The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Wrathbone]

Get a torch and put it on the floor. Shine it parallel to the floor and it'll cast a shadow of anything down there like tiny screws. Next time, use a mason jar or something with a lid.

Ask me how I know. ¬_¬

Yep, tried that. At this point I'd sooner believe it's popped into a different plane of existence than it still being in this room.

[Mantis]

Frequently happens to me with fiddly items off music gear. The more concerning thing is that on a couple of occasions recently I've found a random screw on the floor and been completely unable to place where it's come from. Either something in the room is slowly falling apart and I'll only find out when disaster strikes one day, or the screws from your PC are falling through a pocket dimension and landing on my floor.

[Alan]

Like plectrums. They go where they want and where they want to. The vid quite accurately depicts the struggle...

[Raid]

Model kit parts here. Clip a small part off a sprue that's at a funny angle and it pings off with such force that I'm fairly sure it rips a hole in the space time continuum and vanishes through it.

[Animalmother]

You have a vacuum cleaner like a Dyson where you can empty the drum? Maybe vacuum around the floor and hope you hear something clattering around inside it.

[Snowy]

You have a vacuum cleaner like a Dyson where you can empty the drum? Maybe vacuum around the floor and hope you hear something clattering around inside it.

And when you don't, you will wonder until the end of time if you hoovered it up and binned it unwittingly

[Wrathbone]

Against all odds, I found it! It had somehow propelled itself to the other side of the room.

[Animalmother]

[Wrathbone]

The PC refurb didn't turn out great. I got everything up and running, clean new build, but I remembered that it had always had issues with random total system freezes that happened sporadically enough that I never got to the bottom of it (most of the hardware is 12 years old, and I don't think I'd turned it on since 2014). Sure enough, after an hour or so it completely froze and had to be hard reset. I guessed the most likely culprit was the PSU or motherboard, but I decided to rule out RAM first since it's easiest to check and replace.

So trying one stick at a time, it ran fine for 5+ hours on each of them, which made me think perhaps it was an issue with slot 4 (dual sticks are meant to go in slots 2 and 4 on this motherboard). My assessment was not inaccurate.

Having put both sticks back in to see if it would freeze again, I powered up with the side of the case still open. After a few seconds I could smell something wasn't right, and then a couple of seconds later RAM slot 4 burst into flames. A literal flame shooting out of it, which was somewhat alarming. I've never heard of anything like that before, let alone witnessed it. Thankfully I managed to frantically switch the PSU off and yank the power cable out before it got out of hand, which stopped the fire.

I'm fairly certain it's the RAM slot rather than the RAM itself, which means the motherboard is toast. No chance I'm risking turning anything in that PC on again anytime soon, or at least not without a fire extinguisher at hand. Luckily the only money I sunk into it was a cheap case and a new CPU heatsink, but it'll certainly be going in my tech disaster hall of fame.

[Raid]

Blimey.

There surely can't be enough current running through a RAM slot to cause anything to ignite, can there? I always assumed that the big power draws in a PC were the CPU and GPU, I've never seen anyone talking about RAM when it comes to power consumption. Is it possible that the naughty screw you found was a red herring and the one you dropped had actually managed to wedge itself underneath the motherboard where it could short circuit something?

[Wrathbone]

Nah, it had been running fine for hours, but I agree that it's an especially strange area of the motherboard to set on fire. There aren't even any capacitors near that area, which might have explained it. Doing a bit of googling, apparently it's possible for the DDR controller to cause a fire if its shorted, so that seems the most likely possibility.

I'll have a good look at it once the smell has cleared.

[Lenny Solidus]

That numb as fuck dog owner who had an American Bully dog off the leash in a public park, it then proceeded to attack a local police horse because 'it had never seen a horse before'.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ ... 69630.html

[Alan]

The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to:
watch or record TV on any channel - via any TV service (e.g. Sky, Virgin, BT, Freeview, Freesat)
watch TV live on any streaming service (e.g. ITVX, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go)
watch BBC iPlayer*.




How, in the fuck, can the BBC licence make it illegal to watch live streamed content on self funded channels on demand services? Entertainment fascism! Or maybe they’re just over reaching cunts.

[Wrathbone]

A while back I watched a lawyer discuss the part about watching live TV on any streaming service, because it entirely depends on what's classified as TV. In legal terms I get the impression that it wouldn't hold up in court if they prosecuted you for watching, say, cat videos on Youtube. But if you watched a BBC programme that was fully or partly on Youtube, that may change things. Apparently production standards influence what is counted as TV, though it's such a grey area that a decent legal defence would likely see prosecution on that basis dismissed. Which explains why TV Licensing rely on intimidation tactics.

If you refuse to pay for a TV licence (which I'd entirely sympathise with) and aren't blatently watching Pointless every day, the simplest option is to ignore them, refuse entry, and don't give them your name under any circumstances. They're crafty bastards - I had a friend in York who was being badgered by them a few years ago when he only used his TV with a media PC, and after months of him not opening the door to them they resorted to sending him a parcel which required a signature. Since he wasn't expecting any parcels and is something of a troll at times, he signed for it as John Fashanu. A few days later he received a letter from TV Licensing addressed to Mr Fashanu, threatening court action. Ultimately he moved house before anything serious happened.

[Alan]

I don’t watch telly so I don’t pay it. It just irks me in the declaration that they ban you from watching things that are nothing at all to do with the bbc. It’s ridiculous. Not that I want to watch those either, but still, the principal of it all!