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Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

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Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#103
post #93
post #92

I've been looking for a large comfortable neoproene mousepad/desk pad which is conductive and can be grounded. I think this would help prevent damaging your computer or peripherals from ESD. I haven't been able to find anything. The electronics industry ESD mats are rubber for temperature resistance and cleaning, but not comfortable or good for mousing. I found some small cheap mousepads on AliExpress that claim heal…

Almost all components and peripherals have ESD protection built into them, designed specifically to prevent human contact causing issues. There should be no reason to be worried about damaging your peripherals (or, especially, your PC). Are you having issues with components dying randomly or something?

Before I started taking mitigation steps [0] yes. Sometimes my monitors or keyboards would shut off or get frozen and wouldn't work until I power cycled them. I broke my Ethernet port once when I blindly stuck a USB cable into the Ethernet port and gave it a big zap. I had a lot of other gremlins which I can't conclusively blame on ESD but I eliminated other possible causes. ESD protection isn't perfect and degrades every time it's used. I was giving multiple painful shocks per day.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744965

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#104
post #90
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are a terrible ESD and EMC environment and safety critical at the same time. Computer equipment usually does pretty well, especially after installation (when there's good ground path everywhere and it's in a chassis). Between ferrite beads and TVS, there's a pretty good amount of protection, and I've seen pretty few ESD anomalies-- a reset or two when touching connectors long ago is about the extent of it. RFI a…

As a kid, someone gave me a toy keyboard. Checking Google, it looks nearly identical to a Casio PT-1, but was probably a clone or slightly different model. 9 year-old me was delighted to discover that it would start playing on its own when it was near the plasma globe I had bought at a science museum gift shop. I couldn't explain it, but eventually came to a vague understanding. It was semi-random, mashing together s…

I am pretty sure I had the same keyboard and plasma globe!!!! IIRC, you could also get the keyboard to play when you set it on top of the SCSI external CDROM drive that came with my mac 2400c.

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less technical, but: My wifi goes out when it rains. My wifi is on the same breaker as the outdoor outlets so any issues with water intrusion affects the wifi.

Outdoor outlets should be at least IP44 to prevent this from happening...

Should, and modern code probably are. However there are a lot of old construction that doesn't meet modern standards.

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#106
post #30
post #23

One of my first jobs 30+ years ago was ESD testing automotive and consumer electronics. I would spend a week with a discharge gun methodically running different discharge energies and waveforms both directly onto the devices as well as onto radiators at various distances from the device under test, as well as any cabling/harnessing that attached to the device. Then the design team would figure out the reason for any…

Cars are a terrible ESD and EMC environment and safety critical at the same time. Computer equipment usually does pretty well, especially after installation (when there's good ground path everywhere and it's in a chassis). Between ferrite beads and TVS, there's a pretty good amount of protection, and I've seen pretty few ESD anomalies-- a reset or two when touching connectors long ago is about the extent of it. RFI a…

My dad's car had velour interior. Anytime the humidity was below 50%, expect the car to zap you and to be zapped touching door handles. I assume there are/were numerous gas station fuel fires from cars with velour upholstery.

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#107
post #47

An electric lighter does this to my mouse when I zap specific objects with it, such as a screwdriver. I tried distances up to about 1.5 meters away from the mouse. The only reason I initially noticed is because I saw the red light turn off that was coming faintly through the holes I drilled in the top to let a heating element that I had built in heat my hand better. (Spoiler: the holes didn't do anything, but I did n…

> It took some time for ~15-year-old me to figure out that it happened with high rates of small network packets I honestly think that there's a hidden potential with instrumenting programs with different noises, and being able to listen to them could give you a broad understanding of program behavior without needing to profile or watch logs.

I always took out my earphones or turned down/off speakers while doing computer modifications. I want to hear things like that fans are spinning, how busy the hard drive is if the screen is not yet working... in a computer repair shop I noticed others didn't do the same and that's when I realized that I was subconsciously doing this in the first place. Nowadays I do less of that messing around, but also there's SSDs and quiet laptops. Either way, yeah I totally get you.

Relevant / you might enjoy: ping -a

Re: Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

#110

I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout. The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotpl…

This is the greatest thing I've read today. I love when software and the real world have entirely unexpected interactions. And by love, I usually mean hate, especially when I'm the one that has to debug them.

my favorite story on this is a town in north east usa changed it's traffic lights from energy wasting old fashion lights to new fancy low energy lights. The unexpected result: in winter time these lights did not melt the snow away and the lights were opaque with white snow.
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