Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984
Thank goodness smoking is becoming rarer here and is no banned pretty much everywhere indoors and near entrances.
I don’t mind if people have a vice (I’ve got mine) but keep me out of it.
A Flipper Zero would be the modern equivalent, I suppose. I like the idea of being able to turn off devices in a certain radius - but I don’t like the idea of everyone having one. Having ultimate power over the wireless noise in my immediate vicinity - awesome .. but seeing someone empty their pockets at the airport and a Flipper Zero in the inspection box - not so fun.
It’s going to be a wild and woolly future, the more these kinds of shenanigans become relevant.
RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.
Well, there's your problem right there. I stopped reading after that.
There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.
Anyone who has enough audio skills, feel free to build this!
In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.
I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.
One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote. As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief!
The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to come downstairs to the tv turned on, blaring full volume and on channel 99 (static). This continued for a while until I realized that my father, who is HAM operator, and an early riser, would somehow be injecting into the remote sensor on certain frequencies occasionally. Needless to say it was thusly unplugged afterwards!
As a side note, intentionally jamming or interfering with other peoples signals can carry up to a $1m fine and several years in prison. =3
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.
Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.
I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.
Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.
I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.
I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.
I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.
But yeah, I’ll try to pay attention to it”
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
That's not "interference" in the technical sense.
Interference actually causes signal degradation, distortion, or loss.
This is the system "working as expected" technically. It was just set up wrong.
A simple, thoughtful fix is to gift them a wireless TV speaker designed for this exact problem.
The Sony SRS-LSR200 sits close to the listener, so dialogue is clear without blasting the TV for everyone else. It lets them enjoy their shows again without turning the volume knob into a neighborhood event.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
My neighbor is smoking on the balcony, and smoke goes to my home with little kids. I talked with him several times, didn't help. It's his territory, so not much I can do, besides closing the doors. But at least i can use this fake smoke detector with VERY ANNOYING random buzzer. It starts buzzing when i connect to it my iPhone via BLE. Makes it not as relaxing to smoke on the balcony as it planned to be for him. I'm going to train this mofo with reinforcement learning like a fkn Pavlov Dog.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...
umvi•1h ago
kelseyfrog•1h ago
4b11b4•1h ago
bentcorner•19m ago
For a passive read-only device (like most satellite/cable receivers 20 years ago), it was probably more important to allow customers to easily replace their lost remotes than it was to prevent pranksters (who could often be dissuaded by more physical means).