On my old phone I had an issue with the proximity sensor and front facing camera. This led me to holding my phone backwards to take photos and being unable to hang up phone calls.
I think I put up with this for a year and a half.
I did end up figuring out the issue with the proximity sensor but opening up my phone to reconnect the camera module was too much effort for me.
I used an Ubuntu Phone as my daily for about 6 months.
And how was it
Quite bad. This was over 10 years ago so the details are muddy… It was on BQ hardware and the first weeks it couldn’t even work outside on GSM or 3G (or whatever was at the time). It was clearly developed and tested solely on Wifi. Using cellular connection make it fall apart and constantly hang.
Then it never was able to get WhatsApp working. Everyone uses WhatsApp, and had to get by using old SMS or whoever I got to trick to install the then unknown Telegram.
Eventually got tired and got back to an Android phone. An Alcatel if I recall correctly.
After some time, BQ offered a way to revert the hardware back to its Android version, did that and had a backup for many years.
It was a very messy and buggy launch, but being on the bleeding edge, it’s expected. If they had offered a WhatsApp app I would have hung on way longer, it was the only deal breaker.
I knew a woman who used an iPhone 6 up until I think 2022.
Her secret was she never did updates. And lo and behold, the phone kept working fine and she never felt any need to get a new one. By the end, the battery lasted about 15-20 minutes.
This is pretty horrible to hear as someone working in security. Just because it works does not mean you should do it.
I imagine her data gets lost multiple times per year.
I don’t disagree - I should make clear; I’m not saying this as an example of a good thing you should do (hence why I posted it in this thread), more as a data point about how happy Apple is to break their stuff for old hardware holders and to give some perspective on how they use software updates to encourage hardware purchases.
My 6s still works. I did have the battery replaced 3 years ago because I expected to continue to use it a couple more years. I got a new phone last year but my old one is still happily running.
It belongs in a museum!
So did I, it was just fine. Though I kept it updated and replaced the battery once.
At university in the 90s some friends and I ran our own Linux server. It was a 486 or early Pentium and we hooked it up to the university network in a post grad student’s office who was happy to just keep it running under his desk.
We even got the campus sysadmins to give us a proper edu domain name. It was a more open and different time and ethernet still meant coax cables with T connectors and terminators.
We were running pre v1 kernel on slackware and it was all installed from floppies. We used it as a web server, coded and played muds, read newsgroups and mail etc. I think tin and pine etc. we easily had 20 users using it from the computer labs.
Anyways the computer kept dying or freezing occasionally. Still early Linux. And the office where it was kept wasn’t always open and we didn’t have a key.
Being electronic engineering students we built a whole circuit with a PIC controller which plugged into the parallel port. We wrote a watchdog daemon which would keep pinging this dongle. And the firmware on the PIC would check for these pings.
If the server died the pings would stop and the dead man’s switch dongle was wired directly into the hardware reset button of the PC.
Worked like a charm for 4 years. And apparently worked for another 5 or 6 after I left.
Those were truly wonderful times. I remember even around 2000 campus network security was minimal to non-existent and we were all just going wild and I learned so much.
It was so much fun. I still get some of the same thrills building a retro console using a rpi, or a home media server in the garage using a second hand dual Xeon motherboard.
But sadly as the CEO of a software firm I don’t get to hack away much on anything anymore.
I do occasionally get to impress the young ones with my Linux command line wizardry and 1337 vim skills. I really need to get a beard.
Home self hosted stuff is definitely the only time I usually get to have fun with this stuff. Work can sometimes involve fun problem solving but by the time you cut through all the red tape to get it anywhere the thrill is gone.
Bonsai STONITH.
Years ago I got a second hand Sega Saturn - it was fine for a while then stopped working because it couldn’t read the disks.
But then I discovered (not sure how) that if I turned it upside down it would work fine. So I did that for a couple of years.
…how did you work that out?!
They probably got frustrated and kicked it across the room and it landed upside and started loading.
That’s my head canon anyways.
Yeah, let’s go with that, why not? :-)
I wish I could remember - it makes absolutely no sense at all, but it worked :-)
I got an HP laptop in university and someone coughed a mouthful of tea onto my keyboard a few months later. At first I kept “a” on my clipboard so I could paste it as needed while typing, but soon other keys followed. So my computer is over 6 years old and I’ve been typing for almost 6 years using:
- The 4 on my num pad as the A key
- The 7 on my numpad as Q
- The 5 on my numpad as tab
- The 2 on my numpad as Z
- The help/F1 is ESC
- The numpad 1 to type 1 and exclamation points
Recently, I’ve also changed the minus on my numpad to be ` (backtick). I don’t have a capslock. Thankfully, the damage didn’t continue to spread because I would have eventually run out of keys.
Sometimes I fantasize about someone calling me out on a weird typo so I can tell them about it.
Actual goddamn psychopath
My family’s first computer baxk in the 90s was a hand-me-down power Mac from a relative. Between whatever they had done with it before we got it, and what we managed to screw up as inexperienced computer users playing around with it, it had it’s share of little quirks.
At some point we managed to turn on some screen reading function, and set the voice profile to something singsongy. It also had an error that popped up every time you started it up. The result of this is that almost 3 decades later I still have this ridiculous little tune seared into my brain after hearing my computer literally sing it who knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of times
The globalfax software has successfully installed, however, since no fax device control panels were loaded, faxing has been disabled
Put up with it for several years, none of us knew or really cared enough to figure out how to get rid of that error or turn off the text-to-speech.
Dang I kinda wanna hear it 🙋♂️
did you ignore
You’re using the past tense here. That’s gonna narrow my potential responses.
