Your personal tech fuck ups - This can't possiblly go wrong.

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I remember when I was a tiny shit kid I accidentally deleted a bunch of shit off our Window 3.1 PC that was important and my parents had to call some dude to do data recovery.

I genuinely can't really remember any other serious tech fails I may have had. More of them in the garage/shop.
 
One day back in college, I had Manjaro on my laptop and wanted to change from Gnome to KDE. I hated Gnome a ton so I, naively, uninstalled Gnome and it's dependencies, thinking it'd just get rid of the gnome dedicated applications.
It did not. It got rid of network manager too. And pretty much everything that ran the OS. Whoops.
 
Age 12, had a laptop with Win XP and CentOS dualbooted, I got paranoid bringing my laptop to school, put a HDD password on it and forgot it the next day. My computer was and is still a brick to this day.
 
Some 10 years ago I bent over a counter to reach something while having a freshly bought tablet in my pocket. It snapped in half.
 
Some 5 years ago I won a new HP laptop keyboard on a E Bay auction for little over $1 + international shipping from United Kingdom, I didn't realize that the layout of some keys would be different.
 
I'm using an old backup GUI for rsync. Yesterday I realized that 1GB of swap will not cut it if I want to play with "AI". Now the thing is, I'm running ZFS on root. And from what I've read i a nice book, COW doesn't like having swap files, and I can't shrink "partition".

Now here's a thing, ZFS has ability to send and receive datasets, and after this fuckup I will train myself how to do it in VM.

The problem was between keyboard and chair, as expected. I was making backups to a nice DAS I got myself for Christmas, laoded with x6 4TB drives in RaidZ2 pool (I got those for dirt cheap from some old datecenter pull). Now software I used is called LuckyBackup, it has lots of options, one of them was to skip cache files. I assumed that it will skip stuff in ~/.cache and cache directories in /var.
Nope.
So when I recreated my root dataset with desired size, leaving 32GB of swap (just in case, I have 64GB of RAM) I tried to boot, nope. Well, that one was on me, I changed partlabel for ZFS partition, so I rebuilt kernel image and updated zpool cache. Reboot.

Nope, logind isn't happy, so i plugged in my phone with USB tethering, fuck remembering how to connect to wireless via CLI.
Running pacman-fix-permissions script from AUR, yep it's fucked, loads of missing files in various cache directories in /usr, permissions mismatch, plus about 10 file conflicts.
After I fixed pacman files conflicts, pacman-fix-permissions resolved all issues.

Lessons learned, read documentation, duh. Also I should probably read about "zfs send" and "zfs receive commands".

TLDR. Don't be retarded like me. My system is back and running and I can play with AI without running out of memory, for now.
 
Shattered the phone screen to death when I was at the dacha. There was no better option than to ask a friend who was going to visit me the next day to buy a replacement and use an upside down hot pan as a heating table to remove the remnants of the old screen.
Everything went perfectly, except the new screen was either incompatible with my revision or was just counterfeit, it ended up being unresponsive, lol.
 
Cooked an Atari Flashback by plugging in a power brick that had much higher specs than what the console was rated for. I had incorrectly assumed that because the end connecting into the console fit, I was in the clear and I could use it. I wasn't. Later found the actual power supply it was intended for in a box of other kinds of cables. That day, I learned to be more careful about what power bricks to use and to actually read the voltage ratings on them.
 
Fried the small circuit board that controlled my chassis fan speed a while back. The molex cable that powered this little fan hub on the side of the case was a complete heap of shit, all molex cables are a sin against God but this ones pins would pop out of the housing whenever it was plugged in and it was very inconsistent as to when it would actually decide to power anything plugged into the hub. I was trying to get the case fans spinning by switching the PC off, readjusting the pins then switching it all back on, rinse and repeat. Switched it on at one point, there's a small pop then smoke starts coming out the small control bay at the front of the case. Honestly very lucky nothing more serious got overloaded, ended up removing it along with the fan hub and plugging all the case fans directly into my motherboard. Never dealing with fan hubs that have molex cables again, it's akin to torture.
 
