hello all!, i've decided to create this thread to share what pardiciments we have had with our devices and how we got those problems in the first place.

here's some follish mistakes i've done with my devices:

when i first got my Nokia n800 i corrupted my OS2008 install by trying to install a window manager on my Nokia N800 and i had to reflash .
(probibly my most follish mistake i've done on my N800)

i dropt my PSP on my concrete driveway and ruined it.

i put my Gameboy advance sp on a laundry basket and forgot i had it on top of it and it fell off the top of the laundry basket and it fell down a stairway and the screen got smashed .

Well..... enyone want to share their past mishaps?

I threw my Dell Axim at my younger brother after he clubbed my broken foot with my own crutch.

I also ended up frying an old Palm of mine by messing with it's charger. Scary~

I gave my Palm M105 to my Mom many years ago for Mothers' Day. I used it mainly for it's awesome alarm that could wake the dead (and for iSolo eBook reading). She ended up never turning it on or using it and the new batteries I installed in it corroded the insides when I checked it a year or so later.

The worst thing I've done to my N800 is

sudo gainroot
apt-get upgrade
y

Oh, pish, that's nothing (it's actually become my preferred update method over the last month or so). You just gotta make sure your repos are clean and check what it actually intends to install before you hit yes. Most people should be fine as long as they keep the rtcomm beta repo far, far away.

I bent the connector of my n800's screen after reading a disassembly guide and put it back together... now the screen won't turn on, it was my fault, i'm just gonna save up for an n810.

'till then I gotta browse the internet on this wii, lol

I made the mistake of holding my N810 in my hand over the driveway while my oldest son was close enough to grab for it and send it skidding... several scratchy feet...

Random drop tests from varying heights for a multitude of PDA's & the N810.
I've dropped most of them from high enough to eject batteries across the room.
HP LX (95, 100, 200), Compaq IPAQ, N810.
I once dropped/flung a calculator so hard that the case demolished. I continued to use it for a few years with basically the skeleton keyboard, labeled with sharpie, the LED, and a 9volt battery taped on.

These are the worst things I've done to some of my PDAs:

N800: Turned it on, looked at it in a sad way, shook my head and said: "You've disappointed me".

Newton MessagePad 2100: Stopped using it and put it in storage.

Psion Series 3a: Gave it away (okay, to a friend, but still...)

Well, at the moment, I have a broken apt. I was fiddling around doing the cp -r, rm, ln -s routine to jam stuff onto the SD card. That was largely going OK, but I did something dumb. I got the tablet frozen (not responding to the UI) doing something, and rebooted. 16GB SDHC card rendered unreadable, unmountable, unrepairable (from the N800). Ouch.

Tried the Panasonic formatter; it didn't seem to work...

Put the card in my pocket, to mess with later. It went through the wash, and I found it then (after washing, that is). Tried it, and it works now; but some data is gone for good. Now don't believe anecdotal evidence! But it appears that a good washing is what it needed.

Now I'm sure there's some way to rebuild apt's config, if I wanted to become an apt pro. (I don't, though!) So it has been sitting with a nearly-full rootfs (there's a reason I was moving stuff) and not much upgrading for the past couple weeks.

But as soon as tomorrow (which is to say, this evening; I'm pulling a six-night week this past 4 days and the next 3...), I'll be clean reflashing, and setting up boot from SD as primary operating environment, with a complete, but uncluttered, installation in main memory. Alas, I just missed the window for installing Diablo.

On second thought, maybe that's the worst thing I did to my tablet. I betrayed it by going public with a nudge to the Diablo repo, and now it can't upgrade. I'm so sorry, little tablet... I never meant to hurt you, I just didn't think...

I slept on my N810.

Found it in its slid-open state under me when I woke up.

FYI I'm 16 stone (~100kg)


It works perfectly, no scratches, no marks, no pressure marks, about the only noticable thing is that when it's shut - the clamshell gap is ever so slightly more open on one end than the other.



Also done the apt-get upgrade y mistake too