23
votes
What are some of your recent "little" failures?
What have you tried lately that hasn't quite worked out? Small things like hobbies gone wrong, or social experiences that were slightly awkward.
Sometimes it can be cathartic to both get these things off your chest and to hear what others have struggled with as a reminder that no one is perfect.
I set off the smoke alarm while cooking earlier this evening. No actual fire or other issue, just had the heat too high for butter so it made for a lot of smoke.
I remember this happening to my family when I was a kid. My mom wasn't a frequent baker, and due to that, things usually went wrong.
The smoke alarm was connected to the house alarm system, so it set off a flashing light and siren outside of the house too. No one came to check on us, but I'm sure it was a WTF moment for our neighbors.
This honestly scared me out of baking, thinking my family was cursed. My partner has since helped me prove that is not the case, as we bake many things successfully!
I do this all the time. It's gotten to the point that I know which dishes will do it, and will preemptively take the kitchen's smoke detector off the ceiling and leave it outside until I'm done cooking.
I have mentioned before my kids' media player.
We also have a Toniebox.
I thought "well of course I can cross contaminate these and use the Tonie figure to play movies on the player"
Turns out some NFC tags are privacy protected? Okay, no worries, I have the hardware, I will just crack it so I can use it anyway. They probably all use the same password anyway?
Following that, it turns out that the NFC reader hat that I was using for the player does not have the ability to use password protected tags at all. Well, if it does it is undocumented.
I am now just spiteful. I paid through the nose for those figures and I am not going to lose this fight so I am looking into how I can get this board to do it anyway, and I am absolutely going to publish how for anyone else when I do figure it out.
Until then, it is a failure that upsets me more than it has any right to.
I just looked up what a Tonie box is and it's essentially what I've been after for my young child. That said, the notion of paying through the nose for Amiibos is so not interesting to me.
You referenced your kids media player. Is there a previous thread where you go into how it works? I'd love to find a tactile solution where (screen or not) my child can choose to play her own music on her own time.
Just a note, you can buy Tonie characters that you can put your own content on. They are like $10. You can add and remove music/stories.
Really it's more that the grandparents paid for them. They are like the ideal form factor for holiday gifts.
As for the media player, here's a link to the blog. You could hook the pi up to a speaker and play music instead by changing like two lines of code https://blog.ox-stuff.com/blog/mediaplayer/
Oh wow, that's so awesome. Excellent work.
I not too long ago locked myself out of my home server through SSH as I was setting up a reverse proxy and things. Forget exactly what setting I had changed but I realized my mistake the moment I sent a ctrl-C over and I just went "fuck". Luckily I wasn't totally locked out, I just needed to plug a keyboard and monitor upto my server and update the broken config file. However, that was a few scary minutes while I pondered what to do.
Another fun one was when I was traveling in Japan. After a week in Tokyo, my next destination was Nagoya. I stayed up late the night before doing laundry and then woke up early to rush to the train. After arriving in Nagoya, I dropped my bags off at the hotel and returned at 4pm to check in. I was desperate to charge my phone, which was at 14%, and it wasn't until I opened my bags that I realized I had left my charger back in Tokyo. Hurriedly called the hotel and they graciously agreed to hold my charger for me until I returned a week later on my last day. However, I had forgotten about this arrangement until I'd gone through security at Haneda airport on that final day. Thankfully, a friend of mine was also visiting Tokyo and he picked up my charger in the end but it was a difficult time without my fancy 4 port brick haha. I made it through the remainder of my journey by picking up a smaller brick at a nearby Anker store which I now keep solely for travel.
I've done something like this before but I was too lazy to move the monitor across the room so I ordered a HDMI to USB-C cable to use my phone as a monitor. Surprisingly, it worked! But it requires special apps like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=infinitegra.app.usbcamera which uses the same protocols that webcams use.
Then a few months later I broke
/etc/security/limits.confon a server that I didn't have physical access to as it was all the way across the world. This brokesudoand a lot of other things so I couldn't edit the file again. The normal services that the server was running were working fine but I spent two weeks trying to fix it when I had a new idea.pkexec su --session-command, etc... Nothing worked until I discovered thatsystemd-runsomehow bypassed the problem:systemd-run sh -c "cat fixed.conf > /etc/security/limits.conf"A little while after that I locked myself out of ssh and had to ask someone to type in reverse mapped colemak (as the system keyboard layout wasn't set to qwerty) into a virtual console...
I recently misconfigured a firewall rule at home that killed connectivity for all of my self-hosted applications. Thankfully I caught it pretty quickly, but it was a little embarrassing since I've been working with OPNsense for many years now.
I just dumped a full bag of granola all over my face, the stove and the floor.
... And it was this delicious, expensive kind that's one of my pleasure in this busy parent meets work life.
So for now, fml
Not really a mistake but I caught the flu and am forced to burn up sick days until my fever comes down.
Fender bender caused by me. I didnt check my blind spot well enough and a compact car was hiding there. No injuries save to my wallet come next insurance contract
Becoming the main person who puts my kid (2 years and 4 months) to sleep. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. My wife is putting him to sleep right now, and I'm a little frustrated about that. I assessed the situation and determined that it would take way too long for him to sleep with me today, given his agitation.
Yesterday, I went out to dinner with a coworker and his wife. Given that we still have tons of snow and ice piled up everywhere after a snowstorm last weekend, I opted not to drive. I wasn't sure if I'd find parking, since the restaurant is in a more residential area. Plus, I was planning to have a few cocktails since my coworker said they were excellent. Which was true!
