Jonathan Kamens 86 47
Here's today's dispatch from the "tech is shit" battlefront, in which I bitch about the things that went wrong for me with tech since my last dispatch that I had to deal with.
#TechIsShitDispatch #SysAdmin #ITDIY #BestBuy #rsync
🧵1/8
Aug 25, 2025 at 12:28amWeb
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Best Buy?
Well, now I have.
Today, my daughter went to buy new laptop at Best Buy, which would not have been my choice. She gave them our home phone# at checkout, which also would not have been my choice. They told her she didn't need to buy accident protection for the laptop because their computer says we're paying $180 per year for a Best Buy membership, which as far as I know is a lie.
🧵2/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
Because of that lie, my daughter walked out of Best Buy with the laptop and without the accident protection I told her to buy, which she absolutely needs because she breaks every laptop I buy for her.
I attempted to log into Best Buy's website to try to figure out what they might be talking about regarding the alleged membership. I was able to log in with my Best Buy account with an Addy.io address and confirmed that our home phone# is not associated with that account.
🧵3/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
So then I tried to log into Best Buy's website with my main email address rather than my Addy.io address, and I got a vague "Something went wrong" error. Then I tried to log in again with the Addy.io address, and got the same vague "Something went wrong" error. Just to be clear, I had successfully logged into that account just five minutes prior.
🧵4/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
So then I turned off my VPN and suddenly I was able to log into both Best Buy accounts, i.e., Best Buy is yet another company that doesn't let people log in when they're using a VPN without telling them why they can't log in. Assholes.
They've introduced a new spin on it, though: they only block VPN logins _sometimes_. Awesome. Yay.
🧵5/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
After I logged into the Best Buy account associated with my main email address (which I didn't even know existed!), I was able to confirm that it has our home phone# associated with it, AND that it doesn't have any sort of paid Best Buy membership associated with it. So I have no idea what the checkout clerk was talking about when he told me daughter that it did or why he would lie about something like that.
🧵6/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
In other news, one of my nightly backup tasks failed last night because rsync complained "some files vanished before they could be transferred." There is no way to tell rsync not to treat this as an error, i.e., not to exit with a non-zero exit status when this occurs. This is stupid. It does, however, supposedly exit with a specific exit status when this occurs, so I had to modify the backup task to check for that specific the exit status and ignore it.
🧵7/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
While fixing that I noticed the permissions on the backup script in /etc/cron.daily were wrong because I wrote "755" instead of "0755" in the Ansible playbook that deploys it, so I fixed that as well (see, even _my_ tech is shit!😜).
🧵8/8
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
P.S. This was actually a light day on the tech is shit front. It only took me about a half hour to deal with all the shit. That's pretty good.
Show threadDr Neenah Estrella-LunaAug 25, 2025
@jik Why didn't she go to Microcenter?
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Aug 25, 2025
@starluna She tried Micro Center, they didn't have a single laptop on display that was small enough for her hands.
She wants to be able to play Stardew Valley with the keyboard and trackpad so she needs a small keyboard with the trackpad close to it.
Show threadDr Neenah Estrella-LunaAug 25, 2025
@jik Ah that does happen sometimes. I've gone to a bigger laptop myself in the last couple of years and so ended up getting a Bluetooth keyboard that better fits my hands. Also helps to keep the laptop elevated which is better for my back.