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Last September, I asked the SoylentNews community for help in choosing an UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4K television to use as a computer monitor. I was amazed at all the helpful and informative replies! I'm please to report that I got a TCL Roku 43S515 on sale at Best Buy and it has been working great! I so enjoy having more pixels to arrange even more info on my screen.
But something funny happened a couple days ago. I powered up the TV using the remote as I would normally do. Then I selected the input coming from my laptop, again as I usually do. And then, for a few moments, I saw a message displayed at the bottom of my screen:
Hamster wheel engaged
After I stopped laughing, I wondered if I had inadvertently stumbled upon an Easter Egg. What other messages, if any, lurked in my TV?
It seems the developers at Roku have a sense of humor. Some searching around the web (Roku's forum (all 4 pages) as well as on Amazon forum) revealed quite a few messages. I've gathered them here in alphabetical order:
Aligning Solar Panels
Boosting entertainment channels
Engaging warp drive
Hamster wheel engaged
Installing solar panels
Maximizing Fun Factor
Opening the gateway
Opening Stream Gates
Releasing the stream
Supercharging your system
Tuning Hyperdrive
What strange, silly, or whimsical messages have you seen?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:28PM (2 children)
A while ago, I was porting embedded firmware from (Microware) OS/9 to (Microblaze, unrelated) Linux for a customer. Reports came in that about once in every two operating weeks, the machine would freeze, but in many cases would also resume operation after a few minutes. From looking at the logs of a controlling PC, I could figure out that the embedded board was completely passive during the freeze. We did have hardware access into the embedded controller, and I extended the Linux kernel debugger with a few commands to dump state, but none of the testers was remotely capable of operating a debugger or even an ICE. So I wrote a small utility to ping the machine that, once the response died, would play an 8-bit LoFi rendering of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries". The testers were sternly advised to immediately call someone from the hardware department if that happened. For two weeks, nothing happened, but then, one morning I got rung out and greeted with the words:
"The music has played."
I scrambled, headed to the site, saw the frozen machine in debugging state, could somehow deduce that the issue was caused by a bug where an overflow of the Kernel's tick timer for the architecture might stall the scheduler, and fixed it. A single Kernel release newer than ours (around 3.13), the faulty code was rewritten upstream, also without the bug, but we hadn't tried that, because it broke other places.
I can't remember how I came up with 8-bit Wagner; I guess I wanted some clearly unique signal that stood out in the middle of beeps, bleeps, and other distractions in the environment.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 31 2019, @07:45AM (1 child)
Because Wagner, more than most other opera, typically involves a fat lady singing?
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:00PM
Now that I think of it, she (or rather her corporate owners) would want royalties (therefore the 8-bit version). As would the owners of more modern score. This was in a corporate environment, I needed something that was royalty free, so I could copy it onto the customer's computer and stay clean license-wise. Also, the "ride" goes through the octaves with a 9/8 beat (effectively 3/4 with every beat broken down in 6 16ths). I must have assumed this would stand out not only by covering the frequency spectrum, but also with a rhythm that runs against that of machinery chugging along.