Note: this is not a request for troubleshooting help.
For the past few years my 10ish year old “smart” TV will maybe once a week or so completely lose the ability to play sound in the Youtube app, and only in the Youtube app. Sound works just fine everywhere else. Bizarrely this is always triggered by an ad and never a video. Restarting the app doesn’t fix it, and neither does clearing the cache. Fortunately doing a full restart of the TV fixes it, it’s just irritating to have to restart because an ad somehow broke the sound.
What technological gremlins haunt you?
Once a week or so, my right hearing aid stops giving me audio and starts blasting data into my ear. Like the old dial up modem sounds combined with R2D2. But only at home and only in a few rooms. I figure it’s picking up wifi or Bluetooth and trying to convert them to audio, and failing.
I kind of wish that I had a handheld gizmo – maybe an ADC that could attach to a cell phone – that could take into account location and direction and help me locate sources of radio interference.
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I have a couple, as well as GNU Radio, but there isn’t a software package that I’m aware of that does some analog of something like what Kismet does for WiFi, which will let you move around and use GPS position data to identify the location of sources of radio energy.
I suspect that it’d also be more-effective to do something like have an antenna array and use a device with a common, synchronized clock to identify direction.
My PC just won’t turn on if he is cold. No, it is not “humidity is high” or too low temperature. It just doesn’t turn on if he cold start. A little of heat on the mb and he turns on like nothing ever happened. Already replaced PSU, CPU, GPU, HDD, fans. So surely it is just a feature of my mb.
I had a similar issue until I bought a different PSU that was slightly higher capacity. Not sure if it was some cold start GPU power draw quirk but that’s the only thing I changed and haven’t had a problem since.
I changed from a CX500W to a RM850W, nothing changed xD
Yea just sharing my anecdote since not a lot on google about it. My thought is it’s probably some combo of the CPU and Mobo not liking the level of cold. There was a Linus tech tips video on overclocking with liquid nitrogen and one of the quirks is computer won’t boot till you warm it up again.
My tinfoil hat theory is something in the mobo/cpu self shorts/disconnects when too cold and just depends on the silicone quality you get for that number of cold before it needs the hairdryer treatment.
That’s funny, same thing here. I’m very thankful to the stranger on a forum who suggested “blasting the motherboard with a blow-dryer.” Now sometimes I joke that my PC is diesel-powered.
Mine is solar powered. If I move my PC a little it warms under the Sun and turns on
Similar here: a boot from power off will ALWAYS mean there’s no network, but a warm boot will always work.
As a workaround, I always hit the reset button two seconds after turning the computer on.
I can tell there’s been a power outage if the computer is on and has no network.
Next time it happens unplug the front case connector and short the power pins. If it comes on, replace the power switch and wires.
Already tried, not even a spark of life. I am afraid of trying the MB’s cable short pin and burning something
My computer turns itself on when I walk through a certain spot nearby it.
“Ah, you must have your mouse or some other peripheral set to activate it and the vibrations from walking-” Nope, I know how to disable wakeup from peripherals. “Well, then the vibrations from walking must be disturbing a loose component inside-” Nope, problem existed through a near-complete teardown and OS reinstall. Also, putting the PC on vibration isolating foam did not help.
At this point, I’m down to two conclusions:
- The wire for the wall outlet runs under the floor, and vibrations are causing adequate power fluctuations to wake the machine up. Not sure how to test for this, though it does concern me about the state of the wiring.
- The PC is haunted.
Do you have wake-on-lan enabled? Any setting that would wake on network activity? Could be you’re interrupting or amplifying a signal - Ethernet or WiFi - that is causing the OS to think it’s getting traffic.
No Wifi, as it simply doesn’t have a wifi adaptor.
Ethernet is a possibility. I tested it right now and removing the Ethernet cable doesn’t cause a wake-up, but I suppose it’s possible that slight interference if the cable were just slightly moved might cause it to register traffic plus a continued connection, enough to cause a wakeup. I’ll try tinkering with that, thanks!
It’s only a theory; if you don’t have wake-on-lan enabled, it’d probably not be even a consideration.
Interesting. Wake-On-Lan is not only traffic, you need to send the MAC in the packages.
Maybe some shielding problem?
You know it’s 2! Everything you do. It’s haunted for you!
