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Comment by sahmeepee | Hacker News Reader

Not hard drive related AFAIK, but I used to work in a media lab with about 30 mac desktops of around the powermac g4 vintage.

We noticed that the macs were rebooting unexpectedly when certain people were in the room. After a bit of observation we worked out that the call button on our walkie talkies could trigger a reboot from a couple of feet away, which turned out to be an awesome superpower if you'd had a gobful from an especially obnoxious student.

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I used to enjoy the fact that Intel iMacs came with a remote control that could be used to put the mac into “media mode” but that wasn’t paired to a specific Mac to mess with co-workers in the room by putting them in media mode inexplicably.

We had that problem with computers when having the metal shielding off the cases. Every time someone in the vicinity got a phonecall on their Motorola 2880 (random model number, can't remember but one of the really old ones) the computers would bluescreen. This was at hackernights with all sorts of different computers running windows 95. If they had the metal shields off, many of them would bluescreen on phonecalls. Shields were off for having more cooling from external sources or friends helping with installing stuff or whatever, and the problems would go away when the shield was on again.

I used to work for the point of sale provider for various golf events in the US. We were having circuit breakers on UPS battery backup units trip, seemingly randomly. We soon realized that we couldn’t key up our walkie talkies when standing near one.

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