge that was not even possible in real life. Every family memeber started staring at me.

My mother : That's what you do? No? That's what you do whole day in your office?
Me: No, no. I....
My mother: See her face. Poor lady.
Me: But mom, that's impossible. It is just fiction. In real life it is not possible.
My mother : Get out of my sight.

My mom did not dine yesterday. These fucking serial maker. These women's.

Ever had that frustrating moment that the customer overreacts a small issue into a big issue? Just happened to me today.

Client: "Hey can you check why we are not getting any software update/patches to our firewall?"
Me: "OK. Lemme check"
** Checking **
Me: "I found that its not getting the latest updates because the license file registered has a product serial # mismatch with their support site. You can see it clearly here..."
Client: "THAT'S TERRIBLE!! QUICK!! MAKE IT A PRIORITY 1 ISSUE AND HAVE IT RESOLVE ASAP!!!"
Me: *Facepalm*

So today, me, the pacifistic "linux is not THAT great"-guy, was like well let's try ubuntu 17.10 (cus in the end i want a reliable os with no to less maintenance).

So i installed it next to my loved windows.

Clicking a link seems to have an hard coded delay of about 3-5 seconds until the pages actually start loading in ff on linux, so i was like maybe it's because there is a wall between me and my router..

Went into the other room.

I have one bar WLAN strength. I stand next to my router. What the fuck.

Hmm, could be sth else, let's don't be an asshole and blame linux, let's check windows. Full wlan, full speed, all good.

So my point is proven: you want to fiddle around a bit, do some coding with serial-connected devices, want a shell that actually is usable and you like to procrastinate by doing some random maintenance? choose linux.

If you need to be productive with other things, use windows.

A while ago I stumbled upon this cheap vps provider called dedistation (lowest was $15/year), so I end up buying a one year subscription and transferred all of my personal sites to it. Fast forward six month later, uptime robot notified me that my vps is down. No problem, I'll just submit a ticket. Few days go by and I yet to receive a response. Not a problem, I'll just try and login via the serial interface and get my shit, no luck there either.
Seems like these motherfuckers just packed up and went offline without a shit given.
No response, no notification untill today! How more twat a company could be?
Lessons learned the hard way
- always backup regularly
- check and transfer nameserver or no emails for days.
- you get what u pay for (haven't learned this fully yet. Went again with a cheap legit-ish provider (arubacloud)

Anybody watch HBO Sillicon Valley??

The fastest way to a woman’s heart is through her serial port. 😁😁😁

Last completed (so not something which is still going on) project i have learned a lot was for "digital- and microcontroller technology" classes.
I designed a tower which fits on a pc fan. In this tower there is a tabletennis ball and on top of it is a infrared sensor. With a Potentiometer you can set the height at which the ball shall float.
As microcontroller i took an arduino uno. For visualization i used SerialComInstruments.
Learned lots of microcontroller programming, pid controls and how the fuck a serial port communication really works.

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

My IBM 5150 doesn't have the standard IBM Asynchronous Card in it and was replaced with a Tecram First Mate multifunctional memory expansion, serial connectivity, and printer parallel card. It has more jumpers than a suicide hotline.

My first project is finished xd. i was in designing but merging it with coding was a great idea. It has got a serial system amd an auto updater. Yep it is a cheat injector xD rate for a guy who just started coding.

Frustration Rant!

Because old hardware means learning the hard way sometimes, I've had to purchase more goodies.

On my last update, I installed the rs232 shield which may have inadvertently been wired backwards for Tx/Rx from what im used to. I assume it is backwards to most db9 serial ports because most Arduino or other projects you would do with a pi have serial "in" connections like old routers and devices that would be "controlled" rather than the other way around. Anyway, according to a video on youtube showing a guy turning an old machine into an IRC client via raspberry pi, this shield may be swapped. That means that instead of interfacing with the old machine via a null modem crossover cable, I need a straight cable with male db9 on both ends. I unfortunately tried using the null modem crossover cable which was reversing the reversed pins all over again. I hope these next few days are more fruitful now that I've bought a straight cable and db9/25 adapter.

The good thing is that I managed to get the pi to recognize its new serial port. I also dusted off my DOS skills and my serial card in the 5150 seems to work.

