Comment by robin_reala

I’ve seen some weird technical glitches in my career. One that i will always remember is that a customer was very happy with his new big computer, but could not work for multiple hours on it, because his office would get colder and colder when he kept using it. After some mailing and talking over the phone i suggested a visit to his office where i quickly found the cause of the problem: The big computer fan was aimed directly at the thermostat knob of the radiator, so it assumed the entire office was well heated and closed.

It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs several times because it started "writing" by itself. Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly hitting the keyboard.

Each time it took several days before they repair centre got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was nothing wrong with the computer at all.

After we picked it up, eventually, when it started happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised the problem:

The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence why the repair technician didn't find anything.

I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.

Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.

But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.

“WiFi doesn’t work in the summer” is one of the first anecdotes I learned about WiFi when it was still brand new. You set up WiFi between two buildings in the winter, spring comes and the water in the leaves blocks the signal.

This site has a collection of them: https://500mile.email/

Monitor switches off when I sit down deserves to be on that list (even if it's hardware, not software): https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...

I had one of these myself. WiFi wouldn’t work when my wife was using her laptop in bed. As soon as she gave it to me, it started working again. She thought it was the magic touch of the engineer, but it turned out that when she was in bed, she pulled her knees up and set the computer on her lap, while I would lay down completely and let the computer rest on my chest. Her knees blocked the WiFi signal enough to be quite noticeable.

I wonder if the feeling is excitement or horror when you encounter one of these weird problems that seems like it has to be the user.

Not computer related really, but I'm reminded of when my Mom was helping set up macs in the lab at my middle school. I, a 4th grader, tagged along and hung out in the other lab across the hall. I got very incredulous looks when i claimed that there was a lizard in there. It was the Midwest over summer break! I was obviously a kid seeing things. There's no lizards here.

Then I produced it, caught under a bin. It was a brown anole that had come back in a plant sent from Florida. I wasn't crazy that day.

- A Story About ‘Magic' http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

As seen on HN:

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371

Most of these are good, but "can't log in while standing up" is just too implausible. I can't possibly be led to believe that every single one of a whole group of technically-literate touch typers failed to notice that keys were swapped.

The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709438

there's also the story that wiggling the mouse in Win95 when installing something really does make it go faster. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

At one point, my scanner only worked when my daughter was awake - never when she was asleep (nighttime or napping).

Does this system release all the memory it allocates?

Yes, it releases it at about 200 meters per second.

Also check out Kragen's examples from a thread a couple of years ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988917

> How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

Is there some trick to this? Or do you have to input it like:

You have: 4/3pi(10 cm)^319320 kg/m^345000 GBP/kg

(What ChatGPT gave me)

>25580 acre-feet of water

This is why we can't have nice things.

The * value is the result of converting 10 miles to meters, as requested.

The / value is the inverse of that in case you wanted that, ie 0.1 meters in miles.

It's explained in `man 1 units`

I usually call it non-interactively:

  $ units 1500DKK USD
      * 236.76653
      / 0.00422357

in which case it's always the first line I want.

(The second line is telling me 1USD is 0.00422357 of 1500DKK.)

Note if you use the currency conversions,

  systemctl enable units-currency-update.timer

is needed to keep them up-to-date.

the * is denoting the conversion from your first unit to your second, the / denotes the other way.

You have: 1 miles You want: feet * 5280 / 0.00018939394

In the above example, 1 mile is 5280 feet, and 1 foot is 0.00018939394 miles

If I do 2 miles to feet, the values are doubled (or halved for the reverse conversion)

You have: 2 miles You want: feet * 10560 / 9.469697e-05