9 ms·

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; su

by hazeii 7y ago

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing it was probably swamping the optosensors I made sure I covered the side of the mouse with my hand when using it. His puzzled looks as the mouse worked for me but not for him were priceless (I did let him in on the secret after a few minutes).

anovikov 7y ago
Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.
- Phrenzy 7y ago
  So... This would not happen with Linux?
  - hazeii 7y ago
    I wonder if the downvoters missed the joke? >Fix: install window shutters.
- zoomablemind 7y ago
  > ...It was in the time when mice still had balls, Thinking of present times and times forgone: now mice lost not only balls, they lost their tails, and often find themselves devoid of any 3-dimensionality, being reduced to flat touchpads. Using a mouse always felt to me as having a friedly handshake with the computer, something that touchpads can't emulate.
- hazeii 7y ago
  That's about the right timescale, I guess mice of the era was a bit 'sensitive'. Lucky we were a small office, I wouldn't have wanted to sent out a memo telling people to cover their mouse in the afternoon.
Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
That is absolutely hilarious. Flashback to a similar technology `sleight of hand` - Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  And tech people wonder why the general populace doesn't like them.
  - onceUponADime 7y ago
    We work hard for the pitchforks and torches..
- john-tells-all 7y ago
  My favorite version of this: - screenshot someone's desktop - set the background to the screenshot - iconify all the apps They'll click around in increasing panic on the "apps" on the background, before they realize what happened :) Not that this ever happened to me, of course. I'd never fall for it again.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    Tape on the bottom of the mouse is another common joke these days. If the OS you are using has a taskbar, also set it to auto-hide, preferably in a random location. As always, that kind of elaborate joke is best kept short. I also like replacing someone's shell with `wine cmd`, but nowadays the best protection for myself is that nobody seems to be able to use my computer (sway, full of shortcuts that you have to know in order to do anything). I'm similarly dumbfounded when at my friend's computers. Luckily, this is all fixed by opening a good old POSIX-compliant shell :)
    - o-__-o 7y ago
frereubu 7y ago
How funny - exactly the same thing happened to me, which I wrote about in my first comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834
- hazeii 7y ago
  I had this one as "weird random stuff that no-one else will never get" so pleasing to know others - like you - not only hit the issue but also worked it out.
DoubleGlazing 7y ago
I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a/c background noise one of the other admins noticed the PCs in the problem row weren't making any fan noise. A quick investigation revealed that the PSU fans had been blocked with paperclips and bits of paper causing the CPU to overheat. An older member of staff who was in that row found the PSU fan noise irritating and just decided to take action to stop it. She genuinely didn't realise she was breaking the PCs.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  I must confess that the eleven year old me didn't realize it would be a problem to put a screwdriver through the PSU grid to stop the fan from making noise and that it may have been preventing that musheen from working properly at some point. Yeah, I am sensible to some sound :/.
  - kakwa_ 7y ago
    The eleven years old me was doing the contrary: starting a crappy/sticky PSU fan with a screwdriver not realizing there was a "slight" risk of electrocution (never got a chock however, I guess I was somewhat aware of the danger).
  - bdamm 7y ago
    I'm guilty of this at 14; this was the only way I could get away with late night BBSing since the fan was loud and other folks would be disrupted into halting my modem joy. Only when our EE neighbor saw my rig and sternly told me not to do that did I realize it meant anything at all. sheesh
- dantheman0207 7y ago
  I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and the video card had failed.
darekkay 7y ago
This reminds me of a similar issue I've experienced. A colleague always put his jacket onto his chair. Almost every time he took it off, his monitor connection broke for a few seconds. This mystery was never fully solved, but our best guess was some static (from the jacket-chair-friction) causing issues with his VGA-HDMI adapter.
- mrkstu 7y ago
  I have this occasionally from my MacBook Pro to external 4k. My office seems to be conducive to generating static and I'll occasionally shock my MacBook when first sitting down, temporarily fritz-ing the connection to the monitor.
hanche 7y ago
