Hacker News Reader

Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

I 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.

This 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.

These 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".

Oh, you know it! That's going to be a great tale to bust out for years to come.

I call this “Type 2 Fun”. As in it’s more fun to tell the story than be experiencing it.

As an example: many backpacking trip stories are type 2 fun.

my 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.

Technology Connections did an episode on this kind of stuff. GE just installs heaters in their streetlights now.

Heaters plus LED light… reminds me of technology where you get both at once!

I mean, at least now the heater only has top burn power during the winter (I hope)

even better. it only has to heat when it's actively snowing.

I 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.

Snopes said it is a legend? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

I'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.

Had 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.

Less 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.

Outdoor outlets should be at least IP44 to prevent this from happening...

Should, and modern code probably are. However there are a lot of old construction that doesn't meet modern standards.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

I was about to dig this one out myself!

Love that comic! Totally relevant.

So, 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.

I 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...

Its the stuff what happens when you think 'what can i do with the hardware that i have' instead of 'which hardware to buy'.

I 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.

You 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.

I 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/fr...

The 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.

As much as it would interest me to learn that Cooler Master designed and created a product out of sheer enthusiasm for a small third-party vendor, it much more likely came about through traditional means.

Not long ago, Framework engaged in marketing and promotion campaigns to demonstrate aftermarket uses for their mainboards via direct outreach to popular creators on YouTube and Reddit. I spoke with one of the participants who confirmed that they were sent the mainboard and commissioned by Framework for their project.

Doesn't make any of it less cool, but there's no "secret cult of Framework" driving things, just smart business strategy.

Well yeah, didn't mean to imply there to be a secret cult of Framework (though if there was one I'd happily join it). More that it bodes well to see companies like Cooler Master giving Framework the time of day when it comes to these sorts of business deals.

I want my CPU-load locale switcher back.

These kind of weird software/hardware bugs remind me of this: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

My layout resets every time I start chromium or sometimes I when I start terminal. It’s not external keyboard. Any ideas?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com