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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Most silly excuse was my boss refusing to install Linux because he just had a friend give him original windows 98se licenses for the PCs we just bought for the company.

    Well it gets less silly thinking that getting the eprom programmer software and orcad 4 working on Linux was probably impossible.

    Then it was outright the best decision ever, because those machines never required a reinstall and worked flawless for the 5 years I was there working. Never understood the bad rep W98Se had. Never used it on my personal rigs of course.


  • My kid (13) surprised me the other day and said he wanted to try Linux. He has seen me forever using it and got scared about W10 getting hacked or something so thought of trying it out.

    I handed over to him my Fedora 43 (KDE plasma) install USB drive and once installed the problems began.

    The monitor couldn’t be set to native resolution, and Steam didn’t want to run. Turns out that there is no wayland compatibility with the Radeon Polaris RX480. What a bummer, that card is perfectly fine for what he does on his PC.

    We tried with the cinnamon version and that is working fine. He even has roblox running.

    Tl;Dr: Wayland isn’t compatible with older hardware that most casual windows users are mostly going to be using.








  • If your goal is to make yourself more valuable to employers/clients the best path is to specialize in some critical and niche enterprise tech. People that are good at stuff businesses were lured into using get paid very well. In my case it was SharePoint, but that’s just an example.

    Knowing your way around the OS is taken for granted in these positions, so you have one piece of the puzzle, which is great, but you need the other pieces.

    But be careful, if I have to choose between two experts, one with basic win+linux and the other only linux, I’m choosing the former.







  • 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.




  • Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.

    The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it’s spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.

    The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.