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.

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

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.

did you ignore

You’re using the past tense here. That’s gonna narrow my potential responses.

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.

You don’t need a windows license if you know what slm rearm is

My last phone the USB c port died and I just used wireless charging for like 2 years lol.

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.

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.

I used an Ubuntu Phone as my daily for about 6 months.

My iPhone 4S went for a swim before phones were generally waterproof and the screen backlight went out and the camera light stayed permanently on. I used the blind assist mode with the phone for a few months and even took photos totally blind. Eventually the backlight came on again and I could use the phone totally normal. Finally killed it falling out of my pocket 150’ up while rock climbing. Great phone though.

Spotify would just pause. No reason, no warning. It would just pause. So I’d pull my phone out, unpause it, then it would pause again.

I think it’s been fixed now? Maybe? Hard to tell, because it happened randomly.

My lovley Logitech gamer headset from like 2014 started to loose volume overtime on the right ear. So I just manually adjusted the volume of the right ear to about 60% while the other one had 39%. Over the years that gap grew bigger and bigger. I still use them but they sit at a configuration which now changes every week or so. The right ear sits now a 132% and the left on 39%.

I didn’t ignore it, but I did have to put up with it for months:

Discord would just never recognize that my PC was being left idle, so I would never get notifications on my phone, which constantly left me gaslighting myself into thinking my friends were ignoring me, or just didn’t have any reason to message me all day.

I contacted Discord support at least once over it, and they couldn’t do anything to help me figure it out, since I had all my settings set properly to have it switch over to mobile notifications after 1 minute of inactivity.

After a shit ton of googling, I found out that certain devices, namely third-party xbox controllers, could cause a PC to never actually go idle, and then I found a tool to help me check if my PC is idle, started unplugging things one-by-one, and found out that my 8bitdo Arcade controller was the thing keeping my PC from going idle.

The issue popped up with an etsy-bought Guitar Hero controller further down the line as well, but thankfully by then I knew how to troubleshoot the issue. Bonus points, my new fighting game controllers don’t have this problem.

for 5 years my PC would only turn on at a 45degree angle. It would work fine while upright or sideways after turning it on, but to initially start it up it needed to be tilted. I tried reseating everything many many times, I had even replaced a pretty large number of components over that time. Then I moved and when I plopped down the PC a screw popped out of the PSU. problem solved, and I’m very glad it didn’t explode.