When I set dark mode in an app, the top of the window would remain light, in XFCE. But in early January 2024, I realized it was because XFCE had a theme setting in both Appearance and Window Manager, and they were conflicting with each other. I ignored it for quite a while but now I’m happy with my full dark mode computer
When i boot up my (linux) PC sometimes the second monitor is all messed up. Reloading i3 with super+shift+r fixes it so i can’t be bothered to actually fix it.
Hah dude I’ve been using i3 for years, and same. Like maybe 30% of the time. And half the time the background image is wonky when I start it up. Super+shift+r fixes it every time though, so fuck it
The on/off/wake button on my phone broke off. I installed an app that would wake the phone automatically if the gyro sensors sensed it was taken out of the pocket, which worked around 60% of the time. I was a broke student at the time, so I dealt with that for a year or so before buying a new phone.
I admire the workaround.
My last phone the USB c port died and I just used wireless charging for like 2 years lol.
Currently my life. About 3 months now, no plans to upgrade anytime soon. Sucks though
Oof, there’s many.
Let’s start with my older phone (Moto G5s Plus). Right since I got it, the camera focus was broken. When trying to focus, it would just vibrate and make rattling noise. HOWEVER, I found a “solution”. Hitting it just right from the back and shaking it side-to-side worked. I used it like that for 4 years.
My current phone (Poco X3 Pro)has many software bugs. Some I probably don’t remember as getting around them is a muscle memory.
Let’s start with audio. The left and right microphones are swapped. Thus I flip it around (left-handed) when recording videos. This actually affects a few different MIUI-powered phones as I found out.
Wallpaper bug:
This started appearing since I got my phone back with MIUI global instead of EEA after both MOBO replacements (yes, and both were in warranty). The lockscreen wallpaper gets stretched top to bottom after reboot, but isn’t affected by resolution. Homescreen wallpaper gets stretched if resolution is different than native, otherwise it gets zoomed in.
“Fix:”- For homescreen, create a black rectangle with resolution of 1080x2400 and insert the desired wallpaper into it, but slightly smaller, in center.
- Set it as wallpaper
- Reboot the phone
- When asked for PIN, lock the screen first, wake it up, and just then enter the PIN. This fixes the lockscreen wallpaper.
- Unlock the device and stay on homescreen
- Pull down the notification bar, decrease and then increase brightness
Done! The wallpaper now has correct aspect ratio, it’s just a bit fuzzy due to upscaling.
Images created in Termux not visible to Google Photos:
Go into Google Files, rename the file to something else, then change it back. Done!Files from Termux counting into “System storage”:
Same fix as above.Uploads to OneDrive from Android crashing:
The solution is to use Firefox in Termux. Yes, desktop Firefox.Poco X3 Pro screen not rotating:
The “solution” is opening Accelerometer and Gyroscope in PhyBoxMTP reporting different timestamps:
I do backups with rsync. Unfortunately, I did so over MTP, not realizing the timestamps are adjusted in some odd way. Now, unless I wish to re-do the whole backup, I have to stick to MTP. Unfortunately, I had issues with gvfs on Manjaro, so I can’t get CLI access to MTP.
Solution: Use Linux Mint for backups over MTP.Memory card slot not working in Manjaro for 2 years:
Solution: None. Some update brought the drivers after 2 years.School network being unrealiable:
Solution: Connecting to both Wi-Fi and mobile data at once and running my own HTTP proxy server in Termux.
Warning: The username and password isn’t encrypted in case of HTTP proxy. The proxy will likely also allow access to localhost by default. I’d recommend to null-route those requests. There may be more security issues.ProtonVPN client being mostly broken on Arch:
Solution: Connecting to ProtonVPN on my phone and running proxy server on it.School proxy server limiting network speed based on MAC addresses:
This one was used long time in past and kept as a backup. Unfortunately, it was needed again. It limits the speed to around 0.2Mbps if the MAC is unknown, which among other devices includes newer school PCs.
Terrible solution: Cloning MAC of one of the least used ancient desktops and using that on my laptop. I also bought RTL8152B USB Ethernet adapter, and burned that MAC into its eFuse memory (permanent). Pretty convenient.Ok, I guess that’s enough.
The bearings of the OG case-fans started to fail so I reconfigured them to kick in when the CPU got hot. One after another I ended with only 1 left working all the time…
Had them all replaced last month, 4 fans on max are quieter than the last at 50%…
Oh, my GPU fans were dying, so I leaned a case fan to the GPU to help with cooling.
It was GTX570 which I bought when it was new, shiny and expensive. Server me over 10 years, including Witcher 3 on 100C temp
Used an OG Google pixel until about a year ago. Had to replace the battery a couple times but otherwise still mostly ran like it was brand new.
Have a Samsung Galaxy. Screen cracked by itself several months after getting it, however I was busy, didn’t have time to take it in and got used to it. Now the warranty is expired so I can’t get the screen replaced anymore. I cope by believing they wouldn’t have replaced it and would have told me it was somehow my fault despite using a fairly heavy case and not being a phone-dropper/slammer.
My parents’ plasma TV (probably one of the last working ones in existence) has had HD overscan cutting off the edges of the picture for as long as I can remember. Once they started using a laptop as a media PC, they had to increase the height of the start menu to see it. Just this week I found the setting to fix it burried deep in the TV menus.
They’ve been effectively watching 720p scaled up to 1080p this entire time…
probably one of the last working ones in existence
I just decommissioned mine. I got it for free from my parents who got it for free from my aunt who got it with their house when they first moved to the area about 15 years ago. Only reason I decommissioned it is it no longer plays any audio from HDMI sources, and we wanted something a bit more power efficient. I plan on opening it up and seeing if I can repair it, then it’ll probably be put into another room to continue being used as a TV