This reminds me of a recent issue I had. I had just gotten a new laptop from IT. While picking it up from them, I had generated myself a password, put it in my password manager on my phone, and then entered it twice to set it on the laptop. Everything worked great. But when I got back to my desk, the password didn't work! I tried a bunch of times, watched myself hit each key to eliminate typos, etc.
I went back to IT and they asked me to demonstrate. But this time it worked! I walked back to my desk, thoroughly embarrassed. But a couple hours later I had to log in again and once again could not.
After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I was typing at IT while standing over a sitting-height desk. Sure enough, typing in that position fixed my issue. I carefully watched what I was doing this time - something about the exact layout of the keyboard and the weird angle I was typing at ensured that I was making a particular typo I typed in that position - just a single letter switched to another, every time. Sure enough, making that one substitution to my intended password got me in.
It's worth noting that sometimes (incorrect) keyboard maps can get in the way.
If it's a key that you may not often type and one that is often transposed between regions, the fact that the entered char is not shown can lead to frustration.
e.g. " and @ are in different positions in UK vs. US keyboards. So user thinks they are typing @, but " goes into the box.
One of the more annoying things I've found moving country is the unavailability of keyboards / laptops with the layout I grew up with. I find it especially annoying as the country I'm from uses a US layout which I naively assumed would be easily available everywhere (and it is available but not without a long delivery and a premium price)
Side note: helping my French housemate with his uni assignments was an experience, none of the symbols were where I expected them to be
Meh, takes you like some days to get used to another layout being visible on the keys, while your OS (and brain) actually using another layout.
I've used US keyboard layout since I started programming (my first mentor essentially forced me to switch to it, he was right about it being easier), but throughout the years been using Swedish, Norwegian, British, Spanish and French physical keyboards, never cleanly mapped to the actual layout I've used on the OS, and never been an issue.
The last part though, is a real one, trying to pair program with Spanish programmers always have at least one moment of holding Shift and sliding the finger across all numbers to see where that specific symbol actually is.
On other layouts that isn't enough. For example French keyboards are AZERTY, not QWERTY. and here in Sweden we have å, ä and ö next to the (tall) enter key, instead of the symbols US and UK have.
(Side note: those are not a and o with diacretics, they are entirely separate letters in the alphabets of the Nordic countries, with entirely different sounds.)
The product I make deals with passwords. We’ve had several bugs over the years that came down to Unicode usernames and passwords containing unexpected characters. Solving them was simple, we just had to be sure to get the encoding and character sets right, but as an American it was eye opening to find so many people with the Euro symbol in password strings.
Related, a friend of mine uses a long list of heavy metal band names as one of his unit tests for strings. Says it catches a lot of weird encoding bugs.
I’ve done this before as well. It truly baffled me because of how much in undermined me sense of being totally aware of my body. I truly believed I was hitting the right keys (I know how to type after all) and I never noticed any issue when writing normally, but only when typing my password. But of course I couldn’t see my password as I typed, while in other cases I would subconsciously correct any resulting typos because I could see them. I had no reason to classify typos due to standing as any different than the regular errors I might make while typing.
Almost felt like a bug in error correction loop in my brain, or maybe more like an unconsidered edge case.
I somes subconsciously correct typos even when not looking at them. It drives me crazy when UI design breaks this, like fixed-length security code / PIN entry UIs that automatically submit when you enter the last character of the code.
I also tend to memorize long (8+ digit) PINs based on the physical layout of the keys, so if I need to enter a PIN set up on a phone-style keypad on a normal keyboard or numeric keypad, or vice versa, I need to visualize entering the PIN on the original input device to remember it.
I don't think the OP ever returned with a conclusive answer, but I'm somewhat convinced by the commenters that it was either a low-frequency engine sound rattling the neighbor's windows or something to do with the car's rear-cross sensor.
This has been happening to me and I had no idea it was this. Every time I sit down at my chair the monitor goes black for a second. Never would I have guessed this.
Obligatory mention of David J. Agans's "Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems" where you can find dozens of such stories, including why their computer crashes when you wear a certain green T-shirt.
Ok I swear I had a printer that would do some kind of internal cleaning noise thing every time I plugged something else in to a 120v outlet anywhere in the same apartment. I never really tried to figure it out.
It's an urban legend that's floated around in various forms: in some it's an ice cream parlor rather than a store and they pack the vanilla faster, in some it's only the vanilla that gets hand-packed so it takes longer, it's pistachio that takes longer and triggers the problem, or butter pecan.
Snopes covered this one and they cite to an urban legends book from 1989: "Curses, Broiled Again" by Jan Harold Brunvand. Brunvand prints the "vanilla takes longer" version and reports also having a "pistachio takes longer" version printed in a magazine in 1978, which itself referred to another magazine as its source. In the book's version it's a Texas car dealer who's looking into the problem. The same author's later book from 1999 covers the story again and includes versions dating back further, plus a 1992 version which is this one where it's Pontiac and the problem is the vanilla being in a separate case at the front of the store.
In the Pontiac version you can go and pick at various implausible details stacked up together, that Pontiac's president cares enough to send an engineer out, that the engineer is there when the car won't start on the first night but still just comes back many more times rather than looking at the car or presumably noticing that it starts a couple minutes later, that this guy is buying a new container of ice cream every night and never stocking up, that he never takes any other trip where it's a short stop... You can go on each of those and say they do happen: like presidents and CEOs do sometimes go digging deep on random problems customers put in front of them. But if you look at the whole thing I think you need to recognize it as a piece of storytelling, not fact.
Maybe there's some kernel of a true story in there, but if so it's probably a pretty small kernel. Anyway it doesn't matter much: it's just a fun story that teaches a little lesson so people like to share it around.
My grandmother's house is adjacent my parents' w/ 200 ft. between and line of sight. Back in 2013, when my grandmother moved into the then-new house, I setup a point-to-point wifi bridge between them to share my parents' Internet connection and give me easy remote support access to grandma.
