I was an apple tech for a time. With iPads that were out of warranty (basically go buy a new one or GTFO) and exhibiting a certain display issue, I would take it in the back and slam the thing on a counter at a certain angle. Worked every time for that particular problem.
why and how did that work, how hard were you slamming it, I am presuming not hard enough to break glass, but than, what would such a slam do? I am going to presume these were LCDs, and maybe the the liquid crystals would have gone too cold, and maybe by smacking, you somehow freed them or something. I would like to know more.
I had a similar thing on an old crt monitor. The screen would start to flicker badly after a while, and 8 year old me found if you banged the side, just right, it would keep working for a couple of hours.
Turns out the circuit board had some dry solders on it and when I hit it on the side where the board was, it got the connection back for a while.
Pretty sure it was a loose cable. They’re basically giant iPhones and I saw similar issues on those. I should also mention said counter had an antistatic mat on it to soften the blow.
First things first: if people call me they really have a problem and 9 times out of 10 it is not their fault. But, me standing next to the machine while they reproduce the problem “fixes” it about half the time.
Seems like random glitches that only last a minute or two.
PC knows when the alpha is about to wreck their shit if they don’t behave.
Okay but I am actually good with tech and actually do my due diligence and this still happens to me sometimes and it’s embarrassing!
I have possibly the dumbest workaround to anything in history
bindntr=CTRL,C,exec,hyprctl activewindow | rg -q "class: Wfica" && ( sleep 0.02 && hyprctl closewindow class:alacrittyclipboard ; alacritty -qq --config-file ~/.config/alacritty/alacrittyclipboard.toml --class 'alacrittyclipboard' --title 'Office 365 Desktop (SSL/TLS Secured, 256 bit)' -e sh -c 'sleep 0.03 && xclip -o | copyq copy - ; copyq clipboard | xclip -i' ) & ( sleep 0.2 && closewindow class:alacrittyclipboard ) windowrulev2 = float,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = stayfocused,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = noborder,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = noanim,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = noblur,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = opacity 0,class:(alacrittyclipboard) windowrulev2 = maxsize 1 1,class:(alacrittyclipboard)allow me to explain this monstrocity… the clipboard in citrix workspace is broken in a stupid way
it doesn’t update the system clipboard unless you move focus away from the window… and out of focus windows can’t update the clipboard for security reasons… this makes it so that if I hit ctrl c when citrix is open it opens a terminal window that’s tiny, invisible and steals focus that essentially forces the clipboard to work.
nonsense hack, but it works
Had a dvd player that would skip all the time even if it was a brand new dvd. Got pissed off and threw it at the wall. Girlfriend plugged it back in a couple hours later and it never skipped again.
You scared the poor little guy.
The irony of that is after I threw it I screamed “You have one fucking job! BE a dvd player!”
I did this with a google home mini. I could not get it to work correctly, got mad, threw it at a wall, and put it in a box.
A few months later I found it, plugged it in, and it works perfectly. Except the strange rattle if you shake it haha
In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.
A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn’t care.
Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I started using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.
When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said “hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!” And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.
The look on my manager’s face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must’ve looked like to him. “Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!” Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn’t possible to explain it a way that didn’t sound crazy.
In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.
In engineering speak, that’s referred to as “percussive maintenance”.
I had a situation ten or so years ago working on a machine that displayed an error code i didn’t recognize. I looked in the manual, and it had descriptions for error messages like (E1, E2, etc.), but the message was a couple numbers higher than the highest error in the manual (and as a side note, it’s really dumb to program a machine to give an error message without a corresponding key).
I looked through the handwritten old log book for the machine, and found someone referencing the same error code in the early 90’s. The error back then occurred after the machine was moved, but it cleared up after being moved again. We guessed that the issue was a loose connection that got jostled back into place. The machine had just been moved slightly again before our issue, so we assumed it was the same.
We ended up opening the machine, and just poking around until we hit the right wire that reconnected itself and cleared the error message. We wrote that down in the log book as a “digital re-alignment” (digital as in fingers).
Sounds exactly like some shit that would happen to me, lmao. Glad you didn’t lose your job over it!
Stopped using the PC for a week. Came back and an update came out and everything was good. Sometimes theres nothing you can do.
For several years my pc would only turn on while at a 45degree angle, not on its side and not upright but tilted 45degrees. After it turned on I could put it back and it’d be fine.
Eventually I moved and the pc ended up upside down and shaken, I put it down and a screw fell out of the psu. Problem solved!
D:
Lots of percussive maintenance going on around here, but one that sticks in my mind was testing some of the first 486DX PCs in 1990. One particular specimen from Compaq would only boot after hard power off by taking the lid off and tapping the CPU with a screwdriver. Worked fine after that.
Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.
Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.
He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.
Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.
Retail is depressing.
Do I want to know what csam means?
Child Sex Abuse Material.
Basically (and usually) child pronography.
Thanks, turns out I didn’t want to know that, but alas. Depressing that there is apparently known abbreviation for it.
It might help in the future for trigger warnings as it’s used in those quite often, at least. Every cloud…
Question, when did it change from CP to CSAM? I was watching a true crime video on YT the other day and was like wtf is CSAM?!
Also who decided it needed to be changed?
I dont really know but I guess CSAM is more broad and includes pictures of children at the beach etc.
Friend’s desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn’t even open a Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.
This kind of hacky dumb workaround is exactly what I wanted to read when I posted this thread, haha. It’s kind of genius but also I’m horrified to imagine how things got to that point.
Didn’t notepad file dialogue also use explorer?
IIRC, yes but it’s called differently. I’ve used that technique to work around nannyware a time or two.
Smacked the shit out of our old CRT TV, worked!
That’s where the phrase “out of whack” came from. You just needed to give it a whack.
I smacked my calculator in middle school, it somehow worked too
I have revived multiple computers and my mom’s windshield wipers with concussive application of a rubber chicken.
Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked
People who say violence never solved anything have never really been intimate with a printer
Worked on my cars dragging brakes the other day. I need to service them…
I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days of VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.
So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.
I used to do this when my Xbox 360 mic was messing up.
Kinky
Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer
Sticks were maybe the first human technology and we’ve yet to top it to this day.
