Skip to main content

The flickering of a 2019 MacBook Pro

 

It started, late one summer evening...

This laptop is pretty much lightly used, was package well for shipping, and only sat on my desk after arrival. 



description:  a computer monitor with a silver base and black border with a photo of a desert landscape. white lines dance across the surface.

I see other people have tried steps listed as to remedy the problem, to no solution.

One person on Apple's forums even received an entirely new (to them) machine, and it still persisted, so I'm thinking it's a software problem. 

After restarting several times, I restarted into the diagnostics tools.

I had dead pixels on my old MacBook Air and I dropped that more than once - no flickering. How can a laptop that simply sat for a few months flicker on the display?

[I forgot to make a video while the issue was happening. If it starts again - hopefully not - I will edit one in]

The stripe is only on light backgrounds.  Anything darker than white does not see the stripe.

 There are occasional flashes across the screen almost as a whole. The task bar / drawer at the bottom remains unaffected by all glitches.

I tried the steps listed here. The one things that did some temporary good was minimizing the amount of white on my screen. I dislike this because I don't really like dark modes. Also turning down the brightness helped a bit.

Eventually, I started purging software I no longer used - Roblox Studio, Blender -- surprisingly, that seemed to stop the issue. I do remember Roblox in particular taking up a lot of resources and getting the laptop fairly hot. 

 I do think I have narrowed it down to one particular piece of software - a Safari extension that blocks websites for productivity. The problem returned in full force when I reinstalled it. Pity, as I liked it, but there are other options.

 Eventually, it got so bad that the monitor no longer works, and the keyboard no longer works either.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory