I did one of these threads several months ago, when the site was new, and thought now was a good time to do another.
Message me if you
- Want to try installing Linux for the first time
- Want to try Linux but don't want to install it
- Have some Linux-related problem you want another pair of eyeballs on
- Want to learn a programming language
- Want to build a computer
- Want tutoring in any of the above
- Need help with any old technical problem
(also play Arma with me)
I'm saving this post for the next time I have some kind of tech problem that brings me to the verge of tears. Prepare yourself!
Oh gosh i really want to learn how to code anything someday, my father wants ne to do it as well, but i never bother starting,,,
Look up thenewboston on youtube, he has a lot of good entry-level tutorials
A month ago, I knocked my computer over while playing beat saber, and now one of my hhds won't work. I've opened the case up and I've verified that the power and sata cable are still attached and everything looks ok.
The biggest problem is that my computer is still trying to find the drive, and it thinks programs are still installed that were on that drive. Is there anyway to recover the drive? Or if I have to replace it, how do I get the pc to recognize that old drive is gone so I can reinstall the programs that were on the old drive? Right now I can't reinstall until I uninstall the programs, but I can't because they aren't there to uninstall.
I'm 100% fine if I can't save the drive and have to replace it, but how do I get the pc to stop thinking stuff is installed so I can redownload and install them?
I can't tell you whether the drive is recoverable or not with no other information. It's possible it responds to SATA commands but cannot read from sectors. It's possible that it's mostly fine but there are some bad sectors that prevent the filesystem from being recognised. It's possible the platters are completely destroyed.
If there's data you care about, and if the drive is actually bad, I don't know of a better tool to recover drives than ddrescue, which works at a low level and will try its best to read every byte it can off a failing drive. It's also very slow, and you'll require a space big enough to put the data from the failing drive.
As for the software side, if you're using Windows, I can't really help you. I haven't used Windows in a decade and don't really know how it works.
Seconding DDRescue from a Linux LiveCD, preferably with an external USB hard drive to contain the backup image. Trying to read the drive under Windows is a great way to trash what's left of it, because Windows will keep thrashing on those bad sectors.
Regarding Windows-based tools, Spinrite, the de facto Windows drive recovery, works by retrying a failed sector over and over and over again before moving on -- as in, it doesn't skip and return to failed sectors like DDRescue does. As a result, it tends to destroy a failing/damaged drive before it even recovers all of the salvageable data. Don't use Spinrite. Spinrite is terrible. Unless you have an old Maxtor DiamondMax ATA/100 with noisy bearings and you're trying to piss off the neighbors. It's pretty good for that. But not data recovery.
In the start tray, search for "Disk Management" and you'll get to the partition controller. Here you can remove/uninstall the disc. You'll still wind up with broken shortcuts however.
I'm fine with broken shortcuts. The biggest problem I was having is I couldn't redownload and reinstall epic to snag those sweet free games. This fixed it, so now I don't get the "application already installed" bs. I'll work on seeing if I can recover the drive now.
how come the 4gb ram do the of when 8gb ram not the poor?🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔
First, thank you for taking the time to do the original thread. Second, I applied but never got a response, comrade. I want to learn programming as i'm a DACA recipient in USA and can't go to school.
Hi,
By 'applied' do you mean that you messaged me or posted a comment? I double checked my message history and the original post, and I couldn't find your name. It's possible it never made it through to the site.
I'd be more than happy to teach you whatever I can. I can message you and schedule some sessions if you'd like.
Bloodshot, thank you for responding back. I think it was via google docs or maybe im not remembering it right but i did post on the thread too where you did a follow up about the original post. If its ok and you have time I can do it based on when its convenient for you. I'm just laying low. Please let me know and thank you again for even offering to help me.
Hey
I never used Google docs, or made a follow up post. I think there was a Chapo Community IT thread that never materialised. I wasn't involved with that.
I'll message you about details w.r.t tutoring.
I'd probably scrub that extra detail from this comment, I wouldn't want it getting seen or getting associated with your real person
I'm sorry about my mistake and will correct it. Thank you for willing to help me and the community
Chapo Community IT thread that never materialised. I wasn’t involved with that.
