[dbatten]

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account...

Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.

I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._

Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

[Intermernet]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)

[dEnigma]

Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.

[BoxOfRain]

Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod", you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name".

You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.

[psd1]

Ha, I've played a similar game! Not sure I should spoil it but let's say that the mark ends up fixated on information from the audio channel

[civilized]

Getting a "Who's on First" vibe, but I can't quite make it into a real joke...

- "I can't get a p, no matter what I do there's no p at all!"

- "No p?"

- "Nope!"

- "Well if it's a no-op of course there's no p!"

- "It's not a no-op, I'm telling you there's no p!"

[bryanrasmussen]

I was going to go with no p probably indicating an enlarged prostate.

[t-writescode]

At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses.

One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone.

We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine."

It worked.

It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and legitimate and helpful piece of advice.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, bit flips happen all the time, and we call that "cosmic rays". It is not obvious that bit flips from cosmic rays in the more usual sense of "cosmic rays" happen all the time.

[dredmorbius]

That's actually testable and determinable from several perspetives.

- Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation.

- Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms).

- Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.)

- Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.)

You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8

[asddubs]

like maybe changing a key in some hashmap

[atribecalledqst]

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

[miah_]

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

[js2]

Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.

I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.

This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.

ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT.

BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

[Toutouxc]

> BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you can't write the letters Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý Á, Í, É without caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4, ..., 0

So that's why I need it. :)

[rawbot]

Isn't this why Alt+Gr exist? I use US-International and you can do Alt+Gr + Shift for a different set of characters.

[hoseja]

Alternatively you can do ˇ + E etc...

[II2II]

> BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key (which is slightly different) tended to be used when people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.

As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was the one key I was guaranteed to never use.

[klyrs]

Capslock exists to make typing in allcaps easy. I use it most when I'm in a C project with lots of macros. I use it about as often as I use ten-key -- just enough to justify its existence, not enough to find alternatives in every os/editor/browser/etc that I use.

[dotancohen]

I used to use Caps Lock when rewriting my sloppy SQL for production. But VIM makes it very easy to 'uppercase' a word with `gUiw`.

[klyrs]

Yep. That's one editor that I use, and only double the keystrokes.

[recursive]

Sometimes I use caps lock for its intended purpose. Probably not nearly enough to justify its existence as a physical key that takes up space, but at least a little.

[tokamak-teapot]

Lots of old documents with rules about writing ridiculously large parts of them in ALL CAPS. For no reason at all, that I can determine.

[Sanguinaire]

All-caps mode exists as a safe space for FORTRAN programmers.

[sbierwagen]

Notepad++ has a toolbar option that will uppercase all the currently selected text. Write a paragraph normally and then uppercase it with one click.

[tpxl]

Lots of tools have this. IntelliJ has it mapped to ctrl shift U by default I think.

[Razengan]

why do capital letters even still exist? what’s the point really?

[lordnacho]

This is a rabbit hole that I followed as well. There's some good articles if you search for it.

Auto doesn't make total sense to me, but it seems originally the Romans had only the letters we know as capitals, and none of the extra characters like semicolon.

IIRC sometime in the middle ages lower case letters were added, but it's not clear to me why and how it ended up getting a bunch of different rules (eg German capitalises nouns but in English it's only proper nouns).

[ourcat]

Here's an interesting article on where and why they get commonly used in legal documents and contracts.

https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/all-caps-legal-agreements/

There are also theories out there about why our names appear in all-caps on government documents, relating to the concept of treating an individual as a 'corporation'.

[ljm]

Same deal if you remap the key in Windows using the PowerToys utility. Only, it'll happen whenever something pegs the CPU.

Never had the problem when using SharpKeys to rewrite the registry.

[chrismorgan]

Yeah, back when I was using Windows, I had RAlt mapped to Compose with WinCompose, and RAlt would get stuck occasionally when the system was under significant load, so I’d need to manually disable WinCompose, tap RAlt to clear its spurious down state, and then enable WinCompose again.

[Gaelan]

> (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))

When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Xorg has an option to toggle capslock by pressing both shift keys together, which seems like a nice solution.

[thesmok]

I'm using Caps Lock key to switch between input languages, but I can still use the caps lock mode by pressing Shift + Caps Lock. This is macOS built-in functionality.

[bscphil]

How would you remap the capslock key without using a hotkeys-like setup, such as Karabiner? I looked for a long time for a way to do that and couldn't figure it out.

[blacksmith_tb]

Sys Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... will let you switch it to a short list of alternatives.

[ksherlock]

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys

[axiosgunnar]

Perhaps hold shift to temporarily deactivate it then?

[ruined]

this happened to me a couple times before i switched to an external keyboard with qmk and just did the mapping in firmware

[treeman79]

Remote learning with a 1st grader showed me just how many ways a computer can get screwed up by random impresses.

[formerly_proven]

Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen; just bringing up task manager doesn't change anything.

