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I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout. The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the b
by blueflow 4y ago
I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout.
The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotplugging my keyboard, so the previous setxkbmap call was not effective anymore and i was back to the standard US qwerty layout.
- kstrauser 4y agoThis is the greatest thing I've read today. I love when software and the real world have entirely unexpected interactions. And by love, I usually mean hate, especially when I'm the one that has to debug them.
- sophacles 4y agoThese sorts of things make for good war stories. I find a trick to improve my attitude while dealing with them is to remind myself "this will be a good story at least, and I'll be glad it happened once I'm regaling others with it".
- andrewfromx 4y agomy favorite story on this is a town in north east usa changed it's traffic lights from energy wasting old fashion lights to new fancy low energy lights. The unexpected result: in winter time these lights did not melt the snow away and the lights were opaque with white snow.
- bobsmooth 4y agoTechnology Connections did an episode on this kind of stuff. GE just installs heaters in their streetlights now.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoHeaters plus LED light… reminds me of technology where you get both at once!
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoI mean, at least now the heater only has top burn power during the winter (I hope)
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoeven better. it only has to heat when it's actively snowing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- riggsdk 4y agoI remember a story about a car that consistently refused to start after a family went to the store to buy vanilla ice cream but it worked fine when they bought chocolate ice cream. (My apologies for any inaccuracies in my recollection of it). They had a manufacturer engineer verify it happened even. Turned out to be an overheating issue. The chocolate ice cream was at the back of the store while the vanilla ice cream was at the front, effectively changing how much time the car had to cool down properly before attempting to start it again.
- phantomathkg 4y agoSnopes said it is a legend? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
- tambourine_man 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- tetris11 4y agoI currently have an RPi4 mounted to the back of my TV for easy Kodi streaming, but I never considered using the business end of a laptop. I'm sure I have a decade old laptop with a broken screen sitting at the bottom of a shelf somewhere...
- blueflow 4y agoIts the stuff what happens when you think 'what can i do with the hardware that i have' instead of 'which hardware to buy'.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoI used to think this way, but then HN scared me into thinking that all this 5+ year hardware is much less power-efficient, so now I just... avoid the issue entirely, and don't do anything requiring hardware, old or new.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoYou may find it helpful to check how much power things actually use and what power actually costs where you are. I used to obsess over energy efficiency until I realized that all my machines were laptops that maxed out at like 40W running full bore and I'd spent hours saving like $0.10.
- l72 4y agoI invested in a frame.work laptop. If I ever purchase a new mainboard, I'll get this cooler for my old mainboard and use it as a server or mount it to a TV: https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mainboard-case/framework/ https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mainboard-case/fr...
- yellowapple 4y agoThe fact that traditional parts makers like Cooler Master are putting out Framework cases and such bodes really well, I reckon. There are few things I've bought that produce the opposite of buyer's remorse, and my Framework is at the top of the list.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI want my CPU-load locale switcher back.
- samschooler 4y agoLess technical, but: My wifi goes out when it rains. My wifi is on the same breaker as the outdoor outlets so any issues with water intrusion affects the wifi.
- oakwhiz 4y agoHad a similar thing happen with "fake" (passive) PoE working fine but some types of network activity would cause the CPUs in the network devices to work harder, leading to voltage sag which would sometimes cause the remote side of the link to reboot or hang. The problem went away with a separate power supply for the local and remote side.
- mrguyorama 4y agoI once had to rip VHS tapes from family to digital. I had a VHS deck and a spare laptop with a little RCA plug to USB dongle to ingest content. My first few test rips were awful quality, full of analog noise and weird banding and just unexplainable signal degradation. I couldn't understand, because when I was just playing with the dongle the signal was great. Eventually it dawned on me: I sat the laptop, right on top of the VHS deck while running the rips. The VHS head ended up directly under the CPU and HDD, such that, CPU and hard drive activity were interfering with the tape reading! I moved the laptop off the VHS deck and everything worked just fine.
- danShumway 4y agoI've heard a number of weird "remember that computers are physical devices" debugging stories now, but this might be the best one :) It's such a Rube Goldberg kind of error, I love it.
- andrepd 4y agoThese kind of weird software/hardware bugs remind me of this: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-ever https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
- GuB-42 4y agoSo, a DIY setup. I guess that when you are making a production model (ex: iMac), this is the kind of thing you have to test for. We had an interference problem at work once, in a VME rack, an I/O board with a particularly large coil was messing with the CPU board, solved by moving the offending board in another slot. The effect was mostly random crashes and reboot though, nothing fancy like a keyboard layout change.
- Aerbil313 4y agoMy layout resets every time I start chromium or sometimes I when I start terminal. It’s not external keyboard. Any ideas?