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Comment by thejackgoode | Hacker News Reader

Google says we can have 1-4 days of warning for this kind of thing. Is there any approach to circuit breaking that can help appliances against such an event?

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Can have, not that you'll actually get that warning every time.

The Carrington Event followed the magnetic field lines of a previous flare and the particle flux reached Earth much faster than expected.

Move everything into an old multi story carpark that has bad radio reception?

I love murphy’s law arbitrage

Make sure ones that are metal boxes are grounded. Put all other inside metal box and ground it

Tangent but the concept of "grounding" is so strange, especially for residential electrical systems. It's literally just a metal stake in the ground

Well, not if you worked on a MacBook using an ungrounded socket in Europe, for example. Forearms are not that strongly insulated

I have an old house that had ungrounded outlets. My MBP made me take on costly electrical repairs cuz I got so sick of the shocks and tingling sensation whenever id touch it while charging. I should've put a multimeter on it to see what voltage and current it carried, didn't "hurt" but it was certainly a noticeable tingling.

I went to Europe years ago for work. And the adapter for my macbook work gave me wasn't grounded. Whenever I plugged my computer in I could feel a buzz when i touched the aluminum body. Others thought I was crazy. But it freaked me out and only charged when I wasn't touching it.

You make me feel like I wasn't making it all up. haha!

Same here in New Zealand. The tingle in the fingers when charging is unpleasant.

Haha, no, you can find people complaining about that all over the web. It’s a very real effect.

Has anyone tried taping a conducting wire to the macbook case and running it to the closest ground connector?

Might cause GFC protection to trip.

Has anyone simply tried measuring the voltage difference between the macbook case and the nearest ground connector, and also the other two prongs in a normal electrical socket? This isn't exactly a difficult test to do.

The worst I felt was touching both a charging device and the skin of another person at the same time, did someone experienced this ? It feels weird, almost like magnet sticky, but also almost like you aren't touching the other person.

Yes, I have felt this numerous times with my wife's aluminium laptop. Touching the surface feels weird

I think it's Apple's weird choice of not using a Schuko plug, opting for a two-pole connector attached to their MacBook power brick instead, even where ground is available, isn't it? I thought old school VDE rules were such that if your device has conducting parts outside, you're supposed to ground these, but I'm not an EE. Anyway the Apple power brick makes a poor impression indeed.

The plug part is still detachable, and at least previously you'd receive both a long cord with Schuko to attach there and a short plug with just two prongs. I guess the two prong thing is standard now?

Yeah, got both with my old 2015 MBP but only the two-prong with the 2023 one. Though the two-prong plug is still detachable from the brick so I presume Apple would be happy to sell me a Schuko+cord for some exorbitant price.

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