I literally banged my head after nothing worked. Im hoping that the tx/ Rx is solved soon.

Oh and that AT to PS/2 adapter will allow me to use by IBM original Model M Keyboarf rather than the fun model F.

!dev

Before I bought a couch, I thought I had to get a couch because when I have a girl at my place, she will definitely think I'm a serial killer who's going to murder her.

Now that I have my couch, yeah I still don't have any girls over.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

The Raspberry Pi is fun. As long as you not try to connect it via bluetooth to something and read/write serial-ish.

The worst type of debugging: Programming an MCU without a Serial Monitor.

Some Context: I've spendt today about 3h+ on getting an attiny 45 to read 3 digital values on 3 pins. So for every test I wanted to make, I needed to put the MCU inside a socket put this socket on a arduino and flash it. Then extract it from the socket and put it on a breadboard for testing.
After getting headaches for nothing making any goddamn sense, I ended up noticing that one input pin is a multiplexed reset pin with the reset having top priority and no way to change it. So whenever this pin should have read a low signal, it got held in reset! FML

We were having a 30 min discussion about differed tasks and how to kill children spawned by a specific parent if the so said parent is killed, and if in a situation where keeping a parent alive is irrelevant if a child fails, should the child kill the parent and the other children?
Also if a family of tasks spawned from the same parents were canceled, should should I just kill myself or do I take care of the others first?
Or should I concentrate on killing the tasks instead? Which one is easier?

I remember learning VB for the first time and then using it to write a software to control a robot via a serial port. I couldn't debug few errors! So I changed the message text in the alert boxes to things like - 'Please press OK to let robot know that you're ready.' 'Robot is thinking. OK to continue'. 😂😆 And my friends still loved me!

!rant seems that my raspberry pi serial idea is a little bit complex at the moment and may take a more serious turn later, but I have studied and found DOS based TCP/IP software that will allow me to use my 5150 with actual Ethernet. There are a few 8bit ISA Ethernet cards that will work in the 5150 and separate executables that will configure DHCP, DNS, and even allow me to use a terminal emulator and SSH to connect to *nix based computers over lan! I'll keep you all posted!

Coding for MCUs gets more and more surreal every day.. On one hand we're cooding oldschool heavy metal C or C++, but on the other hand they tell you to use PuTTY to check if there is a working serial connection - what the fuck?

Also the IDEs they suggest you. VSCode or Eclipse. Both are so unbelievable unusable for this, even with plugins, I would compile this shit via CLI myself before using them.

It just feels so contrary - they act like professionals and just spit out 200 uncommented lines of C to start WiFi on the ESP32 - not explaining a single fucking thing, but on the other hand, they checked the connection via PuTTY after writing some uwu kawaii shit into Eclipse.

Not to mention Arduino with their FUCKING SKETCHES.

You know a server is having a jolly'ol time when, while logging through the serial console, it lags... Then, a few seconds later, you get a message

[time.seconds] Out of memory: Kill process PID (login) score 0 or sacrifice child
[time.seconds] Killed process PID (login) total-vm:65400kB, anon-rss:488kB, file-rss:0kB

10/10, only way to bring the server back to life was by a hard-reset :|

A programme I have to maintain (and not allowed to optimise or change):

1) read input from serial connection
2) store data in MySQL database
3) every day convert to CSV
4) store on Windows file share
5) process CSV in access 2000
6) store in MsSQL database

When it was first developed, I said to te developer to store it straight from serial to MsSQL but out boss wanted it to follow the above spec.

He has now left and I have to maintain it

Fucking microshaft! I bought a custom controller from their shop as a birthday gift to my brother. Fucking first thing the website crashes with 500 with my main account so I call support. Said them its a backend issue and they should let the devs investigate. Support says they can't even contact them in anyway shape or form. Fucking great!
So since my account seems to has broken their backend I create another account using some random email while support tells me to fucking log in and out again (yeah man I tried that). OK wonderful new account worked I can buy the controller.