Summer of 2023 visiting relatives complained the Internet service in grandma's house was slow and unreliable. There were repeated suggestions made by helpful relatives for purchasing a new WiFi router for her house, getting independent Internet service, etc.
Grandma was happy with it, and the relatives went home, so I put off looking at it. When I did finally look at it, months later (when I went over for Thanksgiving) everything seemed fine.
When the relatives came to visit in summer 2024 they complained again. I looked at it immediately and found massive packet loss on both ends.
The ornamental trees planted along the driveway between the houses were the culprit. With the leaves off (say, at Thanksgiving time) it was fine. When the relatives came to visit in the summer the trees were in full leaf and acting as very good attenuators.
The trees were newly planted when grandma moved in. I didn't even think about them getting bigger and fuller when I set up the link. They filled out in the 10 years intervening, though. (Chalk it up to me still being relatively young and not thinking about installations on 10+ year timescales when I put it up.)
Fortunately there's a room in her house with line of sight to my parents' house unobscured by trees. It meant putting the radio outside a bedroom window instead of the attic (where I'd originally stashed it), but it solved the problem and ended complaints from relatives.
A friend told me once that his mouse stops working when someone is using the microwave. His room was on the backside of the kitchen.
When I took a look at it, it turned out that his (proprietary) wireless USB adapter for the mouse was very close to the band of the noise of the microwave. The microwave was also not properly grounded and shared a circuit breaker with his room, as apparently the kitchen was formerly larger and then split into two rooms by the landlord.
That was quite funny seeing that problem happen in action, he was always joking about a ghost in the machine, and I was joking about him being radiated by his microwave.
The cool part is years later in University one of my commilitones told me that his mouse stops working when the fridge turns on. The first thing that I checked was whether or not there's noise on the power circuit, et voila, easily fixed.
Noise on powerlines is annoying, very frequently present and sometimes dangerous.
Long ago there was this case of a factory that pressed desks out of steel sheets. Their main press (an absolute monster) had taken someone's arm off and they couldn't find the cause. It turned out that near the roof there was an air conditioning unit that that had a flaky relay in it that drew a gigantic spark on disconnecting, enough to upset the latch that controlled the safety interlock on the press, causing the press to move by itself.
> A friend told me once that his mouse stops working when someone is using the microwave. His room was on the backside of the kitchen.
I had to disable a 2.4ghz access point a couple years ago because a bathroom had a passive IR detector for the light switch that would never let the light shutoff. Because detecting IR is a pretty weak signal, I guess these switches amplify it. The issue is the circuit also acts as a weak antenna for 2.4ghz and thinks its seeing IR when it's actually just amplifying and seeing the 2.4ghz beacon signal.
RF gets weird. Something I've thought about over the years is how my FM radios at my old house would sometimes pick up aviation radio which should be AM well above a tuned FM frequency. Apparently this is due to the common design being a superheterodyne receiver which comes with a few quirks (such as causing some small interference itself when it's receiving).
If you strum an electric guitar and let the hertz of the string fall through the range of AM radio the amp will briefly pickup AM radio stations. Not that you can decipher anything but you recognize voices as it travels past the station.
That's not because of the frequency of the guitar but because the guitar functions as a very nice antenna (long piece of metal (the strong) + a coil forming a tuned circuit), what happens is that your hands create a very temporary partial diode where you touch the strings!
Such naturally occurring diodes are an interesting phenomenon (in this case: the salt in your sweat interacting with the steel of the strings) and were the basis of the very first radio receivers after the 'Coherer' (which is a word that has fallen out of use so far that it registers as a spelling error on my browser!).
How so? A guitar doesn't go past a few kHz (the highest string is IIRC 660 Hz, and the top fret is 660*4) and AM long wave radio—which is almost dead—starts around 120 kHz.
That's a common myth. There is no special water resonance at 2.4GHz, it's just a frequency allocated for general use. Early microwave ovens didn't use 2.4GHz
I had a Customer complaining about bad WiFi in a conference room. Every time I checked it I had good performance. Eventually I attended the meeting most of the of the complaints related to just to observe.
What I observed was workers from cubes near the conference room microwaving food for their lunch in the break room right across from the conference room.
My only unsolved networking mystery was that my computer would experience high packet loss when a Roku in the other room was streaming Netflix.
My PC and the roku device were both wired to two different ports on a router (iirc an Edgerouter X running openwrt at the time). This didn't repro when the roku streamed other services (hulu/youtube tested), only netflix. This also didn't repro if the roku was connected over wireless (connecting to an AP wired to a different port). Just opening netflix also didn't repro, the roku had to be actively streaming a netflix video.
I never ended up solving it, I just worked around it by making the roku connect over wireless.
It did take me forever to figure out the problem though. For a long time I'd be in one room getting frustrated with my computer while someone was innocently watching netflix in the other room.
Here's a fun one that I still haven't figured out:
I recently purchased a Banana Pi 4 with the 802.11be Wi-Fi 7 module to be used as an access point. It generally works well as an AP and I'm getting full speeds. However, for some reason whenever I try to communicate directly with the router/firewall (separate device on the same network) through this AP, it will intermittently drop 3/4 packets. It only happens when communicating with the router/firewall device, and only over the wlan interface on the bpi-r4. I have a similar AP setup on another embedded system (PCEngines APU2) and this has never been an issue.
I suspect there's some sort of bug with the internal 4-port switch of the bpi-r4 not playing well with the wlan interface when they're all bridged together, but digging through the logs hasn't revealed anything obvious.
Good guess! I did enable some QoS algorithm in openwrt so it's certainly possible. But yeah it doesn't make sense that wifi traffic was non-impacting. But it's something I didn't try turning off.
People have mentioned "can't print on Tuesdays", which reminds me of an error that occurred with a Linux PDF viewer at the math department at Berkeley:
"Oct 2: Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares."