Ok this one is actually resolved kind of but it super freaks me out. I was working on something and had white noise in my bluetooth headphones coming from Spotify on my browser. At like 2 in the morning, over the white noise, and without making a noise like it connected to anything else, the headphones started playing this like chatter (like people chit chatting) and eventually the started singing what sounded like hymns, at the same time the headset kept cutting in and out and this went on for like 10 minutes. I turned off the Spotify, closed the browsers, confirmed my headset wasn’t connected to anything else and nothing else was playing sound that I could see.
A few days later I go back to my computer, open up some separate work I had been doing (transcribing interviews) and lo and behold at the end of the roll there’s the creepy fucking chatter and singing.
What it must’ve been was somehow my foot pedal getting triggered (though I maintain my foot was not on the pedal) and somehow, though I’m certain my app was closed, playing the end of that recording. But damn if I wasn’t sure I was haunted those few days.
Are you positive it was the exact same chatter and singing?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5567924/
ETA: white noise auditory hallucinations are common even in those without psychiatric disorders, even though that’s what the paper is based on, I just couldn’t find quick paper link about non-disordered hallucinations.
That sounds almost exactly like youre picking up radio signals. This exact thing has happened to me before, I even picked up a local religious station like I’m assuming you did. Some of the churches in my area have their own little radio broadcast antennas and thats why I think their signal was the one to cut through. Speakers and headphones have been been able to pick this stuff up for like as long as both technologies have existed. You’re not crazy and tons of people have been through this
If my desktop is sleeping, turning off my bathroom light will 2 out of 5 times wake up the pc.
It’s a fluorescent lamp, so it is likely that it makes considerable noise on the electrical circuit when being toggled (and it’s a small apartment so all lights and outlets are on the same circuit)
I believe I read a forum post from someone else experiencing the same thing, and they also had a Gigabyte motherboard. So it might be related to their bios/firmware implementation of wake-on-lan in some way.
Do you, by any chance, have network extenders that send ethernet via an electrical socket? They send the ethernet signals through your electrical wiring, and if for some reason your bathroom light is on the same circuit as your sockets, then you might be getting some kind of wake on lan packet. Or what it thinks is a wake on lan packet.
My 9 year old LG smart TV (WebOS, but never connected to the network) will occasionally “overlay” RGB colour artifacts over the entire screen. There’s no pattern of time, day, on duration, HDMI source, etc.
It just occasionally happens, probably once every month or two. Putting it into standby and back on again fixes it every time. 🤷🏻♂️
Small world. My 47LM8600 LG TV (which is 3D, from 2015!) occasionally fails to pop up its pop up menu when asked, the one that has the input list and so forth in it. Instead it shows a vague error about “memory problem” and prompts the user to factory reset the TV.
Turning it fully off and back on again fixes it, and the issue won’t reoccur for usually several months.
Wow. Nice group of people with old LG WebOS TVs! I have an 42LBsomething with 3D. Works fine. Sometimes the YouTube App crashes because it’s out of memory. But nowadays with all the ADs it’s barely usable anyways.
Ha, definitely a small world. Mine’s a 55UF770V.
Now I’m thinking the classic Windows troubleshooting method is used by LG…
My partner streams my Plex to their whole house by way of some sort of coax input device. I’m not really sure how it works but it uses the house’s cable lines to stream whatever from an hdmi device (in this case an rpi) to a unique channel.
Works great everywhere and for every device plugged into it, except a 9-ish year old Samsung tv. On that, the audio cuts out for a half second every 30 seconds or so. Without fail. No change to the picture, and an older Samsung tv handles it fine. We’ve tried everything we could find - including heavily tweaking Plex, and rebuilding the rpi entirely - short of replacing the tv, no dice.
Interestingly, no other stuff through that rpi on that same configuration has problems on that tv, so like we can load the retropi and play games and the sound works fine. It’s really just that one app, through that one method, on that one tv. So weirdly specific.
2017 Audi Q7. Keeps alerting that the “Front side marker lights” are defective. Right and Left.
Both lights work fine. Alert comes back every time the headlights are on.
Apparently a super common problem.
Not sure about this specific model, but in older cars things like this are almost always caused by either too high or too low resistance in the wiring harness or headlight assembly itself because that’s how the car detects when a light is out.