Here is a similar story from the childhood of computers: One of the first computers installed in a Norwegian university was of course in high demand, and students generally had to stay up at night to be able to use it. One morning, around 3 o'clock, the line printer came to a a halt and locked up the computer. They tried everything they could think of to get it going again, to no avail. In the end they called the person in charge of the computer. He came over and closed the curtains, and the printer started up again. He left without a word of explanation. That explanation emerged later: The early morning sun (the sun rises early in the summer here) was shining in, through the paper in the printer, onto the out-of-paper sensor, making the printer think it had no paper. Closing the curtain fixed it.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  The word you are looking for is azimuth. The azimuth of the sun to the earth shifts as the earth wobbles throughout the year, and as we shift our time for daylights savings. My garage door was affected by this until I created blinders for the trip sensor.. IR from the sun would cause the garage door to stay open. Lately I just watch my new neighbors leave their garage door open because they can’t figure out why
froindt 7y ago
I did an industrial automation class in college. We had a PLC setup with optical sensors and were sorting cylinders by height. We wired it up tested it, then called the TA over to review. It failed despite no changes and working minutes earlier. We changed some logic, tested again, and again called the TA over. It failed. We had another team look at our code and see if we were missing something obvious. Nope, it looked the same. Finally I realized I was standing when we did the testing. I shaded the sensors and kept them from being overloaded with sunlight. We were the only table in direct sunlight, so only we were experiencing the issue.
dunham 7y ago
Back in college (90's) we had a professor who, about once a year, would send an email to help desk saying his monitor had gotten blurry and he needed a new one. We'd go to his office, wipe off the thick layer of dust and it'd be as good as new again.
- jolmg 7y ago
  Did you try showing him the issue and how to handle it on his own?
elwell 7y ago
> after a few minutes Savage...
LorenPechtel 7y ago
20+ years ago, machines with a monochrome and a color monitor. One machine the color monitor would fail every afternoon. Turns out that for some reason there was a little notch cut in one slat of the blinds. (Presumably to fit around something that was no longer there.) That allowed the sunlight to strike the video card, apparently that was just enough heat to push it over the edge. (This was before PCs were full of cooling fans.)
LinuxBender 7y ago
Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it, so they unplugged it, buffed the floor and plugged it back in. Half-split troubleshooting may have saved a plane flight.
- GurnB 7y ago
  The best part of this anecdote is that you mentioned Banyan Vines. Spent a handful of years installing/maintaining Banyan Vines network in the early 90's.
- guytv 7y ago
  Amazing, and exact version of this happened to me in the Israeli Army in the 90's. Every day at around 13:30 (give and take a few minutes) the network for an entire building went offline, only to come back on line a few minutes later. ... In our version of this 'bug' - one of the NCOs unplugged the electricity to that "big box with lots of blinky LEDs" in order to plugin an electric pot, to prepare his post-meal Turkish coffee, then plug it back in once water boiled... Many resources were "thrown" at the problem, until, weeks in, someone had the splendid idea of quietly sitting around the network-cabinet around 13:30 and see what's going on.
- xsmasher 7y ago
  This is an old one. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    The hospital story for sure, they have alarms on patient devices and battery backup for some, but I was there for the mmac-8 being unplugged.
shanecleveland 7y ago
As support IT in an office, I have a lot of mouse "issues", particularly with the wireless Apple Magic Mouse ... using it turned around 180 deg., making things disappear by not recognizing that the surface can be used to scroll horizontally, battery dying ... to name a few.
ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
I work at a K-12 school and had a similar experience working in a school. The teacher complained the Smartboard touch capability wouldn't work in the morning, but worked in the afternoon. I said nonsense. Went in there and surely it didn't work, but I noticed a bit of a glare from the reflection of the light on the window. I asked her to turn down the shade and the Smartboard instantly started working... felt awesome lol.
ducaale 7y ago
We had an xbox 360 that kept ejecting the CD. Later we discovered that it was due to the sunlight coming from the door. After putting it in a dim place the issue never recurred.

by hazeii 7y ago

anovikov 7y ago

Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.

