My Wi-Fi used to work better in the rain because our signal was fairly weak as it was coming from the apartment behind the wall and the channels were generally crowded so (I assume) rain helped to at least insulate us from the networks in the buildings across the courtyard.
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#72Let 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.
If we are doing classic stories - Grace Hooper and the Nanosecond of wire
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#73My Wi-Fi used to work better in the rain because our signal was fairly weak as it was coming from the apartment behind the wall and the channels were generally crowded so (I assume) rain helped to at least insulate us from the networks in the buildings across the courtyard.
That's what I thought this article would be about before I read it. I've observed the same thing before.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#74I 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.
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.
My Mac Pro desktop used to wake up whenever I used a MacBook Pro in the same room. Obvious thought was, maybe the laptop was sending wake-on-lan packets for some reason. Turns out, the carpeting in that room tends to create static buildup, and my MBP's charger was not grounded. Touching the laptop would send a mild discharge into the wall line, tripping something in the desktop's PSU to wake it up.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#75I own a Ford Focus and to this day I don't understand why sometimes the gear shifts make this cracking noise when decelerating to zero, but only when it is raining.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#76While we're on the subject: I still can't solve this and thought you'd either laugh or you are the only people who know what I'm going through :) I have some fancy Asus Mesh wifi routers at home. I sit next to the cable modem and one mesh endpoint. My wife sits upstairs. there's an upstairs mesh endpoint but I think neither of us are usually connected to it (mostly serves to extend our connection to go to yard). But…
Actually, if you take a peak in to the wifi logs on the asus mesh node, you might see that it freaks out and restarts the wifi service. There's a tail mode that is pretty nice.
Restore to the default settings, make sure you have updated the firmware, and cross your fingers.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#77Let 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?
Here's one attempt I've seen in other HN comments at a shared "awesome list" of these sorts of stories:
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#78That would be ironic on your wedding day.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#79I own a Ford Focus and to this day I don't understand why sometimes the gear shifts make this cracking noise when decelerating to zero, but only when it is raining.
car clutches and brakes famously act/sound different in the wet, maybe a clutch or friction material somewhere acting differently?
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
My personal example: VoIP phones stopping after the Asterisk server was up for 3 days. Reason: the server had IPv6 turned on, and it steadily accumulated privacy IPv6 addresses. These addresses were all sent in a packet describing the supported media endpoints, using UDP. And yep, eventually it overflowed the MTU and the phones couldn't handle the fragment reassembly.
Which distro was that? ... asking for a friend ...