Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
kelseyfrog
Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
bentcorner
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
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).
zh3
In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.
Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
binaryturtle
I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.
But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
jcul
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
MomsAVoxell
I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!
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.
OutOfHere
TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
zh3
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
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.
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
scoperesolution
>When I moved to a new apartment with my family
Well, there's your problem right there. I stopped reading after that.
unglaublich
My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.
ajb
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point noone wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
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!
phantom784
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
udkl
I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood
pwg
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
arjie
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
2ICofafireteam
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
smeej
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
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.
yurishimo
I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
mfkp
Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
frumplestlatz
In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
tetris11
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
sombragris
My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
PunchyHamster
My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.
Third party app. Un-uninstallable
That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.
paradox460
Ages ago I built a tv-b-gone, and hid it inside an old car key fob. I'd carry it most places, turning off TVs as I went.
Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same
jofla_net
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
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!
Joel_Mckay
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
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
helsinkiandrew
That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
lloydatkinson
That's actually where I thought the article was heading
samrus
One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
elcapitan
Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
amelius
To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
wewewedxfgdf
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
kingo55
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
unsupp0rted
Is this a felony?
bschwindHN
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
jakedata
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
zh3
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
frogpelt
[delayed]
throwaway150
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
miduil
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
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.
Archelaos
The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
anal_reactor
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
shibel
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
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”
morganf
But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
throw20251220
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.
latexr
Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?
varispeed
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window.
That was the end of nuisance.
Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
joncp
I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
kgwxd
loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?
Biganon
Ultrasound whistle?
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
tibbydudeza
Awesome ;).
moltar
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
tantalor
> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.
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.
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
thaumasiotes
> That's not "interference" in the technical sense.
But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.
submeta
Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.
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.
almostlikemagic
this just made my day, thank you.
readthenotes1
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
sejje
And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.
Not everyone is just an asshole.
That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.
redbell
This reminds me of this guy [1]
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.
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
ErroneousBosh
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
davej
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
ajb
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
nntwozz
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
Sound pollution is very real baseline stressor.
tartoran
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
computerdork
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
TacticalCoder
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
wingworks
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
mancerayder
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping sound insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. I suffered from being woken up in the night by party goers, and early morning by door slammers. Once I wake up, it takes me a long time to fall back asleep. On weekends, when I want to stay at home and just play a game or read, people play music in the afternoon and often I would stress over some sort of party nearby beginning that evening, forcing me to find somewhere to go just to avoid the noise. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
mstaoru
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
paradox460
Fwiw, get bulbs that run something like wled. You can pair them with esp-now remotes, like the wiiz remote
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
throwaway150
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
pjdkoch
Genuine web 1 vibes.
ncr100
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
deathanatos
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
neverminder
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
onlypassingthru
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.
throw4847285
Yeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.
wiseowise
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
nixass
Oh Jaysus
phreanix
This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
paradox460
Nah, the VCR was
zephen
> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best.
Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning.
Pedantically yours,
xxxxx
steveBK123
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.
In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.
In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.
In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.
umvi
Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
kelseyfrog
Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
bentcorner
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
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).
zh3
In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.
Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
binaryturtle
I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.
But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
jcul
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
MomsAVoxell
I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!
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.
OutOfHere
TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
zh3
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
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.
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
scoperesolution
>When I moved to a new apartment with my family
Well, there's your problem right there. I stopped reading after that.
unglaublich
My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.
ajb
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point noone wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
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!
phantom784
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
udkl
I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood
pwg
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
arjie
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
2ICofafireteam
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
smeej
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
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.
yurishimo
I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
mfkp
Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
frumplestlatz
In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
tetris11
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
sombragris
My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
PunchyHamster
My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.
Third party app. Un-uninstallable
That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.
paradox460
Ages ago I built a tv-b-gone, and hid it inside an old car key fob. I'd carry it most places, turning off TVs as I went.
Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same
jofla_net
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
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!
Joel_Mckay
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
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
helsinkiandrew
That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
lloydatkinson
That's actually where I thought the article was heading
samrus
One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
elcapitan
Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
amelius
To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
wewewedxfgdf
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
kingo55
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
unsupp0rted
Is this a felony?
bschwindHN
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
jakedata
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
zh3
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
frogpelt
[delayed]
throwaway150
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
miduil
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
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.
Archelaos
The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
anal_reactor
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
shibel
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
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”
morganf
But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
throw20251220
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.
latexr
Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?
varispeed
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window.
That was the end of nuisance.
Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
joncp
I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
kgwxd
loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?
Biganon
Ultrasound whistle?
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
tibbydudeza
Awesome ;).
moltar
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
tantalor
> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.
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.
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
thaumasiotes
> That's not "interference" in the technical sense.
But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.
submeta
Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.
