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Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#391

Post by Aeolun »

Animats wrote: post #378
swores wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment, thanks! (I've sent a quick email suggesting it be added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights :)

If you're really into telephony history, the Internet Archive has "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" (3 volumes) online. If you have to build reliable distributed systems, it's worth understanding how this was done in the electromechanical era of telephony, where the component reliability was much worse than the system reliability. "Number 5 Crossbar"[1] is worth reading, but hard to follow i…

Not truly related to the post content, but there is something about the way these old manuals are formatted/printed that immediately inspires confidence in the contents.

Maybe because you know that someone spent a lot of time on it before it was published since no adjustments could be made after the fact.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#392

Post by parentheses »

addaon wrote: post #40
bell-cot wrote: post #2

This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that, occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the minivan's whole electrical system was dead... Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints serious…

I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything. Had it towed to a service center a few times when this h…

Today's car mechanics are a different breed. The ability to diagnose and triangulate problems without advanced tools made car mechanics quite intuitive and resourceful in the past. I take my car to one such mechanic. I always leave with a bill lower than any other estimate I get and he always finds and fixes the problem.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#394

Post by QuiDortDine »

Simpler but funny tech support anecdote: at some point, someone called me over and said their keyboard would print the letter 'e' repeatedly. I tried another keyboard of course, and it still did it! Rebooted the computer, still 'e's all over.

Finally, I looked at her mouse: it was half of a wireless mouse-keyboard combo. Turns out, the keyboard hadn't been turned off before it went in the pile, and other keyboards on top of it were pressing its keys, or rather just the one key.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#395

Post by spoonjim »

m463 wrote: post #144
MalcolmDwyer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very basic engineering would be to modulate the sender at a specific frequency

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#396

Post by geocar »

m463 wrote: post #144
MalcolmDwyer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paint your garage floor black: less light will reflect.

It also is a lot easier to see fallen bolts and shit on a black floor than on a white/gray one.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#397

Post by shaklee3 »

We had a problem like this too at a satellite company. A customer claimed their service was cutting out every day between 3-4pm. There were no service outages, and it only seemed to affect them, but we did see their modem drop consistently each day. Turned out it was a very low elevation location to where the dish was virtually horizontal. They received UPS packages almost daily around that time, and the truck was blocking the signal long enough to lose service momentarily.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#398

Post by K7PJP »

mrguyorama wrote: post #309
genewitch wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting; i doubt my memory is that faulty, so it's possible the story went through some iterations, making it an apocryphal story about apple, instead. Or, possibly, the major pick and place manufacturer had a slew of alignment issues in the 80s!

I thought the apple "lift and drop the computer" story was about the Apple 3. It had no vents, so it was always overheating and "unseating chips" like the Xbox 360 heat issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they cooked themselves even more…

I've got an HP Laser Printer from about 15 years or so. About once a year, the printer stops responding and I have to remove the board, put it in the oven for 10 minutes or so to revive it.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#399

Post by janxgeist »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #49

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…

We had a similiar problem with a label printer.

On some days, exclusively in the morning hours, the printer would fail to detect the start of a new label, printing over several labels.

After connecting remotely and checking the usual (queue, network connection, drivers etc), I asked my colleague to call me, as soon as it happened again.

When I went there, I saw that a ray of sunlight hit the printer. The windows had shutters, but there was a gap.

Label printers detect the gap between labels using a laser. And for some reason, the printer's case had a clear window at the top.

I printed an empty label and stuck it on the little window.

Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

#400

Post by skykooler »

addaon wrote: post #159
freedomben wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened with the human-powered airplane?? Is that a thing normies can do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaSH_PA I don't know if Alec Proudfoot counts as a normy, but DaSH PA flew a bunch of times, with many different pilots. That particular event, which was an attempt to try some records, was a bust; there had been rain recently and the dry lake beds weren't. Landing gear was a recurring problem (light weight and robust don't go together), and even some last-minute attempts to build a runw…

That's really cool! I was only aware of the Gossamer Condor/Albatross and MIT's Daedalus in that field.
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