I've seen other references to this bug, but the workaround is the sort of thing mathematicians would come up with.
I once moved into a new apartment, built a new PC, but noticed that every 30 or so minutes while gaming my monitor would turn off. It was just frequent enough to make gaming intolerable. One day I was plugging something in and moved my DisplayPort cable slightly and my monitor turned off again. Turns out it was too close to the antennas for the WiFi card I had; it was inducing a current in the DisplayPort cable and the monitor’s firmware didn’t know what to do so it just crashed! I moved the cable slightly further away and it never happened again.
Similarly, if you have one of those office chairs with a pneumatic shock, dropping down hard on the chair may induce an electromagnetic or ESD pulse that shocks the monitor.
There’s a video on YouTube about this somewhere and we were able to confirm their findings.
I must say, the AI-generated "stock image" doesn't add that much to the article and could be done without, especially when its alt-text contains the prompt.
Wifi routers are little magic devices that work only when they want. I talked before here, but I had a Dell Vostro notebook that everytime it connected with my router using windows it would just kill the entire home wifi. It was a TP-Link mesh network. The only thing that would bring the thing up was to reboot every single router in the network and not connect that notebook.
I tried update my routers, tried to update my notebook wifi firmware, tryed to change the router config, the router position, the router order, the wifi channel, the wifi name and password. Nothing worked. But if I connected using linux, things would work just fine.
In the end I divorced my wife and brought a Thinkpad. She keeped the cat, the house, the routers and that dell vostro notebook.
Yep, the nonstandard part of their setup absolutely should have been the first thing to consider. Feels a bit disingenuous to not mention that part straight away.
The old classic, I think it turned out that in hot weather the fuel line vapour locked a few minutes after turning off, and the ice cream was at the back of the store, and took just long enough to walk there and back to trigger the issue.
I have a personal one with my car: if from a cold start during spring/autumn temperatures (or early mornings in summer), I drive about a km and shut it off, then come back to the car after a few minutes it will not manage to stay idling once I turn it on. What happens instead is that the RPM goes too low, and the engine shuts off, then the start/stop feature kicks in and restarts the engine. This happens every few seconds repeatedly. If I press the accelerator it can keep running. And if I just drive a meter or two it will work fine again when I go back to idling.
I tried both with neutral or in gear but with the clutch pressed (yes, it is a manual, fairly common in Sweden still) and that doesn't make a difference.
I haven't managed to figure out the cause, but since it is a modern car I would assume it is something with the ECU that goes wrong. (It is a Dacia Duster in case anyone else recognise this issue. The mechanic I asked hadn't heard about anyone else having this issue though.)
>With a bit of work, my dad set up a line-of-sight Wi-Fi bridge — a couple of high-gain directional Wi-Fi antennas pointed at each other — between the office and our apartment.
How was that not the first thing to be checked ? OP must have hit themselves over the head for not thinking of that one sooner
> How was that not the first thing to be checked ?
I'm a very technical person, and would be considered "smart". A few weeks ago, the TV remote was acting up. I changed the batteries, still happening. Restart the TV, still happening. The mobile app is working fine, I'm wondering if there's a fault on the IR blaster. Use a camera to check the IR blaster on the remote, seems fine. Factory reset the TV, still happening. Take the TV off the unit, pull out back of the TV off, solder to IR blaster looks ok. Put it all back together, still happening. Phone samsung, and go to make a coffee while I'm on hold. Come back, it's working while I'm on hold. Total time, 4 hours at this point.
Turns out, I had put a coffee cup in front of the receiver that morning, and unluckily put it back when I lifted the TV down from the stand...
On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.
Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.
Long time ago I had a 10km 2.4ghz wifi link with directional antennas, it worked very well but the throughtput improved with rain.
Directional antenas are far from directional, they pick noise from everywhere.
In my opinion rain reduces that noise, and if the point to point has more than enough signal margin to keep operating at full speed, it ends up improving the link.
Back when I had cable internet we had a bizarre problem where the service would often stop working if it was very cold and raining. It had to be that specific combo as well.
- Just rain == good internet
- Just cold == good internet
- Cold + rain == bad internet
After a lot of head scratching the provider finally sent someone with a ladder to climb the poll. What they found was that the protective boot on the coax connection was bad. When it rained for a while water would seep into the coax connector. By itself this wasn’t too bad, but if it was also cold outside it would freeze. This would then force a gap between the threads of the socket and the cable, breaking the ground connection.
Previously, the connector had been replaced, but nobody had noticed the torn boot. This tech replaced both the connector and the boot and the problem was solved! It honestly was the best interaction with the cable company I have ever had. Only returning their hardware when switching to fiber felt almost as good.
I had a cable connection that would reliably drop during snowmelt. No other time. Snow? Fine. Rain? Fine. Only continued snowmelt would cause it to drop.
Huh, my initial expectation was wrong! I figured (even until close to the end of the article) that the problem was a dramatic increase in the amount of wi-fi or other 2.4GHz traffic in the area leading to interference, some of which was blocked by rain thus allowing more stable local connections.
I still think that's actually what happened here. A tree in the middle of a 2.4 or 5ghz beam would have an effect, but its branches moving by a few inches would not have this much of an effect.
Kind of tangentially related to weird ways tech works: a few weeks ago I finally disassembled my original DMG-01 Game Boy to fix it. There was decades of battery acid corrosion that took a ton of cleaning and resoldering and reflowing the screen connections.
After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.
I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.
No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.
So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.
This also reminds me of the situation with my TV antenna. I made an antenna years ago and put it in my attic. Using the old antennaweb service I aligned it with the stations we cared about and then never touched it again.
I installed the antenna in the winter. Everything worked great. In the summer, we lost a few channels. Rain in the summer and hardly anything would come in. The answer I realized, like in the article, is trees. Leaves are already full of water so they are good at attenuating signals. Leaves that are also soaked in rain doubly so.
