My Samsung Galaxy S23 just had a very weird one, and, for a phone, it was a gamestopper. I had called in my new credit card, took less than a minute chatting (tho oddly I had to do it with a human since the autobot refused to recognize my keypunches for the card #). I tried calling another number, but when I hung that one up it then autodialed the first one, and, even worse, the hangup button was no longer there, just the green call button. After 4 attempts to get the durned thing to hang up like it should (and 4 c.c. operators who wondered wtf I was up to), I tried to reboot the thing-only, upon trying to hold down the power button, some app I had never heard of before called Bixby came up, so I couldn’t even reboot the f. phone. [this latter part should go into the bad software design thread, because as it turns out there is a hidden setting to change the power down button to that VERY specific app-zero idea why it would be set up to do that for yet another essential function-did manage to turn that off and reboot it finally]
Back when I was taking a college programming class, I made a virtual Rubik’s cube as a project. Very simple, no animation or anything like that, input via the keyboard. When I was demonstrating it to the teacher, a cosmic ray or something zeroed out a value in memory, in one of the variables storing the color of a particular spot on the cube. So that spot on the cube was now color 0, or black. And it moved around the cube when I turned faces, exactly like it should have.
In other words, one of the virtual stickers peeled off of my virtual Rubik’s cube.
Probably not the weirdest, but perhaps the most annoying this week: my biggest stovetop burner has lost the ability to be “on” at less than the highest setting. Instead of the gradation of temperatures you’d normally like in a stovetop, it’s become binary. Funny, this never, ever happened when I had a stove without a f****g chip in it.
Quickbooks (Accounting software) has a feature where, when you start writing an invoice to a customer, it’ll display some info about that customer (previous invoices, open balance etc). On one of the three computers that feature didn’t work.
Turns out the fix was to move the wireless mouse dongle to a different USB port. I don’t know if there was some sort of IRQ conflict or what was going on. Keep in mind, everything else worked just fine, it was just this one information box in this one specific scenario.
And it’s not even like I just figured it out, I found the answer online, so I wasn’t the only one with the problem.
IRQ conflict… There’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.
I hadn’t either, not since High School comp sci.
I’ve told this one before:
15-20 years ago, I was doing something on our home pc with the display BLIPPED, and suddenly it was displaying in mirror image. Not rotated: on some computers, you can hit a key combination that rotates the display, but everything still displays as you’d expect it, just as if you’d turned the monitor on its side or whatever.
But, actually mirror imaged,
We tried rebooting the computer. We tried turning the monitor off and on. We looked at computer and monitor settings - and let me tell you, that was fun. I’d had an oddball hobby of mirror writing, back in the day, and it was either karma coming to bite me, or a fortunately-developed skill.
To isolate the issue, my husband borrowed a spare monitor from his workplace… and it displayed just fine.
I’m not sure what inspired me to try the following: literally unplugging the monitor from the wall and the computer. When I replugged it, everything looked just fine.
I never found any setting on the monitor that could explain that behavior.
The monitor, as it happened, was bought a few years earlier, to fix a problem we’d had with our old PC. We had bought a home-built one from a colleague, and every time we booted it up, it would do a little work, then crash. It got worse and worse to the point where it wouldn’t even finish booting up. We were joking that there was some bad feng shui going on - it worked without error at the colleague’s house (he tried it there, after we saw the behavior).
The colleague replaced the hard drive, and we set the thing up at home, on the floor, and it worked fine.
Then I put it up on the top of the desk - and the behavior happened again.
We ultimately decided that the case wasn’t adequately shielded from the RF that the monitor was emitting. The monitor was getting up in years, and wasn’t displaying all that well, so we replaced it with our first flat-screen monitor - and no more problems even with the CPU a foot away from the monitor.
I have a Harman/Kardon AVR 158 receiver, so I can play music off my laptop to my speakers as suitable volumes, according to my stress levels.
For some reason the display no longer functions, though the volume adjustment wheel does, and the system works fine.
I did a search for the fix, and found a post of mine (!) on another forum from 2019 that I had completely forgotten about, with my fix:
It appears it needs more power on the audio jack to realize that it should show a display. I will try that but I have the problem (which is also irritating) that my newer phone only has digital output via USB C, and the amp wants audio input, so I am not sure how to trouble shoot again.
For over six years, the remote control for my 2017 Honda Fit worked perfectly. Then, in November 2023, I tossed my house and car key ring into my laptop cases’s front pocket for a month-long trip to Thailand.
When I got home, the remote didn’t unlock the car. I at first assumed that the car’s battery was dead, so I went to get the jumper cables. But when I put the key in the keyhole to unlock the car manually, the dome light came on. I started the car (again manually), and everything worked fine. I drove around for 10 minutes to make sure.
I concluded that the remote’s battery was dead. And for a few months, I just used the manual car key to open and start the car. (Yes, I’m lazy).
The next time I took my car in for planned maintenance, I asked them to replace the remote’s battery. They reported that it didn’t work with a new battery; it was apparently broken. I figured it had been banged around during a month of hauling my luggage on and off planes, boats, and automobiles.
