When I worked as an intern in a fancy restaurant I had my workspace in the kitchen below the radio (which was always on when we were prepping). I had braces at the time and the general opinion was, that I was functioning as an extension to the antenna. The radio was only working when I stood at one specific spot (or when I was not present at all).
Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like “what’d you do‽ It’s working!”. Definitely a fix I wasn’t expecting.
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…
Somewhat related.
I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It’s pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there’s no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.
It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.
I just spent the better part of the day trying to get a “music archival tool” to work, but I wasn’t able to get my Spotify account to connect.
The eventual solution I ended up with was to spin up a Windows VM, get the tool connected to my Spotify account there and copy over the config file from the Windows installation to my (Linux BTW) actual computer.
Of course, I’ve never really dabbled in emulation past old video game consoles, so getting a Windows VM up and running involved its own troubleshooting… The whole thing felt absurd, especially since there are so many easy ways to download music, but this was one of those times where I didn’t want to let the computer best me.
Nice. I had a printer that didn’t have the right driver for Linux, found that if you download the Mac driver package and unzip it they had their Mac driver as PPD file, so I was able to copy the text I needed and paste into the Linux file, and run a command to push thr PPD to the print folder and assign spooler/model
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
Kinky
I used to do this when my Xbox 360 mic was messing up.
Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.
At least it’s not with a customer.
What a unique abomination. I salute you.
why use a case at that point, lol
The cobbler’s sons go barefoot.
Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.
We didn’t have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.
but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,
then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus’s window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.
This reminds me of way back when i beat a virus with task manager.
This one was showing as a process in task manager. If you killed it, it would just reappear moments later. I even tried finding the folder it was installing on my pc via rightclick on the program in task manager and clicking “open file location” closing the program and deleting its install folder. But it would still come back, installed somewhere else.
After some time messing around, i noticed that another program would show in the task manager, then the virus would appear, and then the other program would close and disappear from the task manager. All within about 1 or 2 seconds
So i killed the task, waited for the other program to appear right click it fast, open file location, and there it was, a different folder with a program that auto runs when the virus is removed to reinstall the virus and close itself to avoid detection.
I deleted that folder and then killed the virus program in the task manager, and it didn’t reappear. I had won!
I seem to recall it was resistent to virus scanners for this reason.
But this was about 20 years ago so i doubt there are viruses that unsophisticated now.
I had something similar. I was looking at my processes one day for some reason, when I noticed CuteFTP. Now, I knew what it was, but I knew for a fact that I hadn’t installed it. Some investigation led to a hidden folder containing some scripts. One of them was for remote control via an IRC channel. So I hopped in the channel and had a chat with the user who was set to admin the bot on my computer.
Edit: Formatting.
Yeah around the same time as those fbi ones there were ones like that but they generated new ones with randomized names trying to hide. I think
Fucking baller status. There were a couple of fixes, not as complex as yours of course, that I figured out during the wild west of internet and virus infection. Can’t remember any of it in detail, but yeah, shit was it’s own kind of puzzle and was awesome to find a fix like this.
Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
I can’t say I’ve never been confused by keystrokes from objects laying on my keyboard, but I do usually figure it out within a couple of seconds at most.
I had to get someone to find a wireless keyboard they left in a random box because they never used it, yet they still connected the USB receiver for it.
Opened and revived a DOA GameGear by cleaning off the furry, green, PCB corrosion. Didn’t have any Isopropyl around, so I used vodka.
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.
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.
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.
