Wispy2891

TL;DR: when the technician put hands on my device, disabled NTP (unattended time updates from internet) and locked settings with a password so I'm forced to pay him €50/hour to change the time

The year is 2018: there was a burglary in my building and my SO begged me for an alarm system. Perfect, so I ordered immediately a 3G Arduino shield and some PIR sensors.

WTF is that, you're not going to DIY that shit, right? I want something that works all the time and doesn't require any fiddling, no wireless sensors that go out of battery and you will notice after years. And I don't want flying wires everywhere, call a professional that will run cables in existing conduits

So I searched for a fully wired solution that didn't have any subscriptions/servers/internet/apps yet allow remote control and call police when required (commercial solutions with a certification can directly interface with police) and that with professional installation didn't cost an arm and a leg. And that allows easy change of settings in the future.

The day of install, the technician tells me "give me the sim card" - to which I reply "it's ok I install it later when you're done" but to my dismay he said "no, the system must be bound to the sim card serial number using the installation tool".

Fuck! I totally overlooked this! So i run to the city searching for a company that gives me a reasonably priced IOT sim card and do it immediately. Luckily I found one and I come back in time after a couple hours, he was almost done and I notice that he's not setting it up using the main unit screen, but instead was using his laptop via serial.

"Huh? I thought it could be set via the screen"

"Yes, but via computer I have access to more settings "

And I didn't pay attention to this sentence until now.

I had to remove electricity for a couple hours to install some Shelly relays in the light switches, when I was done the alarm said "RTC error, set time again".

Ah yes, after all those years the battery is dead = dead RTC. It's ok, I take the user manual and see how to change the time, but the menu doesn't show that. Huh? How? The manual states also that it could update via NTP if internet is available or via GSM cell info if no internet is available. Perfect! So I wait for one day and... nothing. Wait a couple more... nothing.

I finally call support: they tell me that if the menu is missing, it's because the tech used their special software over serial to hide time setting and NTP, for "security", as an attacker could disable the alarm by doing a MITM over the NTP and change the time to daytime and get the alarm disable by itself with the timer

Conclusion : I have to pay 50-100 euro to someone come to my house to personally do something as trivial as just change the time

One week ago i got a 32gb ipad. Excited for the new toy, I took hundreds of stupid photos with that 720p front webcam using photobooth, downloaded them from icloud, deleted them, and now they're in the trash.

Now the ipad is complaining it's full memory. Full memory? What? Already? I barely used it. I investigated the issue and saw that photos are taking 4gb.

4gb? How? Saw on icloud there's not that usage on photos:

The pics i took were 720p images, when i downloaded them from icloud they were like 50mb in total

Uncompressed lossless caches of old photos? How to fix this?

New Windows 11 release comes with a new Windows 11 bug: middle click on explorer icon on taskbar doesn't open a new window anymore.

This taskbar shit seems so hard to do for microsoft, they took 3 years to fix the combined icons bug

same for "reopen explorer windows at login" which was broken for more than one year

If all their 100k devs are unable to fix it, why don't they open source it and rely on some amateur hobbyist to fix it for free in their spare time?

Now I understand why at each windows 11 update, they introduce more bugs than ever

Got an email that says "please pay $33 + shipping to get a t-shirt with our ad on it"

There's people that would actually pay for something like this? This stuff is usually give away for free at conferences and then used as a sleeping dress, no?

They say they're a viable alternative to starlink and ready to start - not sure how much true is that

I read a musk fan saying "but their terminals aren't made in a NATO country" - isn't the same for starlink?

At work I got Windows 11 24H2. It has a bug, known from september 2024, that resizes all the windows in a tiny corner.

Basically, when the screen shuts off for standby, Windows thinks the resolution now is no more 3840x2160 but 640x480. EVERYTHING gets resized in the top left corner at 640x480 and it's ULTRA INFURIATING

Because microsoft took 3 years to fix the taskbar and 4 years to fix the "restore explorer windows at boot" checkbox, I'm not confident that they will fix this issue in this decade, and I must find a solution, or i will become crazy.

Workarounds tried:

• using fancywm - every time i wake up screen i need to wait 10 seconds to see all the windows rearranging and resizing and it's still infuriating.
• disabling monitor timeout and replacing it with a screensaver - I'm at work and group policy mandate monitor timeout at 5 minutes
• updating the AMD drivers
• uninstalling 24H2 - the admin removed the uninstall files, i can't revert to previous version *uninstalling powertoys in the chance if it was caused by fancyzones
• changing UI scale from 150% to 100%

What I did not try:

• replace the displayport cable with a hdmi one (but it should have only 30hz refresh rate in that case)
• use a dummy video adapter
• use a lower resolution
• wipe and reinstall everything, i have too many stuff with too many settings

This is awesome! For only $450 you can get a machine that can automatically swap battery packs placed on bulky $120 phone cases.

You don't need to plug a cable in your phone anymore, your over engineered machine can swap battery packs for you

I never imagined that I would live this long to see the future