This has been already posted in 2024, and I commented it that time with the story about my non-paid cable signal, but since it's a repost I will just copy my comment again, if you will...
One winter had been so cold I had Cartoon Network and other cable stations available on my terrestrial antenna. When the freezing temperatures ended, I had to buy the cable because I got used to it so much.
"Car won't start when picking daughter up from swimming" was a good one told to me by a colleague. In the late 90s some high-up C-level at BMW had a lovely new 7-series as his company car, and it was great.
Unfortunately he hadn't even had it a week when he found he couldn't unlock it, and once he had it wouldn't start. And wouldn't you know it, it was bucketing with rain at 8pm and there he was, stuck outside the swimming pool trying to take his daughter home from her swimming club. Off it went back to the garage on a breakdown truck, while he got a rather lower-spec loaner.
Next morning it was fine. All week it was fine. Until it was time to pick his daughter up from swimming, of course.
This went on for a few weeks until eventually they tracked it down to interference with the remote fob.
Because the swimming pool was at the local community centre, in another room in the community centre was a local radio station, and they started broadcasting at 6pm every week night.
What was the first thing anyone did on coming into the studio? Turn on the UHF link from the studio to the transmitter site, on 428MHz, sufficiently close to the 433MHz receiver for the remote central locking fob to desense it and prevent it sending the immobiliser key to car's ECU.
Not as elaborate a story, but in a former office we had special office chair that, when you sat down with a bit of force it would switch off one or two specific monitors.
That also took a few minutes to debug why this one coworker came back from lunch, plummeted down into his chair, and someone else's screen went out.
> I wonder how much polarization affects things; I was once told that terrestrial FM Radio is transmitted with vertical polarization to reduce interference from tall objects between you and the transmitter.
> Terrestrial TV (some of which used bands that overlap FM radio) uses horizontal polarization.
This is only true in the US (and probably areas influenced by US standards). In Europe, FM radio transmissions (and digital television nowadays) tend to be mixed-polarization (circular polarization), except if there are known interference (usually border areas) that would preclude mixed-polarization.
Analog television meanwhile significantly differs depending on your area, which required you to either test which tower and polarity is the best (note that all broadcasts are transmitted at a single tower, unlike in the US), or just... request a map with that data.
Connection only happens when it's rainin',
Routers only love you when they're routin',
Say carriers, they will come and they will go
When the rain fries your motherboard, you'll know, you'll know
>The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. We replaced our old 802.11g devices with new 802.11n ones, which took advantage of new magic math and physics to make signals more resistant to interference.
I once had a s775 gigabyte motherboard which would bluescreen on each cold boot. after the bluescreen it would boot successfully - this was both in windows and linux. the workaround was to wait for the bios beep and then hit reset. it worked like that for 6 years lmfao.
same computer did not start if any of its metal surfaces touched the wall, but that might have been a electrical leak - thankfully i do not live at that dump still
I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:
- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
> Can't log in when standing up
This reminds me of a recent issue I had. I had just gotten a new laptop from IT. While picking it up from them, I had generated myself a password, put it in my password manager on my phone, and then entered it twice to set it on the laptop. Everything worked great. But when I got back to my desk, the password didn't work! I tried a bunch of times, watched myself hit each key to eliminate typos, etc.
I went back to IT and they asked me to demonstrate. But this time it worked! I walked back to my desk, thoroughly embarrassed. But a couple hours later I had to log in again and once again could not.
After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I was typing at IT while standing over a sitting-height desk. Sure enough, typing in that position fixed my issue. I carefully watched what I was doing this time - something about the exact layout of the keyboard and the weird angle I was typing at ensured that I was making a particular typo I typed in that position - just a single letter switched to another, every time. Sure enough, making that one substitution to my intended password got me in.
It's worth noting that sometimes (incorrect) keyboard maps can get in the way.
If it's a key that you may not often type and one that is often transposed between regions, the fact that the entered char is not shown can lead to frustration.
e.g. " and @ are in different positions in UK vs. US keyboards. So user thinks they are typing @, but " goes into the box.
One of the more annoying things I've found moving country is the unavailability of keyboards / laptops with the layout I grew up with. I find it especially annoying as the country I'm from uses a US layout which I naively assumed would be easily available everywhere (and it is available but not without a long delivery and a premium price)
Side note: helping my French housemate with his uni assignments was an experience, none of the symbols were where I expected them to be
Meh, takes you like some days to get used to another layout being visible on the keys, while your OS (and brain) actually using another layout.
I've used US keyboard layout since I started programming (my first mentor essentially forced me to switch to it, he was right about it being easier), but throughout the years been using Swedish, Norwegian, British, Spanish and French physical keyboards, never cleanly mapped to the actual layout I've used on the OS, and never been an issue.
The last part though, is a real one, trying to pair program with Spanish programmers always have at least one moment of holding Shift and sliding the finger across all numbers to see where that specific symbol actually is.
No, that is why passwords are alphanumerical, keep your #€{*\$<€$<¥]+]!,’ to yourself.
On other layouts that isn't enough. For example French keyboards are AZERTY, not QWERTY. and here in Sweden we have å, ä and ö next to the (tall) enter key, instead of the symbols US and UK have.
(Side note: those are not a and o with diacretics, they are entirely separate letters in the alphabets of the Nordic countries, with entirely different sounds.)
The product I make deals with passwords. We’ve had several bugs over the years that came down to Unicode usernames and passwords containing unexpected characters. Solving them was simple, we just had to be sure to get the encoding and character sets right, but as an American it was eye opening to find so many people with the Euro symbol in password strings.
Related, a friend of mine uses a long list of heavy metal band names as one of his unit tests for strings. Says it catches a lot of weird encoding bugs.
Well aware, just don’t use them in passwords.
Not all password policies allow you to ignore special characters.
