Asklemmy

Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.

Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked

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.

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 off 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 massive 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.

After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.

Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.

Idk what it was till today , don't forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn't just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.

Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn't get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it's been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn't crash any more.

I'm not sure if this counts because it wasn't intentional on my part, but... When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to "lodge" the lense back into place yet the fall wasn't high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of "That's probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don't go trying that on other things randomly".

My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out

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.

My electric piano requires a very accurate punch in order to the A3 key to work again, I've even read in forums that is the ONLY WAY to fix it. Sounded dumb at the time but it was the fix.

I wanted to install an extra hard drive in my computer, but the power supply didn't have enough connectors. I actually had a spare power supply unit, but upon testing, the 24 pin cable was too short to reach the motherboard.

I ended up using both PSUs. Only one had a power switch on it, so that was connected to the hard drives. I had to use a paperclip in the unused 24 pin connector to make it output power. The 2 PSUs had a wire running between the ground pins of a random unused connector, and they were on the same phase circuit.

The hard drive PSU had to be turned on first at the switch. Once that was on, I could press the power button to turn on the computer. I think I used it for about a year before buying enough upgrade parts to effectively replace the entire computer.

I have two… these are from the old days of computing :)

One: guy said his monitor was showing wavy lines on the screen (old CRT monitor days). Went to his office, looked at his monitor. Sure enough wavy lines. Looked the top of his monitor. Removed the clock sitting on top of said monitor, no more wavy lines. Don’t put electric clocks on CRT monitors folks.

Two: working in a school system. Just before classes started. Get a call “none of the computers turn on”. Go to the classroom. Check a few machines. Machines “turned on” but didn’t boot the OS. Listen to one of the machines… hmmm, no drive noise. Tap it with the back of a screwdriver. Drive spins up, computer boots. Later found out that it was a semi-known problem with Seagate drives. If they sat to long without use, the heads would get stuck.

Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.

I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn't fucking around now.

Easy.

When I was 13, we had an Apple IIc. My mother used to take the cable that connected the computer and the monitor to work with her so I'd focus on homework rather than playing Ultima IV.

But it was a monochrome signal. I straightened out a metal coat hanger and plugged it in... it worked just fine if you didn't bump it.

Dead PC.

Unplug PC.

Lick finger.

Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.

Plug in PC.

PC works.

I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don't know about dumb but it was embarrassing.

Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

chmod -R 777 *

Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.

Individually press all the Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys.

This was back in the Windows 95 days and persisted for quite a few versions. The symptoms were that when typing you'd get accented or no characters, basically Windows thought one of the keys was held down. It happened more often than you'd think.

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.