The dealer couldn’t program me a new remote without my leaving the car overnight–they would have to order one. I decided to wait until the next time I brought the car in for PM. In the meantime, I would continue using the manual key.
This turned out to be fortunate. Because, about a month ago, I was walking to the car when, out of habit, I pressed the remote. It worked! And it’s still working (knock on wood!)
When I was still in college, one of my BFFs had a TV that malfunctioned in a way where the volume was 100% and could not be lowered, which was not only very uncomfortable but also disturbed her apartment neighbors. It just happened one day when she turned it on.
“AND TODAY IN THE NEWS, FIVE PEOPLE WERE SHOT …” etc. LOL
After a few days, she surrendered and got rid of it.
My previous car had a peculiar quirk – under certain conditions, the speedometer needle would bounce around when starting the car. This tended to occur mostly when the weather was cold, and especially after driving the car only a short distance, then starting it again after just a few minutes.
Which were precisely the conditions one cold morning when I drove a few blocks to the coffee shop, got my coffee, and started the car again. This time the needle flailed around so much that it managed to get itself stuck on the wrong side of the pin on which it normally rests at the “0” mark. So as I drove the needle struggled against the pin and went nowhere. The speedometer was no longer functional.
I initially assumed the whole dash would have to be disassembled to get at the speedometer, and even then I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to get inside the thing. But doing a bit of internet research, it turned out there was a secret series of button presses that recalibrated all the gauges. I tried it, and indeed all the needles on all the gauges flailed around and the speedometer fixed itself!
Naturally, the secret button press sequence isn’t documented anywhere in the user manual because it’s, like, secret! Otherwise how could the dealer charge you a small fortune for “recalibrating your gauges”?
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Another one. When playing video from my streaming box, every once in a long while the TV would display “HDMI Error” with an error code, and everything would freeze. No idea why it couldn’t just ignore the error and carry on – it’s not like some vital transmission that must be error-free. But it didn’t, and furthermore, even turning the TV off did not reset it – you had to unplug it!
Turned out the problem was a low-quality HDMI cable. I replaced it with a good one from Monoprice and the problem has never recurred.
My parents had a TV like that. They lived with it for probably longer than I would have.
Way back when I was young, we had a Commodore 64 computer whose sound chip failed. It seemed like something that would be possible to live with, except that a lot of the game software wouldn’t work properly, in ways other than just having no sound. It turns out that the Commodore 64’s sound chip has a white noise generator that was used as a random number generator by many programmers.
My present phone, an AT&T branded Android, will not accept calls from my daughter (no, she is not on the blocked calls list), but will allow texts from her, nor will it accept texts from my youngest son (but will allow incoming calls).
We have two TV monitors up front in our church. The video feed goes from the A/V computer through an HDMI splitter, to a pair of HDMI extenders over CAT6 to the individual TVs.
On a regular basis, the TV on the left starts flickering off and on, as it loses signal and regains it. The fix is to try unplugging the TV and its remote-end of the HDMI extender, then replugging them.
We are absolutely baffled as to why this happens. We have done everything to troubleshoot, including using a spare run of CAT6, replacing the splitter, replacing the HDMI extenders, and even physically swapping the TVs. No matter what we do, the left TV is the one that flickers off and on.
This is so baffling, especially since the “left” TV behaves correctly on the right side now. We have tested everything.
My current theory is that the extenders are sensitive to the CAT6 length. I used a tester and found the left side to be something like 30 feet longer than the right. One of these days when I am feeling motivated, I will add an extra 30-foot extra length to the right side to see if it magically fixes things.
We have a burner like that. We have a Whirlpool range with a glass cooktop, and one of the burners can be set to small, medium, or full size. Sometimes it works correctly and sometimes your only choices are High or Off. If I fiddle with the knob, turning the burner on and off several times, it will eventually start behaving normally. But before I start cooking anything on that burner I’ve gotten into the habit of making sure it is working right, otherwise I’ll burn whatever I’m cooking.
Not sure how weird it is, but my Honda Odyssey will reverse the powered sliding door closing if I start the engine while the door is closing. Which isn’t an uncommon occurrence since the kids tend to jump in and start the door closing while I’m getting in and ready to start the car.
I assume it’s an electrical system issue of some sort, but nobody has been able to figure it out. Or maybe it’s normal operation (although I’m not sure why it would be).
FWIW, I’ve had this 75 ft HDMI over fiber optic cable for about 3 years and not had any problems with it. It does require power via USB at one end. That picture shows it at the destination, but mine is at the source.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PVLTZGR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
Or they’ll both stop working.
Weirdest given the circumstances.
We got a Furby for my daughter on her birthday. Everything worked fine. Less than two months later she passed away. Ever since that moment, the Furby never worked. Tried new batteries and whatnot but to this day it has never turned back on.
A while back, I had a laptop with an IR sensor. Every time I turned it on, it would change the channel of my television to 17.
Hanging out in a college dorm room, late 90’s, and every once in a while we’d hear a “quack” sound effect. After a while we tracked it down. It was her old (early 90s model) mac computer. Apparently it had an IR sensor and would quack in response to her TV remote’s volume control.