I'm sorry for confusing you with someone else
Sorry if this is too technical.
lol this is my wheelhouse.
chmod, as well as a lot of other commands, support recursively operating on a path themselves;chmod -R.More generally, I'd recommend using
find -exec(man find), which you can pass flags to filter what you want (e.g.-type ffor only files).While most commands expect a list of files to operate on as their arguments and not in stdin,
xargstransforms lines from stdin to command line arguments.In simple cases, you can use a shell for loop as follows:
for file in directory/* ; do echo "$file" do_something "$file" doneI wouldn't recommend ever using
lsin scripts; it's made to output human-readable text and not something that a script can reliably parse (think of edge cases like a filename with embedded newlines).
you got any advice on how to pretend to give a shit when you're looking for a job?
smile and nod, laugh at dumb jokes
being an easy person to be around is way more valuable than 5 years of experience with "backend technologies"
heh yeah, I think I used to be able to do that pretty well, but then I transitioned and boom, I get fewer responses from applications than I used to get as cold-emails.
That's always the fucking thing, isn't it, doesn't matter how good you are at whatever fucking technical thing, or how great of a person you are to work with if some 27 year old bay area white guy "doesn't feel like you'd be a good fit" for some unshared reason he's never bothered to interrogate, and you never fucking know because they're not required to tell you why you didn't get a response, and if they told you they aren't required to be honest, and if they were they wouldn't even be conscious of it anyway. So you just feel gaslit by every fucking company because "You're skills aren't really in-line with the requirements of this role" is not fucking true and you know it.
Be white, be cis, be het, get lucky, I guess.
Yeah, that whole part of it just makes me want to like get myself involved in screening/hiring processes for a big ol company somehow just so I can do the exact opposite but based on the recent tweet thread from the google diversity director that doesn't seem like their highest priority.....
lmao not really. "Good" jobs won't give a shit if you give a shit, it'll be a professional arrangement. But it's a crapshoot as to whether you're going to get one of those, or even get to the interview stage.
I've noped out early in the application process because I decided I'd have to be mostly brainworm in order to work there.
Depending on the place, a completely different person will be deciding whether to pass you on to the interview process than the people actually interviewing you. I.e. screened by HR/recruitment, and interviewed by potential coworkers. Focus on keywords with HR, in your cover letter, resume, and then with fellow engineers you can mostly be chill and actually talk about technology. HR/recruitment will be looking to check off all the boxes for knowing each and every little technology they use, so try and tune that stuff to the listing, but be honest when talking to fellow engineers, as they can draw a distinction between "knowing Javascript" (made a webpage in college) and knowing Javascript.
You probably know all that though, and I can't really offer too much to help. It just sucks.
Oh, and if a company wants you to performatively care about the thing they're making, you can usually pivot into being excited about the technologies used to make it, which can be more sincere.
Since you don't give a shit about their shitty Twitter clone, instead say you're really fascinated by the challenges of maintaining such a large, distributed set of services, and you'd love the chance to work with a company pushing the boundaries of scale. Or whatever.
Yeah, that's basically as close as I can ever get to the HR people's platonic ideal of a worker. It does help being legitimately interested in how literally anything gets done but that only ever works with the engineers, for the HR people I just feel like they can hear that I'm lying when I say I'm a self starter or how I looooove being part of a 24/7 on call rotation.
You can often reframe it in terms of what value you were able to provide during your previous positions, which is what HR wants to hear anyway.
Instead of saying "I love being on call 24/7!" say "Via all-hours alterting and rapid incident response, I was able to solve production-critical issues within thirty minutes or less, allowing us to maintain a xx% uptime". You may have hated doing it but it gets you in the door so...
wtf this is no help. why couldn't you just fix capitalism for me? giving you 1 star on the customer satisfaction survey 😤
ext4 and other Linux-native filesystems support extended file metadata, where you can put that information right in the file. I think KDE's Dolphin file browser has support for tags using these.
What you're essentially asking for, though, is how to make a database that correlates those assets with some metadata.
One solution is to use the filesystem as a "poor man's" database, like you suggest. I would recommend using symlinks for this: instead of copying the files, you just reference them in multiple locations. This has the advantage of all your tools supporting it out of the box, since they're just regular files on the filesystem
Another is to use a text document of some format, essentially a spreadsheet, that matches metadata with file path.
You could use SQL with a real database. This is a heavyweight and very powerful tool, might be overkill.