Hmm… so in theory I could diagnose that with an Ohm meter… if I knew the resistance it was looking for…
Check the fluid level. Wife had the same issue and the guys at the shop just said needed a top off on the fluid.
The headlight fluid? ;)
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2016 ish asus vivobook, the bluetooth module will just randomly start spewing garbage into the USB controller, turning it and whatever is in the left port off. The wifi part of the card works great, restarting doesn’t fix it, the duration it does this is random, disconnecting the laptops battery doesn’t fix it. The only thing that fixes it is taking the card out and putting it back in place, probably a broke solder joint or something but this laptop is hot garbage so I’ll get a new one before trying to take the whole mobo out.
Also my phone the other day shut itself off for 30 minutes, when it turned back on it was stuck on the Motorola Blue and Yellow boot screen for another 15 minutes, until it finally booted and was just fine. Still dont know what that’s about.
On my car, a 99 subaru forester, When changing the battery or disconnecting the terminal, the Transmission controller will scream that the fluid is too hot and reaching like over 200 degrees, even though the transmission hasn’t been engaged for a month. You have to just keep reconnecting the terminal until it correctly communicates with the ECU and stops freaking.
Technology is fun.
My phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra) will only partially pair with my car’s (2018 Camery) Bluetooth.
It pairs for media just fine, so I can listen to music and podcasts no problem, but it refuses to sync phone calls and texts. It just goes into a loop of pairing/connected/disconnected/pairing.
I’ve reset the phone and cleared the cache on both ends.
It’s something I’ve been meaning to do a deeper dive into for literal years at this point and just haven’t. Need to check other devices to see if it’s specific to my phone, and I should see if I can’t do some monitoring on the Bluetooth comms directly. It’s just low enough priority that I haven’t gotten around to it.
When turning off my Samsung TV, every once in a while it decides to turn itself back on about 5 minutes later. This has been going on for several years now.
It doesn’t happen every time, and seems to happen randomly as I can’t replicate the conditions in which it happens. It didn’t happen when I bought the TV, so I suspect it started after Samsung pushed a firmware update. It’s a bug others are experiencing with the same model TV and I’ve tried every fix people suggested online, factory reset the TV, and updated the firmware. My conclusion is that it’s a bug that Samsung needs to fix, but I’m confident they won’t given the TV is about 5 years old now.
I will never buy another Samsung anything ever again. Their hardware is fine, but they’re so bad at software. I had a Samsung TV until recently that was just unbelievably slow to turn on, switch inputs, and move through settings on.
Samsung is crap overall.
Back in the day, like 10 years ago, I used to have a Samsung tablet and a phone. Sometimes, when I took either of them out of the standby (and the devices would renegotiate their Wi-Fi), my router would just jam up horribly. No access to the admin interface. No logs. Nothing to do but reboot.
Now, the only Samsung device I have is my TV. Sometimes, thankfully very rarely, when I fire it up, it, um, my router just jams up horribly. No access to the admin interface. No logs. Nothing to do but reboot. And it’s a different router from a completely different manufacturer. Also it’s connected via ethernet.
Is Samsung just cursed?
I bought a brand new Lenovo Yoga laptop, and when connecting to my TV via HDMI, the TV occasionally goes black for a second or 2 then comes back. It doesn’t happen at all when streaming video full screen, only when doing something simple like browsing the Internet. Happens with Windows and Linux, although it’s more frequent on Linux.
My Denon soundbar has the same thing, HDMI related disconnecting periodically.
My 15 year old Sony TV with a PC attached to it wil quickly lose and regain signal as soon as I start some streaming sites for the first time. It only happens once every boot. Pc has been replaced a few times. Prolly a DRM thing.
My Pixel 4a thinks I double press the power button every time I press it. So instead of locking the phone I shove it in my pocket with the camera on and the phone unlocked.
It might be the pc polling or switching GPUs? My Toshiba laptop does it once per boot.
I don’t know if this counts, but when hold my kindle and phone together and I click the unlock button on my phone the kindle turns on too. Doesn’t happen the other way around, I have no clue how it happens
This is very interesting , if anyone ever figures out why, I’d love to know
I’d love to know too, I tried googling it a few times, no results.