Now one year later the controller just fucking stops working (probably why its called Xbox one! controller). Wonderful I paid 90€ for that shit thing and now it won't connect anymore. Tried everything and searched countless forums, nothing helped. Fuckers say: JuSt ConNeCT iT tO YoUr XbOx oNe and it might magically work (TM). You fuck I bought it for PC why the fuck can I not just fix it using a PC. Do you want me to buy a fucking Xbox for 500 bucks just to get the fucking controller to work!? You shitfaced monkey!

OK then lets try that support again because that worked so well last time. I put in the serial number and... Fucking unrecognized number. Unrecognized number my ass. Go suck on a spiked club you buffoon!

Now I'm fucked because I don't have the fucking receipt anymore and the email was send to that fucking temp account I don't even know the email address for anymore (ノ°益°)ノ

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

my 4TB Seagate HDD is failing in a very strange way:

I noticed an issue where my PC would just outright hang for a minute or two occasionally when swapping to the 4TB HDD. When I look at logs, when it hangs, the 4TB HDD times out but then on a retry IMMEDIATELY reads whatever sector just fine. In fact, it reads fine constantly for a few days until the same sector has an issue. So, the timeout is a remap, then? No, as the spare sector and bad sector counts in the SMART info don't change. It doesn't even change how many read errors or anything it's had. Strange, but let's test it with Seatools to be sure.

Tests go as follows:

- Short: pass
- Short: pass
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. Reopening seatools, it pulled a serial of all zeroes... okay....?
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. Seatools gets the right serial on reopen.
- Long: pass
- Long: fail
- Long: pass
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. All zero serial again.

i have no idea what's happening

Senior argue with me that Java can’t do serial programming, I prove to him by read the hardware protocol in HEX , and convert to ASCII using Java. He said the F word to me , I was like “他是什麼意思啊？”

bought a cdp ups, because energy service can be shitty in the town I live.

Everything is fine and dandy with the ups, has a nice lcd but it also has a usb cable and dvd with a so called "upsilon 2000" software. One week after buying the ups I decided to venture with the mother fucker software.

Installed the software, looks awful, like a software that made his way from the 90s to this day... it doesn't show the ups... I left it like that... nothing unsual, then my fucking curiosity picked up and I look into the software options and here you go, changed the "communication type" from serial to usb, and ups was recognized, and even nicer, windows started showing a battery icon like if this desktop was a laptop. I was thrilled... until I restarted my pc for whatever reason

gpu decided to break, like if the drivers weren't installed, was laggy, my second screen didn't work, in device manager the video adapter was shown as "generic video adapter". 😡, immediately I blame nvidia cuz I just updated those drivers the day before.

So I started my journey to get the fucking video card working as it should again. installed DDU, reinstalled newest drivers again... didn't work, used ddu again, installed last known drivers again... didn't work, used ddu, installed drivers from windows update... nothing... after some panicking time, I remembered that besides from updating the nvidia drivers I installed that upsilon shit recently... So I decided to uninstall it, and that was the fix, fucking shady software.

It was very naive from me to not blame that upsilon before blaming everything else.

Um...Good to know. I didn't know that a serial master-slave configuration is worth a number.

I have had to work on a project with a pc104 stack running yocto. I have had this since December last year and the image has always just randomly crashed 🤔. Yesterday I found out why!!
I am able to read the sensor of the cpu temp this has never been over 60/70 degrees C (yes I am English), however after running multiple tests and finally hitting my last wits I made the Kernel output over serial as no msg was shown on crash.
The company we have got the HW from always said this board won't over heat it throttles the cpu blag bla bla... And you guessed it in the mid of nothing but mess was a message "thermal_zone0 critical temp 127 degrees shutting down"
I didn't know if I was happy or about to cry as I didn't know if after working on this project for the last 6months I was back to the drawing boards as I need new HW or my gut at the start of not trusting the Company we are using!

Needless to say I have no idea what Monday will bring, I will keep you all posted as we all do care!

Much love

Jim

So, apparently that another kickstarted IoT chip dev team forgot to bind reset button to anything, so it is just sitting there as a fidget toy and they also messed up with usb-to-serial connection so it is working only in transmission mode. I am just sitting here with bricked chip with no adequate possibilities to unbrick it.

