The "BIOS setup" of some ancient IBM ThinkPads wasn't the ordinary PC BIOS blue character-based UI, but actually a pixel-based GUI, including an <i>animated flappy-bird mouse pointer</i>:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfUkI-n4jpo&t=23s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfUkI-n4jpo&t=23s</a><p>I'd guess most corporate fleet ThinkPad end users never saw the bird flapping its wings to fly as you moved it around the screen with your Trackpoint, but kudos to IBM (known for wearing suits at the time) for letting this bit of whimsy slip through to customers.<p>Maybe it was indicative of corporate flexibility that helped the ThinkPad introduce so many innovations and general technical excellence, and made it such a respected and beloved brand.
<i>> You can see a lot of repetition in the vertical direction, but these are probably redundant resonances. They don’t add any more information, so we should only look at the base frequencies.</i><p>In the context of audio, these are just called "overtones", and the "base frequency" is the "fundamental".<p>The amplitudes of the overtones are what give an instrument its characteristic timbre. It's what makes a flute sound different from, say, a sax, when they are both playing the same note.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency</a>
My fully functional ThinkPad plays a tune on every boot. The tune means "BIOS Password Required". Then, two tones rising mean, "Password Accepted".<p>I had to explain it to my mother the other week over the phone.<p>A few weeks ago, I was boarding a bus with a brand-new mobile fare; I scanned the QR and it turned green and beeped, I guess twice or something, and the operator summons me back and he goes, "it has to beep once", so I shrugged, scanned again, got 3 beeps and a green light, message says, "already scanned" and I asked the operator "what does that mean?" and he didn't know.<p>Come in, C-3PO, where could he be?
Reminds me of this classic: <a href="https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Archive/261186" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Arch...</a>
This is fun although you'd think it would have just been easier on everyone to just have a number of beeps and the count equals the error code. Requiring a second device on hand just to decode the error beeps sounds more complex than necessary.<p>I guess the author now has the responsibility of writing a new app to decode the beeps that hopefully can last longer in the app store before it gets too old.
Okay, this is a rather cool diagnostic feature by Lenovo. One thing though, the Lenovo diagnostic app APK can be found and sideloaded rather easily as I did to see if it actually worked - and it did by bringing up the correct error code. Why Lenovo restricted the installation of the app to certain OS versions is rather silly.
This is cool but why is the human in the loop? If the only possible action is for the human to close a switch, why doesn't the platform diagnostic just close the circuit instead of playing the song?
> But it doesn’t run on recent android devices…<p>> > This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android.<p>I wonder if it really "doesn’t run on recent android devices", or if it's just that Google doesn't want you to install it (because it was made for an older version of Android and Google doesn't like that), and if you somehow downloaded the APK and manually installed it, it would run just fine. I suspect it's the later case... In my experience, other than the missing software version of the legacy hardware menu key, Android's compatibility with software made for older versions of Android is quite good.
I love when people decode data like this.<p>I am curious about the postage codes used in Sweden since 2021. Instead of buying physical postage stamps, you can buy a code online. It is meant to be written on the envelope in the place where you'd normally place a stamp. It has 4 x 3 symbols all are numbers or upper case letters.<p>Looks like this:<p><pre><code> A X X 2
T T 2 Y
3 M 3 5
</code></pre>
I assume some letters are omitted for clarity, like I vs 1. And presumably, there is error correction built in. I imagine the error rate from writing by hand and OCR-ing them is quite high.<p>I wonder if there is anything interesting in there like a time stamp, or if it is just a serial number.
I’ve been a Thinkpad user for probably 20 years or more, never heard of this (though not entirely surprised this level of attention was developed). Also, just yesterday this happened to me (T470s). Now I know to make a note of the tune if it happens again.
Much more pleasant sounding compared to the screeching modem built into appliances.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DADcChMJqBY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DADcChMJqBY</a><p><a href="https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a24653/how-to-diagnose-appliance-problems/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a24653/how-to-dia...</a>
My not broken P16s needs 1.50 Minutes to get out of firmware boot. And this is after the firmware update that shaved of 1 minute.<p>This will be my last Lenovo...