Tell about your most obscure computer problem

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here’s mine. I think this is pretty obscure.

I can’t type the word “huh”. Huh? Yes, “huh”. On my Dell laptop, running Ubuntu, when I type “huh” quickly, only “hu” comes out. The final ‘h’ gets swallowed. It happens in all applications, and is 100% reproducible. Other letter combinations are fine. Even ‘hhh’, ‘uuu’, ‘uhu’ work just fine. If I type slowly, “huh” works too, but I have to “hesitate” about a half second on the final ‘h’. I have a dual boot set up, and it works fine in Windows, so I know it’s a Linux issue.

I’m almost loathe to troubleshoot and fix it as it’s such an odd quirk - it gives my computer character. What weird combination of keyboard driver/kernel interaction would affect “huh” but nothing else?!

For the terminally curious, ‘xev’ does provide clues; it looks like the final ‘h’ of ‘huh’ is accompanied by a rogue, phantom ‘u’ keypress. I’ll spoiler it to spare those who don’t enjoy low-level geeky stuff.

[spoiler]



KeyPress event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x4800001,
    root 0xb0, subw 0x0, time 23741714, (87,57), root:(866,184),
    state 0x10, keycode 43 (keysym 0x68, h), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (68) "h"
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (68) "h"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x4800001,
    root 0xb0, subw 0x0, time 23741826, (87,57), root:(866,184),
    state 0x10, keycode 30 (keysym 0x75, u), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (75) "u"
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (75) "u"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x4800001,
    root 0xb0, subw 0x0, time 23742010, (87,57), root:(866,184),
    state 0x10, keycode 43 (keysym 0x68, h), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (68) "h"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x4800001,
    root 0xb0, subw 0x0, time 23742033, (87,57), root:(866,184),
    state 0x10, keycode 30 (keysym 0x75, u), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (75) "u"
    XFilterEvent returns: False

[/spoiler]Anyone else have any obscure computer problems they’d like to share?

2

Last week my work computer started doing this: only in Horizon, our library’s automation program, I couldn’t type lowercase L’s. Uppercase fine, every other program fine, just l in Horizon. I found out because it seems you can’t spell “pedophilia” without “l”. (That’s L, not I. Although you also can’t spell it without an I, but I am not a pedophile, personally.)

3

My cat removed my scroll-lock key from my laptop for me. Luckily, I have never needed to use it and have never missed it. My [del]cheapskate[/del] thrifty brother, on the other hand, had a damaged “L” key, and remapped it to one of the Function keys rather than replace it.

4

On just some screens I cannot see the Netflix rating stars using Firefox. I’ve been working off and on occasionally since 2006.

5
6

For some reason, my computer seems to think any folder with files in it it somehow contains 800+ files whenever I delete them.

7

That is hilarious!

8

I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for… but after I got my HP in 2007 and got it all set up, I couldn’t get any sound from it. I messed around with that thing for hours and hours off and on, downloading drivers and doing everything that could possibly be done, and had my geek friends and family look at it, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with it. Then I even sent it back to the factory to have them look at it, wherein they got sound just fine and it was perfect and there was nothing that they could find wrong with it. They sent it back to me, and I finally figured out that for some reason, my webcam prevented the sound from working. It only took forever to figure that out, and much frustration.

9

Back when 100 Meg was a really big hard drive, I bought one for a decent price at a computer show. Took it home, and connected it to my computer but didn’t install it IN the computer, turned the computer on, and everything worked just fine.

Happy that my new component worked, I turned the computer off and finished installing the drive. Turned the computer back on, and nothing happened. As in, the computer wouldn’t even POST, nothing.

Took the computer apart, spreading components out but leaving them connected, turned the computer on, and everything worked fine. Put it back together, no POST.

Rinse and repeat for several days, trying various combinations of things. Everything worked fine so long as the computer was spread out on the floor, but when I put it all into the computer case, it didn’t. My housemate, who ran the NOC at a major university and was pretty tech savvy himself, started trying to help me and confessed himself as being as puzzled by the behaviour as I was.

Four days into this, I remembered something the seller had said. “Do not tighten the screws down too far, or the drive won’t work.”

Reassembled the computer, this time only lightly tightening the screws instead of screwing them most of the way in.

This time, the computer worked. Damndest thing.

10

I figured it was a ghosting issue as soon as you said it. Try using a USB keyboard. See if the same event occurs. Bet it doesn’t.

11

Once while under the influence of way too much pain meds, I burrowed deep into the guts of my Mac. I found a “preference” for (apparently) allowing it to read my email. Cool, right? I enabled it and it did! The problem came when I closed email and my computer continued to read everything that appeared on my finder. Yes, everything. It drove me mad. I called the local Mac store, explained my problem and asked how to turn it off. I was assured this could not be happening. I had to take it in to prove it to them. In the end I had to leave it with them to get it fixed.