I told you guys that I would update you on my PiBM-5150 project. I figured out the hard way that my USB to DB-25 cable wouldn't cut it. Seems it is for printers and no matter how hard I tried it wouldn't work because of the path of the wires. After researching, it is apparent that the GPIO pins on the pi are configured for serial by default but it requires a little voltage change from TTY to RS-232. Rather than do like one of the videos I saw and solder junk to a bread board, I found a serial (rs-232) shield and 9pin output for the pi. Now, both computers are true rs-232 each. Instead of using a modem between them, I bought a null modem cable (crossover of Tx Rx signals) to interface the two machines directly. I'll update this evening to show it hopefully working.

PROBLEM:
We need to log out phone calls in and outlet of the company

How we wanted to do it:
Use node.js to read the serial port from the phone system then store the data into the MsSQL database

Eventual solution:
1) Read serial port
2) store in local MySQL database
3) every 3 minutes create a CSV file containing the last 3 minutes of calls and store on a Windows shared directory
4) have a access 2000 programme collect these files every 30 minutes
5) insert into MsSQL database

due to some error on GCP, my and friend got locked out of a prod server over ssh.

And the fucking admin was not giving us privileges to do it through serial port, why you ask cause submitting keys from dashboard was not working.

Later, found out google runs a startup script from startup-script metadata tag.

It felt like showing a middle finger to the admin and google

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

My first dev project was written on Visual Basic 5. I think I wrote a keygen to generate serial numbers based on hardware ID.

Talking to a vendor in China to source some hardware modules. The engineers don't speak any English, and the sales rep doesn't know a serial port from a monkey's ass. Shortest game of Chinese whispers 😥

Rearranging my bedroom/office and just found a fucking ps2 to serial adaptor... Are they even a fucking thing?!

Side note also found my pipe tobacco and pipe, time to get back to looking dapper as fuck!

More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.

Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!

Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.

Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).

Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.

Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.

Only to discover....

....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.

Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.

WTF? /waves arms in the air

OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.

But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did...

#just Bluetooth headphones things

When you're sitting on crowded public transportation and can't hear anything unless your phone is closer to your headphones than anyone else's, i.e. unless it's close as shit to your face 😍😍😍

When you want to listen to music for longer than 2 hours or several times during your workday but can't because the BT headphones last 2-3 hours 😍😍😍

When the left and right side don't pair with each other but you can pair with each individually 😍😍😍

When half of the button presses and user interactions aren't documented and there's no way to forget a device 😍😍😍

When you try to connect a new device to them in a public area and just see a dozen random serial numbers, so you have to wait and hope they get resolved to the headphone brand name 😍😍😍

When Satan takes your soul and the Bluetooth connection drops in hell 😍😍😍

When the music quality is lower and can experience static and maybe even skip in between 😍😍😍

When the bus hits a road bump, it falls out of your ear, and rolls halfway down the bus 😍😍😍

When it takes a long time to find them because they tiny af, and just as long to find the charging cable 😍😍😍

When manufacturers cannot agree on a standard volume sync system and so you have to check the volume and adjust every time you connect and disconnect your headphones 😍😍😍

Can we please just stop making everything Bluetooth?

Sincerely,
Someone who just wanted to listen to a 2 minute billie eilish song but found it easier to sing in his head

USB3.x is such a bitch.
My mouse laggs like hell when I put a USB3-thumbdrive on the same root hub, even if I don't read or write on the drive.

Morons, morons everywhere

How many of you working in a corporate environment can’t stand people escalating “issues” to your bosses, bosses, boss ad nauseam, for things that aren’t actual issues.

Here is something I created just for you!

Just helped in the little 'Büdchen' (kiosk comes close, but in reality it is more of an little super market) around the corner to Update the firmware of a money bill verifier and counter... As there are new 50 Euro bills.

God. Serial to USB. After running installer and starting firmware update, the owner was a bit frightened as it took so long....

XD

Setup. 30 secs. Firmware. 6 Minutes. XD

Oh god why... Why is it that every time I work with software defined radios, I keep on having to rely on not just incomplete, but at times misleading documentation 😩

Last time was GNU radio, with the doc telling me that I could define an input for a processing block using either a type or a (type, size) tupple, only for the actual code to scream at me in confusion upon my passing a tupple.
Now is that other SDR's SDK, which, as if being built upon eclipse wasn't bad enough, managed to make its serial communications confusing. Why can't you just let me set a callback to rx interrupts, you daft punks...

