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Pleb: "What's your job?"
Me: "I'm a programmer."
Pleb: "Great, because I have a problem with my pri..."
Me: "STOP! Last person who thought I was a printer support serf got strangled with the printer cable."
Pleb: "But it's a wireless printer."
Me: "Right, where's the power cord?"5 -
Went to go help someone with their wireless printer.
Client: my printer doesnt work.
Me: okay let me take a look at it.. (took a look at it and saw the power core wasnt plug in)
So it seem like you forgot to plug in the powercord. Do you by any chance have it with you?
Client: well it said it was a wireless printer so i didnt think i would need it. I threw it away.
Me: well yeah wireless as in you dont need a usb core to connect it to your computer you can just do it through wifi.. but it needs a power source in order to turn on..
Client: well then why did it said that its a wireless printer if it needs a cord? Thats false advertisement.
Me: Sir the printer is a wireless printer but you cant get power wireless you need a power source in order to turn on the printer.
Client: you probably dont know what youre doing.
Me: *its okay hes only 79 years old*8 -
Woohoo! 32k achieved!!! Finally I can post some new rant without risking some sudden overshoot 😁
So putting celebrations aside for a minute, a while ago I've noticed a tingle when I stroke my finger across metal areas of my tablet, or the sides of my phone (which probably has metal near it too) while it's charging. And it's been bugging me ever since.
Now, some things to note are that it only happens when my feet are touching the ground though slippers, and that the frequency is so low that I can actually feel the tingle when I slide my finger across the material. This to me at least seems like electricity flows through me into ground, and touching the ground directly provides a path so easy for the electrons to run away that I don't feel it at all. But if I lift my feet off the ground entirely, I just get charged up and after that, nothing else happens.
So those are my ideas. The answers on the subject on the other hand.. absolute cancer. Unsurprisingly, most of them came from Apple users. Here's some of them.
https://discussions.apple.com/threa...
- I've not noticed it, but if you're concerned bring the phone to Apple for evaluation.
- Me too facing same problem.. did u visit apple care?
And one good answer at least...
- google emf sensitivity, its real. You are right, there is a small current flowing through your body, try to limit your usage. The problem with this issue is those who aren't affected (lucky ones for now) will tell you these products are 100% safe. To a degree they are, i used my ipod touch for about 2 years straight vwith virtually no symptoms. then the tingling started and it gets worse.You will get more sensitive to progressively less powerful things. I dont want to scare you but just limit your usage like i didnt do 🙂
Overall that discussion was pretty good actually, aside from "bring it to the Genius Bar, they'll know for sure and not just sell you another unit". But then there's Reddit.
https://reddit.com/r/iphone/...
- Ok, real reason is probably that the extension cord and/or outlet is probably not grounded correctly. Either that or you are using a cheap knockoff charger.
Either use a surge protector and/or use the authentic Apple Charger.
- It's not the volts that hurt you, it's the amps
- I think you are in deep love with your phone. That tingling sensation is usually referred to as "love" in human language.
- Do less acid, I would advise.
Okay, so that's the real cancer. Grounding issue sounds reasonable despite it being wrong. Grounding is actually not needed when your charging appliance doesn't have any exposed metal parts. And isolation from high voltage to low voltage side actually happens through things like routering holes into the PCB, creating spark gaps, and using galvanic isolation through things like optocouplers. As for a surge protector? I'm using them to protect my PC and my servers, but the only purpose they serve is to protect from.. you guessed it.. voltage surges, like lightning bolts hitting the grid. They don't do shit for grounding or reducing this tingle! What a fucking tool.
It's not the volts that kill, it's the amps.. yeah I'm sure that the debunking of that is easy to find. Not gonna explain that here. And the rest of it.. yeah it's just fucking cancer.
Now what's the real issue with this tingle? It's actually a Class-Y rated (i.e. kV rated) capacitor that's on the transformer of any switch-mode power supply, including phone chargers. If memory serves me right, it helps with decoupling the switching noise and so on. But as it's connected to the primary side of the transformer, if the cap is sufficiently large and you are sufficiently sensitive, it can actually cause that tingle by passing a fraction of the mains electricity into your body. It's totally safe though, as the power that these caps pass is very small. But to some, it's noticeable.
