Ringo said the system "worked flawlessly after the 'upgrade'

Sounds like he tuned the system well...

It's lucky he got it working or else he'd have had to face the music...

At least he got to blow his own trumpet ...

(Mine's the one with the harmonica in the left pocket).

"At least he got to blow his own trumpet" *snigger*

He struck a c(h)ord.

I hope he kept a note of what he did ...

He managed to stave off disaster...

Or he'd be stuck in a Clef Stick

Hopefully he documented the solution in his lab notes

We’re currently in our holiday flat it Spain, enjoying the cold wind and grey skies.

The lovely Ivana couldn’t get the toaster to work this morning. No amount of pushing the lever down would make it latch.

On a whim, she decided that the have you switched it off routine would be worth trying.

So she switched the kitchen lights off.

After switching them back on , the toaster latched at the first attempt.

Maybe the lightbulb somehow messed with a sensor in the toaster? Odd.

Maybe the lightbulb somehow messed with a sensor in the toaster? Odd.

Or maybe just a Talkie Toaster™ having a sulk because people weren't eating enough toast. Or bagels. Or waffles. Or flapjacks...

Howdy-doodly-doo!

Toasters usually won't latch unless they're powered. The lights likely being on the same circuit, they probably cause some kind of "dirty" power which causes the toaster to just stay turned off.

Still something you'd probably want checked out because that's not normal and I'd be very concerned about those lights being a fire hazard.

I have a USB 3.0 device that will only ever reliably work if it's plugged into a USB 3.0 and only 3.0 controller. I have a couple of pcie usb 3.0 controllers for it.

The moment I use 3.1 or higher or any hub etc... the device will randomly lockup while in use.

My desktop has some USB 3 and some USB 2 USB ports, and while none of them are non-functional, it's a crapshoot as to _what_ peripherals they work with, seemingly depending more on if they're at the front or back of the machine as much as if they're the 'fast' kind or not.

That's a simple one... they'll work in the most awkward to get to port; unless that's the first one you try.

I supported just such a lab for 20+ years. I remember needing hubs to connect MIDI devices from an age long gone. It was a cross your fingers moment anytime there was an update, either to the OS or the software in use. Some of the horror stories are coming back to me now, I better stop this post...

Many years ago I tried connecting a Nokia (?5130) via serial cable to an ancient laptop, at the time it was the only option available for some remote working, dialling in to work then running an AS/400 5250 terminal emulator. In theory it should have worked fine, in practice it was unreliable until I realised it only worked when the phone was on charge, or at least fully charged.

A dredge through my limited electronics knowledge suggested the likely scenario, the laptop was using TTL 5v logic, the phone was 3.3v CMOS! Once known I just had to make sure I'd got the phone charger as well.

The next iteration of the same connection, with later hardware, was using IrDA instead of the serial cable, it worked fine until I was sat outside my tent on a Sunday, beer in hand, running some month end processes and the sun came out!

Nowadays of course Bluetooth makes connectivity between devices so easy, simple, standard, and secure.

Can you now try saying that with a straight face?

Cruel, at this time of day. Think of readers blood pressure.

For later --->

it worked fine until I was sat outside my tent on a Sunday, beer in hand, running some month end processes and the sun came out

It's a shame that this story is about an As/400 - if you'd been connected to a Sun server the irony would have been wonderful

USB was tricky in the early days.

Our first attempt at building a USB device, would only work if plugged in directly, not via a hub.

We had to redesign when manufacturers started putting hubs on the PC motherboard.

Our second attempt worked directly, or through a hub, but was orders of magnitude faster when put through a hub.

We got it right on the third attempt, and then decided to build a bluetooth version which was a whole other world of pain.

Ringo is the best you could do? Has the Regomiser been connected to CHATGpt or something??

He deserves the full privileges of Ring 0.

.... seem to get qsn hubs to work!

#insert joke about USB-A connectors always requiring a 360 degree turn to work here

Nonsense!

Everyone knows you need two 180-degree turns...

In opposite directions?

Well yeah, obvs. Because that takes away the quantum spin and collapses the probability.

Oooo, clever. I like that one. Will have to steal it.

Might take 20 years to find an appropriate place to insert joke, but I'm patient.

Had to retire a perfectly good, 25 years old RME Multiface last year because my last laptop with a PCI slot finally went out of business. Actually the interface was PCMCIA(!) but was running fine over a PCI to PCMCIA adapter. Even the 5m cable between (PCMCIA) IO card and the actual interface was still original. For a long time one could use these cards via PCI-PC-express cards but that stopped when PCI-slots on motherboards became PCIe-PCI bridges because the BIOS would not recognize the PCI-to-PCCard bridge behind the PCIe-to-PCI bridge and could not initialize the PC-Express-to-PCMCIA bridge behind the latter.

As if the talk about IrDa and Bluetooth further up on this page wasn't enough to give all of us nightmares for the whole weekend, you had to bring PCMCIA into it as well?!

Why not just say "Ultra Wide SCSI 3" (thunder rumbles) while you're at it?

(Fun side note - a company I worked for had a mom-and-pop-shop cable manufacturer who'd solder you a cable for anything. Small runs or even single cables weren't a problem and their workshop was just up the street, so you could usually call him and place and order, then walk over and pick it up half an hour later. He'd make cables for ANYTHING - I swear, if you dreamed up, I don't know, a cross-over null-modem cable with DB9-to-SCART plugs to connect, say, a traffic light to your washing machine, he'd make it for you, and it'd follow all the relevant EMF specs to boot. He wouldn't, however, touch SCSI 2 or higher for the eloquent reason of "the pins are so damn tiny that I keep burning my fingers, and I don't like doing that".)

A part of my brain that hasn't been disturbed for a quarter of a century just said, "People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms", to my subconscious. I doubt that this will ever happen again.

USB3+HDMI KVM at a clients, works fine to the old machine, to the new machine the keyboard and mouse vanish after a couple of days. Cue installing a USB2 hub between the USB 3 KVM and the USB machine. No issues since then.