Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)

It affects my non-cheapo keyboard (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard) as well. Though thankfully I don't have the termination sequence issue.

Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.

Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.

Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).

Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.

RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.

And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.

I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?

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It's all ugly in some way.

Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.

I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot.

Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.

These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.

Right. I've seen unconnected grounds. And I still have a 220V dryer grounded via the neutral. Hasn't been code for new installations since 1996, but is grandfathered.

And yes, I know about GFCIs with no ground and the warning. Had one of those once.

Still, an outlet tester will find the common case. I suspect that the situation here is that everything is on 2-wire external power supplies and there is no path to ground anywhere. But by plugging in an external monitor, the user created more external EMI exposure, by bringing his floating ground out of the laptop and monitor. Standalone laptops are tested for EMI compatibility (emissions in the US, emissions and sensitivity in the EU), but that doesn't cover being cabled up to random external devices.

I use wired headphones, and I'll get an electric discharge from my inner ear and through my earbuds when I get up from my chair.

It's not painful, but feels like pop rocks in my ear canal.