This is like the tech equivalent of consulting the village shaman or wisewoman for some serious disease.
Pumps and motors do mess with electronics though.
True, true… The techpriest vibes I’m getting out of this is because it’s a minor to non-existant improvement that might or might not be placebo is achieved by seemingly outlandish cure. As if the angry spirit of the fridge needed appeasing so that it stops haunting your mouse.
The more consumer friendly and complex this stuff gets the further away from the raw metal those the users see as “magicians” are.
It used to be that the “magicians” were the Electronics Geeks (and the OP’s post and most comments here are a basically on “magic” that has to do with Electronics), but nowadays most “magicians” capable of explaining and dealing with the “unexplainable” are Software Techies.
especially if the pseudo-solution does work in terms of eliminating the symptom, but the real problem was that something isn’t grounded properly…
Ive had commercial techs float the idea of wrapping a tv reciever in foil to mitigate signal interference.
The shamans gut feelings are to be listened to.
Reminds me of the story of a company whose internet connection would cut out intermittently and they couldn’t figure out why. Details hazy but the gist is here.
One day they have a tech come in to investigate the problem. He goes downstairs to where the router is, and everything’s fine.
Seemingly the moment he goes to leave, the connection goes off. Panic stations! He goes back to the router and the connection is re-establishing. OK. All tests fine. He goes away again. It goes off again. What. Tech aura is real!
Nope. Turns out that when he went downstairs, he used the stairs. When he was coming back up he was lazy and used the lift.
The lift motor had been causing enough EM noise to knock out the connection whenever it was used.
I’ve also read another of someone with connection issues with their server. Server was unreachable, but every time someone went into the server room to debug the problem everything was working fine. After a while they noticed the switch with all the cables was plugged to the same outlet as the lightbulb, an outlet which was motion activated, so it only worked while someone was in there.
Reminds me of this story where they couldn’t send e-mails farther than 500 miles.
Some decades ago when I was still an engineering student, my team had to present an electronic assignment. The damn circuit didn’t work, no matter what I did. So I decided to go ask the teacher for advice. I walked away a couple of meters, when my teammates told me that the circuit finally started working. As soon as I went back, it failed again. We soon determined that it failed only when I was near it. My teammates presented the assignment while I was at the other side of the lab. We passed the assignment, and sure enough, when I approached again to pick up my things, the damn circuit stopped working again.
https://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
A Story About ‘Magic’
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
Yessss, I came to the comments to see if somebody else posted it.
I bet that “magic” switch was set up by a geek with an electronics background to take the piss of the ones without such a background.
It could be you wore the kind of clothes - certain shoes, wool pullovers, clothes made of certain plastic fibers - that makes one accumulate static electricity, so you literally had a charge different from the rest (did you have a tendency to get a shock when you touched large metalic objects or other people?)
Or maybe you were the biggest person on the team and hence caused the biggest electromagnetic shadow on the surrounding electromagnetic radiation (nowadays we live surrounded by radio sources). A similiar effect would happen if you had a less dry skin and hence more conductive than your colleagues (was this, for example, early morning after you took your daily shower).
Anyways, somewhere in that circuit was a wire which was unconnected and led to the gate side of a transitor, probably a Mostfet. If you were using a microcontroller in it, you might have left an I/O port enabled that was not physically connected to anything so its value could easilly flip merelly from electromagnetic interference and that day you just happened to have the biggest electromagnetic footprint (due to static charge, body size and/or body conductivity) around.
For fun it’s not hard to make a circuit that “detects people closeby” using a transistor or microcontroller I/O port connected to a wire that goes nowhere with the other side set up to light or not an LED depending on the input signal, which detects people because them being close or not alters the electromagnetic radiation that goes into that wire (an unconnected component pin also works, but it’s more sensitive with a bit or wire). The simple version is not exactly reliable, but it’s pretty spooky when it works.
Your capacitance is probably weird. Are FM radios you tuned also very likely to go to static when you walk away? (also possible the cause was something you were wearing or carrying)
maybe you wore something that gave you just enough static charge to cause problems?
USB-3 over USB-A upstream sockets often put out 2.4GHz noise which will interfere with many wireless dongles, including those commonly used for wireless mice and keyboards. The solution is to get a USB2 extension cable or hub for your dongles.
Intel knew this would be a problem, but ignored it.
In the core2duo era I overclocked a cpu to 2.4GHz, and It killed the wifi in the computer similarly, it took a while to figure out why it was happening, and connect the 2 seemingly unrelated thing.
Microwave ovens also work in the 2.4 GHz range, at one flat my torrents basically stopped when my neighbor used their oven.
This reminds me of when I had apprenticeship classes that got interrupted by the covid lockdowns. I was forced to do theory classes online over zoom. Every morning my wifi connection would drop for a few minutes at a time during my classes.
Turns out it was the microwave. Every time someone used the microwave, it would disrupt the wifi/router for the whole house.
Ended up making a sign to let people know I was in class. My classes were only for 8 weeks total. I had about 4 or 5 weeks remaining by the time I figured it out so it wasn’t too long of an inconvenience.
I’ve seen similar. Whole two story office building’s wifi got knocked out by some big ol’ 1960s microwave.
No one could figure out why the wifi kept going down during lunch.
I’ve had same sort of issue. A refrigerator cycled on and off and that caused the mouse to disconnect. Also sometimes cause HDMI on my TV to reset connection.
They weren’t underlining the spelling error?
deleted by creator
And how did you know that none of your neighbors had smart lights?
deleted by creator
My point is that there clearly could still be smart lights in the vicinity.
my pc wakes up when I or my cats go near it
Yeah, reminds me of a video I once saw: having an empty can on your desk and using one of those electronic lighters on it makes the display reset for some seconds.
HDMI isn’t shielded that well and the shocked can shortly acts as an antenna, sending gibberish signals that get picked up by the display.
I worked for a cable company as the sysadmin. They were having trouble with channels going off randomly but most often in the morning and evening. One day in the middle of the day I’m out there with all hands on deck discussing the problem when one of the employee’s showed up in his older GM truck. Just as he arrived the channels went out and they jumped on the scopes and cable meters to start looking for the problem. He got out it stopped. We all stood around for a few minutes saying it was going to be a long day if we couldn’t figure this out. After a little bit he was instructed to go back to burying drops on his schedule. The second he cranked up the problem started. He drove off and it stopped. Three of us just looked at one another and we called him back. Sure enough as soon as he drove up the problem started. He was given instruction to not drive past the office gate and the problem went away. As to what on that old truck was throwing out all the gigahertz interference we may never know. That truck was gone withing a week.
I can’t say if the frequency is right, but poorly shielded spark plug wires will send all kinds of EM out. You know, the older cars where if you touched one of those wires you’d feel it, or you could see the aura if it was dark jumping around.
Had a similiar issue but with an external hard drive and a bluetooth mouse. When the drive was idle everything was fine, but when IO was happening the pointer got really laggy. Anyway I’ve added some distance between the bluetooth receiver and the drive cable.
