Mike Masnick: The company says it makes the Bluetooth work better, but there's *no way* that's possible, right? Someone please explain this. /4

So I have this ring that tracks my sleep and some health data and whatnot. I got it about 6 months ago. It's okay. Not great. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. But I'm used to it. On Monday it stopped connecting to my phone. I tried everything. Nothing worked. I emailed the company /1

They emailed back, saying to put the ring in the charger, wait 10 seconds, then (I shit you not), to lift the charger & ring up and down from where it was sitting about 1 to 1.5 feet. And to do that *50* times in a row. Then check to see if it connects with the phone. They even sent a video. /2

I had to watch the video, because the whole thing seemed preposterous. But, wtf, I tried it. And, reader, somehow it fucking worked. I have no idea if it's like a secret reset built into the ring or what. But it worked and I swore there was no fucking way it could work. /3

The company says it makes the Bluetooth work better, but there's *no way* that's possible, right? Someone please explain this. /4

It reminds me of the secret code some tech dude at Lenovo taught me to revive my totally 100% dead Thinkpad in 2007 that I wrote about on my old blog. No fucking way it works, but it works. Tech is weird sometimes. /end

Technomancy is a new art, among the magics, but no less mysterious than any other.

This sounds a little bit like common advice to reset your CMOS: you remove the CMOS battery and then do various things with the power button to discharge any remaining capacitance charge (hold it down, press a bunch of times, leave it overnight, etc.), then replace the CMOS battery.

Random 2008 blogpost describing this: joshuakugler.com/a-near-compu...

A near (computer) death experiencejoshuakugler.com It’s amazing the things that can cause a lump in your throat. Say, for instance, your computer not booting. Tonight I was trouble-shooting a trackball I thought to be dead, and I went to plug it in to...

Correct: I was certified warranty tech for Apple, Compaq, IBM, HP & Toshiba - this sort of procedure was in quite a few troubleshooting & repair procedures

It discharges the capacitors on the motherboard. If one of them still has some transient voltage that's causing a problem, this will clear it up. I've always seen it as holding the power button for 15-30 seconds, not hitting the button several times.

Aha now the reset instructions for my monitor make sense! It’s an old 5k with dual DP connectors and sometimes half or the whole screen stops working. Unplugging and holding down power for 10s always fixes it.

Reminds me of the time my sophomore roommate’s computer stopped working and after grumbling grabbed a disposable baking sheet, some toothpick, and the graphic card from the computer and baked it in the oven to fix the apparently faulty solder. I was just like “Whut¿”.

This used to be how people fixed Xbox 360s with the Red Ring of Death, too.

I thought they fixed that problem by buying a Playstation instead..?

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My first generation one never got the RROD and I'm convinced it's because I ran it for an extended period of time while still in a suitcase once without thinking and pre-emptively fixed the problem.

I need this for when the people I’m training at work ask why a piece of Adobe software does something weird sometimes and my answer is “no idea but I have a stupid fix for it”

is this like the apocryphal note in the instruction manual for atari or colecovision or vic-20 or whatever that's like "pick it up about 2 feet off the surface of wherever it's sitting and drop it"

It was the Apple III:

The Mac Bathroom Reader 1994 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivearchive.org The Mac Bathroom Reader 1994

lol so not apocryphal what page? i'm not gonna sequential scan

Bottom of 32 and top of 33 using book page numbers

ah excellent; doubly excellent is they provided a basis for it

Also true of the BBC Micro. "Reseating chips" was always the explanation given

That also was the fix for some hard drives about 30 years ago ("stiction"; freed the heads) and it was worth a shot on a laser printer cartridge that appeared to fail prematurely (loosened up caked toner). We called it "percussive therapy."

You: Help. Broken. Tech support: You do the Hokey-Pokey…

I am compelled to tell you, the only functional aspect of that magic spell is removing the battery and pressing the power button for 30 seconds. The rest was just that guy messing with you. I was in IT for 25 years, and I've done this on my wife's Lenovo a dozen times. :)

(depressing the power button for 30s with all power removed resets the BIOS)

With iPhones the code is at least really clear. “Up-down-hold to actually disconnect the battery” On a max pram resets fix a TON of things that they shouldn’t. This feels related to that.

I was taught to push the power button in time with the song “Staying Alive”, though different instructors will give conflicting opinions on whether to blow on the Nintendo cartridge or do button compressions only. Seriously, though, the Microsoft Surface had a similar issue and solution.

