People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative The unconditional love of a pet is often a solace, and perhaps never more so than at the end of a busy working week. Which is when The Register competes with the animal kingdom for your affection by delivering a new edition of On Call, our Friday column in which we share your stories of scratching out a living delivering tech …
Not a PET, but it had a "Cue:Cat" peripheral. These were free barcode scanners given out. They had a PS/2 keyboard connector intercept jack and plug.
The company hoped you'd install their driver on tour PC, which in turn "phoned home" to query a database, which would return the text info on what item you'd just scanned.
In turn, when the device phones home, it sent the serial number of your Cue:Cat, and logged the item to the profile the company built up on you, which it intended to sell.
The company went bankrupt.
The Cue:Cats themselves worked just fine without the driver, without phoning home, on any OS. You got the string of numbers represented by the bar code, "typed" into your PC via the keyboard port.
A cat of ours managed (by pure luck on its random paw interactions with the keyboard) to hit one of the ctrl alt combos to change "screen orientation" on partner laptop when it went for a keyboard walk (can't remember now if it was 90 degrees or full upside down as many, many years ago, before partner switched to Macs (that cat long deceased), but partner had no clue how to sort it out & I had to fix it for her)
Quite interesting (I'm sure it appeared in a QI episode) is that the terminal velocity of cats is dependant on them being calm.
Fatalities and serious injuries increase with hight up to seven stories, above which both drastically decline.
It's assumed that after seven stories the cat accepts it's fate, calms down and relaxes into a flying squirrel style pose, allowing it to glide to an elegant, cat like, landing.
Vague reference: https://www.straightdope.com/21342281/do-cats-always-land-unharmed-on-their-feet-no-matter-how-far-they-fall
Another theory, which I unfortunately cannot find proof for, is that a cat with buttered bread on it's back will stop falling a few inches off the ground and hover in a perpetual spin.
> Another theory, which I unfortunately cannot find proof for, is that a cat with buttered bread on it's back will stop falling a few inches off the ground and hover in a perpetual spin.
That's an idea that's apparently only a little older than I thought (I encountered it at University in the early 90s, probably via rec.humor.funny): The Buttered Cat Paradox.
But you get the infinite fury of a harnessed cat. :-)
I'm not really being fair. Some cats accept it when their mad human housemate puts them in a harness. Maybe if it it is within their envelope of tolerance for fools and children. Other cats behave as if they're being hanged, even while lying on the ground.
I've seen that one too but it struck me as a lousy explanation. I prefer the one I'd heard before seeing the episode, namely the cat instinctively tenses up when it feels acceleration on it. At terminal velocity there is no more acceleration and so the cat relaxes.
That explanation does not require the cat to understand Newtonian mechanics nor have an instinctive understanding of flight and aerodynamics.
Good point but the cat would still feel that, it would be -1G neglecting aerobraking compared to what it is used to. If that was a human it'd probably make you feel your intestines were in your stomach and your stomach in your diaphragm.
Dammit, now I'm going to have to find out where I can buy a couple of hundred cats...
An explanation I read from a long time ago (no, no reference/citation) was that a falling cat needs time to orientate itself. Over short falls, it doesn't have this time so could land any way up and thus suffer injury. Above that, it has time so can land on it's feet which it is evolved to do. But (this one I heard from a vet) above a certain height, that's going to vary by cat, they are able to land but suffer lower jaw injuries as there's a limit to their ability to arrest the downward velocity - especially of the head.
I have seen (probably on the gogglebox) slow motion video of a falling cat - and it's amazing to see how it twists and turns it's body until it's the right way up.
"A cat of ours managed (by pure luck on its random paw interactions with the keyboard) to hit one of the ctrl alt combos to change "screen orientation" on partner laptop when it went for a keyboard walk (can't remember now if it was 90 degrees or full upside down as many, many years ago, before partner switched to Macs (that cat long deceased), but partner had no clue how to sort it out & I had to fix it for her)"
I had this once, and, much to my furor, the settings was even resistant to reboots ! F***ing Windows. Took me a while to find the cure on another laptop !
