Magnets

• Macbook sitting on top of its lid. Don't do it.

I experienced a ridiculous amount of confusion and wasted time due to a silly oversight I made (repeatedly!).

As mentioned earlier, I’d kept the lid for the Macbook, detached from its hinges and with the broken screen removed, to use as a kind of… lid.

When in use, it seemed like the obvious place to put the lid was under the Macbook, where it fitted perfectly.

For the first few hours, days, even weeks, I had intermittent problems with the machine randomly turning off/on (actually sleeping/waking but I didn’t know that at the time).

Remember I was having enough trouble knowing whether the machine was turned on or not in those early days.

It was the magnets in the lid, activating the hall sensors in the base and making it think I was opening/closing the lid. Due to the thickness of the base the magnets weren’t as close as they’d normally be, and the alignment wasn’t perfect. So this wasn’t a simple matter of ‘when the lid is under the laptop it goes to sleep’. This was a sporadic problem that could come and go as things wobbled in the environment. It took me a while to make the mental connection and work out what was happening.

# TODO Remove magnets from lid!