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Comment by hobs

2 years ago

Turns out most consumer electronics operate in the same unlicensed consumer bands, so your bluetooth mouse, headset, wifi, and microwave all tussle for the same stuff.

I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off, turns out the EM fields from the compression/decompression can actually be enormous in some cases.

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hobs

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hot_gril  2 years ago

My Mac Pro desktop used to wake up whenever I used a MacBook Pro in the same room. Obvious thought was, maybe the laptop was sending wake-on-lan packets for some reason. Turns out, the carpeting in that room tends to create static buildup, and my MBP's charger was not grounded. Touching the laptop would send a mild discharge into the wall line, tripping something in the desktop's PSU to wake it up.

abhorrence  2 years ago

I've experienced something similar, but the chair's discharge was interfering with a PCI riser, tripping just over some threshold that would cause the OS kernel to panic and shutdown. It felt so incredibly unbelievable when we first noticed the correlation that we called tons of people over to watch us demonstrate it just to see if there was something else we were missing.

rrr_oh_man  2 years ago

> I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off

Wait, can you elaborate? I have the same and I thought I was hallucinating or tripping a cable somewhere.