Best one I have had is an older guy who kept asking me why his Word toolbars were constantly resetting with strange options. (Yes toolbars - before ribbons) I then visited him and while chatting over a cup of tea the cat jumped up and walked across the keyboard.
Cats are really good at pressing <CTRL><ALT> keyboard combos...
This is still possible in modern Word today. Only last month client phoned up to ask why her Word "looked odd". Someone (or some thing) had turned on "Immersive Reader" mode. So I asked if she had a cat.
(Edit: Was writing this the same time as Tiggity above... clearly a common issue)
"Like adding ribbons"
Try context-sensitive ribbons/toolbars...
You discover a wonderfully useful function but it was buried 3 levels down and you can't remember the steps you took to find it and, no matter how hard you try, you never come across it again... did I imagine it?
A cat I had was very polite about keyboards for some reason. She would walk across my desk to get my attention, but she would always nicely circle around the keyboard rather than tread on a key. However, she had a different experience with another type of keyboard. When she was exploring after a move, she was very interested in a piano and, I think, wanted to look inside it. Several times, she would jump onto the piano, but because I'd left the lid up, the piano would make a noise whenever she stepped on the keyboard. I was going to put down the lid and try to keep her off, but fortunately, she seemed to interpret the piano's noises as a warning, jumped down whenever it made one, and quickly concluded that she would leave the piano alone as it clearly didn't approve of her visits.
I have a cat that, in winter, has a curious propensity to find the exact moment when I'm out of my home office (filling my glass of water, or going to the toilet or whatever) to hop on the desk and lay down on the keyboard.
Which has already caused me so many problems that I now have the reflex of puling the lid down just far enough that the cat can't get in under (it hasn't yet figured out that all it has to do is push it up with its head) and yet not far enough to trigger sleep mode.
Seems like there is probably a market for a fake laptop with a heater built in. If it is warmer than your real laptop the cat will prefer it.
You might make a killing buying up obsolete laptops for next to nothing that were heading to the recycler and having the battery removed and replaced with a simple resistance heating coil.
Common one for rabbits. 18 years ago I got a call out. A family house sitting let the rabbit run around the front room. Didn't just take out phone cable. It got ALL the cables behind the TV... Not sure how it was still alive as it also went for the power cables.
A friend of mine had a border collie puppy that they used to shut in the utility room when they went out as it was still being house trained. It was a bit cold in there in the winter, so they put an electric heater in to keep it warm.
They came back one day to find the power out. The main RCD had tripped when the puppy decided to chew through the power cable to the heater. It was totally unharmed (thank's to the RCD), but it never went near a cable again!
No particular IT content but friends left their Retriever on their boat while they went to the pub. They were very fortunate to return when they did - it had chewed almost through the gas pipe that ran under the front door. A few minutes later and, if they hadn't noticed the smell of gas, they would probably have reached in and turned the lights on, then possibly boom.
"A few minutes later and, if they hadn't noticed the smell of gas, they would probably have reached in and turned the lights on, then possibly boom."
The closest call of that nature was the lab cleaner who arrived one morning to find a jet of flame issuing from a wall mounted gas tap. What we decided must have happened:
Research student failed to completely turn off a bunsen when he left for the night. The flame struck back, i.e. moved back to become a small flame the jet inside the air-hole at the base. This heated the base until eventually it melted the rubber tube where it joined the base. The flame then moved back to the hole in the tube. For the rest of the night it progressively melted the end of the tube until there was no tube left and the flame, still small, was now burning at the tab. This heated the body of the tap. The tap was wall-mounted with the outlet pointed down at 45° with the operating lever sticking up at 45°. The heat expanded the body allowing the weight of the lever to fall into the fully open position which must just have happened before the cleaner arrived. She turned it off with the handle of her mop, no damage done other than coating the inside of the room with soot.
