Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Suicidal…

 

Looks like my work PC is goosed. I booted on Thursday morning and found the wireless mouse wasn't working.
The batteries were 6 months old, so swapped them out. Still no joy, no keyboard either even though it was illuminated.
No luck with wired substitutes either.
Windows seems intact.
I put the SSD in a test board of the same (4th) gen and it's all fine

The irony is I'm buying an 8th gen mobo combo from @David to replace my Dad's Ivy Bridge PC and be legit Win 11 ready...

I have a couple of 7th gen prebuilts in the for sale pile, so the i5 can be pressed into service while I get a longer term Win 11 ready solution.

In other news, jigsaws aren't great for cutting decking boards nicely...
I'll need to borrow a chop saw or a circular saw which I hate and fear irrationally.

But hey, it's sunny and warm out

 

I have another one of those z370m mobos and another 8th gen i5...

 

Thanks D, I'll see how I get on with the first one. It does look good.
Are those the small mATX ones that squeezed into a few larger ITX cases?

 

Yes, most of Gigabyte's DS3H mATX boards from the generation were smaller. I used one with a i9 9900 in my M1.

Even though they are z series boards, it's mainly to allow faster memory speeds than big beastie CPUs or overclocking - they have no VRM sinks at all.

 

No VRM sinks is a worry on unlocked Z...
I shan't be doing anything adventurous with that one, PS Elements will be it toughest assignment!

 

Yeah, a down-firing cooler is highly recommended.

 

Good call thanks. I have a couple of standard 115X coolers in stock and a better aftermarket one too.

 

I mainly use the DuckDuckGo browser on my iPad and, I also have Vivaldi on there, with the bookmarks synced with my PC.

 

Never tried Vivaldi, my Dad like DDG browser. I'm currently using Firefox on the iPad.

 

Being asked for help with something when the answer they need is right there in the log screenshot they’ve sent me.

I do try to have patience, it’s part of my role to help coach our junior and less experienced engineers. And I do try to guide people towards learning how to diagnose and solve problems themselves, instead of simply telling them the answer.

But my patience wears thin when the same person repeatedly asks me for help with a problem and supplies a log file that explicitly says what the problem is.

 

Changing spark plugs update. Feel like it could have gone in 'ruining my life' or 'awesome' threads each step of the way....

Removed and replaced two plugs - awesome
Realised I needed a deep 8mm socket to get the two other coil packs off - ruining
Ordered one same day delivery from Amazon - awesome
Delivery failed/lost - ruining
Got one the next day and replaced one plug - awesome
Couldn't get the last plug out because an idiot previous owner left debris in the hole and it's blocking the socket - ruining
Fashioned a tool to remove debris using a paintbrush and some sticky fly catching substance - awesome
Replaced final plug - awesome

Overall = meh

 

Cars are fun, until they're not

 

Indeed, the clutch has started slipping on the Land Rover, I reckon I can do it without removing the engine but I need to do the rear main seal at the same time and it's less clear if that is achievable :/

 

I’m disappointed, I felt it was time for Pope Dick…

 

Can't sleep, woke up about 5:15, it's not ruining because I'm back at the gym so I went and it was nice and quiet and got on all equipment I wanted, wish it was awesome for that but I'm fell asleep about 2:30

 

The same, terrible night and up about 520.

I say the same, that's where the similarities end

 

First day back after five days off. The last three days has seen five staff on the rota. Today theres me, one other full timer and a part timer on a half day.

To add insult, my manager messaged me at 9.30 to say I should be on a teams call with the area manager, when I only have one other staff member on site. He did not enjoy my response, and liked it even less when I told him he can explain my absence to the area manager since hes clearly incapable planning a ****ing staff rota.

I look forward to our inevitable heart to heart tomorrow morning.

 

On the brighter side, communion wafers will now be 12" across and covered in cheese & tomato

 

I have to rant about this, and I have to do it somewhere where people will understand why this is a problem.

Trying to fix an issue in work earlier, a process running inside a Debian container was returning a “permission denied” error when attempting to run the command “file” - that’s an actual command line program, it attempts to determine what type of content a file contains.

So I open the docker UI, go to the container, and try to “exec” the file command manually - permission denied. Ok… “file -h” - permission denied. “man file” (open the “manual”) - permission denied.

Right, time for a search engine, and where the rant comes in.

I could not find a *single* relevant hit, and no amount of quotes or boolean operators in the search string made a difference. Every single search engine I tried was utterly useless and kept showing me StackOverflow or Reddit results about “shell script file permission denied”. Out of frustration I even went to Bing - I know, I know, but that’s how pissed off I was about it.

“Oh, yeah, search engines are rubbish, you should just ask AI”, my colleagues crowed. No. Just… no. [eye-twitching intensifies]

I found the problem in the end. But only after I went down many many rabbit-holes around filesystem permissions, checking /bin or /sbin or wherever, and umpteen variations of the arcane docker command line incantations required to give me a shell terminal in the underlying base container. Turns out that the package just wasn’t installed, and - for some reason known only to wizened docker greybeards whose zen oaths of silence prevent them from speaking to you even if they deem you worthy of interaction - docker was reporting “permission denied” instead of “command not found”.

Add “apt update && apt install -y file” to the dockerfile, run a new container build… et voila! The command no longer fails.

But I wasted a good two hours or so with all the command-line hackery, because I couldn’t find a single ****ing relevant result in ANY search engine.

I knew search engines had become extremely ****, but I didn’t think they were that ****.