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.