Well, my first project was to replicate something I saw somewhere: connect a pen to a potentiometer and to the serial port of an Apple II in such a way that you could replicate the movement of the pen on screen and also draw.

Apple II . Mouse, touch screens, tablet, etc didn't exist.
It worked.

However, a part from feeling old, I feel also stupid now, because I didn't understand at all the potentiality of such a tool nor what was going to happen in few years.

I could have invented a mouse. Or the concept of GUI. It was just in front of me.

Instead, I think I just draw some tits an some dick.

So I'm here.
Wondering, what is there now in front of my eyes, that I don't see?

So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.

It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.

Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.

This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.

The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one.

More from my big black book of ai and neuroscience:

I think if trace theory is true to any degree it would go some distance in explaining phenomenal consciousness, assuming I haven't misunderstood anything.

In fuzzy trace theory (FTT) it is posited that people form two types of mental representations about a past event:

*verbatim traces: detailed representations of a past event.

*gist traces: fuzzy representations of a past event.

People can reason with verbatim *and* gist traces but prefer gists.

*vision was suggested to work similarly in 1999. With human vision, two processes could be used: one that aggregates local receptive fields and one that parses the local receptive spatial field. It was suggested that people used prior experience, gists, to decide which dominates a perceptual decision.

Gist processes form representations of events, semantic details, where verbatim reinstates the context found in the surface details of an event.

__notes__

Parallel storage: asserts encoding/storage of verbatim/gist traces operate in *parallel*, not in serial.

I like to think of verbatim traces as databases, and gists as queries constructed by recognition.

Several studies have found that the meaning (gist) of an item is encoded even *before* the surface details (verbatim).

This might be important as a survival mechanism but should not be taken to mean strictly that gists are formed wholly *without* details or important and recognizable features of the item in question. It may well be for high level el processing and classification efficiency this may be an important reprocessing step, in the same way that many functions of the brain are duplicated throughout.

Im thinking about getting a raspberry pi 3 or an odroid-c2.
(Specs at the end)

Its to host a simple php server and maybe a gitlab server, both for personal use.

Should I go with the better performance or the better community support?

Odroid specs
System-on-chip used : Amlogic S905
CPU: 1.5 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53
Memory: 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM at 912 MHz
Storage: MicroSDHC slot, eMMC module socket
Graphics: Mali-450 MP3
Connectivity: 4× USB 2.0, micro-USB OTG, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet (8P8C), Infrared, 40× GPIO ports

Raspberry specs:
SoC: Broadcom BCM2837
CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53, 1.2GHz
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore IV
RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 (900 MHz)
Networking: 10/100 Ethernet, 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.1 Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy
Storage: microSD
GPIO: 40-pin header, populated
Ports: HDMI, 3.5mm analogue audio-video jack, 4× USB 2.0, Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)

Ended up dong an internship for my school (not really internship, more along the lines of formal volunteering, but whatever) helping set up laptops for a statewide standardized assessment.

I made a program to log the machine's identifying info (Serial, MAC addresses, etc), renames it, joins it to the school's Active Directory, and takes notes on machines, which gets dumped into a csv file.

Made the classic rookie mistake of backing things up occasionally, but not often enough. Accidentally nuked the flash drive with the data on it, and spent a good while learning data recovery and how grep works.

Lesson Learned? Back up frequently and back up everything

A serial entrepreneur superAI robot that can help us build all dream projects successfully. Period.

I've gotta create a bidirectional communication protocol to link 2-3 RPis over GPIO. I have between 4-5 pins for TX and 45 for RX, so each directional bus is that wide.
Even better, I have to assume 4 bit bus length unless told otherwise, since 4 to 6 pins on the GPIO are usually used for serial/UART, COM and/or 1-pin communications (for use to get a console, not to throw data down.)

The best part?

Needs to be a Python library.

i wanna die

serial number
killing machine

Fml
Why can't I still figure this shit out?
This is supposed to be easy!
Its a freaking USB communication!
It IS easy.
So why am I stuck?
Fcuk me.
I got shit ton of stuff to figure out and this is where I'm stuck?
Ugghhhhh!