I just got done making a fuckup. I have never soldered anything and got talked into resoldering some wires on a old dc motor. Picrel is the result of my VERY SUCCESSFUL gender reassignment surgery performed on this nigga.
1000001844.jpg
 
Few years ago I was changing graphics cards and getting rid of the old driver. I saw the AMD one to delete and the Intel integrated graphics driver, I thought "Well, better not do anything to that one". Within the next nanosecond I thought "I wonder what would happen if I disabled it" followed immediately by the screen going black. I out loud said to myself "What the fuck did you think was gonna happen!", thankfully a reboot sorted it but honestly, what was I thinking.
 
NoraKozlowski_*>f7U said:
Age 12, had a laptop with Win XP and CentOS dualbooted, I got paranoid bringing my laptop to school, put a HDD password on it and forgot it the next day. My computer was and is still a brick to this day.
Click to expand...
I did this with a laptop of mine from a few years ago. Tried nearly 100 passwords until calling Dell support, spending 3 hours proving to them I was the owner of the device, then them issuing a key that's supposed to overwrite the password (glowie backdoor technology) and even that failed.

Ended up waking up in the middle of the night with the correct password and unlocked it lol.
 
Nothing crazy, but when I was a kid, I didn't know the difference between a laptop membrane keyboard and a mechanical keyboard. I wanted to clean the laptop one and ripped off some keys... only to discover they're not detachable.

When I was a little older I got into linux. I still don't know what I did, but the kernel panic screen greeted me very fast. Multiple times.
 
Bowman Dan said:
Few years ago I was changing graphics cards and getting rid of the old driver. I saw the AMD one to delete and the Intel integrated graphics driver, I thought "Well, better not do anything to that one". Within the next nanosecond I thought "I wonder what would happen if I disabled it" followed immediately by the screen going black. I out loud said to myself "What the fuck did you think was gonna happen!", thankfully a reboot sorted it but honestly, what was I thinking.
Click to expand...
A while back I had a (mostly) headless server that I would only interact with remotely, but it did have a keyboard and monitor. The keyboard was needed because the drives used whole disk encryption, so you needed to type in a password to unlock the machine during boot. Well, along the way I needed the keyboard for something else, so I unplugged it from the server and never reconnected it. Then one day I did a system update (Linux), which did a kernel update. That particular machine was configured to only include "necessary drivers", so only drivers for the specific hardware attached to the machine. See where this is going? Since there was no keyboard attached, the kernel update didn't bother to include a keyboard driver. When I rebooted, it was pretty tough to type in the encryption password without a keyboard! And, of course, you can't connect via SSH or something until you've booted. Thank St Terry I had a Live disk and lots of free time to fix that.
 
As a kid I more than once accidentally deleted save files of complete playthroughs from consoles. Not all of those consoles may or may not have been mine.



Recently I was trying to force an unsustainable situation with libraries in my Artix install:

cd /lib
rm * thing.so

Note the space after *.

I had a very recent backup so no problem, but it was 10 minutes I could've spent doing something else. I also just gave on what I was trying to do so some good came out of it.
 
NoraKozlowski_*>f7U said:
Age 12, had a laptop with Win XP and CentOS dualbooted, I got paranoid bringing my laptop to school, put a HDD password on it and forgot it the next day. My computer was and is still a brick to this day.
Click to expand...
What's autistic about it? There are real retards who will sneak peek into someone's laptop if they can. If you can always have a password on your phone and laptop, even if it's weak shit like "1234567890".

There are tools to unfuck your laptop.
 
I was just applying new thermal paste to my laptop CPU when I knocked over the uncapped bottle of isopropyl alcohol I was using to clean off the old stuff. This caused about a quarter of the bottle to spill all across the motherboard (and the SSD, and the battery...)

I blotted it up with coffee filters and let it air out. It booted fine, although the exhaust reeks of rubbing alcohol.
 
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