Phrenzy 7y ago
So... This would not happen with Linux?
- hazeii 7y ago
  I wonder if the downvoters missed the joke? >Fix: install window shutters.
zoomablemind 7y ago
> ...It was in the time when mice still had balls, Thinking of present times and times forgone: now mice lost not only balls, they lost their tails, and often find themselves devoid of any 3-dimensionality, being reduced to flat touchpads. Using a mouse always felt to me as having a friedly handshake with the computer, something that touchpads can't emulate.
hazeii 7y ago
That's about the right timescale, I guess mice of the era was a bit 'sensitive'. Lucky we were a small office, I wouldn't have wanted to sent out a memo telling people to cover their mouse in the afternoon.

Japhy_Ryder 7y ago

That is absolutely hilarious. Flashback to a similar technology `sleight of hand` - Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
And tech people wonder why the general populace doesn't like them.
- onceUponADime 7y ago
  We work hard for the pitchforks and torches..
john-tells-all 7y ago
My favorite version of this: - screenshot someone's desktop - set the background to the screenshot - iconify all the apps They'll click around in increasing panic on the "apps" on the background, before they realize what happened :) Not that this ever happened to me, of course. I'd never fall for it again.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Tape on the bottom of the mouse is another common joke these days. If the OS you are using has a taskbar, also set it to auto-hide, preferably in a random location. As always, that kind of elaborate joke is best kept short. I also like replacing someone's shell with `wine cmd`, but nowadays the best protection for myself is that nobody seems to be able to use my computer (sway, full of shortcuts that you have to know in order to do anything). I'm similarly dumbfounded when at my friend's computers. Luckily, this is all fixed by opening a good old POSIX-compliant shell :)
  - o-__-o 7y ago

frereubu 7y ago

How funny - exactly the same thing happened to me, which I wrote about in my first comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834

hazeii 7y ago
I had this one as "weird random stuff that no-one else will never get" so pleasing to know others - like you - not only hit the issue but also worked it out.

DoubleGlazing 7y ago

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a/c background noise one of the other admins noticed the PCs in the problem row weren't making any fan noise. A quick investigation revealed that the PSU fans had been blocked with paperclips and bits of paper causing the CPU to overheat. An older member of staff who was in that row found the PSU fan noise irritating and just decided to take action to stop it. She genuinely didn't realise she was breaking the PCs.

johnchristopher 7y ago
I must confess that the eleven year old me didn't realize it would be a problem to put a screwdriver through the PSU grid to stop the fan from making noise and that it may have been preventing that musheen from working properly at some point. Yeah, I am sensible to some sound :/.
- kakwa_ 7y ago
  The eleven years old me was doing the contrary: starting a crappy/sticky PSU fan with a screwdriver not realizing there was a "slight" risk of electrocution (never got a chock however, I guess I was somewhat aware of the danger).
- bdamm 7y ago
  I'm guilty of this at 14; this was the only way I could get away with late night BBSing since the fan was loud and other folks would be disrupted into halting my modem joy. Only when our EE neighbor saw my rig and sternly told me not to do that did I realize it meant anything at all. sheesh
dantheman0207 7y ago
I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and the video card had failed.

darekkay 7y ago

This reminds me of a similar issue I've experienced. A colleague always put his jacket onto his chair. Almost every time he took it off, his monitor connection broke for a few seconds. This mystery was never fully solved, but our best guess was some static (from the jacket-chair-friction) causing issues with his VGA-HDMI adapter.

mrkstu 7y ago
I have this occasionally from my MacBook Pro to external 4k. My office seems to be conducive to generating static and I'll occasionally shock my MacBook when first sitting down, temporarily fritz-ing the connection to the monitor.