[Arainach]

It sounds like you've installed some sort of app with a low level keyboard hook that's discarding the input. The login screen is in a separate desktop and not subject to such meddling. If it was an accessibility tool it might be able to hook into the login screen, I forget.

[not1ofU]

A couple of things to try that may help:

Alt+Tab (switch between open programs) - might help change the focus

Windows 10 has an advanced version of ^ as I understand, which uses the key combo: Win + Tab. The cycle of these commands can be reversed by adding "shift" to the mix (in case of many open programs / windows and you dont want to cycle through all of them)

Win+x has different, but equally useful menus for win 8 / win 10 - I was overjoyed when i first discovered this, as it retired many many other shortcuts I used over the years. (to get to device manager / control panel / event viewer)

and if all else fails: Alt+F4 - closes active (focused) program / window. If no programs or windows are in focus, then it will bring up the "shut down" dialog box, which allows for reboot / signout / shutdown / Switch user / sleep and hibernation if its enabled.

[dreamcompiler]

MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6 and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was an enforced invariant.

In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.

[nitrogen]

Could you have something running with an invisible window, e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to talk about writing such things.

[ctraynor]

The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.

[rawling]

My favourite W10 bug is that if I maximise an Office window and then try to close it by mashing the mouse right into the top right corner, it actually clicks past and closes whatever window is underneath.

[johnsoft]

I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.

[not1ofU]

Doesn't Win+L lock the screen?

[johnsoft]

You're right, I used the word "logout" imprecisely. I meant "lock".

[Rd6n6]

Button presses are often handled by state machines at a driver level so that a single “press” only registers as a single press. Otherwise, it will register as a lot of presses because the physical switches bounce on contact. They call this debouncing. Probably, a drivers state machine did not transition out

[dbatten]

This doesn't seem to explain how it would happen after plugging in a new keyboard, or trying to use the on-screen keyboard, though...

[Rd6n6]

Same generic keyboard debouncing in use in all 3 instances on the windows end? I know windows drivers debounce mouse clicks because I had a really old mouse that would double and triple click by accident on Linux but not in windows. I might be wrong, but changing the device might not affect it if the different devices are handled by shared runtime code

[ayewo]

Sounds like a reasonable explanation for physical keyboards—if the new keyboard used by the OP was identical to the keyboard on their machine, I can see how Windows might reuse the same device driver instance since it has already been loaded into memory.

But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key presses get routed through the keyboard device driver too?

[Rd6n6]

So fingers bounce when they touch a screen? I wrote a capacitive touch driver once back in uni and we debounced that. I don’t know how windows does it, I’m speculating

[gpm]

It wouldn't be the same debouncer, keyboard input is usually debounced before it reaches the OS, let alone whatever windowing system that an on screen keyboard sends events to.

[Nextgrid]

Pretty sure this would be done at the hardware level, as otherwise this behavior would differ between the BIOS, Windows, Linux & Mac. As far as I know no such debouncing code exists in operating systems for HID keyboards.

[a1369209993]

> One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

> It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

On Ubuntu, that would be:

  $ Q=$($(echo /usr/bin/*rintf) \\x70)
  $ echo hel$Q
  help

right?

[justinsaccount]

  $ echo hel$'\x70'
  help

[a1369209993]

Oh, neat. It's `echo hel$\x70` in my shell, but I didn't know bash had a similar mechanism.

[belgesel]

even echo has it $ echo -e "hel\x70"

[da_chicken]

I have actually seen this before. It wasn't the P key; it was a different key. X or C, I think. However, the symptoms otherwise seem to match. I don't remember if we tried a second keyboard, but we definitely tried the on-screen keyboard and were confused when it, too, didn't work.

The only things we could guess were something related to the Windows Search, Cortana, or telemetry services. Unfortunately, it's been since the early days of Win10 since that happened so I don't remember any other details. We also had to physically restart the system to fix the problem.

[not1ofU]

Meanwhile a printer somewhere was unloading a rainforest worth of paper all over the place.

(thinking your CTRL key was stuck and activating the print shortcut, but unplugging the keyboard rules that out)

[vvatermelone]

I've been having bizarrely similar issues with my XPS lately, except that none of the keys work except the i key, even with the on-screen keyboard. Only happens once in a blue moon, but as in your case, requires a hard reset.

[drewzero1]

Wow, I'd nearly forgotten about this. The exact same thing happened to my sister-in-law a few years ago when she visited with her Windows 10 laptop and couldn't connect to our wifi.

Eventually we figured out the 'p' (or maybe it was 'n'? Can't remember for sure.) in the password was getting skipped, but it was hard to tell with the password masking. Tried a USB keyboard, onscreen keyboard, same thing. I think we might have given up and let her use one of our computers at that point. It was (and still is) very confusing.

[sixothree]

My first thought would be one of those mouse sharing programs (synergy, multipliciy, mouse without borders). They really screw up _everything_.

Nothing sucks like mouse without borders. Nothing. Except for Synergy which is worse. But nothing sucks like synergy. Well except Multiplicity.