Any time an android phone I own gets older than, say, a year, the volume controls get more and more sluggish. I feel like it’s a form of planned obsolescence, but I haven’t ever heard of anyone else talking about it.

When I set dark mode in an app, the top of the window would remain light, in XFCE. But in early January 2024, I realized it was because XFCE had a theme setting in both Appearance and Window Manager, and they were conflicting with each other. I ignored it for quite a while but now I’m happy with my full dark mode computer

I had a car with a leaky radiator. I would fill it up with water in the morning and drive to work. If I didn’t it would start overheating. I don’t remember filling it again on the way back. Put up with that for weeks. I think I only got it fixed because the weather warmed up and it was no longer sufficient to cool it. Or maybe it was the same problem as the heating not working and after a few weeks of wearing multiple layers and getting absolutely frozen I finally got it fixed. They may have been two separate issues/occasions, this was around 2003.

The on/off/wake button on my phone broke off. I installed an app that would wake the phone automatically if the gyro sensors sensed it was taken out of the pocket, which worked around 60% of the time. I was a broke student at the time, so I dealt with that for a year or so before buying a new phone.

Automod. Need I say more?

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.

When I turn on my PC, it goes into BIOS and I have to Save and restart for it to boot. It doesn’t detect the boot drive at first. Sometimes it does. Been like this for the past 5 months

My laptop (Framework 12) sometimes does not start. It seems the hard drive is just not found, or the part used for decryption. I just restart at most 3 times then it works.

I have automated, tested, daily backups in case something goes boom.

I have a HDD in my PC that was manufactured in 2008, it still works and SMART is not reporting any errors.

The bearings of the OG case-fans started to fail so I reconfigured them to kick in when the CPU got hot. One after another I ended with only 1 left working all the time…

Had them all replaced last month, 4 fans on max are quieter than the last at 50%…

My family’s first computer baxk in the 90s was a hand-me-down power Mac from a relative. Between whatever they had done with it before we got it, and what we managed to screw up as inexperienced computer users playing around with it, it had it’s share of little quirks.

At some point we managed to turn on some screen reading function, and set the voice profile to something singsongy. It also had an error that popped up every time you started it up. The result of this is that almost 3 decades later I still have this ridiculous little tune seared into my brain after hearing my computer literally sing it who knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of times

The globalfax software has successfully installed, however, since no fax device control panels were loaded, faxing has been disabled

Put up with it for several years, none of us knew or really cared enough to figure out how to get rid of that error or turn off the text-to-speech.

Some 20 years ago, the right shift key on my keyboard was busted. I ignored it for so long that I got used to only using the left shift key. To this day, and many keyboards later, that’s still how I type.

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.

Back when I was still using Ubuntu MATE about half a year ago or so, I started having this really odd problem where signing into my account after a reboot would bring me to a blank screen with only my desktop background and nothing else. No taskbar, no panels, not even the cursor if I recall correctly.

Some furious Googling brought me to a serverfault thread that suggested that switching to tty7 with CTRL + ALT + F7 followed by ALT + F1 to switch back would alleviate it… and it did! But the problem returned on every login.

So for about six months I just had that as part of my routine on any reboot. Log it, switch to tty7, switch back to tty1. It was stupid and I hated it. Mostly because I didn’t understand what I was doing or why it fixed anything.

On a tangent, this is precisely the thing that makes people intimidated by Linux, I think… it’s not so much the inability to do things. Rather, even when you are given a way on a silver platter, you don’t feel like you’re really in control because you don’t know what the black magic incantation really does. It’s a truly horrible feeling.

I never did resolve the problem. I eventually nuked that OS and paved over its ashes with Debian Testing + KDE Plasma 5, and I haven’t looked back.

Actively ignoring one now. I have a dying ssd that’s been loosing sectors. Everything important is backed up and Its faster than the replacement hdd would be. Waiting for a good deal on a 2 tb nvme ssd