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

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

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

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

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

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

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

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

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

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

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

This probably isn't the coolest bug I've ever solved, but surely the one with the biggest faceplam
So I was building a Bluetooth smart watch that pairs with your Android device for the final year bachelor's project. The submission was in a 2 days and it was all ready and it suddenly stopped working.. Spent hours trying to fix it, even tried to get a replacement Bluetooth module (was out of stock -_-).. After a day's worth of freaking out I discovered that Android phones (at least the OnePlus X) don't connect to Bluetooth modules when their battery is below 15% -_- and since I was freaking out I would let the phone charge a bit and get back to debugging and it never crossed 15% so it never worked.. One day of debugging attempts later it suddenly struck me that low battery might be an issue.. And voila! It worked after charging the phone

Shouldn't such things be clearly mentioned in documentation :/

(Btw, got full for the project, got a 10/10 GPA for the semester)

I’ve just talked to my cousin (24 yo) about smartphones, since I saw that he has an old phone and I asked him if he wanted to buy my old S6 (for reasonable price), he declined this offer moreover he said that he is not planning to change his current device. I was kinda shocked tbh how one can live like that (being online only when using PC), a while after that I realised that he was the one who was smart in this conversation, the one that does not get influenced by others in this matter. I wish I could live like that, when he is not available, he’s just not available. I mean this rant is not purely dev related, but, quite a lot of us here are maintaining some projects, maybe need to talk to managers after their work to make some decisions, doing some side projects. I know that we sort of agreed with those rules at the beginning, but don’t forget to stay offline for some time, especially now when holidays are coming and there will be occasions to spend some time with our families. Just a friendly reminder :)

New project at work involving Google Nest Hubs, supervisor asks me to do the initial setup of one of them to start developing with it using its API.

I start looking throughout the documentation and realise that we need to setup a work google account in order to register the devices, pay a fee and only THEN be able to use Google's API for Smart Devices (damn, you, Google!). Supervisor is somewhat baffled by this, and in my head I'm also surprised by his reaction. I'd assume you'd research your devices before you buy them, right?

Later, he comes into the room I'm in (I'm still allowed to work on location), looks at the freshly setup Nest Hub, saying "wow, this sure is a much smaller screen than I was expecting". I mean, you did research these devices before you bought TWENTY of them. RIGHT?!

On my way to fight with this Google device-registration-API-thing now.

To be continued...

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".

'Get a smart device', they said.
'Unlimited media experience, internet powered!' they said.

What they didn't say, most of the apps are just webpages with an expiration date.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Why THE FUCK is screen mirroring without being in the same wifi network a thing?

Why THE FUCK have all these smart tvs turned this on by default?

Why THE FUCK does the list of found devices SORT itself RANDOMLY if another device is found.

I probably mirrored my phone screen to a random tv in the neighbourhood because as soon as my finger was about to touch the name of my tv, a random tv swooshed into it's place.

WHAT THE FUCK THERE IS NO FUCKING NEED FOR THIS FEATURE IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ACCESS POINT AROUND, THERE WILL BE ONE IN 99% OF ALL POSSIBLE USE CASES.

I mean if I got it right, i can share porn with my neighbors now, or at least annoy them?

I'm thinking of buying a Samsung Galaxy S7 as a replacement to my Nexus 6P.. from what I can tell, it ticks all the boxes.. nice battery (3000mAh), 5GHz Wi-Fi, octacore CPU, kernel source being available, QHD display... However, it being sold at €350 - and that only in the Netherlands - does introduce quite some hurdles. For anyone who's owned this device, how long did you own this device and did any issues show up, especially hardware-related ones? Last time I owned a Samsung device was with a Galaxy S3 Mini, which was a delight to use. Other than that I don't really have any experience with it.

Another thing that piqued my curiosity - I still have 3 Raspberry Pi's unused, as well as one LCD display (but without touch). It got me thinking, the only things that I really use my phones for on the go is for calling, texting and listening to music via Bluetooth. Perhaps a Raspberry Pi or even an Arduino could take care of that? The smart devices that I'd consume and produce most content on are my tablet and my PC anyway.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Fucking experimental technologies. I feel like doing webassembly stuff is like buying a smart device, it's not worth any of the trouble for now.
I wanted to do some webassembly-stuff with rust and yew (basically react for rust). I was really hyped because it all looked promising and i found this cool band "heilung" whose music made me my coding feel like black magic with complex incantations and shit.
A basic webassembly setup did work, but everything afterwards was pure shit. Crate installation didn't go as expected, i get weird errors even though i simply copied the example (and checked the versions). The best i got was when i tried to compile and rust told me to go fuck myself because i cant use feature XY in a package in the stable environment. Why the hell would someone even publish said package then? After losing half a day because of this i give up for now. I don't feel like a badass magician anymore anyways, more like the guy that puts mentos into coke and gets hit by the foam.

