Note: this is not a request for troubleshooting help.
For the past few years my 10ish year old “smart” TV will maybe once a week or so completely lose the ability to play sound in the Youtube app, and only in the Youtube app. Sound works just fine everywhere else. Bizarrely this is always triggered by an ad and never a video. Restarting the app doesn’t fix it, and neither does clearing the cache. Fortunately doing a full restart of the TV fixes it, it’s just irritating to have to restart because an ad somehow broke the sound.
What technological gremlins haunt you?
Once a week or so, my right hearing aid stops giving me audio and starts blasting data into my ear. Like the old dial up modem sounds combined with R2D2. But only at home and only in a few rooms. I figure it’s picking up wifi or Bluetooth and trying to convert them to audio, and failing.
I kind of wish that I had a handheld gizmo – maybe an ADC that could attach to a cell phone – that could take into account location and direction and help me locate sources of radio interference.
My computer turns itself on when I walk through a certain spot nearby it.
“Ah, you must have your mouse or some other peripheral set to activate it and the vibrations from walking-” Nope, I know how to disable wakeup from peripherals. “Well, then the vibrations from walking must be disturbing a loose component inside-” Nope, problem existed through a near-complete teardown and OS reinstall. Also, putting the PC on vibration isolating foam did not help.
At this point, I’m down to two conclusions:
- The wire for the wall outlet runs under the floor, and vibrations are causing adequate power fluctuations to wake the machine up. Not sure how to test for this, though it does concern me about the state of the wiring.
- The PC is haunted.
Do you have wake-on-lan enabled? Any setting that would wake on network activity? Could be you’re interrupting or amplifying a signal - Ethernet or WiFi - that is causing the OS to think it’s getting traffic.
No Wifi, as it simply doesn’t have a wifi adaptor.
Ethernet is a possibility. I tested it right now and removing the Ethernet cable doesn’t cause a wake-up, but I suppose it’s possible that slight interference if the cable were just slightly moved might cause it to register traffic plus a continued connection, enough to cause a wakeup. I’ll try tinkering with that, thanks!
It’s only a theory; if you don’t have wake-on-lan enabled, it’d probably not be even a consideration.
Interesting. Wake-On-Lan is not only traffic, you need to send the MAC in the packages.
Maybe some shielding problem?
You know it’s 2! Everything you do. It’s haunted for you!
When turning off my Samsung TV, every once in a while it decides to turn itself back on about 5 minutes later. This has been going on for several years now.
It doesn’t happen every time, and seems to happen randomly as I can’t replicate the conditions in which it happens. It didn’t happen when I bought the TV, so I suspect it started after Samsung pushed a firmware update. It’s a bug others are experiencing with the same model TV and I’ve tried every fix people suggested online, factory reset the TV, and updated the firmware. My conclusion is that it’s a bug that Samsung needs to fix, but I’m confident they won’t given the TV is about 5 years old now.
I will never buy another Samsung anything ever again. Their hardware is fine, but they’re so bad at software. I had a Samsung TV until recently that was just unbelievably slow to turn on, switch inputs, and move through settings on.
Samsung is crap overall.
I bought a brand new Lenovo Yoga laptop, and when connecting to my TV via HDMI, the TV occasionally goes black for a second or 2 then comes back. It doesn’t happen at all when streaming video full screen, only when doing something simple like browsing the Internet. Happens with Windows and Linux, although it’s more frequent on Linux.
My Denon soundbar has the same thing, HDMI related disconnecting periodically.
Back in the day, like 10 years ago, I used to have a Samsung tablet and a phone. Sometimes, when I took either of them out of the standby (and the devices would renegotiate their Wi-Fi), my router would just jam up horribly. No access to the admin interface. No logs. Nothing to do but reboot.
Now, the only Samsung device I have is my TV. Sometimes, thankfully very rarely, when I fire it up, it, um, my router just jams up horribly. No access to the admin interface. No logs. Nothing to do but reboot. And it’s a different router from a completely different manufacturer. Also it’s connected via ethernet.
Is Samsung just cursed?
My partner streams my Plex to their whole house by way of some sort of coax input device. I’m not really sure how it works but it uses the house’s cable lines to stream whatever from an hdmi device (in this case an rpi) to a unique channel.
Works great everywhere and for every device plugged into it, except a 9-ish year old Samsung tv. On that, the audio cuts out for a half second every 30 seconds or so. Without fail. No change to the picture, and an older Samsung tv handles it fine. We’ve tried everything we could find - including heavily tweaking Plex, and rebuilding the rpi entirely - short of replacing the tv, no dice.
