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.
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.
Home self hosted stuff is definitely the only time I usually get to have fun with this stuff. Work can sometimes involve fun problem solving but by the time you cut through all the red tape to get it anywhere the thrill is gone.
Bonsai STONITH.