My son decided to insert a metal key into the electrical socket (EU non-protected with plastic bits) of our new house on the first day we took him there, before we had time to fit child safety covers on the sockets.
Thanks to the RCD he learnt never to stick things in the socket again. Slight pain and shock is a wonderful thing, now where is my detuned cattle prod?
> never to stick things in the socket again.
I had a US power strip in the bottom of the record-player cabinet in the next room. And a short-leg Corgi-dog with metal dog-tags.
Lights dim, ZAPP!!!, ooooorhoorh! She thought there was food back there. It wasn't clear what happened until I saw the arc-marks on the tag; even then it was some deduction. I try to be good about shoving the dangerous US prongs ALL the way in, but she managed to wedge the metal tag across prongs. Dead short. Sparks under her chin.
Still have that power strip, now on the 2nd shelf where Corgis can't reach. (The Pyr's head is too big to sniff shelves). I also have a rubbery tag-holder to silence the ting-tingh-ting and also be double-insulation.
Raccoons help the squirrels out sometimes.
It was a clear calm day and the power company said it must be a problem with our wiring. No one else had a problem. So I check for voltage at the cartridge fuses under the meter. No voltage there so I called them back and finally got them to come out.
They noticed the fuse(/breaker?) feeding the power transformer on the pole had blown. So they used a bucket truck to get close enough to fix it and saw a hapless "red shirt" raccoon laying in the tall grass below.
"My daughters rabbit got lose in the house, went behind the TV... "
Could be worse, could have been her Rabbi...
I lived briefly with a disturbingly bright black female cat who had very fixed ideas of where things should be. A housemate was woken in the middle of the night by an odd sound which turned out to be the cat dragging his new pair of Converse boots out of the room by their laces to put them on the landing. After a few repetitions over the following days he learnt to put them there himself for a quiet night.
The same house mate had a sideline repairing valve guitar amps & modifying guitar effects boxes. He wasn't the tidiest or most organised individual so when he complained regularly that he couldn't find this or that component that "was definitely on my bench yesterday" we ignored him. Months later he went off to play one of his regular gigs & on a whim took a different guitar amp to give it an airing. It was an open-back type, (Vox AC30 iirc for those that like such details) & when he laid it on its back in the back of the dear old Volvo 240 there was an odd rattling noise & a cascade of all the missing components, plus a host of other small items, eg Rizla packets, odd socks, biro tops etc all fell out.
She was both a challenge & a delight to live with.
Get in my house somehow and was running around inside the (finished) ceiling in my basement. After a couple evenings hearing him running around up there and trying to figure out how to kill him I noticed my internet had become slower. I checked the DSL modem and it was down from the usual 40M/20M down to something like 5M/1M. I rebooted it but no dice - it retrained at an even slower speed!
The next morning I ran a power cord from inside the house to where my inside wiring connects to the phone company and plugged the modem in and found it worked at full speed, so I knew the issue was inside my house. I had been doing a little remodeling work upstairs the same day it got slow so I feared I'd put a nail through the phone line where it ran upstairs. I figured if I could isolate the line going to the DSL modem from the rest of the house I could get it back to full speed until I could find repair the damage.
Since the area where the outside lines enter the basement was the only place I had ceiling tiles rather than drywall, I'd taken the opportunity to redo the connection between the line going to my modem and the older wiring to the rest of the house to avoid needing those DSL blocker things on the phones in the rest of the house. That allowed me an easy way to isolate the line to my DSL modem by temporarily disconnecting all the other lines in the house.
I pulled that tile and when I looked at that connection I made it was clear that for whatever reason the mouse had been chewing on where I had the cables connected. Maybe he liked the glue in the electrical tape I'd used to cover the connection (I just twisted the wires together, didn't use those fancy 3M red button telco connectors) I cut out the bad part and redid it and went back to full speed. Later that evening the mouse got caught in the trap I'd set for him right next to where he'd eaten the wiring before on the theory he might return, so it was a double win that day!
