Show HN: My Stupid Calculator Hack
It was the year 2000. A more innocent time.<p>I was in highschool math with my best friend Brooks and a supply teacher had just walked in with a case of Texas Instruments&#x27; finest.<p>Perfect. I didn&#x27;t feel like working anyway.<p>We could hardly contain ourselves. Every calculator she handed us magically died within minutes and there was nothing we could do, honest.<p>Even our classmates must not have been aware or one of the 40 of the other fish packed into that can would surely have rat us out to the fuzz.<p>The trick? Simply turn the brightness down to 0.<p>It was some kind of UI bug that actually let you set the brightness to the point that nothing registered on the screen.<p>Turning it on and turning it off didn&#x27;t work.<p>You had to know that the batteries were not dead and that the brightness was down before unscrewing the back to change the batteries, probably resetting the brightness memory in the process anyways<p>I wonder if they ever fixed that?