I once had a Time Warner tech blame the moisture content of the air for impacting the copper cabling to explain outages at our apartment. This both makes more sense and, I suppose, is more interesting.
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#32I had an experience like this once! My my laptop would inexplicably and intermittently stop connecting to the internet. It turned out my bluetooth headset was using the same band as the wifi but I only figured this out after a few months and a replaced wifi card. I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy.
Same, my macbook had unusable wifi when playing music via Bluetooth headphones. Switched to playing from my phone, somehow that worked - probably problem with the BT radio in the laptop since I didn't change wifi channel.
Aren't bluetooth and wifi typically on the same module these days?
The worst interference problem I've heard of is how USB 3.0 uses 2.4ghz and therefore can cause problems with devices connected with it.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#33Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#34> The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. This made me smile. My brain autocompleted the fix to something like "help the neighbors trim their tree", but of course the fix is new hardware.
Well, that would have meant interacting with other people...
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out most consumer electronics operate in the same unlicensed consumer bands, so your bluetooth mouse, headset, wifi, and microwave all tussle for the same stuff. I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off, turns out the EM fields from the compression/decompression can actually be enormous in some cases.
> I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off Wait, can you elaborate? I have the same and I thought I was hallucinating or tripping a cable somewhere.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#36Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
The 500 mile email story is one of my favorite reminders that, fundamentally, we're still governed by the laws of physics. It's funny, but it's also a reminder that, while networks might be very fast, the latency is still going to be governed by the speed of light.
Well laws of physics is what gave us radio in the first place.
Some of my favorite video documentaries are on how it was theorized and then slowly developed over years and decades until they finally got to spark-gap transmitters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_radio
But just imagine listening to spark-gap morse code radio broadcasts for years as amateur and then suddenly someone does a broadcast test of actual voice (violin!) That must have been incredible to hear wirelessly.
24 December 1906 Reginald Fessenden, that was the leap that eventually gave us wifi
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#37Sounds like it would be a neat excuse to get the children to go out when it's sunny!
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#38At Pinterest, when we were working from one of the founder's apartment, the internet went down. Lots of debugging later and we traced it to a cable that a squirrel had chewed threw..
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! I helped review this story, and also am one of the organizers of April Cools. Two things: 1. u/obi1kenobi told me it was a real thing that happened to him 2. The point of April Cools is that the things aren't jokes. They're real essays written with care, just outside of the author's usual writing topics. Some of the other ones we got this year are about hydroponics, current events in Sumo wrestling, parenting, an…
the organizers of April Cools. The org name April Tools was right there!
Sorry, but why would 'April Tools' be better?
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#40Could also have be that the neighbor have a not compliant WiFi device that send out deauthentication packages, then it would also work better during rain.
And the same upgrade would often fix it