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.
And how was it
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.
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.
…how did you work that out?!
I wish I could remember - it makes absolutely no sense at all, but it worked :-)
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.
Actual goddamn psychopath
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.
Dang I kinda wanna hear 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
When i boot up my (linux) PC sometimes the second monitor is all messed up. Reloading i3 with super+shift+r fixes it so i can’t be bothered to actually fix it.
My last phone the USB c port died and I just used wireless charging for like 2 years lol.
Currently my life. About 3 months now, no plans to upgrade anytime soon. Sucks though
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.
I admire the workaround.
Used an OG Google pixel until about a year ago. Had to replace the battery a couple times but otherwise still mostly ran like it was brand new.
Have a Samsung Galaxy. Screen cracked by itself several months after getting it, however I was busy, didn’t have time to take it in and got used to it. Now the warranty is expired so I can’t get the screen replaced anymore. I cope by believing they wouldn’t have replaced it and would have told me it was somehow my fault despite using a fairly heavy case and not being a phone-dropper/slammer.
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%…
Oh, my GPU fans were dying, so I leaned a case fan to the GPU to help with cooling.
It was GTX570 which I bought when it was new, shiny and expensive. Server me over 10 years, including Witcher 3 on 100C temp
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.
This kept happening to me. Then, I realized my account was compromised. Someone in China was also using it to listen to music. It kept pausing every time they started playing a song.
So every time I give up and stick with my silence I’m letting some jackass in China win?
I don’t know why your Spotify was pausing! Just thought I’d share my experience, in case it helped you or someone else researching this in the future.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been saved by finding a 2 year old forum post with the same issue that I was having.
Man you’d think they’d put in some kind of “Music started on X device so we’re stopping it here” message for your scenario instead of making you sleuth it out like Mulder and Scully
Audio device de/re-connecting?
Could be. Fucking lighting strikes again
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.
My previous PSU had one extremely noisy fan. I wasn’t about to open a power supply… so I stuck a plastic tab on the outer grille, so that fan simply could not spin.
I used that computer for about ten years.
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%.
My hard drive making dying noises.
I didn’t lose anything though. (except money on a new one)
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