hanche 7y ago

Here is a similar story from the childhood of computers: One of the first computers installed in a Norwegian university was of course in high demand, and students generally had to stay up at night to be able to use it. One morning, around 3 o'clock, the line printer came to a a halt and locked up the computer. They tried everything they could think of to get it going again, to no avail. In the end they called the person in charge of the computer. He came over and closed the curtains, and the printer started up again. He left without a word of explanation. That explanation emerged later: The early morning sun (the sun rises early in the summer here) was shining in, through the paper in the printer, onto the out-of-paper sensor, making the printer think it had no paper. Closing the curtain fixed it.

o-__-o 7y ago
The word you are looking for is azimuth. The azimuth of the sun to the earth shifts as the earth wobbles throughout the year, and as we shift our time for daylights savings. My garage door was affected by this until I created blinders for the trip sensor.. IR from the sun would cause the garage door to stay open. Lately I just watch my new neighbors leave their garage door open because they can’t figure out why

froindt 7y ago

I did an industrial automation class in college. We had a PLC setup with optical sensors and were sorting cylinders by height. We wired it up tested it, then called the TA over to review. It failed despite no changes and working minutes earlier. We changed some logic, tested again, and again called the TA over. It failed. We had another team look at our code and see if we were missing something obvious. Nope, it looked the same. Finally I realized I was standing when we did the testing. I shaded the sensors and kept them from being overloaded with sunlight. We were the only table in direct sunlight, so only we were experiencing the issue.

dunham 7y ago

Back in college (90's) we had a professor who, about once a year, would send an email to help desk saying his monitor had gotten blurry and he needed a new one. We'd go to his office, wipe off the thick layer of dust and it'd be as good as new again.

jolmg 7y ago
Did you try showing him the issue and how to handle it on his own?

elwell 7y ago

> after a few minutes Savage...

LorenPechtel 7y ago

20+ years ago, machines with a monochrome and a color monitor. One machine the color monitor would fail every afternoon. Turns out that for some reason there was a little notch cut in one slat of the blinds. (Presumably to fit around something that was no longer there.) That allowed the sunlight to strike the video card, apparently that was just enough heat to push it over the edge. (This was before PCs were full of cooling fans.)

LinuxBender 7y ago

Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it, so they unplugged it, buffed the floor and plugged it back in. Half-split troubleshooting may have saved a plane flight.

GurnB 7y ago
The best part of this anecdote is that you mentioned Banyan Vines. Spent a handful of years installing/maintaining Banyan Vines network in the early 90's.
guytv 7y ago
Amazing, and exact version of this happened to me in the Israeli Army in the 90's. Every day at around 13:30 (give and take a few minutes) the network for an entire building went offline, only to come back on line a few minutes later. ... In our version of this 'bug' - one of the NCOs unplugged the electricity to that "big box with lots of blinky LEDs" in order to plugin an electric pot, to prepare his post-meal Turkish coffee, then plug it back in once water boiled... Many resources were "thrown" at the problem, until, weeks in, someone had the splendid idea of quietly sitting around the network-cabinet around 13:30 and see what's going on.
xsmasher 7y ago
This is an old one. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  The hospital story for sure, they have alarms on patient devices and battery backup for some, but I was there for the mmac-8 being unplugged.

shanecleveland 7y ago

As support IT in an office, I have a lot of mouse "issues", particularly with the wireless Apple Magic Mouse ... using it turned around 180 deg., making things disappear by not recognizing that the surface can be used to scroll horizontally, battery dying ... to name a few.

ChicagoBoy11 7y ago

I work at a K-12 school and had a similar experience working in a school. The teacher complained the Smartboard touch capability wouldn't work in the morning, but worked in the afternoon. I said nonsense. Went in there and surely it didn't work, but I noticed a bit of a glare from the reflection of the light on the window. I asked her to turn down the shade and the Smartboard instantly started working... felt awesome lol.

ducaale 7y ago

We had an xbox 360 that kept ejecting the CD. Later we discovered that it was due to the sunlight coming from the door. After putting it in a dim place the issue never recurred.