Anyway, since the restaurant was only a few miles away, I was planning to take public transit. But my timing was off. Or maybe Google Maps' was; not sure. When I looked at Google Maps again before I was about to leave, it all of sudden said I'd get there like 15-20min late. So ended up taking an Uber.
It wasn't super expensive -- about a $10 fare + tip -- but it was still more than the <$3.00 it'd have been had I taken public transit. Oh well.
Had to travel internationally on really short notice. Booked a travel path that I've done before, from a big airport a few hours from my city, to a big airport a few hours from my destination. It cost a ton on account of booking a day before departure.
Booked the flight, trains, everything, only to realise after that there just happened to be a seasonal flight from my home city's airport to my desination city's airport, for half the price (less when taking into account travel to/fro the airports). I just didn't even bother checking because there are so few flights out of my city's airport and there have never been direct flights between these two places. Unfortunately it would have cost me even more to cancel and rebook everything, so I just ended up spending too much money to travel for a journey that was 6 more hours than it could have been.
And it gets worse: The flight was delayed, we landed 10 minutes before my bus was meant to depart, and I did the cardinal sin of (very politely and apologetically) pushing to the front of the plane to egress quickly and sprint. Except I forgot something on the fucking plane. Noticed immediately after going down the steps and had to do the walk of shame back on the plane. Turns out my bus got cancelled anyways so it wouldn't have mattered, but damn, absolutely embarassing display. If I were one of the other passengers I would have absolutely tutted in judgement.
All in all, not one of my best travel stories.
Oh wow, this sounds like such a cursed journey. I used to joke about 'travel luck', when things seem to fall in place but sometimes the opposite happens and the stars just really don't align. I hope your future travels are much smoother. Also, I'm travelling soon, wish me luck!
Awwww man that sucks.
I lost my glasses. No idea where. Fortunately-ish the prescription was getting a bit out of date so I was planing on getting some new ones but still inconvenient.
I keep not finishing characters I start to draw. I've just been getting into doing pixel art. And I enjoy it, I have done better with this media than any other I think, it seems to suit me. But characters, even stills, just seem so intimidating to get right in the details as I hone into the last third. I'm still practicing and early in my journey though
I've been following lospec dailies to get inspiration and it's been really helpful! Sometimes the prompt alone doesn't inspire much but then I see the daily palette and an idea strikes.
My spouse likes to work out at 7a but our 1 year old is now waking up at 6a most days. I am usually on deck to do morning duty when she works out, but we didn't talk about it before bed. Spouse got up and mentioned to me (while I was half asleep) that she didn't know if she should go workout or not and asked what I thought. I didn't give a definitive answer, so she just got up and did the morning routine without going to the gym. She told me she was bummed I didn't respond yes or no when I got up around 7:30 to help them get out the door to daycare.
It's not a big deal and she isn't mad, but I feel guilty because I know how much she likes her morning gym routine.
Unsolicited advice, but make sure she knows how you feel about it! One of my personal struggles has been communicating that side of things in conversations with my partner, but I'm starting to get better at it.
Great advice. I already talked to them and we are making a plan, so that neither of us are left guessing what the plan is at 5:45a. Wish I could go back and be better, but the next best way to handle it was to talk it out.
I'm prepping for a miniature wargames tournament and went to use my resin 3d Printer to print a new tank. After faffing about with it and getting some non-prints, I realized the screen on it was broken.
Not a huge deal, because there is a screen/motherboard upgrade for $50, so I picked that up. Again, faffed about with that for several hours last Friday, tried it out and again, nothing. Turns out the instructions are poor (which was obvious) and instruct the user to put the screen in upside down. So I took it back apart in about 20 minutes on Sunday and swapped the screen around.
Did a test print, came out great! Started printing my tank, which was supposed to take 4-hours. When it had about half an hour left we had a power blackout. Great. Print failed, 4-hours wasted.
Power came back on about 20-minutes later, so I went to check my print, clean off the plate and get it restarted. The print actually looked pretty great! So at least things are working...wait...why is there a 1/4" hole through the entire thing? That shouldn't be there. So I took the vat off and took a look at the screen and guess what? Broken again.
My guess it I set my Z level too low, but I can't be sure. The broken bit is in one particular part of the screen and doesn't look broken or cracked per se, but it's clearly an issue where the LCD burst out in this one particular area. Anyway, I guess I'm not surprised because the whole upgrade process was a little janky and the new screen doesn't quite sit all the way down in the new bracket/adapter they sent along with it, coupled with those poor instructions. I'm mostly just annoyed I wasted $50 on this.
Anyway, I bought the model I wanted from a model kit maker, which was $40 and I intend to just buy a new 3d printer down the road when I'm ready to print some more miniatures. This one is probably close to 10-years old, the plastic is cracking and falling apart, I'm assuming due to UV exposure (because that's how resin printers print) and it's slow and low resolution. Even the new higher resolution screen is only 4k, versus now I can pick up something with a 9k screen for better detail and faster prints. But it all just feels like a fail.
Made an appointment with the optometrist to get my prescription updated for a new pair of glasses. Didn't realize I booked the appointment at the wrong place until I walked into the place I booked the appointment. Didn't feel like canceling on them literally last minute and also waiting extra week or two for a new pair of glasses so went ahead with it. Ended up costing a bit more than my usual place and I'm pretty sure that's where this cold or pneumonia or whatever this is came from...
Failing my Instant Pot rice recipe over and over. Here is the recipe:
I then fry up JUST Egg (vegan egg alt) and fry some of the rice up with the eggs and some soy sauce and sesame oil in a pan, and store the rest for meal prep. Here are the issues I had/mistakes I made:
I'm willing to bet it was the water. I have made a similar mistake- we have the large model and it will give that burn warning if you have less than 2 cups of water in it.