A couple of yeras ago I was on a Zoom call with a consultant when he suddenly dropped off the call. We got a phonecall about 20 minutes later, he said he was rejoining the call from his wife's office upsatirs in the house because his dog had chewed through the network cable going to his office at the back of his garage. He sent us a photo of a network cable running up the outside wall of his office which had been completely chewed in half.
30 year ago we bought our mother a laptop computer. She was living on her own and starting to get confused.
She loved the fish tank screensaver, of the fish swimming around.
I visited her once, to see her with a watering can, trying to find a hole to add more water, as it was a month since she had got the screen saver, and knew you had to top up the water in fish tanks.
Back in my Windows 3.11 days (Windows 95 was available by then, but I hadn't taken the big step yet), one day, I was browsing the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ (or maybe it was SYSTEM32\) in good ol' File Manager, as one does, with my little white cat looking on watching me work. With a mouse in motion, apparently she just couldn't take it any more, and she took a swipe at the mouse. She managed to hit my finger just right to bounce the button and move the mouse around, and suddenly, a big chunk of those SYSTEM(32) files were dropped into some other directory, I knew not where. I immediately realised that I'd have to find them and put them back where they came from before rebooting, because it was unlikely to boot successfully without those files in the right place, and before it restarted itself or shutdown, because it was Windows 3.11, whichever came first. Fortunately, I did locate where they'd been moved in time, and never had any other bad side effects of their having gone missing.
But really, going after a mouse? How stereotypical!
Mine yesterday were standing over my hands, just in front of the keyboard, and that's okay as I can reasonably well touch type.
The second cat seems to want to nudge the mouse in my hand, and that can be disastrous when trying to drag and drop files, or simply type into a remote session. My hands move away from the keyboard fairly fast when they come in. After 5 minutes though, I do have to move the cats off to do any work.
On the upside when I'm doing a presentation and cats come in during a client call, you know the cat lovers by all the smiles, or sometimes a request to see the cat.
So it goes many ways to stopping work.
However, it's hard to keep a straight face when they deign to show their bums to the camera, and it's being recorded. Or when my nose is being tickled by a tail and I need to talk about something important/esoteric and useful
Used to live with two young cats and one of them took a liking to the wires running across the desk (keyboard and trackball). Eventually solved by moving to wireless peripherals (back then a very new thing), but I found that if the cable on the MS Trackball was folded back on itself at exactly the right point and pinched with a clothes peg, the internal cables would just about make contact and the device was "usable" until the replacement turned up.
Luckily the current furry resident has no interest whatsoever in wiring. (furballing onto nice clean duvet covers on the other hand....)
My father used to have a large CRT on his desk, which was one of the cat's favourite napping spots, with the toasty warmth of a glowing CRT gently heating the cat.
Until he replaced it with a shiny new LCD.
Cat jumps on the desk, hops on the monitor and of course immediately falls off on the other side of the now suddenly very narrow monitor.
Ah, progress. Not always a good thing when you are a cat.
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We did a pilot where we gave some of our workmen (joiners, plumbers, electricians, etc) a laptop. They didn't want a laptop. They made if very clear they didn't want a laptop. They complained to everyone who would listen that they weren't IT people and didn't see the point of having a laptop - you can all probably imagine the incessant whinging that went on from them. Management decreed they were to trial the laptops and so they were given laptops.
Fast forward a week or two, we get a support call that one of the laptops has a screen that "doesn't work". The workman brings in it and straight away we spot what the issue might be.
"What did you do to it?"
"Nothing"
"Really?"
"Yeah, it just broke"
"Hmm, then how to you explain the massive dent in the back of the screen complete with footprint? Can we take a look at your shoes, just see if it matches?"
He got a disciplinary and his manager had to stump up the cost of a replacement laptop.
Common one at friends, who have a varied number of cats over the years: That lovely fluffy blanket of Cat hair that gets into the intakes to insulate the internals of the computer.
They're not quite sold on the idea it's a self-service grooming device for cats, but they have gotten used to regularly opening up the case to clean out the accumulated fluff before the computer suffers thermal shutdown due to all that lovely insulation...