I can’t speak to the weird ring dropping, but this Q & A probably describes how your laptop was resurrected. I’ve used a similar procedure for desktop computers. With the billions of electrons flying around, it’s a wonder that electronics work at all. superuser.com/questions/28...

Why does pulling the power cord then pressing the power button fix a non-booting PC?superuser.com I've been working at this institution for about 6 years. One thing thing that I've always found curious is that sometimes—especially after a power outage—we find a PC that won't boot when the power

That trick, or at least an approximation of it, still worked on my t430. I just held the power button for 20 second to clear the capacitors, though.

Sure, sure 👍

I can confirm that this trick has also worked on old Dell laptops of mine.

Static buildup is the king of causing weird tech nonsense. Your smart phone screen, which is otherwise totally fine, is acting odd and not getting touched quite right? It’s almost certainly static buildup and can be alleviated by finding creative ways to discharge the battery.

Wake me when you get to using a paperclip as a jumper to watch the CEL flash codes on a 1989 Ford Mustang to find out the issue.

My dad just had to do this for his 2007 Toyota Sienna ABS. You would think by then they would have figured out how to show the code through the obd.

They did with the introduction of enhanced OBD II, but there were a lot of workarounds used since it took time for companies and dealerships to disseminate the tools needed.

I attribute all electronic mysteries to “impedance mismatch”. I sound sophisticated. Also, everyone knows that impedance is important but no one—and I mean no one—really understands what it is.

So you claim to have a Magic Ring that communicates your health to you. Then you used Somatic Gestures to invoke the bring forth its mystical knowledge. And by invoking a mysterious and complex ritual, you returned life to the Magic Mirror that had fallen into silence and would speak no more.

The actual mechanism behind power button thing is quite simple. With a battery in, the power button closes a circuit on the motherboard that starts the PC. Without the battery, the same circuit drains all residual charge out of the motherboard. The number of times you press it is mostly irrelevant.

This actually works on most laptops, it drains the capacitors of any leftover energy and lets the computer reset if the breaker popped. I've done it on MacBooks as well, pain in the ass to disconnect the battery

We have a little wacky routine to reset the teevee remote when it goes dead & its batteries are fine (I found it from looking on YouTube). It involves, among other things, pushing all the buttons firmly and quickly. Makes no sense, but somehow works!

I once got a similar explanation for why it sometimes works to unplug the cable and wait 5-10 minutes. It involved capacitors in some circuitry designed to protect against power spikes that can lock things in weird ways, and which take a few minutes to decharge. Not sure if right, but made sense.

Any sufficiently advanced technology that requires mysterious and unexplainable actions to make it work is indistinguishable from magic.

When our 486 got wonky I called tech support & the guy said "it's probably chip creep" and I asked if he was putting me on. Nope, just reseat the chip, vibration moves them. Well, it worked.

I remember re-seating chips, got a satisfying snap or crunch. I don't recall that it ever really fixed anything, though.

With the laptop, are you sure all of those steps were needed? Maybe just removing the battery was enough. Unless you ran a series of tests there is no way to know the guy wasn't messing with you.

Simply removing the battery didn't do it. That was the first thing I had done.

It probably didn't need 10 presses exactly, it is just a bunch of short presses followed by holding it down. There was some capacitor that held a phantom charge on the motherboard that interfered with the boot process. Sleep/hibernate/power/wake-on made laptop booting interesting.

Probably resetting a microcontroller on the motherboard. Often they have their own battery or leach off the clock battery.

Maybe a capacitor that keeps some circuit running when the battery and charger are out? Fiddling with the power button puts a load on the capacitor and discharges it, so the circuit resets? Doesn’t explain why the pattern though…

The laptop reset isn’t unusual, and it makes sense. Even unplugging stuff doesn’t deenergize things well. The Playstation 4 has a similar “reset” process, PC motherboards as well, but heck even my water heater controller board has a hidden reset!

Nah this is legit, it empties the capacitors, and sort of forces everything to properly turn off. Though I've only heard the plain 30 second version, the tapping on the button is new to me. Maybe they have better capacitors these days.

Ahhh, the good ole days... when you could easily remove your battery because it wasn't actually inside your laptop but just plug-in connected on the outside... I miss it.

I've done it! It works! I also thought it was a strange, real-world cheat code.

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