Currently staring at perhaps the slowest update of my life that is threatening some 2 hours to update one package, and that sent me down remembering other silly mistakes and failures on personal tech. Anyone got good stories? Nothing like the world is burning just like, a chuckle at yourself at your own expense type of moment. Some gooberposting, if you will :3
I think for me my worst was when a friend convinced me to use Uniget/Winget, when I still used windows at least, I let it run rampant. Accidentally filled my drive with, like, six Unity engine versions at 20Gig a pop.
If not that, then when my new OS was installed I didn’t check some configs and found out the filesystem it ran on default was taking whole boot drive backups and keeping ten of em, clogging another 100gig more than it ought to and that was entirely because I had some games on the boot drive instead of my storage drives.
Got a brand new computer when I was 16 with integrated 56k modem and I couldn’t connect it to the internet no matter what I did. Convinced my parents to take me back to the computer store, saw the guy there put the cable into the actually modem, not the ethernet port as I had, and it just worked.
I just went, "hmmm, that’s strange! Oh well, guess it works now, bye!
Picking the wrong waterfox AUR option and building it from scratch for 40+ minutes for some reason. I could just cancel it but surely it’s done in a moment.. right.. right..?
When working as a audiovisual technician for a youtube channel, picked up the parts to make the brand new computer that was to be responsible for the work of two different programs, 6 cameras attached to it. The computer alone was something like a used car in price.
Started assembling it, the font was modular so was in the process of attaching the necessary cables, something came up and had to drop in the middle of it and go work on something else. Work hours ended, left the pc to finish assembling the other day. Next day, finished everything, went to turn it on, no juice. Double checked, triple checked, everything seemed to be in order, but nothing. Started panicking, thinking maybe one of the parts was faulty. Decided to disassemble everything and start from scratch. That was when i noticed the mobo to font cable was, on the font side, divided in two parts, and i conected only one of them and was about to conect the other the other day when i was interrupted, then got back, checked that the mobo had a conected cable and thought “ok this one is on already”
Oh, also, building my own computer for the first time, Intel CPU, absolutely mashed the pins on the socket, brought it to the computer store and said that’s how it came to me, got a replacement for free.
Upgrading the project from Unity 4 to Unity 5 took the team something like 6 months
Comedy option: Unity engine itself and everything about it since they introduced multiple render pipelines, I think that’s when it started going downhill. Nowadays the whole thing is just progress bar simulator. Not so much memorable but living rent free in my head since the current project I’m on use a newer version of the engine and it’s just progress bar forever it’s driving me nuts
I did the exact same thing because I had the wrong processor for my motherboard, desperately tried to salvage it by tweezing the springs back into shape
That computer is now ten years old and still boots, but I am never, ever going to touch that CPU lever
I once had a job that involved burn-in for telemetry units used in power distribution, the guy training me told me to set the power supply to “Four Volts”.
But his accent was very confusing to me, so I banged in 40V and slapped the big red switch.
There were no sparks, no noises, but a row of ten units just instantly lit on fire. It was my first week
I was very good with my first pc build, even still use my lil archer case to this day with new guts even though she’s super tiny to the point my hands don’t exactly fit.
No for me my first pin mashing was when I first came down with covid and tried to upgrade my cpu fan since my temp was maxing and my old fan was surely dying. I ordered a fan that barely fit, and it was for an AMD configuration whereas I had intel. It did not fit. I tried anyway and was too sick to realize what was wrong until the snap. Fairly certain I smashed the whole CPU, it sure didn’t work anymore. Bought my first and ideally last box PC, sadly that was on credit and during the crypto bubble so my 3060 cost like 95% of the tag I paid.
As a VRChat user, I feel this within my soul. The shaders I like to use put my PC through a good 10 minute render pipeline for the first time compiling the avatar, and it isn’t for lack of raw strength (；一_一)
VRchat used to be on a pretty solid version of the engine too I think, was it 2017 and then 2019? Both of those were pretty comfortable to use, now it’s on 2022 or something right? Just annoying. I will admit the shader compiling doesnt bother me as much because at least that one makes sense, more keywords, longer compile…it’s the “waiting…485848 seconds” when recompiling a script or importing a texture that gets me
This reminds me, when I was 11 or 12ish. I pointed out the PSU voltage swap button to a classmate of mine, that red thing to go between 240 and 120.
Classmate asked what would happen if he switched it, and my reply was a “I dunno, probably break it.” and this person just flipped the switch while the pc was running. There was some noise, there was some smoke and that pc never turned on since.
Funniest part of all this is the punishment we got, we told the teacher that the pc smoked and had issues and this guy just went “Haha, yeah guess a little bird died in there” and that was it. Literally, nothing.
One thing I look back on in horror is the time I found an old CRT on the street and took it home to disassemble for fun, not knowing that there are several things in there easily could have killed me.
I may have opened up my PC power supply as a teen to see what it looked like inside. I imagine there’s several alternate universe versions of me whose stories ended then and there.
Oh, I also once turned on a plug and it blew up on me and left a dark sooty smoke mark on the wall. My dad wasn’t happy apparently and my mum laughed. I was unharmed haha
First time I built a tower from a mix of scavenged parts, stainless steel case, didn’t use any motherboard standoffs. It ran beautifully, but had this strange habit of suddenly freezing with an alarming whining/buzzing noise. Ran a DC++ hub from it for many months and didn’t realize until years later what the problem was. I was a software engineer, not a hardware tech (and apparently never bothered to rtfm, despite the shiny rtfm badge I’d affixed to one of the faceplates).
I was setting up a speedrun marathon that was an in person event in a hotel event room.
The event room we rented out had no internet for some reason. To get the event live, I managed to find a 100 yard ethernet cable that I ran from the event room, through the parking lot and with perhaps a centimeter or two of slack back into the hotel through a window of an attendee’s room that did have a working port. It managed to work without any issue the entire weekend, but we kept having to run outside and check no one messed with this ethernet cable the whole time.
Also, same event, we had a computer catch on fire.
When I was first installing Windows on my first built-from-scratch PC, I haplessly enabled the compatibility support module in UEFI, completely oblivious as to what this would cause down the line, as Windows is infamous for going “Oh, this computer supports legacy BIOS; we’ll just automatically install Windows in legacy BIOS mode without telling the user!”
Less than four years later, shortly after I upgraded my PC for the first time, my SSD would die a death of a thousand cuts, and it was only then that I learned what I had done to myself. Not only that, but the repeated bluescreens caused by the SSD dying a horrible death caused me to get confused when I also had driver errors and blackscreens on my then-new 5700XT, which prevented me from realizing that my PC was also suffering from overheating issues. As a result, for half the year I didn’t even use my new GPU and I just fell back on my old 1060.
my brother and I would find old CRTs on the sides of the street and take them to our dad’s garage and smash them. Hoo-boy, are we lucky