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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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.




  • Well, my older one was on raspberry os for a while, because she just needed a web for school stuff, but I couldn’t get movie streaming working, and she was starting with video projects the SD wasn’t enough so I ended up getting her a laptop without pre-installed os and set it up with Fedora, and to date no serious problems.

    The younger one has my old Ryzen 1700 PC, and tried Fedora first and couldn’t get his games (Roblox or Fortnite) to work, but did get Steam to work… So without much investigation I just tried another distro based off Debian, and gave a try to popos. Same thing. Reading about it, it’s deliberate these developers don’t want their games working on Linux.

    So I’ve temporarily swapped his ssd with a windows 10 setup until I can get him to give up these games. I guess age will do it :(



  • On the other hand, if you are buying cheap it’s usually because you aren’t familiar with the product and it’s characteristics. So you can take it as the price for learning about said product and what you really want from it.

    For example, I got a cheap electric scooter for my wife on her birthday. We are new to these things, and didn’t even know if we would use it at all. Fast forward a year and we have used the crap out of it, even the kids can’t stop taking it out for a spin, and we now know what to look for and what sort of power and features we want when it comes time to replace it.


  • We have a budget for streaming services. ATM Netflix, HBO max and Showtime. About 20€ a month. Me and my wife like a good classic flick every now and then, so the two latter stay. The kids eat up crap Netflix series like candy. Everytime they ask to get prime or Disney they have the choice to give up Netflix to change… but they don’t.

    If ads come, or the price goes up too much will consider canceling. Until then, it suits our wants.