I’ve done this before as well. It truly baffled me because of how much in undermined me sense of being totally aware of my body. I truly believed I was hitting the right keys (I know how to type after all) and I never noticed any issue when writing normally, but only when typing my password. But of course I couldn’t see my password as I typed, while in other cases I would subconsciously correct any resulting typos because I could see them. I had no reason to classify typos due to standing as any different than the regular errors I might make while typing.
Almost felt like a bug in error correction loop in my brain, or maybe more like an unconsidered edge case.
I somes subconsciously correct typos even when not looking at them. It drives me crazy when UI design breaks this, like fixed-length security code / PIN entry UIs that automatically submit when you enter the last character of the code.
I also tend to memorize long (8+ digit) PINs based on the physical layout of the keys, so if I need to enter a PIN set up on a phone-style keypad on a normal keyboard or numeric keypad, or vice versa, I need to visualize entering the PIN on the original input device to remember it.
This always frustrates the heck out of me when it is the same mechanical keyboards but different switches
- We can’t send an email more than 500 miles
https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
Here's another for your collection.
- Putting the car in reverse sets off the neighbor's home security system. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/7k12fs/neighbors_hous...
Did this get solved? I think I read all the comments from OP but saw no confirmation as to what happened.
I don't think the OP ever returned with a conclusive answer, but I'm somewhat convinced by the commenters that it was either a low-frequency engine sound rattling the neighbor's windows or something to do with the car's rear-cross sensor.
You can add this one to the list: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7p09ay/i_shit...
Office chairs are turning monitors on and off.
This is actually officially documented on the DisplayLink website as well: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...
This has been happening to me and I had no idea it was this. Every time I sit down at my chair the monitor goes black for a second. Never would I have guessed this.
Can't send email more than 500 miles away: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
And my personal favorite, "more magic": https://web.archive.org/web/20260103114654/http://www.catb.o...
Also this one, which originally came from Usenet days:
https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/cp48t...
This one about a singly-wired switch is in the same vein:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Here you have another one, although is not named like that: https://web.archive.org/web/20241112052925/https://cohost.or...
In addition to the others people have mentioned, I'd add "Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain"[0]
[0] https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
In a very strange coincidence, I happened to read that first story in a book[1] I'm reading, just last night! What are the chances?
[1] https://debuggingrules.com/
Obligatory mention of David J. Agans's "Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems" where you can find dozens of such stories, including why their computer crashes when you wear a certain green T-shirt.
Listening to Janet Jackson crashes hard drives https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2022-38392
Ok I swear I had a printer that would do some kind of internal cleaning noise thing every time I plugged something else in to a 120v outlet anywhere in the same apartment. I never really tried to figure it out.
What about the dog who barked before the (landline) phone started ringing?
The vanilla story is insane!
It's not real, but it's still a fine story.
How do you know?
It's an urban legend that's floated around in various forms: in some it's an ice cream parlor rather than a store and they pack the vanilla faster, in some it's only the vanilla that gets hand-packed so it takes longer, it's pistachio that takes longer and triggers the problem, or butter pecan.
Snopes covered this one and they cite to an urban legends book from 1989: "Curses, Broiled Again" by Jan Harold Brunvand. Brunvand prints the "vanilla takes longer" version and reports also having a "pistachio takes longer" version printed in a magazine in 1978, which itself referred to another magazine as its source. In the book's version it's a Texas car dealer who's looking into the problem. The same author's later book from 1999 covers the story again and includes versions dating back further, plus a 1992 version which is this one where it's Pontiac and the problem is the vanilla being in a separate case at the front of the store.
In the Pontiac version you can go and pick at various implausible details stacked up together, that Pontiac's president cares enough to send an engineer out, that the engineer is there when the car won't start on the first night but still just comes back many more times rather than looking at the car or presumably noticing that it starts a couple minutes later, that this guy is buying a new container of ice cream every night and never stocking up, that he never takes any other trip where it's a short stop... You can go on each of those and say they do happen: like presidents and CEOs do sometimes go digging deep on random problems customers put in front of them. But if you look at the whole thing I think you need to recognize it as a piece of storytelling, not fact.
Maybe there's some kernel of a true story in there, but if so it's probably a pretty small kernel. Anyway it doesn't matter much: it's just a fun story that teaches a little lesson so people like to share it around.
Oh, wow. This sort of happened in my life!
My grandmother's house is adjacent my parents' w/ 200 ft. between and line of sight. Back in 2013, when my grandmother moved into the then-new house, I setup a point-to-point wifi bridge between them to share my parents' Internet connection and give me easy remote support access to grandma.
Summer of 2023 visiting relatives complained the Internet service in grandma's house was slow and unreliable. There were repeated suggestions made by helpful relatives for purchasing a new WiFi router for her house, getting independent Internet service, etc.
Grandma was happy with it, and the relatives went home, so I put off looking at it. When I did finally look at it, months later (when I went over for Thanksgiving) everything seemed fine.
When the relatives came to visit in summer 2024 they complained again. I looked at it immediately and found massive packet loss on both ends.
The ornamental trees planted along the driveway between the houses were the culprit. With the leaves off (say, at Thanksgiving time) it was fine. When the relatives came to visit in the summer the trees were in full leaf and acting as very good attenuators.
The trees were newly planted when grandma moved in. I didn't even think about them getting bigger and fuller when I set up the link. They filled out in the 10 years intervening, though. (Chalk it up to me still being relatively young and not thinking about installations on 10+ year timescales when I put it up.)
Fortunately there's a room in her house with line of sight to my parents' house unobscured by trees. It meant putting the radio outside a bedroom window instead of the attic (where I'd originally stashed it), but it solved the problem and ended complaints from relatives.
For GHz signals water is a pretty good dampening material, I can tell on some links whether it is foggy!
Your microwave uses 2.4 GHz specifically because it's particularly well absorbed by water :)
A friend told me once that his mouse stops working when someone is using the microwave. His room was on the backside of the kitchen.