Finally, there are probably third party tools geared towards this already. Think of something like itunes but more general. You'd probably be able to find them by searching for "Music tagger" or "photograph tagger".
Is python a good first pick if I primarily want ro tinker with electronics? I was thinking about trying to do the "automate the boring stuff" thing
Sure, lots of libraries for sensors, controllers, etc. are available in Python. I'd say it's a great first pick.
Guess it depends on what you're using. If you're using Pis or similar SoCs, and interfacing via GPIO, you can stick to high level.
I'm over here trying to understand how to build a google sheets web app with a shared drive like -> :(
Never used sheets before, can try to help if you're having a specific problem
I figured it out. I used some code from this project: https://spreadapi.com/ and figured out the quirks with google web apps. A big one was kinda dumb, you have to publish as a "New" version if you want you updated code to run, you can't just save your script in their web app.
I haven't figured out the shared drive, but basically I think it'll end up being the shared sheet pointing to a sheet on my personal company drive.
Anyway now I have sort of a REST api working with google sheets, which is very limited but good for non-techies who mostly just use spread sheets to format and sanitize a bunch of columns and rows to show to the boss.
Can you go fix the nixos-unstable branch in hydra? It's been broken for two weeks and I'm too lazy to either fix it myself or use my local nixpkgs workaround for all my installed programs.nvm someone fixed it last night. Fuck yeahOn a serious note, props for this. More leftist techies should be mentoring noobs
So I haven't touched Linux in well over 5 years when I played around with Ubuntu a bit im HS. What's the go to distro/top ones nowadays? And is it better to ease back in by dual booting before going whole hog?
I've worked with Linux professionally for years, and here's a secret: distro doesn't matter all that much, especially if you're just a desktop user. Since they're packaging mostly the same software differently, you can just pick which one you'd like.
- Debian is a community distribution with actual democracy behind it
- Red Hat distros have corporate support
- Arch Linux is very rolling release
- Ubuntu is Ubuntu
- Gentoo compiles stuff from source, which appeals to some people
etc.
As for dual booting, if you want to keep using Windows or whatever for anything, there's no real reason you ever have to stop dual booting. You can keep it there if you need it. Some people remove it because they truly don't need it, some people remove it because they like to commit and if they don't they'll never learn Linux, and a lot of people just have Windows there indefinitely.
A note on Debian since that's what I use: Debian, when you install it, is entirely free software. If you want to download non-free things (like NVIDIA drivers, wifi drivers) you have to enable that and then install them. If Debian runs slow but Ubuntu is fast, it's probably the graphics drivers, as Ubuntu gets most of its packages from Debian.
I actually switched to a ssd boot/hdd storage dual drive setup this year, and the hdd is 1tb so if I wanted to I could at least experiment on the hdd and keep them separated. Thanks for the tip. Mentioning boot loader corruption has brought up flashbacks from my first attempts with everything. Desperately trying to get a rig I built out of some new parts in an old pc to run a dual boot taught me more about computers than just about anything else lol.
only dual boot if you have a second ssd IMO
or a spinning drive (HDD) for those of us that aren't living in the future
I dual booted my most recent build and its been updating fine, the main issue is that by default the installer does clobber your boot partition or something so IIRC you have to install windows on a partition first and then install linux and then rewrite the windows bootloader with GRUB and your linux install. but it's not that bad to get both working together on the same ssd.
Even with a second ssd windows sometimes still overwrites the bootloader after an update. Easy enough to fix, but still annoying.
I want to learn how to program in Swift (more specifically, I keep trying to figure out how to wrap an ios app around certain website or website content and how would that work). I have a very basic understanding of programming and python more specifcally.
Sure. I don't have any knowledge about the Apple toolchain, but I'd be happy to give you a call & collaborate if you need it
Do you have experience with hardware? I tried soldering for the first time not too long ago, but it was a kit, so I wasn't doing any of the decision making. What kinda projects would you recommend? Also, I'd love to build a PC someday, but it will be quite a while until I have the money; I program professionally and want to start getting into more computationally expensive problems, so I feel like I need to save for a good one.
Not really much experience with electronics/soldering, aside from like watching Ben Eater, sorry. Have a friend I could bug, but that's all.
Someone else DM'd me for tips on PC building, and I could paste my response here if that'd be useful.
