Computer's haunted? Always has been.

[cosmolinguist]

Last week my mom and I determined that I should find something other than Skype to use for us to talk because we're both finding it clunky and unsatisyfing lately. The last few weeks my video hasn't shown up for them (which I consider a blessing but which my mom always complains and sulks about) and there are regularly problems on their end which I think are more about their resistance to learning anything about how to use their iPad than they are about Skype itself, but Skype probably isn't helping.

I promptly forgot about this, asked some people on the internet a couple days ago and got unsuitable answers (no I will not be using Facebook Messenger or Signal for this!), forgot about it again until this afternoon, and of course D mentioned an easy, familiar and obvious (or should have been obvious) solution to me.

But then my camera was still misbehaving. And even trying the built-in webcam on my laptop rather than the one plugged into my external monitor/USB dock made no difference.

D got involved and found out several mysterious things, and ended up concluding that external webcam was not only hecked up, which he'd suspected for a while, but was also so cursed that once it had been plugged in it didn't even allow the built-in webcam to work.

This is bizarre but consistent with work buying me the most random IT peripherals -- to be fair they don't need to care about what the webcam is like on Linux because I use Windows for work. But since I just replaced a keyboard that was losing its space bar functionality, and a new mouse is being ordered at the same time as the webcam because the scroll wheel is intermittently failing, I am seeing a pattern here.

After all this work and fretting, of course I didn't hear from my parents at all. I could have spent my evening doing something fun!

But it is nice to feel like my computer has a chance of being less haunted soon.

Comments

[barakta]

FWIW we have found with peripherals that are playing up, you need to hard unboot the machine, as in turn it off, keep power off (unplug the fucker if needed - or yoink battery in laptop if needed) and then restart from cold to get the USB bus to behave properly sometimes...

Just a 'restart' doesn't reset the USB bus in the same way... Cos that'd be too helpful!

Hateful having multiple fucked up IT things all cross-fucking up. Especially when not under your full control. I realise how blessed we are at my work that IT is pretty good and after 3-4 rounds of fail they will accept "nope, fuck this, new ThingTM" rather than endless fighting a losing battle.

[silveradept]

Here's hoping for less haunting and more communication.

[otter]

And perhaps once things are less haunted we could schedule a video call, too. I've been out of sorts/under a rock lately but hopefully edging towards more sociable soon.

Here’s a money making

[jesse_the_k]

Scheme that surprisingly hasn’t been exploited: laptop exorcism.