When I took a look at it, it turned out that his (proprietary) wireless USB adapter for the mouse was very close to the band of the noise of the microwave. The microwave was also not properly grounded and shared a circuit breaker with his room, as apparently the kitchen was formerly larger and then split into two rooms by the landlord.
That was quite funny seeing that problem happen in action, he was always joking about a ghost in the machine, and I was joking about him being radiated by his microwave.
The cool part is years later in University one of my commilitones told me that his mouse stops working when the fridge turns on. The first thing that I checked was whether or not there's noise on the power circuit, et voila, easily fixed.
Noise on powerlines is annoying, very frequently present and sometimes dangerous.
Long ago there was this case of a factory that pressed desks out of steel sheets. Their main press (an absolute monster) had taken someone's arm off and they couldn't find the cause. It turned out that near the roof there was an air conditioning unit that that had a flaky relay in it that drew a gigantic spark on disconnecting, enough to upset the latch that controlled the safety interlock on the press, causing the press to move by itself.
It took quite a while to find it.
Mysterious radio astronomy signals turned out to be the breakroom microwave:
Sadly, it's never aliens
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/its-the-microwave-h...
> A friend told me once that his mouse stops working when someone is using the microwave. His room was on the backside of the kitchen.
I had to disable a 2.4ghz access point a couple years ago because a bathroom had a passive IR detector for the light switch that would never let the light shutoff. Because detecting IR is a pretty weak signal, I guess these switches amplify it. The issue is the circuit also acts as a weak antenna for 2.4ghz and thinks its seeing IR when it's actually just amplifying and seeing the 2.4ghz beacon signal.
RF gets weird. Something I've thought about over the years is how my FM radios at my old house would sometimes pick up aviation radio which should be AM well above a tuned FM frequency. Apparently this is due to the common design being a superheterodyne receiver which comes with a few quirks (such as causing some small interference itself when it's receiving).
If you strum an electric guitar and let the hertz of the string fall through the range of AM radio the amp will briefly pickup AM radio stations. Not that you can decipher anything but you recognize voices as it travels past the station.
That's not because of the frequency of the guitar but because the guitar functions as a very nice antenna (long piece of metal (the strong) + a coil forming a tuned circuit), what happens is that your hands create a very temporary partial diode where you touch the strings!
Such naturally occurring diodes are an interesting phenomenon (in this case: the salt in your sweat interacting with the steel of the strings) and were the basis of the very first radio receivers after the 'Coherer' (which is a word that has fallen out of use so far that it registers as a spelling error on my browser!).
That may be one explanation, but more broadly with analog audio it is actually quite difficult NOT to end up with an AM receiver.
Hehe. That's a very good point.
Of course, if you want to build a proper AM receiver you will find that it is quite hard ;)
Same with oscillators and amplifiers. You always get the other one first.
Oh, and it is also very hard not to build a microphone. Except...
Yup, pretty much any nonlinearity will demodulate AM.
Too late to edit: strong => strings. sorry!
How so? A guitar doesn't go past a few kHz (the highest string is IIRC 660 Hz, and the top fret is 660*4) and AM long wave radio—which is almost dead—starts around 120 kHz.
That's a common myth. There is no special water resonance at 2.4GHz, it's just a frequency allocated for general use. Early microwave ovens didn't use 2.4GHz
This happened in my life too!
I had a Customer complaining about bad WiFi in a conference room. Every time I checked it I had good performance. Eventually I attended the meeting most of the of the complaints related to just to observe.
What I observed was workers from cubes near the conference room microwaving food for their lunch in the break room right across from the conference room.
My only unsolved networking mystery was that my computer would experience high packet loss when a Roku in the other room was streaming Netflix.
My PC and the roku device were both wired to two different ports on a router (iirc an Edgerouter X running openwrt at the time). This didn't repro when the roku streamed other services (hulu/youtube tested), only netflix. This also didn't repro if the roku was connected over wireless (connecting to an AP wired to a different port). Just opening netflix also didn't repro, the roku had to be actively streaming a netflix video.
I never ended up solving it, I just worked around it by making the roku connect over wireless.
It did take me forever to figure out the problem though. For a long time I'd be in one room getting frustrated with my computer while someone was innocently watching netflix in the other room.
Here's a fun one that I still haven't figured out:
I recently purchased a Banana Pi 4 with the 802.11be Wi-Fi 7 module to be used as an access point. It generally works well as an AP and I'm getting full speeds. However, for some reason whenever I try to communicate directly with the router/firewall (separate device on the same network) through this AP, it will intermittently drop 3/4 packets. It only happens when communicating with the router/firewall device, and only over the wlan interface on the bpi-r4. I have a similar AP setup on another embedded system (PCEngines APU2) and this has never been an issue.
I suspect there's some sort of bug with the internal 4-port switch of the bpi-r4 not playing well with the wlan interface when they're all bridged together, but digging through the logs hasn't revealed anything obvious.
It's driving me nuts!
QoS?
Does sound like a QoS thing, but I would think QoS still applies over WiFi so I'm not sure
Good guess! I did enable some QoS algorithm in openwrt so it's certainly possible. But yeah it doesn't make sense that wifi traffic was non-impacting. But it's something I didn't try turning off.
When you're desperate you'll troubleshooting anything hey
People have mentioned "can't print on Tuesdays", which reminds me of an error that occurred with a Linux PDF viewer at the math department at Berkeley:
"Oct 2: Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares."
I've seen other references to this bug, but the workaround is the sort of thing mathematicians would come up with.
sources: https://mathoverflow.net/a/3601/143, https://math.berkeley.edu/computing/wiki/index.php?title=Sup...
