Wasted entire evening trying to get the new version of Flik Pay working unsuccessfully. Maybe it's time to go back to analog ways.

Perhaps Android modding is really dead now. Just another walled garden.

Replaced the old Crucial MX300 750GB SSD with Samsung 870 EVO 4TB SSD on my "modern" system (it's over 11 years old now) and installed Linux Mint as my daily driver. I switched to Linux a year ago and chose Kubuntu after some testing around back then, I liked KDE more than GNOME.

But now that Win10 support is getting dropped I need to replace it with something on my mothers laptop. It does support Win11 but I ain't touching that, I'm done with modern Windows as daily driver. I just don't trust Win11 or Microsoft in general anymore, so Linux it is.

While I've gotten fairly comfortable with Linux during the past year I'm still pretty new to it, so I decided to use the same distro on my own system and on my mothers laptop to make things easier for me if/when I need to act as phone support. I could have picked Kubuntu again but I had some issues with it and also the current long support release of Linux Mint is good for two years more than Kubuntu, so I went with Mint.

So far so good. Honestly I'm positively surprised all in all, my only gripes with it are just visual. Still not the biggest fan of how it looks, the start menu isn't entirely to my liking and the system settings pages make me feel like I'm using android on my desktop which isn't great but I can live with such minor issues.

Especially since everything else seems to work just fine. Even found a good text editor called Geany that lets you turn off remembering cursor position after closing files. That annoyed me to no end on Kubuntu with Kate, text files opened constantly all over the place. Doesn't seem like there's a text editor that is on par with Notepad++ unfortunately. Oh well, good enough.

Grub boot menu is also nice, letting me boot to Win7 from there. This stupid cheapo motherboard doesn't have shortcut key for boot override, you need to go through BIOS for that.

I can't figure out why Visual Studio Code's syntax highlighting in JavaScript is broken on my home PC. At work, it normally highlights everything, fresh install. Pretty sure it worked at home when I messed with XUL version of uBlock Origin months ago, now it only highlights common reserved words and strings, doesn't highlight variable names. The amount of settings is insane.

I've been messing with web app that I deal with at work, I thought it would be cool to be able to use USB card reader from the web browser. The reader makes virtual COM port (serial over USB), so at least it's possible with Chromium based browsers that have Web Serial API. As the exercise for myself, I got the basics to work, still need to handle some aspect of the GUI if reader is unplugged. If I got it where I want, I'll ask if they'd be interested in merging the feature.

Why is programming so hard? Takes me good while to get couple of lines of code right. Even the easiest part, code for reading the hex string from the reader and extracting card number from it looked ugly at first.

I'm not employed as programmer there, but if that place isn't disorganized as hell with its management living in some fantasy land... Not only there are always bugs when it comes to basics, but they're working on something entirely new not related to the main "bread and butter" of the company while features that customers have been asking for years still haven't been implemented. Couple of years back, the big longtime client went somewhere else. They didn't even flinch.

I've encountered bunch of bugs working there that I'd fix myself if I had access to code repository. And it wouldn't take months!

UCyborg wrote on 2025-07-19, 06:06:

Why is programming so hard? Takes me good while to get couple of lines of code right. Even the easiest part, code for reading the hex string from the reader and extracting card number from it looked ugly at first.

when you do programming irregularly, and swap development tools and languages often, there is a kind of 'remembering how to' barrier that makes things difficult. if you stay with one toolset for a long time, and use daily, it starts to become easy. you build an 'experience library' of know-how in terms of the task and implementing the steps, but it slowly slips away if not maintained.

One thing i noticed - lots of devs and others now use LLMs for code - if its used for handling very specific tasks i'm sometimes amazed by how good it is - but then it is really the same as you reading hundreds of manuals and resources and then all relevant forum posts over the last 30 years, remembering everything that seems important and then synthesising a probable solution from all of that without typing..! For tackling things lots of people have done before its impressive.

If used to generate many disparate solutions and then gluing them together though, you end up with a repetitive, messy and inefficient application often with subtle bugs

anyway, you might find a use for it in narrow tasks

While there are differences with tools / languages, you still have to figure out the logic to make it work. It's not something I could do every day I think. And it takes so much code before anything interesting happens!