Interestingly, no other stuff through that rpi on that same configuration has problems on that tv, so like we can load the retropi and play games and the sound works fine. It’s really just that one app, through that one method, on that one tv. So weirdly specific.
2016 ish asus vivobook, the bluetooth module will just randomly start spewing garbage into the USB controller, turning it and whatever is in the left port off. The wifi part of the card works great, restarting doesn’t fix it, the duration it does this is random, disconnecting the laptops battery doesn’t fix it. The only thing that fixes it is taking the card out and putting it back in place, probably a broke solder joint or something but this laptop is hot garbage so I’ll get a new one before trying to take the whole mobo out.
Also my phone the other day shut itself off for 30 minutes, when it turned back on it was stuck on the Motorola Blue and Yellow boot screen for another 15 minutes, until it finally booted and was just fine. Still dont know what that’s about.
On my car, a 99 subaru forester, When changing the battery or disconnecting the terminal, the Transmission controller will scream that the fluid is too hot and reaching like over 200 degrees, even though the transmission hasn’t been engaged for a month. You have to just keep reconnecting the terminal until it correctly communicates with the ECU and stops freaking.
Technology is fun.
My PC just won’t turn on if he is cold. No, it is not “humidity is high” or too low temperature. It just doesn’t turn on if he cold start. A little of heat on the mb and he turns on like nothing ever happened. Already replaced PSU, CPU, GPU, HDD, fans. So surely it is just a feature of my mb.
It sounds like a defect.
I would vote (in this order)
- Bad solder joint
- Failing chip
- Bad capacitor
Bad capacitor moves up on the list if it wasn’t happening and is getting more profound or if you are having other stability issues.
While I bet you have had it for a while, thiswould be enough for me to try a warranty claim. The problem could lead to other issues.
I had a similar issue until I bought a different PSU that was slightly higher capacity. Not sure if it was some cold start GPU power draw quirk but that’s the only thing I changed and haven’t had a problem since.
My monitor currently loses signal every now and then in some (not particularly demanding) fullscreen games in Linux (e.g. Axiom Verge did it several times the other day). It uses the same refresh rate and resolution as my regular desktop. Switching to a console (which uses a different refresh rate, and I assume re-establishes the connection) and then back to Wayland resolves it.
No kernel log errors.
I first noticed it shortly after moving an external antenna with a cable that had been sitting next to the DisplayPort cable; I don’t know whether it’s just used by my motherboard for WiFi (which I don’t use) or for Bluetooth (which I do) as well. Could maybe try repositioning that.
I don’t believe that it used to do it, so it’s a new issue, but I haven’t cared enough to really dig into it. If I did, I suppose I’d probably go back and try to find a reasonably-reliable repro case, then go back and try installing older versions of drivers. On the hardware end, maybe try putting a bigger PSU in the system, on the off chance that it has anything to do with power limitations (but I’d guess that it’s software).
Hmm. Now that I think about it, I really only use Bluetooth for game controllers, and I think that in all the games that I’ve seen this in, I’m using my controller. If the antenna is used for Bluetooth transmission, in games, that might actually be a good explanation.
Switched to Windows from Linux for a bit because I was having a few problems with Linux, but the main one is that seemingly, spotty 5Ghz connections cause iwlwifi to panic, which means no wifi. Windows does not have this problem. (relevant chip is the Intel AX210)
It’s annoying because the UX on KDE is objectively better than Windows and I don’t want to have to deal with slower connections because the wifi driver has a dumb bug, and reporting the bug to the LKML is something I do not have the knowledge to do.
I work in IT and right now it’s a group of CCTV IP cameras that have a patterned flicker at certain times of the day but on random days. I’m pretty sure I’ve boiled it down to either a heavy power draw from other equipment or the shitty segregated network they’re on. I’m in the middle of desegregation and network uplift and the pool is shrinking so I might have it figured out finally but it’s been months still hella random.
My digital tv reciever cannot receive a large range of channels when a mini pc, in off state, is plugged in on the same switch. It works fine when the UTP cable is not connected, it works fine when the mini pc is on, also fine when the pc had no power at all. Distance between pc and receiver does not matter, neither does the configuration of cables in the switch. I’ve given up on it, but sometimes the issue disappears for months, and then comes back for a while.
Unbound dns. It worked perfectly and all that jazz. But one day it didn’t. No one could answer why. Every solution in book was tried. Got support from high up but nope. Gave up for the day then two days later it just worked.
For three years then same problem and no way to fix it. And I gave up. Really liked it and one day I will try again but rebuilding my network every time really sucks.
Reddit chat, need I say more?