I once moved into a new apartment, built a new PC, but noticed that every 30 or so minutes while gaming my monitor would turn off. It was just frequent enough to make gaming intolerable. One day I was plugging something in and moved my DisplayPort cable slightly and my monitor turned off again. Turns out it was too close to the antennas for the WiFi card I had; it was inducing a current in the DisplayPort cable and the monitor’s firmware didn’t know what to do so it just crashed! I moved the cable slightly further away and it never happened again.
Similarly, if you have one of those office chairs with a pneumatic shock, dropping down hard on the chair may induce an electromagnetic or ESD pulse that shocks the monitor.
There’s a video on YouTube about this somewhere and we were able to confirm their findings.
Oh my god, so THAT'S WHY sometimes when I get up from the chair in my office, the screen flashes black for a brief moment?!
Yup! I don't know what the exact mechanism is, but google "monitor flashes when I sit on my chair" and you'll find tons of hits.
I have a Samsung Odyssey G9 monitor and it’s so sensitive to EMFs, it’ll blink off for a moment when I take my jumper off.
Most likely it's the cable(s) and not the monitor. Another commenter posted: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861... Try a higher quality cable or a clip-on ferrite ring.
Funny enough in my original comment above, I also was using a G9. This checks out
My first thought was atmospheric effects, i.e. along the lines of "The radio only works at night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear-channel_station
Also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation
I must say, the AI-generated "stock image" doesn't add that much to the article and could be done without, especially when its alt-text contains the prompt.
Wifi routers are little magic devices that work only when they want. I talked before here, but I had a Dell Vostro notebook that everytime it connected with my router using windows it would just kill the entire home wifi. It was a TP-Link mesh network. The only thing that would bring the thing up was to reboot every single router in the network and not connect that notebook.
I tried update my routers, tried to update my notebook wifi firmware, tryed to change the router config, the router position, the router order, the wifi channel, the wifi name and password. Nothing worked. But if I connected using linux, things would work just fine.
In the end I divorced my wife and brought a Thinkpad. She keeped the cat, the house, the routers and that dell vostro notebook.
I keeped the dog and the car.
A divorce is a quite radical solution for a WiFi problem. But I am happy it worked.
Anything for a fast internet connection.
This makes for a good story, but if in fact a part of their wifi setup was outdoors, wouldn't that be the first place you start checking?
This was my thought exactly. The much more boring but accurate title would be "Outdoor point-to-point wifi bridge system affected by weather"
Yep, the nonstandard part of their setup absolutely should have been the first thing to consider. Feels a bit disingenuous to not mention that part straight away.
Man having dealt with so many wireless issues I already had a shortlist when I read fixed wireless was involved.
Either the radios were misaligned and the rain was reflecting it back towards a stable link just enough to improve throughput.
Or
The rain took a bad link all the way down, failing over to a different link.
Or
The rain/wind was moving an obstruction.
I have about a million of these stories sadly.
"The internet goes down on tuesdays"
Crane.
"The internet goes out in the morning"
Temperature inversion.
“The car won’t start after I buy ice cream”
The old classic, I think it turned out that in hot weather the fuel line vapour locked a few minutes after turning off, and the ice cream was at the back of the store, and took just long enough to walk there and back to trigger the issue.
I have a personal one with my car: if from a cold start during spring/autumn temperatures (or early mornings in summer), I drive about a km and shut it off, then come back to the car after a few minutes it will not manage to stay idling once I turn it on. What happens instead is that the RPM goes too low, and the engine shuts off, then the start/stop feature kicks in and restarts the engine. This happens every few seconds repeatedly. If I press the accelerator it can keep running. And if I just drive a meter or two it will work fine again when I go back to idling.
I tried both with neutral or in gear but with the clutch pressed (yes, it is a manual, fairly common in Sweden still) and that doesn't make a difference.
I haven't managed to figure out the cause, but since it is a modern car I would assume it is something with the ECU that goes wrong. (It is a Dacia Duster in case anyone else recognise this issue. The mechanic I asked hadn't heard about anyone else having this issue though.)
>With a bit of work, my dad set up a line-of-sight Wi-Fi bridge — a couple of high-gain directional Wi-Fi antennas pointed at each other — between the office and our apartment.
How was that not the first thing to be checked ? OP must have hit themselves over the head for not thinking of that one sooner
> How was that not the first thing to be checked ?
I'm a very technical person, and would be considered "smart". A few weeks ago, the TV remote was acting up. I changed the batteries, still happening. Restart the TV, still happening. The mobile app is working fine, I'm wondering if there's a fault on the IR blaster. Use a camera to check the IR blaster on the remote, seems fine. Factory reset the TV, still happening. Take the TV off the unit, pull out back of the TV off, solder to IR blaster looks ok. Put it all back together, still happening. Phone samsung, and go to make a coffee while I'm on hold. Come back, it's working while I'm on hold. Total time, 4 hours at this point.
Turns out, I had put a coffee cup in front of the receiver that morning, and unluckily put it back when I lifted the TV down from the stand...
It makes a much shorter and boring story that obviates the entire "the wifi only works when it's raining" title.
On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.
Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.
Long time ago I had a 10km 2.4ghz wifi link with directional antennas, it worked very well but the throughtput improved with rain.
Directional antenas are far from directional, they pick noise from everywhere.
In my opinion rain reduces that noise, and if the point to point has more than enough signal margin to keep operating at full speed, it ends up improving the link.
Something like horse blinders.
Back when I had cable internet we had a bizarre problem where the service would often stop working if it was very cold and raining. It had to be that specific combo as well.
- Just rain == good internet
- Just cold == good internet
- Cold + rain == bad internet
After a lot of head scratching the provider finally sent someone with a ladder to climb the poll. What they found was that the protective boot on the coax connection was bad. When it rained for a while water would seep into the coax connector. By itself this wasn’t too bad, but if it was also cold outside it would freeze. This would then force a gap between the threads of the socket and the cable, breaking the ground connection.
