I had a similar case. Was going crazy about the horizontal lines on my screen. They weren’t always there, just when a certain color took up most the screen or when a window was placed in a certain position. Suddenly bam, my whole screen looked like grip tape.
I started troubleshooting the display, compositor, checking the software for some sort of night mode or eye protection. Nuthin.
Then my friend says, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try switching.” I switched to HDMI and god fucking dammit if it didn’t just work. Afaik it was something to do with the nvidia proptietary gpu drivers, because when I’d roll them back it didn’t happen.
I’ve literally seen a heater on a timer cause modem brownouts, ain’t nothing too crazy to happen
My audio bugs out to the point of dying on high CPU load.
And firmware flashing my phone works only over USB 2, not 3.
Reminds me of this story where they couldn’t send e-mails farther than 500 miles.
I’ve had it where my wireless mouse (connected with a usb dongle) stutters when my wifi/bluetooth chip is going full-throttle. I thought it was some polling rate on my mouse, or maybe my mouse was dying, but nah lol. This is next level insane tho
Reminds me of an old coworker, who I think had some sort of paranoia or persecution complex, because he always had stories of how his mouse would stop working at random and cite the kinds of EM pulses that could be used to cause such an effect, clearly the work of someone who wanted to harass him
My wired mouse’s lights reset when I roll my chair just a few centimeters on the carpet. I believe your coworker.
Me trying to find out why I hear static on my ham radio.
Seen that with an elevator running. As soon as the elevator moved, wifi & BT died.
The problem was that the elevator was older than wifi and BT, so there was no warranty or something they could just call on. I told them to still get it fixed, as the local equivalent of the FCC is known not be be that nice when something is creating problems on the spectrum.
It’s truly a challenge when even your elevator is on the spectrum.
My neighbor’s poorly shielded microwave would knock out our WiFi. Because microwaves are in the 2.4GHz range, which is also the same range as older WiFi. Except that a microwave operates with several thousand times more power than WiFi, so it essentially acts as a jammer when it’s not shielded well.
Figuring that out took me fucking ages. I eventually heard her microwave beep through the shared wall, right as my WiFi came back online.
Ours did that for WiFi. I knew when my wife was warming something in the Microwave, by her complaints about her streaming video dropping
That used to happen at a friend’s house, the microwave would shut down their WiFi.
Yep, microwaves are nasty in that regard.
My old keyboard had an identical problem to this. I would play games with my friends, and randomly it would just cut out for like 1 second. When it first started I thought it was just me getting old and fudging my key presses, but suddenly one day, I realised it was my office fridge that had turned on.
I used to have a hard drive dock that would knock the wireless powerline adapter network out whenever it was turned off
I’ve had a couple of issues like this:
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Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)
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We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.
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We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block
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I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.
Good news, they’re making it easier to fix stuff like “spurious double clicks”.
https://who-t.blogspot.com/2025/05/libinput-and-lua-plugins.html
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Yessss, I came to the comments to see if somebody else posted it.
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?
"Computer works fine now, but the smell of decomp is becoming unbearable… "
My keyboard and mouse disconnected for a second everytime I sat on my chair. I have changed my laptop recently and I haven’t been able to reproduce this behaviour.
recently dealt with an issue at my parents house where whenever they connected the TV to the wifi, half the devices in the house would lose connection. turns out there was an instability in the Comcast router firmware and whenever the TV would connect it would crash everything else on the 2.4ghz frequency.
solution was to replace the router with one they owned instead of whatever crap they were leasing from Comcast.
I had an issue like this with a tp-link Wi-Fi adapter in my computer. Never buying from tp-link again
