401–410 of 517 posts
I was trying to fix the flaky Bluetooth connectivity on my Subaru. There was one post on the forums that said "Just slam the glove compartment closed really hard." Knowing that this was bullshit, I tried everything else to no avail. I finally caved and slammed the glove compartment. To my surprise, Bluetooth has been solid ever since...
So this guy never ever restarted his car after a short interval except for when he bought vanilla ice cream? Additionally, he never varied the time intervals in the shop when he was buying aforementioned ice cream? Is it is an understatement to suggest this is a highly unlikely circumstance?
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 had a similar problem, but in the opposite direction. My cable internet speeds at home were fairly good (for the US, anyway), but sometimes would absolutely bottom out. Not dead, just glacially slow. After troubleshooting everything under the sun, I came to realize that the problems would happen not when it was raining per se, but when it was heavily foggy or misting. Normal to heavy rain was fine. Called the cable…
Eventually I called so many times and had so many appointments, that the tech lead gave me his direct number and told me to call him directly the next time it happened. When it did, I did, and he ran some tests, and confirmed there was a problem. I don't know that we ever got it sorted out (it was a while ago), but just getting them to agree there was an issue took a very long process.
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…
Your mouse story makes me think of the day the CI system at work turned out not to be robust to vibrations. One day we started having flaky tests, seemingly out of nowhere. We quickly identified that the issue affected tests involving graphical X client applications, but then we struggled to make further progress. The issue was just impossible to reproduce in other conditions... Well, as it happens, the CI jobs were…
Let me guess - tests with very tight timings?
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I had a VCR back in the day that refused to function if you opened its case. It turned out that instead of using physical switches inside it used pairs of lights and detectors that would give false positive results when ambient light shined on them.
as in an optocoupler? Those are the coolest, especially for dealing with different voltages.
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We have a countertop ice maker that gets jammed up and overloaded with ice on sunny days for a similar reason. There's an infrared beam and sensor. When the ice tray is full, it is supposed to block the beam, and then the machine stops making ice. On a sunny day, there's enough bright light in our kitchen to fool the sensor so it keeps making ice. We have a random magazine that we put on top of it to make it work cor…
I have a garage door that will not close on sunny days. Same sort of problem. The obstruction sensor at the bottom of the door is confused by the strong sunlight and the door stops closing part way and re-opens. I've tried a toilet-paper tube around the sensor but that isn't always successful. I really wish there was a laser sensor to replace it with.
I had to replace my opener and door anyway and had a conversation with a tech about it. We decided on a LiftMaster in part because their sensors are very good at dealing with sunlight.
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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.
Mice used to be expensive enough to troubleshoot.
I suppose a good office-computer mouse in 1990 would cost $100 ~ $200 (say $350 today). In that case, yes troubleshooting it for a day would make sense, especially if it's not an isolated problem.
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I have a garage door that will not close on sunny days. Same sort of problem. The obstruction sensor at the bottom of the door is confused by the strong sunlight and the door stops closing part way and re-opens. I've tried a toilet-paper tube around the sensor but that isn't always successful. I really wish there was a laser sensor to replace it with.
I have this exact problem and (mostly) fixed it by swapping the sensor and transmitter. I just cut the wires and spliced with electrical tape. Now the problem still happens but only sometimes in the fall and spring when the sun's angle is just right. This is with a west facing garage about 41°N latitude USA. But yeah, why this isn't laser based, or using a light frequency that is less affected by sunlight? Probably c…
It'a not laser based so the sensors don't have to be perfectly aligned. Keeps your garage door working when you kid knocks it with their foot.
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…
When it’s sunny, my wife’s car can’t open the garage door, and my car requires getting extremely close. Once the sun goes down, we can both open the door from the street. It turns out our solar panels (or the optimizers, or the inverter) emit radio frequencies that interfere with our garage door opener. When the sun is out and they are producing energy, the interference is stronger than the homelink garage door opene…
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>I joked when I moved to Seattle that the main problem is since there is no salt, there are still Citations on the road and that is unnatural. Their place in the natural order is the junk yard. This was the fate of many British Leyland cars, even the ones that people genuinely liked such as as the classic Mini and the MGB were practically hygroscopic.
I loved the Mini, but I loved my Maxi even more. That was the most useful car ever bar none.