Previously, the connector had been replaced, but nobody had noticed the torn boot. This tech replaced both the connector and the boot and the problem was solved! It honestly was the best interaction with the cable company I have ever had. Only returning their hardware when switching to fiber felt almost as good.
I had a cable connection that would reliably drop during snowmelt. No other time. Snow? Fine. Rain? Fine. Only continued snowmelt would cause it to drop.
Eventually got fiber.
Huh, my initial expectation was wrong! I figured (even until close to the end of the article) that the problem was a dramatic increase in the amount of wi-fi or other 2.4GHz traffic in the area leading to interference, some of which was blocked by rain thus allowing more stable local connections.
I still think that's actually what happened here. A tree in the middle of a 2.4 or 5ghz beam would have an effect, but its branches moving by a few inches would not have this much of an effect.
Kind of tangentially related to weird ways tech works: a few weeks ago I finally disassembled my original DMG-01 Game Boy to fix it. There was decades of battery acid corrosion that took a ton of cleaning and resoldering and reflowing the screen connections.
After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.
I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.
No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.
So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.
Ok, Bender.
This also reminds me of the situation with my TV antenna. I made an antenna years ago and put it in my attic. Using the old antennaweb service I aligned it with the stations we cared about and then never touched it again.
I installed the antenna in the winter. Everything worked great. In the summer, we lost a few channels. Rain in the summer and hardly anything would come in. The answer I realized, like in the article, is trees. Leaves are already full of water so they are good at attenuating signals. Leaves that are also soaked in rain doubly so.
This has been already posted in 2024, and I commented it that time with the story about my non-paid cable signal, but since it's a repost I will just copy my comment again, if you will...
This reminds me of the printer that never prints on Tuesdays.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010
Also the not more than 500 miles email.
I was fully prepared for the wet walls of the building to act as a reflector.
I'm surprised WiFi can't pass on reliably through branches. Must have been a nightmare back then.
I would guess that the interior of leaves are quite conductive and that this accounts for most of the attenuation and scattering.
Update: this comment on the original posting of this article suggests so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896699
"Car won't start when picking daughter up from swimming" was a good one told to me by a colleague. In the late 90s some high-up C-level at BMW had a lovely new 7-series as his company car, and it was great.
Unfortunately he hadn't even had it a week when he found he couldn't unlock it, and once he had it wouldn't start. And wouldn't you know it, it was bucketing with rain at 8pm and there he was, stuck outside the swimming pool trying to take his daughter home from her swimming club. Off it went back to the garage on a breakdown truck, while he got a rather lower-spec loaner.
Next morning it was fine. All week it was fine. Until it was time to pick his daughter up from swimming, of course.
This went on for a few weeks until eventually they tracked it down to interference with the remote fob.
Because the swimming pool was at the local community centre, in another room in the community centre was a local radio station, and they started broadcasting at 6pm every week night.
What was the first thing anyone did on coming into the studio? Turn on the UHF link from the studio to the transmitter site, on 428MHz, sufficiently close to the 433MHz receiver for the remote central locking fob to desense it and prevent it sending the immobiliser key to car's ECU.
No, no-one back in Munich believed it either.
Not as elaborate a story, but in a former office we had special office chair that, when you sat down with a bit of force it would switch off one or two specific monitors.
That also took a few minutes to debug why this one coworker came back from lunch, plummeted down into his chair, and someone else's screen went out.
Reminds me of an old joke:
https://youtu.be/ub0Nl4HPFGA
European standard ball time?
> The fix was easy: cut down the tree
(2024)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371
Related:
We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805665
Just read this in the comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39899534):
> I wonder how much polarization affects things; I was once told that terrestrial FM Radio is transmitted with vertical polarization to reduce interference from tall objects between you and the transmitter.
> Terrestrial TV (some of which used bands that overlap FM radio) uses horizontal polarization.
This is only true in the US (and probably areas influenced by US standards). In Europe, FM radio transmissions (and digital television nowadays) tend to be mixed-polarization (circular polarization), except if there are known interference (usually border areas) that would preclude mixed-polarization.
Analog television meanwhile significantly differs depending on your area, which required you to either test which tower and polarity is the best (note that all broadcasts are transmitted at a single tower, unlike in the US), or just... request a map with that data.
Connection only happens when it's rainin', Routers only love you when they're routin', Say carriers, they will come and they will go When the rain fries your motherboard, you'll know, you'll know
And there is this classic:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
I expected this
The fix was easy: Prune the branches. than
>The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. We replaced our old 802.11g devices with new 802.11n ones, which took advantage of new magic math and physics to make signals more resistant to interference.
Easier, and probably even cheaper to upgrade a pair of wifi transceivers than negotiating with the neighbor to cut his tree.
Mainly because error correction is not free, you pay for extra bits and retries.
But only a bit extra.
This also taught me that if I have wifi issues, I should do a tree search
/s
Maybe if you owned the tree, not if someone a few houses down does
I feel like a really good writer could turn these crazy debugging incidents into a Columbo-style story series.
We had a Time Warner tech blame moisture in the air impacting the (sheathed) cable for an outage.
The 2 April 1st posts on the front page right now have me questioning the date...
Just a guess. But after the first couple of paragraphs I realized it was a tree. Kept reading. Yup. Tree.
The rain would move branches out of the way.
This is why experience helps. Good life and professional experience helps to short circuit many problems.
A client had a weird problem with data flowing 10x faster in one direction between two parts of its campus on either side of a road, ~30Y ago...
http://d.hd.org/anecdotes.html#NFS
TL;DR: kinked fibre causing large (NFS) packets to fail frequently in one direction
I once had a s775 gigabyte motherboard which would bluescreen on each cold boot. after the bluescreen it would boot successfully - this was both in windows and linux. the workaround was to wait for the bios beep and then hit reset. it worked like that for 6 years lmfao.
same computer did not start if any of its metal surfaces touched the wall, but that might have been a electrical leak - thankfully i do not live at that dump still