I fixed Visual Studio Code by deleting %AppData%\Code folder.

gerry wrote on 2025-07-21, 13:09:

when you do programming irregularly, and swap development tools and languages often, there is a kind of 'remembering how to' barrier that makes things difficult. if you stay with one toolset for a long time, and use daily, it starts to become easy. you build an 'experience library' of know-how in terms of the task and implementing the steps, but it slowly slips away if not maintained.

It still seems like you still spend more time debugging than actually writing code, even if you do it every day.

Now I'm being reminded of work again. I don't do any programming, but I make enough FPGA boards to get to know the firmware department well.

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-07-23, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

LoStSOul wrote on 2025-07-23, 22:05:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-07-23, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

Thanks.

I know there's a tool for tl866. That's why i mentioned that i still do prefer that XGPro software.
What's the graphics setup in vmware for your setup? I have not seen any non-passthrough VM setup where the latency between mouse movement and response on display is so low that i can forget i'm in the vm.
I've read from quite many places that people recommend OnlyOffice. I currently have the preinstalled LibreOffice. I would be fine with that, too. But MS Office's integration with OneDrive syncing is something that is hard to beat. (Closest experience is actually Microsoft's own web-based office applications!)

I'm waiting for full official Debian 13 release and I may then try to jump over. 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-07-23, 22:11:

Thanks. […]
Show full quote

LoStSOul wrote on 2025-07-23, 22:05:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-07-23, 21:49:

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE. […]
Show full quote

I'm learning to become friends with linux. Currently I'm on Fedora 42 KDE.

It is my lab computer, and that means i often get some weird hardware that may have only windows software to use it. So i definitely need Windows with some sort of passthrough capability by the VM setup.
During my experimentation i came to a conclusion that i can not tolerate the lagginess of mouse+display in VM. I need something better.
As a result, i was able to set up Windows 10 VM with all my usb controllers, network, sound and graphics card directly passed through to the VM. And while there were lots of problems to get it running, i now have a (hopefully) stable and non-breaking solution to quickly jump into Windows environment.

Currently i see the following usages for my Windows VM:
* Beforemention weird hardware. I actually kinda like XGPro software for programming chips with my TL866II Plus. And i couldn't get that software to work through wine on Fedora. (Maybe there's more luck with Debian-based systems)
* Onedrive. Linux has "Onedriver" software, that mounts onedrive as network drive. But all activity is happening directly on the wire - it's damn slow to work with. I would like to have something like that with "large cache", so everyday activities would be more fluent.
* If we are already here, there are some uses of MS office.
* Until i get fully friends with rider/vscode, i can still jump to Windows and use Visual Studio

Love it!

I have debian on main pc and use VM when needed to use windows app (winxp, win7,win10..), this computer are ryzen 7 1800x, 64gb ram using vmware workstation and VMs are on SSD (important!! helps a lot). I use xgpro on win7 virtual, but there are a tool for linux to use tl866 ( https://github.com/ppsilv/minipro )

Office, you can use ONLYOFFICE that looks like a clone from microsoft office

Thanks.

I know there's a tool for tl866. That's why i mentioned that i still do prefer that XGPro software.
What's the graphics setup in vmware for your setup? I have not seen any non-passthrough VM setup where the latency between mouse movement and response on display is so low that i can forget i'm in the vm.
I've read from quite many places that people recommend OnlyOffice. I currently have the preinstalled LibreOffice. I would be fine with that, too. But MS Office's integration with OneDrive syncing is something that is hard to beat. (Closest experience is actually Microsoft's own web-based office applications!)

I'm waiting for full official Debian 13 release and I may then try to jump over. 😀

I have installed vmware tools on guest, enabled 3d hardware aceleration, enable virtualization engine VT-x or AMD-V
On vmware->edit->preferences-> memory, i choose "fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM"

lti wrote on 2025-07-23, 02:37:

gerry wrote on 2025-07-21, 13:09:

when you do programming irregularly, and swap development tools and languages often, there is a kind of 'remembering how to' barrier that makes things difficult. if you stay with one toolset for a long time, and use daily, it starts to become easy. you build an 'experience library' of know-how in terms of the task and implementing the steps, but it slowly slips away if not maintained.

It still seems like you still spend more time debugging than actually writing code, even if you do it every day.