Hope you found this interesting! And thanks a lot for bringing me to 2^15. I really appreciate it ♥️
15 -
Today I found out my family does 'hard' shut downs to my home server by unplugging the power cord when I'm not home...5
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Okay so my weekend project went well :D put my retropie system inside of this old r2d2 I've had collecting dust. Has a cooling fan inside as well as a 16x2 lcd I was playing with. Got a red led tied to the rpis txd pin, ports in the front for easy access and power cord and hdmi coming out the back.
2 -
I used to think the magnetic power cord on the mac was a great idea...until we got a kitten. One of his greatest joys is to play havoc with the cords under the computer desk...but his favourite is the mac powercord - which he rips out without me noticing ... until the mac runs out of power and shuts down...
4 -
I just flashed BIOS on my server. I don't own a UPS, and i was only using 1 of the 2 PSU's since i couldn't find a second power cord.
Without a doubt the scariest 30 seconds I've ever experienced while working with IT1 -
Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊
Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.
Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.2 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...
TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.
So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.
So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.
While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.
Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.
Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.
Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.
$ dmesg -w
Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.
However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.6 -
When your already coding something boring and your foot hits the switch on the power cord under your desk...2
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When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.2 -
Today, a few thousand dollars of potential equipment being replaced was prevented by deciding to follow the network cords and finding out that the switchboard had the power cord knocked loose.
Payment was in candy.3 -
Pretty sure my laptop's battery is dead...
Works fine when plugged in but dies without power cord...
Rip 70€....
So much beer wasted
At least I'm getting a higher capacity one, and the previous one lasted 3,5 years, so that's not too bad...2 -
My computer is dying. It's been a slow, painful process where the screen starts flickering badly when the battery is low. Now it flickers constantly if the power cord isn't plugged in. Today the screen flickers even if the power cord is plugged in. (Tried changing the battery, etcetera) You served me well. I'm going to frame the screen and put it as a painting on the wall. Rest in peace friend.
6 -
Years ago when I was a kid I was into making things to solve problems. Earlier in my life I remember as a kid seeing a neighbor shove 120VAC into the ground to get worms to come up to the surface. I also remember taking a worm and slapping it on one of the posts and shocking the shit out of myself. Apparently that lesson did not stick.
As a teenager I wanted a device similar to this. So I wired a 120VAC plug and cord to a 1/4" audio connector. I threw this in a box and forgot about it. Years later my sister went through my things looking for a power plug for a synthesizer we had. It had an audio 1/4" plug for headphones. She told me she plugged this cord she found of mine into the synth and it started smoking. She went to pull the plug out and shocked the shit out of her. I don't think that the synth ever worked correctly after that.
Well, today I was thinking fondly about that story. I mean, who wouldn't think fondly about shocking the shit out of your sister (she didn't die, so its okay). However, it was dangerous. Really really dangerous.
The lesson I can take from this memory is this: if you know a software interface (or electrical) is not safe then don't build it. Someone will try and use that shit years later and really fuck some stuff up. I have to wonder. What kind of software traps have I built in the past that are yet to be discovered?3 -
It was simple Tuesday morning, got to work, turned on laptop. And hell began. First call, my co worker asked me to come. Got shouted, why I bought this peace of shit printer. Why it's printing slow. Asked to bring back old one because it's faster. But before I switched printers. I got strange and funny question, "why paper comes out hotter from this printer and not from older one ", I became speechless, and left her without answer. Ok I changed printer. Went to take tea break(hate coffee). Got asked by same women to bring original power cord that was with printer, because that one connected somehow slowed printing speed. The fuck? Too hot paper, now power cord? Why? How? That was stupidest things I ever heard.
P.S Slow printing problem was with her computer, bad drivers, something wrong with computer or OS. Anyway I need to change her computer pretty soon anyway.9 -
my sophomore year of highschool I went to a public hangout / study area after class was over and installed a raspberry pi above the ceiling tile. I ran a cord along the wall and into the ceiling to power the device. I ran a sniffing script over the next few weeks and collected all the user/pass data that went through in plaintext. You'd be surprised what goes unencrypted... ;)1
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Have you ever find yourself talking cursing singing to your computer?
I'm for this example find myself commanding the computer to build 😆.
Got the grip an the power cord saying I'm your boss!!!
Also sang the song "You Are my only exception".
What do you say ? Or cursing?
Or is it only me 🧐?4
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