• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It was my first time using a Linux GUI. I was comfortable with CLI, but it was my first time having it installed on a laptop instead of just sshing into a server somewhere.

    So naturally, instead of learning how the GUI worked, I tried changing it to be exactly like Windows. I was doing things like making it so I could double click shell scripts and other code files and they would run instead of opening them up in an editor. I think you see where this is going, but I sure as hell didn’t.

    Well, one of my coworkers comes over and asks me to run this code on this device we were developing. We were still in the very early stages of development, we didn’t even have git set up, so he brought the code over on a USB stick. I pop it into my laptop. I went to check it once by opening it in an editor by double clicking on it… Only it ran the code that was written for our device on my laptop instead of opening in an editor.

    To this day, I have no idea what it did to fuck my laptop so bad. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out what was wrong, but I was so inexperienced with Linux, that I decided to just reinstall the OS. I had only installed it the day before anyway, so I wasn’t losing much.









  • It really depends. For example, the app might not be sending data on what is happening. It might just say “event 1 happened” which triggers it to flash blue or “event 2 happened” which triggers it to flash rainbow. If there are no additional information, then the only way it could be done is by modifying the app.

    And that’s not even getting into creating custom firmware for the device. You would either need to get your hands on their source code for that or reverse engineer it.

    I’m a firm believer that nothing is impossible, but one this is for sure, it would likely be a ton of work.






  • It does suck that Google gave themselves a monopoly on it on Android. But I personally find it much better than Signal as far as features go. I think Signal tries too hard to be secure at the expense of features. My old phone broke and I lost all my messages. Nothing I can do to get them back. Luckily I only used it when my parents were out of the country, but if I had old messages and photos from a friend that passed, I would have been heartbroken. Signal was basically dead to me after I realized that sometimes I can lose messages.

    I still have my texts from when my wife and I started dating almost 15 years ago.


  • I guess it depends on how you define “worse”. With RCS, you have SMS fallback, so anyone with a phone number can get your message when you send it. There’s a lot of value in that. Even with dedicated IM services having more features, if everyone I know can’t agree on one of those, I dont want to have 5 messaging apps on my phone and have to check them all every day. Very few people that I know even use one of those, and those people are all using different ones.

    It’s great for Europeans where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but here in the US, I don’t know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I’d someone asked me to use it, I would just tell them to text me because I don’t want to use a product owned by Facebook.

    The closest thing we have here that most people use is Discord, but the older people I know can’t figure it out.