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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Actively ignoring one now. I have a dying ssd that’s been loosing sectors. Everything important is backed up and Its faster than the replacement hdd would be. Waiting for a good deal on a 2 tb nvme ssd
Good to know I wasn’t the only one taking such risks.
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
A Fairphone 4. Got it at launch and it’s a terribly buggy mess.
Describing all the issues would make a huge wall of text.
The sad part is that the hardware is ok. But they don’t seem to have any software QA at all.
My goal was to carry it until 2027, when replacable batteries will become standard, but since I can’t even use the phone for calling, I am trying to at least carry it until the Galaxy S55 launches.
Have you considered using something like LineageOS?
Spotify would just pause. No reason, no warning. It would just pause. So I’d pull my phone out, unpause it, then it would pause again.
I think it’s been fixed now? Maybe? Hard to tell, because it happened randomly.
This kept happening to me. Then, I realized my account was compromised. Someone in China was also using it to listen to music. It kept pausing every time they started playing a song.
So every time I give up and stick with my silence I’m letting some jackass in China win?
I don’t know why your Spotify was pausing! Just thought I’d share my experience, in case it helped you or someone else researching this in the future.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been saved by finding a 2 year old forum post with the same issue that I was having.
Man you’d think they’d put in some kind of “Music started on X device so we’re stopping it here” message for your scenario instead of making you sleuth it out like Mulder and Scully
My old note 9 stopped charging via the USB port. Ended up having to get a wireless charging dock. Worked so well that I still use it instead of wired charging.
Calculator battery housing had a missing screw. Would have to squeeze it there for it to work. Did that for about a year.
Eventually broke entirely. So I soldered in two CR2032 cell holders and glued them to the back. Am now the proud owner of a Casio fx-4000p with an external battery. I made it rechargeable for a while, but quiescent current draw was too high and it was impractical.
I made a living pretty much just doing math for a short while. It served me very well. I refuse to get a new calculator.
Another time my DVD drive had difficulty opening. I’d have to press the eject button a lot of times before it worked, just did that for like 3 months. Eventually it failed entirely, so I took it apart, removed the magnet that holds the drive shut, cooked it on the gas stove to weaken it, and put it back in. Worked for another 6 months. Was glad I paid attention that day in Physics class.
for 5 years my PC would only turn on at a 45degree angle. It would work fine while upright or sideways after turning it on, but to initially start it up it needed to be tilted. I tried reseating everything many many times, I had even replaced a pretty large number of components over that time. Then I moved and when I plopped down the PC a screw popped out of the PSU. problem solved, and I’m very glad it didn’t explode.
I had a cellphone around 2004 or so, where sometimes the display would suddenly become mirrored. After a while it would also turn upside down. On the really bad days it would be both. Everything else worked fine, so I kept using it, but writing and reading SMS was a pain.