Now I'm being reminded of work again. I don't do any programming, but I make enough FPGA boards to get to know the firmware department well.

Dealing with bugs and staring at the code for hours with nothing to show for it. Is it still better than dealing with idiots and annoying people? I don't really know.

I came across a funny bug at the (bit special) customer that probably no one else will see. The software deals with worktime records, the customer used crazy long description for the type of record. Now all plain strings in the database are defined with length of 255 chars. Customer couldn't change the type of record, the software errored out when he tried. It was logged that SQL server refused to insert the record because it would be truncated.

Turned out it failed tried writing a record about the change that was made. Type description was combined with the code and that together exceeded 255 chars. So basically trying to combine two fields, both with potential max length 255 in a single field (again 255), and add one char for space. In real life, code will contain only few chars and description will contain few words.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-07-28, 17:04:

Dealing with bugs and staring at the code for hours with nothing to show for it. Is it still better than dealing with idiots and annoying people? I don't really know.

You're still working with idiots, but now they're in upper management. I had a health scare after hearing the VP in one of those all-employee meetings last spring.

I tried to take a few days off, but nothing really sounded interesting, especially with the extreme heat that is now normal (and even the most extreme climate change activists deny how much temperatures have actually increased). Then I saw a weird bug at work (the kind that makes even less sense as you keep testing and leads you to some ridiculous potential causes), and I want to see what happens.

Started a project to remote mount a rad in the basement between the floor jousts. I bought a alpha cool 1080mm rad, it will be a tight fit and I may have to mount it under the joists. I also picked up some quick disconnects, some nylon braided cable sleeving to sleeve the tubes, fans, fan filters and a few other parts. I all ready have a 2 inch hole in my office going down to the basement for the coaxial cable for the modem so I got that part done already. once I get the rad I can make the mounts for it to install it in my basement ceiling.

I plan to use 2 D5 pumps, one is a old school koolance 450s, that's a older high RPM 24v d5 that runs at around 6500rpm vs the bog standard 4800~5000rpm that most modern D5s run at along with a second pump in the PC, however I may just put both pumps in the basement. I also thought about putting a second res in the basement too but IDK yet. the second res would make filling and priming the system less of a hassle but also opens it up to more points of failure/leaks.

now what to do with all the added space in my PC case, I'll be removing a pump, 2 360mms and a 480mm rad 🤣

old school gamer man wrote on 2025-07-29, 13:28:

Started a project to remote mount a rad in the basement between the floor jousts. I bought a alpha cool 1080mm rad, it will be a tight fit and I may have to mount it under the joists. I also picked up some quick disconnects, some nylon braided cable sleeving to sleeve the tubes, fans, fan filters and a few other parts. I all ready have a 2 inch hole in my office going down to the basement for the coaxial cable for the modem so I got that part done already. once I get the rad I can make the mounts for it to install it in my basement ceiling.

I plan to use 2 D5 pumps, one is a old school koolance 450s, that's a older high RPM 24v d5 that runs at around 6500rpm vs the bog standard 4800~5000rpm that most modern D5s run at along with a second pump in the PC, however I may just put both pumps in the basement. I also thought about putting a second res in the basement too but IDK yet. the second res would make filling and priming the system less of a hassle but also opens it up to more points of failure/leaks.

now what to do with all the added space in my PC case, I'll be removing a pump, 2 360mms and a 480mm rad 🤣

Sounds like a solid plan to me. I've been toying with that idea for mine and my wife's systems.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2025-07-29, 14:06:

Sounds like a solid plan to me. I've been toying with that idea for mine and my wife's systems.

it's something I been needing to do for years now, I'm renovating the house and now is the time to do it. I wanted to get the bigger 1260mm rad but its hard to find anything remotely good in a 200mm fan size and the joists in my house are a bit narrower then a up to code house. my home was over engineered and has a crap ton of joists and columns holding the house up.