We used to have a top-loading VHS video recorder. One of those Ferguson things. Unfortunately we also had a cat flap that wasn't just used by our own cats. A neighbour's tom cat decided to mark it as its own when we were all out at work or school. It took us a while before we replaced it and about as long to get rid of the smell.
My old ginger peed into our (front-loading!) Panasonic vcr somehow, presumably by reversing up to it, which implies a degree of intent. Shortly after he destroyed an ancient Tektronix oscilloscope by the more conventional method of clambering onto it in the cramped shelf space that it lived in & peeing through the top.
I loved him dearly, but he was a complete fuckwit.
> It's squirrels here in northeast USA
So many that the squirrel-tracking site https://cybersquirrel1.com/ quit taking reports.
At my work it was a possum. They stink worse.
> the fuse(/breaker?) feeding the power transformer
High voltages on poles stuck with fuses long after 240V stuff went all breakers. A hi-volt breaker needs a very long throw to out-run the long arc. The workers are paid to not use pennies in fuseholders. Ideally fuse failure is a rare thing so breakers don't pay-back well. Often it is just a housing or 'drop' with a foot of special-size wire, and there's a roll of fusewire on the truck, so it is a few-buck fix.
Depends - for the higher voltages they're often tubes filled with sand or some other material to dampen the effect of any arc if the fuse blows, on the really high voltage stuff the fuses are spring loaded to move any broken fuse wire parts away from each other as quickly as possible to remove the arc path if they do blow.
Oddly, I did- I posted this less than an hour at most before you did.
I say oddly, because I was genuinely surprised that in a thread which had been running for two days and over a hundred comments, no-one had made that obvious reference. (*) And then, like buses, two come along at once.
(*) Yes, it's a very old meme now, but this isn't a site dominated by 18-year-olds and I was pretty sure that a significant percentage of Register readers would have been old enough to remember it.
Growing up, we had a Lab that recognised the sound of the 3kW fan heater my parents used to try to warm the dining room and would lie in front of it. So close you'd get whiffs of burnt fur. Bruce didn't seem to notice this - being double-coated fur, I doubt he suffered any ill effects. However, the fan heater couldn't 'breathe' properly and its internal thermostat would trip. One pissed-off Lab would then drag himself off to the settee or other warmish spot...then dutifully plonk himself down in front of the fan heater as soon as the thermostat clicked back out and the thing started making a noise again. He could keep this cycle going for hours, apparently.
.. who has accounted for two retirements of Macbook Pro units:
No 1 - one of the ones with the dodgy butterfly-switch keyboards. Not improved by the whole glass of orange juice that she knocked over onto the keyboard.. (unit still works, but the keyboard is somewhat random. At £700 for a replacement keyboard [replacing the keyboard means replacing the whole of the top section including the battery] it's not worth it. Replaced by a shiny new M2 MBP
No. 2 - Having learnt from no.1, I made sure that no liquids are near the shiny new MBP. I neglected to ensure that they were not on the same *table*. Had a glass of white wine at one end of the table and my new MBP at the other. Came back into the room and said cat was sat at the wine end of the table with a knocked over glass next to her. At the other end, sitting in a puddle of wine, was a very dead MBP (apparently, wine likes the cooling slots on the side/underside of the case and actively wicks in..). Home insurance paid for a replacement (recondidtioned, from Apple, M3 Pro, cost the same but was more powerful, had more RAM, same 1TB HD)
Said current Mac now sits on a stand to put it up above wine-level. On a small table with no room for putting liquid-containing glasses. She [1] often goes to sit on it (regardless of whether the lid is up) so I'm expecting a cat pee-related MBP death next.
[1] Small black cat, rescued from a friends shed at ~ 3 months old. She's 7 now and I'm pretty certain that she's just an over developed tortie because she acts more like one than our original tortie.. She's sitting on my lap as I type this and, if I don't give her attention to the level she expects, I get a small bite on the arm..
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