Client wants me to document the updated patch in the system... In detail. I just want to upgrade their server memory but noooooo. They want me to detail it all in step-by-step, including change impact, description task, expected time duration, back-out plan.

The first time I had to do this, it was cute. But now it's FUCKING ANNOYING ON HOW DETAIL THEY WANT ME TO PUT IN!!!

Client: "OK, so you wanna upgrade the server memory. What do you need to bring into the data centre?"
Me: "Just my laptop. I'm just configuring your underutilised server memory and upgrade it."
Client: "Good. Put that in the document, including your laptop serial #, make and model."
Me: *Screaming internally*

Is there any good linux application to send FUCKING RAW data to a serial port?

Port in question: /dev/ttyACM0
Baud (nice if configurable): 9600

I want to send specific binary data. I want to send 0b00110011 or something like that to it, not some character or a hex value.

SIM 800L
The fucking nail to my coffin. This thing is so unreliable. I fixed on issue get the next one. Then get an error trying to make a http request, with little information on the web. Eventually switch to FTP which is working for a while. Then suddenly nothing is working properly. Even the serial communication has errors. This process took over 6 months. Constant debugging and headscraching involved. After hundreds of hours I give up. I'm going to switch to a Raspberry Pi Zero with an UMTS Stick attached. This is going to cost way more battery time but my project needs to be finished by july and I'm tired of this shitty little module.

Started a journey of serial exploitations and trying to read stuff with UART/debug pins. Holy fuck where are the UART pins!!

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.

"- Hello I work on this shitty Drupal project where the vendor directory is gitted, and we can't use composer becauses it returns error [note: i wish this was a joke]. So I installed a module that won't work, because it needs a depency. I installed it but it still doesn't work
- You need to edit your autoloader
- Ok, what do I put in it?
- Idk, you're not supposed to do it, and let composer do it for you"

Did I ever tell you how the Drupal stack exchange will one day make me turn into a serial killer?

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

At least pretend to have a reason for using checkboxes where the behaviour is obviously a single choice. I know I'm sometimes full of crap. I know I can waste so much time arguing for something I'm wrong about. At least I have arguments to support my approach, and I don't dismiss my mistakes. I don't need you to spend the next 5 minutes changing checkboxes for radio buttons in the mockup, it took dev 5 seconds to replace "checkbox" with "radio" and move on. However, I do need you to know what you're doing, even if it turns to be wrong.

I know this world celebrates people who can do things perfectly: models with perfect bodies, singers with perfect voices, sportsmen with perfect scores, students with perfect grades. I understand that's why you wish to try again so you can do it perfectly.

That's not what the world needs. The world needs people who know why they did what they did. It's drunk drivers who break down in the court, not serial killers. Serial killers know what they did, they know why they did it, and they believe it was the right thing to do; drunk drivers on the other hand had no idea what they did or why they did it, and they try to dismiss their wrongdoings by blaming them on alcohol, not getting a taxi, parking fees, the car, or some other circumstances.

So confront your bullshit for once. Stop searching for excuses to dismiss challenging ideas and prove you can defend your position. Otherwise, don't get angry when your "impeccable" ideas lose to someone who at least tries to defend their nonsense.

Hey guys...
Looking for a Framework or language that has:
- multi-platform (Windows + Android minimum)
- Easy to design GUI
- Native
- Can use file databases like SQLite
- Can use serial, BT, Wi-Fi to send-receive data.

I already used Python + Kivy but I think there must be easier frameworks for this...

So apparently changing the root password on my embedded linux system from the default to anything else breaks ssh. The only error i get is, that the password has "expired".
Dis is gonna take a long time to figure out, cuz no system logger and only serial access...

I am in no way a senior dev, in skill or compensation. I have completely inherited all rank and responsibility from all the folks who came before me and got canned.

For the last year, I have led and managed a team of juniors working on the only application making my company any money, while everyone else has been building new shit from scratch; every day my only two goals are to impart my team with as much knowledge as I possibly can give them, and to keep production from blowing up.