Why the fuck does Samsung Hub which I don't want on my device, keeps installing Peel Smart Remote TV Guide, what ever that shit is on my device.
Have deleted it 3 times since yesterday and it keeps installing it.

I am slowly turning my home into an automated smart home, however. I have found a lot of responding devices (media players, sockets, etc..) but no trigger devices (buttons, sensors) I can work with.

Am I looking in the wrong place or do I really have to build something myself using arduino?

My setup is the following: I have a central server in my home that hosts a bunch of docker services that all server a certain purpose. All smart devices have static ips so that server can address them quickly. So it is capable of controlling many things. However, now I want to trigger certain actions through a hardware button. It seems I cannot find such a device....

Any other hads on here?

I recently switched back from Android to using a BlackBerry Bold – a 9700, specifically. This transition was made because I have been growing increasingly impatient with the many, many flaws of Android, and iOS wouldn't work for me, even though it does work well for many people. There are many features of which I was unaware when I was using BlackBerry back in the day, such as general tinkering abilities; while I may not understand everything, I am smart enough to be able to use technical references to figure out most of that which I do not understand. I won't go into detail about this so I don't sound like an advertisement for a product which was abandoned by its own creator, but I thought that the people here might find the ability to fiddle with the device to be interesting.
Having an actual keyboard is pretty nice, too.

I‘ve now my first smart home device. It is only a power outlet, but the story behind it is a bit special.
Because Apple trapped me in there ecosystem I wanted to have a HomeKit compatible outlet. The problem with that: Either to expensive or to big. So my ne mission: Connect a non HomeKit device to HomeKit, but without a too expensive proprietary gateway/bridge.
After a bit of googling I found a software called "Homebridge", build to run on a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately I had one old RasbPi 1 B. So I installed a new Raspbian and installed Homebridge. I forgot how slow it was.
Then I bought a cheap (but good) ZigBee outlet and a ZigBee USB Dongle. With a plugin for Homebridge it was very easy to connect the ZigBee Dongle.
Then I tried to connect the outlet, but the log said "Unrecognized device". After a bit of research I found out that the outlet is not supported by the homebridge-zigbee plugin. As a software engineer I tried to find a solution for it, so I reverse engineered the device recognition (very easy because Homebridge is a node application). After a while I managed to add the configuration for the outlet to the plugin.
And see, it became light.

Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.

I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.

It would not receive non manual software updates

It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.

Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol

Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.

The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.

Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol

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

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

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

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

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

Another Mojave Post...

Apple added 4 new apps, all of which cannot be removed (oh boy am I off to a great start). I saw the new home app and thought "if your stuck here I might as well attempt to put you to some use" so I opened it to try and maybe add my smart plug or something, but it told me I need an iOS device to add accessories...

Why the fuck is there any functionality that is locked behind iOS especially something as integral to the core functionality of the app like adding a fucking device to an app that manages them.

On a side note apparently news is bugged for me and I cannot find it it the launchpad so that's slightly less bloat.

You can make your software as good as you want, if its core functionality has one major flaw that cripples its usefulness, users will switch to an alternative.

For example, an imaginary file manager that is otherwise the best in the world becomes far less useful if it imposes an arbitrary fifty-character limit for naming files and folders.

If you developed a file manager better than ES File Explorer was in the golden age of smartphones (before Google excercised their so-called "iron grip" on Android OS by crippling storage access, presumably for some unknown economic incentive such as selling cloud storage, and before ES File Explorer became adware), and if your file manager had all the useful functionality like range selection and tabbed browsing and navigation history, but it limits file names to 50 characters even though the file system supports far longer names, the user will have to rely on a different application for the sole purpose of giving files longer names, since renaming, as a file action, is one of the few core features of a file management software.

Why do I mention a 50-character limit? The pre-installed "My Files" app by Samsung actually did once have a fifty-character limit for renaming files and folders. When entering a longer name, it would show the message "up to 50 characters available". My thought: "Yeah, thank you for being so damn useful (sarcasm). I already use you reluctantly because Google locked out superior third-party file managers likely for some stupid economic incentives, and now you make managing files even more of a headache than it already is, by imposing this pointless limitation on file names' length."

Some one at Samsung's developer department had a brain fart some day that it would be a smart idea to impose an arbitrary limit on file name lengths. It isn't.

The user needs to move files to a directory accessible to a superior third-party file manager just to give it a name longer than fifty characters. Even file management on desktop computers two decades ago was better than this crap!

All of this because Google apparently wants us to pay them instead of SanDisk or some other memory card vendor. This again shows that one only truly owns a device if one has root access. Then these crippling restrictions that were made "for security reasons" (which, in case it isn't clear, is an obvious pretext) can be defeated for selected apps.