On my old phone I had an issue with the proximity sensor and front facing camera. This led me to holding my phone backwards to take photos and being unable to hang up phone calls.
I think I put up with this for a year and a half.
I did end up figuring out the issue with the proximity sensor but opening up my phone to reconnect the camera module was too much effort for me.
I used an Ubuntu Phone as my daily for about 6 months.
Quite bad. This was over 10 years ago so the details are muddy… It was on BQ hardware and the first weeks it couldn’t even work outside on GSM or 3G (or whatever was at the time). It was clearly developed and tested solely on Wifi. Using cellular connection make it fall apart and constantly hang.
Then it never was able to get WhatsApp working. Everyone uses WhatsApp, and had to get by using old SMS or whoever I got to trick to install the then unknown Telegram.
Eventually got tired and got back to an Android phone. An Alcatel if I recall correctly.
After some time, BQ offered a way to revert the hardware back to its Android version, did that and had a backup for many years.
It was a very messy and buggy launch, but being on the bleeding edge, it’s expected. If they had offered a WhatsApp app I would have hung on way longer, it was the only deal breaker.
I knew a woman who used an iPhone 6 up until I think 2022.
Her secret was she never did updates. And lo and behold, the phone kept working fine and she never felt any need to get a new one. By the end, the battery lasted about 15-20 minutes.
This is pretty horrible to hear as someone working in security. Just because it works does not mean you should do it.
I imagine her data gets lost multiple times per year.
I don’t disagree - I should make clear; I’m not saying this as an example of a good thing you should do (hence why I posted it in this thread), more as a data point about how happy Apple is to break their stuff for old hardware holders and to give some perspective on how they use software updates to encourage hardware purchases.
My 6s still works. I did have the battery replaced 3 years ago because I expected to continue to use it a couple more years. I got a new phone last year but my old one is still happily running.
At university in the 90s some friends and I ran our own Linux server. It was a 486 or early Pentium and we hooked it up to the university network in a post grad student’s office who was happy to just keep it running under his desk.
We even got the campus sysadmins to give us a proper edu domain name. It was a more open and different time and ethernet still meant coax cables with T connectors and terminators.
We were running pre v1 kernel on slackware and it was all installed from floppies. We used it as a web server, coded and played muds, read newsgroups and mail etc. I think tin and pine etc. we easily had 20 users using it from the computer labs.
Anyways the computer kept dying or freezing occasionally. Still early Linux. And the office where it was kept wasn’t always open and we didn’t have a key.
Being electronic engineering students we built a whole circuit with a PIC controller which plugged into the parallel port. We wrote a watchdog daemon which would keep pinging this dongle. And the firmware on the PIC would check for these pings.
If the server died the pings would stop and the dead man’s switch dongle was wired directly into the hardware reset button of the PC.
Worked like a charm for 4 years. And apparently worked for another 5 or 6 after I left.
Those were truly wonderful times. I remember even around 2000 campus network security was minimal to non-existent and we were all just going wild and I learned so much.
It was so much fun. I still get some of the same thrills building a retro console using a rpi, or a home media server in the garage using a second hand dual Xeon motherboard.
But sadly as the CEO of a software firm I don’t get to hack away much on anything anymore.
I do occasionally get to impress the young ones with my Linux command line wizardry and 1337 vim skills. I really need to get a beard.
Years ago I got a second hand Sega Saturn - it was fine for a while then stopped working because it couldn’t read the disks.
But then I discovered (not sure how) that if I turned it upside down it would work fine. So I did that for a couple of years.
They probably got frustrated and kicked it across the room and it landed upside and started loading.
That’s my head canon anyways.
I got an HP laptop in university and someone coughed a mouthful of tea onto my keyboard a few months later. At first I kept “a” on my clipboard so I could paste it as needed while typing, but soon other keys followed. So my computer is over 6 years old and I’ve been typing for almost 6 years using:
- The 4 on my num pad as the A key
- The 7 on my numpad as Q
- The 5 on my numpad as tab
- The 2 on my numpad as Z
- The help/F1 is ESC
- The numpad 1 to type 1 and exclamation points
Recently, I’ve also changed the minus on my numpad to be ` (backtick). I don’t have a capslock. Thankfully, the damage didn’t continue to spread because I would have eventually run out of keys.
Sometimes I fantasize about someone calling me out on a weird typo so I can tell them about it.
