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

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Just Some Other Guy said:
Hmm, maybe it depends on the card. All I know is pcie 2 card worked fine, and the newer card worked in a pcie 3 board.

Then again, it was quite a while ago.
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Maybe it was a power issue in that one tried to draw too much from PCI-E and that particular motherboard couldn't do it. Like Real Fakeman said, PCI-E have forwards and backwards compatibility. Nvidia's and AMD's latest graphics cards are PCI-E 4.0 and that's not so widespread yet, it is also exclusive to AMD systems for the moment. Intel doesn't have have anything supporting 4.0 and the cards work just fine.
 
DNA_JACKED said:
No, that would be FORWARD compatible.

PCIe is both forward and backward compatible, its more likely there was something wrong with the card itself or the motherboard.
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Ah, whatever. Learn something new lol. Was just some one off thing a long time ago. Haven't interacted with anything non pcie3 since then.

Parts worked separately though, I'll just chalk it up to power limitation *shrug*
 
I took my earbuds out, left them on my laptop keyboard and wandered off. Came back later on and closed the laptop absentmindedly. Crunch.

The upper-left quarter of my screen is currently useless.
 
Deadwaste said:
i tried rooting it. i dont know what i did after that to brick it however. it crashed on me at some point then got stuck in an infinite boot loop that even resetting it couldnt fix
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Had something similar recently. Found an old android phone in a gutter and after letting it dry out it miraculously worked but was password locked. Tried to fuck around and root it/flash a custom rom and it just got stuck in a boot loop. Not a big deal though as it was basically a dumpster find.

On the one hand I think the protection on modern phones is good as will discourage thieves but on the other hand if you ever forget your passcode you might be fucked.
 
Accidentally rm -rf'ed my root partition when trying to move my Linux system onto a new SSD. Tried extundelete without much luck, file hierarchy was preserved, but all their contents mixed up. Thankfully /home and other important partitions were unmounted at the time, so I moved on, changing the distro and DE, and setting up LVM snapshots to prevent further similar fuckups.

CPU fan gradually started rattling to the point where it was happened all the time when PC was powered. Bought a new cooler, started picking apart the system, and when I was trying to remove the heatsink, CPU came off with it, and I bent a few pins while trying to unglue it. Had to straighten them up wth a steel ruler, processor is still working after that. Then it turned out that both the new fan and heatsink were too big for my case, so I had to somehow jam in the door, leaving a quarter-inch diagonal gap on top.

Also ran a virus that automatically wipes the partition scheme as an 11 year old kid. I already knew about that exact type of malware, and the way it was disguised was blatantly obvious, but I still ran the program despite all of that. Well, at least it was a dedicated laptop of mine, and not a family computer.
 
Changing out a processor on a computer at work, the Intel style with the pins in the slot and the pads on the processor. Dropped the processor and bent a bunch of pins. Spent about an hour with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass carefully moving everything back into place. Computer is still running to this day, but jesus christ was I sweating when it happened.

Another work story: Installed Open WRT on a new router I was setting up. Poked around in settings and decided stock firmware worked better for us. Bricked the router switching back to stock. Ended up using some obscure method I found buried on a support forum where I had to set up a ftp server on a computer containing only the stock firmware, plug it into a specific LAN port, set a specific IP and power up the router holding the reset button.

I don't think I've fucked anything and not been able to unfuck it in my adult life when it comes to computers and electronics so I've been lucky. These are probably my two biggest fuck-ups of the last decade or so.
 
I once spent 3 hours working on a machine locally only to realize when I was done that I had been SSH'd into a completely different machine the whole time.
 
I bought an AMD card and spent the next 4-5 years dealing with AMD's shit drivers until finally upgrading to Nvidia.
 
Pulled a disk out of a RAID 1 setup in hopes to do a DD copy onto other disks and used copy disks for other servers. Turns out there where layers of linux logical drives, partitions, and other tom foolery that prevented me from doing so. So I stuck the disk back into the root server to have the server shit the bed when it was performing its restore.

Remember everyone, RAID is not a backup.
 
Some JERK said:
I once spent 3 hours working on a machine locally only to realize when I was done that I had been SSH'd into a completely different machine the whole time.
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I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I've done something like this.

Even worse is when you think you're just on normal terminal but you're actually ssh'd. I wonder if you can change the background or something to make it obvious.
 
I spilled water on my laptop 4 years ago. Didn't take the keyboard out to dry it off completely, so it lays dead in my basement now, circuits destroyed

I still think about it sometimes.
 
Rusty Crab said:
Even worse is when you think you're just on normal terminal but you're actually ssh'd. I wonder if you can change the background or something to make it obvious.
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Try e.g.

Code: 
printf '\033]0;%s - %s\a' "$PWD" "$HOSTNAME"

in .bashrc inside PROMPT_COMMAND if you use bash, with most terminal emulators in X that would set the window title to (current path) - (name of the machine). You might have to set a flag for your terminal emulator to allow the title to be set. Similar things should work with other shells.

--

In the early 90s I stuck a piece of quite expensive electronics the wrong way into an Amiga Zorro II slot. (which are not keyed, although you are supposed to stick the IC-containing side into a certain way I was tired and didn't pay attention) Magic smoke escaped almost immediately from the expansion and the Amiga refused to boot afterwards. Both parts were fixed by replacing some 74xx series logic. I was sweating quite a bit.
 
Ran rm -rf ~ instead of rm -rf * once, thus nuking my home directory instead of clearing out the current one.
I blame this key:
pic-selected-210217-0821-51.png
 
Exploded several small vintage system power supplies by feeding them AC instead of DC. Oops. A couple were old enough that I was able to replace the fried voltage regulators and fix them though. I hate barrel connectors.

Aside from that, I've had the typical install and configure a bunch of packages on the wrong machine via ssh experience several times as well as the fun one of forgetting to actually commit changes to a repository and having to manually pick changes to salvage out of 100+ different files when resetting.
 
I set a boot password via the BIOS on the family computer when I was maybe 8ish.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I read the description, set the password, reset the PC and then realised I didn't commit the password to memory and couldn't remember it 20 seconds or so later. I just turned off the computer and let my parents find out.

I denied everything to my parents and managed to get out of punishment, as I doubt they know you can set a boot password even now. Maybe they took it to get fixed and a tech explained, but I can't remember.
 
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