361–370 of 517 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having had to debug many of such cable issues in the past, it's baffling to me that cable companies aren't proactively monitoring for things like this. They have all the data available on their end, as far as I can tell! (Unless DOCSIS modems somehow don't have a standard "signal receive report" functionality?)
Telcos used to monitor their copper outside plant for moisture. This was called Automatic Line Insulation Testing in the Bell System. The ALIT system ran in the hours before dawn. It would connect to each idle line, and apply, for tens of milliseconds, about 400 volts limited to very low current between the two wires, and between each wire and ground, measuring the leakage current. This would detect moisture in the c…
At 02:40.
And yes, it is an adding machine.
This reminds me of a strange recurring experience I used to have with electronics in my house. In that house,on certain days of the week at midnight, something that sounded like recordings of political speeches from WW2 would be audibly (but faintly so) from all of stationary electronics. It was so faint, that it was usually hard to pinpoint any one source, and the words used weren't understandable, so it usually sou…
AM radio is a terrible transmission format in many ways but it's good because as you note it's extremely easy to decode into sound!
A pair of old not-plugged-in computer speakers can also be an AM radio receiver.
My son's laptop screen kept shutting off while he was playing American Truck Simulator. His truck would drive off the road while the screen was black. Every time I played on his laptop, this did not happen. He swore he was cursed. This went on for many days, with many instances where it would happen for him but not for me. Then one day I just sat and observed him while he played, looking for any difference. That's wh…
And this bug made Apple move to a different sensor for the screen angle. And Apple being Apple they now had the excuse to serialize the sensor: https://www.ifixit.com/News/33952/apple-put-a-hinge-sensor-i...
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Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0] mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going around in the 80s[1] [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...
Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story. Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support p…
Do not mistake cynicism for intelligence. It is actually negatively correlated [0, + other studies]
Just listing a basket of "I doubt..." and "No one does..." does not make it all false.
Of course Just So stories exist, but that does not mean that all cool stories are fabricated Just So stories. In this case, it is the cynicism that merits a [Citation Needed] tag.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-games/202111/t...
We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later. On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours. The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast…
I'm amazed an IT department would troubleshoot deeply enough to figure out it was the thin plastic letting in interfering light on sunny days. I would have guessed they'd shrug at the first sign of trouble, swap it out with a known-working mouse and mark the ticket resolved... unless all the replacement mice were thin plastic too, I suppose.
the moral of this story, the engineer being a logical man refused to try reproducing the problem and devoted infinite time to watching the user shop every night. that way he gets paid to hang and eat ice cream
engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. the moral of this story, the engineer being a logical man refused to try reproducing the problem and devoted infinite time to watching the user shop every night. that way he gets paid to hang and eat ice cream
We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later. On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours. The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast…
Seriously, this is one of those dumbass stories that come from your boomer relatives with the subject line "fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: re: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: vanilla ice cream"
Nobody actually believes this story is true, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GM cars are notorious for (sometimes) developing strange problems that would have you think they are possessed with the devil. (Despite post-1990 GM cars being near peers to Japanese cars for reliability overall)
i learned that these things typically are grounding issues. it usually came down to a single source of ground being a loose connection which is why it was intermittent. as a personal anecdote to this, as a first car as a teenager, i drove a GM/Chevy S-10 that one day started to have issues where all of the gauges on the dash would just go crazy and the lights would go on and off, and then suddenly just start working…