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Comment by rzzzt | Hacker News Reader

Office chair interference theorists, assemble:

- My PC plays a weird sound whenever I stand up from the desk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30950402

- AriedK's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631096

- Sitting on gas lift chairs can generate an EMI spike which blanks your monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652

- Bug: Office chair turns off monitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004

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Don't forget the curious case of the 500 mile email: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

That one is great. We still get real-world examples of similar issues where people migrate applications and they suddenly don't work anymore. After 10 such attempts the common denominator was distance, turns out someone set the network latency limit to 1 ms and when you migrate an application to a different datacenter the network isn't sub-1ms anymore.

Or the my car has issues based on the flavor ice cream I purchase.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

My wife and I both work from home. I work in a spare room and she works from the living room. Our desks are separated by the spare room wall. For a long time, every time she got up from her chair my monitor would black out for about a second.

I think the issue is that she sits on a blanket, so when she gets up it generates static electricity. Though, she has a similar monitor and I actually have to monitors side by side. I'm not sure why just my monitor was blacking out. It also does that when I turn on a small fan under my monitor.

it's more likely the piston in her chair. Try replacing your video cable, or putting a "ferrite bead" on it.

"Sitting on gas lift chairs can generate an EMI spike which blanks your monitor" I'm not sure how exotic this is but I always had the issue that my monitor has infrequent and unexplainable blankings, I guessed it's just the cable, power brick or monitor but this is a much more fun thing to blame ;)

I mean I specifically had “My screen goes blank exactly when one of my colleagues stands up” so I imagine it must be reasonably common (it is almost certainly the cable or cheap unshielded laptop dongles to blame at the root)

I have two monitors that have always blanked whenever I ... move too much?

This information may just settle YEARS of idle speculation and curiosity on my part. Hooray!

Ditto, I've been waiting patiently for my tower GPU to finally succumb for a few years now.

Chair triggers on oscilloscopes are a real thing.

Magnets in wallets, belts, shirts can also trigger the magnetic switches in laptops to power on or off.

Our TV regularly blanks when I get up from my living room couch. Even seen it happen once when our (large) dog was sprawled across the same chair and slid off. Just measured it, and there's 2.2 meters between the TV and the couch.

The second and third link give me a 403

In college I was told about a case with punchcard mainframes where it would crash around the same time in the process of running a long complicated multi step calculation. The place had under floor wires and tiled flooring. One was lose and a worker feeding data in would walk across it at the same point in the process, generating an emi spike.

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