Won’t do that again.

12

You win the bet.

So, what is a “ghosting issue”, and why does it only happen in Linux, and only with the integrated keyboard?

13

Sounds like a problem I had with a system back when 10Meg was really big. Putting one of the mounting screws too far in would short the casing on the drive to the computer case. After several attempts, I didn’t want to screw it all the way in since I thought it would happen again, and I’d just have to take it out. That time it worked. I checked with the supplier, they just scratched their heads. Then I contacted the drive manufacturer and they said, don’t ground the drive casing. I called back the supplier and told them about it, then used a washer to keep it from happening. A few days later I got a letter from the supplier, with a shorter screw in a little plastic baggy. That baggy with the screw in it stayed taped to the side of the computer case after that as a reminder of the incident. I figure this would have been in 1980. Man am I old!

14

Of course, if one is involved with programming on ANY level, the one spends one’s life dealing with the most obscure bugs – one’s own, one’s friends/colleagues bugs, or bugs in apps or operating systems one is using. Any programmer or sysadmin could write a book of such things, and some of them are just weird! Add to that, the bugs that arise in your own programs because the f’ing compiler mis-compiled your program! Once upon a time (way back when FORTRAN was king), a part of my job consisted of tracking down bugs in our users’ programs and investigating bugs in the FORTRAN compiler. Yes, there were plenty! Guess what! They caused users’ programs to get the wrong answers! (Duh!)

There was a famous “Famous Bugs” document floating around on Usenet back in the day (I first saw it around 1986 or so) with some hastily-written remarks about major bugs back then – including bugs aboard manned Apollo spacecraft, and bugs in pacemakers that could be (and sometimes were) fatal! And some mention of bugs in nuclear reactor control software. Fun stuff like that. Check it out! http://textfiles.com/100/famous.bug

ETA: A few of the names dropped in that document, were names of some of the major luminaries in the computer science field of the day (e.g., Butler Lampson, for one).

15

Just for example: Here is one excerpt from the above-mentioned “Famous Bugs” document:

ETA: (n.b.: At least some, if not all, mis-spellings in the above are as-is in the original.)

16

Not strictly a “computer” problem, but my phone has a bug that baffles me.

It’s a droid bionic.

The bug is highly specific: I dial voicemail to check my voice mail. It prompts me to enter my key. I take the phone from my ear to type in the password.

One of the numbers in my password is a ‘3’. The following digit is a ‘1’. When I press these, in order, the phone terminates the call and shuts off. Now the weirdness:

It happens only on entering the voicemail password. I can open a web browser or whatever and type these digits in order just fine. Previously I had flip phone and this particular password never gave the voicemail system problems.

It happens only with my index finger. If I poke out the password with my middle finger (or any other), it works just fine.

The phone has no problems recognizing input from my index finger in any other application.

Strange, strange. I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, I’m going on the theory that my index finger is haunted.

17

Hardly exciting but on my laptop when I press the apostrophe key nothing appears on the screen but when I press it a second time I suddenly see two apostrophes. Kind of odd.

18

I have a MacBookPro with insomnia. If left closed (in theory, asleep) and connected to a power source, it will periodically wake up - the backlight comes on, I can hear both the hard drive and CD drive start up - then go back to sleep. This will happen 7-8 times in a row, then not again for many hours. It happens regardless of what programs were or were not left running when the computer was put to sleep. It’s super annoying at night, when the noise wakes me up.

I asked IT at work, but they’re mystified.

19

Once, long ago, I had a PC which would mysteriously power up by itself.

After I shut it down, there’s no way I can get it to start up again. No lights, no sound of fan etc.

It was like this for a week, then the problem disappears. I have no idea why.

20

Had this one when I worked as a Mac tech many moons ago: someone’s IP wasn’t being properly assigned. Look into it, and somehow the computer’s MAC has changed. Freaky.

Did a lot of research, and found out that, apparently, for some reason, MAC addresses had traditionally been stored in “reverse-nibble” format. In case someone’s never heard of them: you know how one binary digit, a 0 or 1, is called a “bit”, and 8 bits makes a “byte”? Some funny guy way back when decided that four bits, half a byte, should be called a “nibble”. Anyway, I have no idea why, but that’s how the MAC addresses were traditionally stored, every four bits reversed.

Well, apparently a short run of some Macintosh computers were produced with their nibbles un-flipped, assigning them an address range that Apple hadn’t reserved; manufacturers of network devices, at least back then, were designated certain address ranges that they would assign serially to their products, so that it wasn’t just chaos. Apple quickly applied for and received the address range they had mistakenly used. A later system update fixed the reverse-nibble thing, but that changed the computer’s MAC, so IP servers ended up confused when they looked to assign certain IPs. So we straightened all that out in the IP server, and all was well again.