Well there you go, just use a 1000 gallon tropical marine aquarium as the heatsink for a heatexchanger since your floor can take it 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-07-29, 15:50:

Well there you go, just use a 1000 gallon tropical marine aquarium as the heatsink for a heatexchanger since your floor can take it 🤣

haha I do have a lot of aquariums already, might have to tap into one. 🤣 But no this house is crazy over build, there was a tornado not to long ago and I was like what the heck happened when I went outside after words. i had no clue one ripped down my street. I was like why are all the trees down. The joists on one part of the house are 10 inches apart, 14ish under my office with bracing between the joists. It has these crazy 4x8x8 oak columns holding the house up, the roof uses trusses and not rafters. Everything is true to size lumber so even a 2x4 is bigger. You can't hear crap outside the house or in the next room the walls are so thick and its so overly insulated that I can run my AC/heat for a a hour or so and I'm good all day if not 2 days. And the crazy part if that you would never know it looking at the house form the outside as it looks like any run of the mill modern home but its actually over 100 years old.

but its not all good, can't get wifi/cell single in the house at all. I can be 20 feet form my router and have 1 bar at best. Gotta love old school plaster walls with metal lath 🤣. its also a pain to work on as just finding the material is a pain. I actually went dumpster diving the other day at someones home renovation as they had a lot of true to size wood they were tossing, saved me so much time planing down bigger cuts of wood.

I bought a 3rd graphics card from Sapphire, RX 5600XT Pulse. I alredy have 2 same model. This one was cheap and I made a windows only gaming rig.
Even this 3rd card instead of PCIe 3x16, it show 8x. Not a problem, they output the same results with usual statistical variations (all in line with general results).

I'm starting to think that something is wrong with the 2 mobos I tried them on, X370 + 3600X and B450 + 2600.
Both cpus are capable of PCIe 3 16x.

I tried multiple OSs and programs, all showing the same 8x.

Other cards show PCIe 3 16x. I am truly puzzled. Makes no difference, but on an old i5-6xxx they are reported 16x.
Old i7-3820, 16x.

Is intel beating Amd on its turf? 🤣

Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-29, 21:23:

I bought a 3rd graphics card from Sapphire, RX 5600XT Pulse. I alredy have 2 same model. This one was cheap and I made a windows […]
Show full quote

I bought a 3rd graphics card from Sapphire, RX 5600XT Pulse. I alredy have 2 same model. This one was cheap and I made a windows only gaming rig.
Even this 3rd card instead of PCIe 3x16, it show 8x. Not a problem, they output the same results with usual statistical variations (all in line with general results).

I'm starting to think that something is wrong with the 2 mobos I tried them on, X370 + 3600X and B450 + 2600.
Both cpus are capable of PCIe 3 16x.

I tried multiple OSs and programs, all showing the same 8x.

Other cards show PCIe 3 16x. I am truly puzzled. Makes no difference, but on an old i5-6xxx they are reported 16x.
Old i7-3820, 16x.

Is intel beating Amd on its turf? 🤣

Is the slot on your motherboard actually an x16 slot? A lot of times you can have a full length slot and it only have pins for 8x, 4x , or even 1x. Check the slot and see how many pins are in it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2025-07-29, 21:43:

Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-29, 21:23:

I bought a 3rd graphics card from Sapphire, RX 5600XT Pulse. I alredy have 2 same model. This one was cheap and I made a windows […]
Show full quote

I bought a 3rd graphics card from Sapphire, RX 5600XT Pulse. I alredy have 2 same model. This one was cheap and I made a windows only gaming rig.
Even this 3rd card instead of PCIe 3x16, it show 8x. Not a problem, they output the same results with usual statistical variations (all in line with general results).

I'm starting to think that something is wrong with the 2 mobos I tried them on, X370 + 3600X and B450 + 2600.
Both cpus are capable of PCIe 3 16x.

I tried multiple OSs and programs, all showing the same 8x.

Other cards show PCIe 3 16x. I am truly puzzled. Makes no difference, but on an old i5-6xxx they are reported 16x.
Old i7-3820, 16x.

Is intel beating Amd on its turf? 🤣

Is the slot on your motherboard actually an x16 slot? A lot of times you can have a full length slot and it only have pins for 8x, 4x , or even 1x. Check the slot and see how many pins are in it.

Yep, the PCIe lanes are the ones of the slots connected to the cpu.
I'm not concerned, it isn't affecting the results one bit.
IIRC a RTX 2080 isn't maxing out the bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 16x. Thus 3.0 8x is totally fine for this card (like a 2060 performance). It's 6GB GDDR6 192 bit.