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?
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.
You know it’s 2! Everything you do. It’s haunted for you!
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!
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.
My old computer that was build about 6 years ago started not getting powered since about 2 years ago, when I unplug it and took it to computer shops, that computer gets powered instantly when plugged in, but I needed to wait at least 12 hours before I attempt to plug it in again in order to make it boot (if I am lucky).
I changed the PSU, didn’t work, bought a UPS as stop gap fix, I saved money to buy a new PC instead.
I had something like this one. It was the ram. If I powered off, shut off the PSU and unplugged, then reseated the ram and tried again it would come on. Upgraded the ram and the issue went away.
Also, if you encounter this with a Dell laptop, same thing (just make sure to disconnect the battery before touching the ram).
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 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.
If my desktop is sleeping, turning off my bathroom light will 2 out of 5 times wake up the pc.
It’s a fluorescent lamp, so it is likely that it makes considerable noise on the electrical circuit when being toggled (and it’s a small apartment so all lights and outlets are on the same circuit)
I believe I read a forum post from someone else experiencing the same thing, and they also had a Gigabyte motherboard. So it might be related to their bios/firmware implementation of wake-on-lan in some way.
Do you, by any chance, have network extenders that send ethernet via an electrical socket? They send the ethernet signals through your electrical wiring, and if for some reason your bathroom light is on the same circuit as your sockets, then you might be getting some kind of wake on lan packet. Or what it thinks is a wake on lan packet.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know if this counts, but when hold my kindle and phone together and I click the unlock button on my phone the kindle turns on too. Doesn’t happen the other way around, I have no clue how it happens
This is very interesting , if anyone ever figures out why, I’d love to know
My 3rd party Switch dock needs some strange ritual to actually work, but still not sure what the correct steps and orders.
It’s a fairly early 3rd party dock, from the times when there were articles about 3rd party docks blowing the Nintendo Switch’s charging IC or something like that.
Tho this dock works, but only if I plug in the charger, the HDMI cable and the Switch itself in the correct order. Otherwise no video, only just charging.
IIRC, the order is HDMI, charger and Switch, but I may be wrong, it was a while ago I used that dock.
Probably some funky device detection or bug in the dock’s code, but it’s amusing. Especially after others see me trying and trying and they are like that was the moment when I blew my Switch, but no.
Ok this one is actually resolved kind of but it super freaks me out. I was working on something and had white noise in my bluetooth headphones coming from Spotify on my browser. At like 2 in the morning, over the white noise, and without making a noise like it connected to anything else, the headphones started playing this like chatter (like people chit chatting) and eventually the started singing what sounded like hymns, at the same time the headset kept cutting in and out and this went on for like 10 minutes. I turned off the Spotify, closed the browsers, confirmed my headset wasn’t connected to anything else and nothing else was playing sound that I could see.
A few days later I go back to my computer, open up some separate work I had been doing (transcribing interviews) and lo and behold at the end of the roll there’s the creepy fucking chatter and singing.
What it must’ve been was somehow my foot pedal getting triggered (though I maintain my foot was not on the pedal) and somehow, though I’m certain my app was closed, playing the end of that recording. But damn if I wasn’t sure I was haunted those few days.
Are you positive it was the exact same chatter and singing?
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.
RTLSDR are cheap, the software defined radio lets you see an entire spectrum at once
My 9 year old LG smart TV (WebOS, but never connected to the network) will occasionally “overlay” RGB colour artifacts over the entire screen. There’s no pattern of time, day, on duration, HDMI source, etc.
It just occasionally happens, probably once every month or two. Putting it into standby and back on again fixes it every time. 🤷🏻♂️
Small world. My 47LM8600 LG TV (which is 3D, from 2015!) occasionally fails to pop up its pop up menu when asked, the one that has the input list and so forth in it. Instead it shows a vague error about “memory problem” and prompts the user to factory reset the TV.
Turning it fully off and back on again fixes it, and the issue won’t reoccur for usually several months.
Wow. Nice group of people with old LG WebOS TVs! I have an 42LBsomething with 3D.
Ha, definitely a small world. Mine’s a 55UF770V.
Now I’m thinking the classic Windows troubleshooting method is used by LG…
My phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra) will only partially pair with my car’s (2018 Camery) Bluetooth.
It pairs for media just fine, so I can listen to music and podcasts no problem, but it refuses to sync phone calls and texts. It just goes into a loop of pairing/connected/disconnected/pairing.
I’ve reset the phone and cleared the cache on both ends.
It’s something I’ve been meaning to do a deeper dive into for literal years at this point and just haven’t. Need to check other devices to see if it’s specific to my phone, and I should see if I can’t do some monitoring on the Bluetooth comms directly. It’s just low enough priority that I haven’t gotten around to it.