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.
almostlikemagic
this just made my day, thank you.
readthenotes1
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
sejje
And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.
Not everyone is just an asshole.
That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.
redbell
This reminds me of this guy [1]
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.
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
ErroneousBosh
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
davej
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
ajb
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
nntwozz
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
Sound pollution is very real baseline stressor.
tartoran
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
computerdork
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
TacticalCoder
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
wingworks
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
mancerayder
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping sound insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. I suffered from being woken up in the night by party goers, and early morning by door slammers. Once I wake up, it takes me a long time to fall back asleep. On weekends, when I want to stay at home and just play a game or read, people play music in the afternoon and often I would stress over some sort of party nearby beginning that evening, forcing me to find somewhere to go just to avoid the noise. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
mstaoru
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
paradox460
Fwiw, get bulbs that run something like wled. You can pair them with esp-now remotes, like the wiiz remote
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
throwaway150
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
pjdkoch
Genuine web 1 vibes.
ncr100
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
deathanatos
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
neverminder
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
onlypassingthru
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.
throw4847285
Yeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.
wiseowise
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
nixass
Oh Jaysus
phreanix
This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
paradox460
Nah, the VCR was
zephen
> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best.
Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning.
Pedantically yours,
xxxxx
steveBK123
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.
In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.
In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.
In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.
Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
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).
In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.
Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.
But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!
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.
TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
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.
TV-B-Gone Kit:
https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
>When I moved to a new apartment with my family
Well, there's your problem right there. I stopped reading after that.
My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point noone wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
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!
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
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 would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.
Third party app. Un-uninstallable
That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.
Ages ago I built a tv-b-gone, and hid it inside an old car key fob. I'd carry it most places, turning off TVs as I went.
Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
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!
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
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
That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
That's actually where I thought the article was heading
One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
Is this a felony?
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
why would there be irda on server ?
I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
[delayed]
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
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.
The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
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”
But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
This post and your comment has me thinking about STFU, posted here a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649142
Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.
Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window. That was the end of nuisance. Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?
Ultrasound whistle?
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
Awesome ;).
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-channel_interference
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
> That's not "interference" in the technical sense.
But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.
Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.
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.
this just made my day, thank you.
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.
Not everyone is just an asshole.
That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.
This reminds me of this guy [1]
___________1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...
[dead]
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
Sound pollution is very real baseline stressor.
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping sound insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. I suffered from being woken up in the night by party goers, and early morning by door slammers. Once I wake up, it takes me a long time to fall back asleep. On weekends, when I want to stay at home and just play a game or read, people play music in the afternoon and often I would stress over some sort of party nearby beginning that evening, forcing me to find somewhere to go just to avoid the noise. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
Fwiw, get bulbs that run something like wled. You can pair them with esp-now remotes, like the wiiz remote
https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/wled-15w-color-bulb
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
Genuine web 1 vibes.
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULEBSxP725w
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.
Yeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
Oh Jaysus
This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
Nah, the VCR was
> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best.
Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning.
Pedantically yours, xxxxx
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.
In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.
In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.
In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.
Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
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).
In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.
Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.
I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.
But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!
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.
TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
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.
TV-B-Gone Kit:
https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
>When I moved to a new apartment with my family
Well, there's your problem right there. I stopped reading after that.
My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point noone wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
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!
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
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 would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.
Third party app. Un-uninstallable
That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.
Ages ago I built a tv-b-gone, and hid it inside an old car key fob. I'd carry it most places, turning off TVs as I went.
Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
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!
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
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
That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
That's actually where I thought the article was heading
One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
Is this a felony?
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
why would there be irda on server ?
I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
[delayed]
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
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.
The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
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”
But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
This post and your comment has me thinking about STFU, posted here a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649142
Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.
Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window. That was the end of nuisance. Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?
Ultrasound whistle?
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
Awesome ;).
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-channel_interference
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
> That's not "interference" in the technical sense.
But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.
Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.
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.
this just made my day, thank you.
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.
Not everyone is just an asshole.
That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.
This reminds me of this guy [1]
___________1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...
[dead]
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
Sound pollution is very real baseline stressor.
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping sound insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. I suffered from being woken up in the night by party goers, and early morning by door slammers. Once I wake up, it takes me a long time to fall back asleep. On weekends, when I want to stay at home and just play a game or read, people play music in the afternoon and often I would stress over some sort of party nearby beginning that evening, forcing me to find somewhere to go just to avoid the noise. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
Fwiw, get bulbs that run something like wled. You can pair them with esp-now remotes, like the wiiz remote
https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/wled-15w-color-bulb
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
Genuine web 1 vibes.
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULEBSxP725w
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.
Yeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
Oh Jaysus
This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
Nah, the VCR was
> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best.
Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning.
Pedantically yours, xxxxx
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.
In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.
In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.
In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.