Mouse cursor disappears when my refrigerator turns off

Known bug #1568604: "Mouse cursor lost when unlocking with Intel graphics"[1]. There are many suspend/resume/power management events which can cause the cursor to disappear. The refrigerator cycling is probably causing a brief power dip or surge which the computer interprets as a power cycling event. There's a fix, and it's gradually going into the various Linux distros.

When this happens, try CTRL-ALT-F1 followed by CTRL-ALT-F7. That switches the display to text mode and back. If that restores the cursor, this is the problem.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...

I think thinkpads of that generation had RF shielding issues.

I had a W520 that would crash whenever it was moved across a table or removed from a backpack. Turns out the shielding on the RAM door was faulty and the static charge generated by friction on the bottom of the case was enough to corrupt the ram contents and crash the laptop. Talk about a bizarre failure.

"Try another refrigerator" pretty much sums up internet help.

I think my old Optical USB mouse had a ferrite bead just for this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead

I really wanted this to be about a smart refrigerator stealing a wireless mouse's signal from the desktop trackpad, or something of the sort. Though the plausible explanation[1] is just as pathological (albeit not as nefarious).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/55pbqp/mouse_cur...

ctrl+f "ground": no results.

I'd bet it's a grounding issue.

I have a similar issue.

Sometimes, but not every time, when I turn on a particular halogen lamp using the same outlet as a particular computer, it triggers USB detection and I get kernel messages on /dev/console as if I was plugging in a USB device.

This is a BSD kernel.