Until now, I've apparently kept everyone in the dark about the fact that I'm just skating by by "going with it" and able to google the answers just before they can ask the question. But now that the pandemic has hit, all future projects are put on hold indefinitely, and the company is pivoting all other devs under me. Now we have "true" seniors ripping the app apart and injecting code without thinking once to actually read the code base and analyze how the application was designed to work, because they are under orders from our serial entrepreneur of a CEO to "get it done, quick and dirty" and meanwhile as the app further destabilizes, the c-suite team looks to me.

So half the time I have no clue what I'm doing, but I can't let them know that. I mean at least I'm still gainfully employed, I still make way more than I ever did before in my life. I'm *reasonably* happy with what I do for a living. And if they can me, the company will be dead in the water, because I'm the only dev who understands intimately how to change the system and add new features without completely bricking it.

Am I doing it right, or nah?

our office software has the shittiest documentation. no problem! i love to browse all the subfolders to find where to place a serial letter template! why would someone want to do this in the first place?

if someone working in the german medical field: i can not recommend eva/viva for some other reasons as well.

!tips
Hey codebroes! Give me your best programming movie, serial, documentary.

That episode from NCIS where they created a GUI for tracking down a criminal doesn't count!

hey guys what do you think about MR.ROBOT serial? how much its close to reality? you recommend or not? actually i'm not a series fan but i like to taste.

almost everything work related. especially filtering a csv export file with a python executable to open a word serial letter to open a email for some entries with vba. or writing a js object file with vba from an excel 'database'. my proudness is ambivalent.

Is it hard to write a kernel module to expose information to usee space ? I need smartctls abilitytl to specify sata being transported over. USB cable to a sata drive to pull Information like make model serial but it requires root and lsblk doesn't have the functionality to grab info on the device on the other end of the usb to sata cable
There is another way though right ?

What do you think about psychometric tests? I doubt a test can define the type of person you are nor your characteristics. I think it's ambigous, unprecise and extremely subjective. Today I was rejected from a job offer because "the psychometric department didn't give their vote of approval". This is the first time I get rejected for that reason, in the past nobody complained about the results of my tests. I don't know if psychometry is useful, but this company is looking for someone different, or maybe psychometry is, in fact, subjective and any fool can interpret your results however he feels like: "Oh, so he likes kittens over puppies, he's a potential serial killer, let's reject him"

Is there a way to include a Python interpreter in a kotlin app? I need to do some serial communication over WiFi and I thought a simple Android app will be good for this

The moment you realize the .net Framework's String.TrimEnd() method will actually modify your String prior to returning it, and there seems to be no convenient way of getting a copy without declaring a new variable...

Just wanted to get rid of excess empty lines in the log caused by trailing <CR><LF> when receiving lines of serial data:

Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("H:m:s.fff") + " - serial data received on " + com_port + ": " + serial_data.TrimEnd())

But suddenly the parser could not find its termination characters anymore...
Resulting in probably the most disgusting parentheses I had ever added to any code:

Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("H:m:s.fff") + " - serial data received on " + com_port + (": " + serial_data).TrimEnd())

Yes, I feel bad about it, but then again is VB .net and it kinda "works for me". I promise I will (try to remember to) remove these as soon as debugging is done...

So I'm building an app, donations get you a serial key. Once a month I want the app to verify the key with a server.

Recommendations for this? It's written in c++, if that matters.

Just turned myself inside out why parsing data from serial didn't work. A full day, and 20 minutes before going home I realize the uart interrupt function was too slow. I just didn't get all chars...

Writing fun code for your esp module but wondering why it won't flash correctly. But there is a USB cable in your USB to serial and it goes behind your monitors and the esp shows you that's its powered.
10 minutes later you notice that it is plugged into your adapter instead of your computer...........

I've had to update some 200 scanning devices on the only available computer old enough to still have the necessary connector. Over a serial connection that was so slow I could've probably written the firmware faster than updating it. It took me 14 hours to update all devices.

Need some help here!!
I'm learning machine learning, so planning to buy Asus R510JX-DM230T. Are the below specs enough to practice TensorFlow ?? Specs : 2.6GHz Core i7 4720HQ processor

8GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive

15.6-inch FHD Anti-Glare Display, 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M Graphics

So weird stuff is I can't make my modem make a call (ATD command). It keeps saying no carrier. Wtf!