191–200 of 216 posts
I had a user once calling me real desperately saying she was hacked. Got to her desk and nothing was going on. She then sit or her desk and started talking me through what she was doing, then suddenly the screen started to move by itself, stuff getting typed everywhere, applications opening and closing all around. Turns out she had accidentally turned on speech recognition on her mac, and the laptop was simply trying…
Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…
Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it,…
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*duct, ironically.
Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on. ("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.) If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on. ("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.) If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)
Actually I just looked it up and it's "duck" because it was made from "cotton duck", a type of fabric.
If I'd known that time of day was the variable causing the behavior change, it would have been fairly easy to resolve—but that wasn't the case. Instead it was only resolved by the large-scale collection of failure and success cases coupled with the careful correlation of bytes sent & received across an entire session.
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Out of curiosity, what happened to her ?
Nothing. Head if IT had words with her and she acknowledged What she did. HR also offered her a free hearing assesment. It was a semi-state co so they actually cared for their staff.
Hmm, doesn't sound like she needed it. Maybe only to figure out if her hearing was better than normal.
Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…
Here is a similar story from the childhood of computers: One of the first computers installed in a Norwegian university was of course in high demand, and students generally had to stay up at night to be able to use it. One morning, around 3 o'clock, the line printer came to a a halt and locked up the computer. They tried everything they could think of to get it going again, to no avail. In the end they called the per…
My garage door was affected by this until I created blinders for the trip sensor.. IR from the sun would cause the garage door to stay open. Lately I just watch my new neighbors leave their garage door open because they can’t figure out why
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My favorite version of this: - screenshot someone's desktop - set the background to the screenshot - iconify all the apps They'll click around in increasing panic on the "apps" on the background, before they realize what happened :) Not that this ever happened to me, of course. I'd never fall for it again.
Tape on the bottom of the mouse is another common joke these days. If the OS you are using has a taskbar, also set it to auto-hide, preferably in a random location. As always, that kind of elaborate joke is best kept short. I also like replacing someone's shell with `wine cmd`, but nowadays the best protection for myself is that nobody seems to be able to use my computer (sway, full of shortcuts that you have to know…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
*duct, ironically.
Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on. ("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.) If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)
According to Wikipedia, the name comes from it being manufactured from "cotton duck" (not because water rolls off it like a duck). Then a derived product became popular for wrapping air ducts, and the name evolved to duct tape. Then someone trademarked "Duck Tape" and revived the old name.
I'm not sure anymore about the true origins of the terms, but I still maintain that "duck tape" and "duct tape" are both acceptable names (trademark issues aside).
I had a 2011 Macbook Air that would go blank randomly. After some investigation, I determined it was often when I was moving it from one place to another (sometimes even just repositioning on my lap), and that it was going to sleep, not completely crashing. Of course, MBAs have no moving parts, and there were no rattles when I shook the machine and listened. Apple also could not figure it out. After replacing several…
During troubleshooting we clarified that the computer was not shutting down; the login window appeared immediately if she pressed the power button gently instead of holding it down. She also allowed that the unexpected sleep was not only at login, but could happen any time if she got past the login window. And she could work around the problem by using a USB keyboard.
The culprit was a magnetic bracelet that she wore only occasionally. First thing in the morning she would try to log in to the laptop, without the USB keyboard, and her wrist got close enough to trigger the sleep-when-lid-closed setting. I heard the bracelet jangle on the phone, and guessed correctly that it might be a magnet.
This was my second encounter with this problem. The first time was when a laptop on my workbench died unexpectedly during troubleshooting and would not start up. It was stacked on top of another of the same model, and the lid of the laptop underneath was triggering sleep-on-closed-lid setting of the laptop on top.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I diagnosed a similar problem in 5 seconds while walking through the office. Laptop sleep was being triggered by an employee's new Apple watch.
It might take hours or days to figure out a problem the first time you encounter it. The second time is a memory test. The third time you look like a genius.