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Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down
- umvi 8mo agoSeems 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 8mo agoWhy? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
- 4b11b4 8mo agoIt's a feature not a bug
- bentcorner 8mo agoHonestly 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).
- paradox460 8mo agoGame console manufacturers figured this out ages ago. Press button on the console, press button on the controller, they're now paired
- wewewedxfgdf 8mo agoWhen 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.
- zh3 8mo agoIn 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 8mo agoI 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. :-\
- 1e1a 8mo agoWhat about a really loud fire alarm outside your house, that goes off whenever it detects even a slight amount of smoke?
- apparent 8mo agoYep, you could point out that the purpose of the alarm is to notify you to close your windows, not to annoy the smoker.
- herf 8mo ago"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur." - Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984
- nkrisc 8mo agoPeople who smoke on the balconies of multi-unit buildings are awful people. It’d be a beautiful day but I can’t keep my windows open because there’s always somebody smoking to make my unit smell disgusting if I just want to enjoy a cool breeze going through. Thank goodness smoking is becoming rarer here and is no banned pretty much everywhere indoors and near entrances. I don’t mind if people have a vice (I’ve got mine) but keep me out of it.
- MomsAVoxell 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoTV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
- Liftyee 8mo agoIndeed. It works with infrared light, the same way most TV remotes do.
- mbirth 8mo agoUnless you manage to aim a strong IR blaster at their window/the ceiling behind it.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo agoCan you see their window? Pick up a cheap CCTV infrared floodlight, gut it, and gate it with Ye Olde Bloody Great MOSFET driven by your TV-Be-Gone microcontroller.
- galangalalgol 8mo agoA spark gap does pretty well. But the FCC fowns on such things.
- zh3 8mo agoIt'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.
- scoperesolution 8mo ago[flagged]
- unglaublich 8mo agoMy, 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 8mo agoRight, 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 no-one 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 engineering skills, feel free to build this!
- lostdog 8mo agoAnd get it into a modern certification. Want LEEDS? Get the sound measurement people out.
- clates 8mo agoWhen people complain about housing prices being too high, this is what I usually point them to. There are _a lot_ of boxes to tick, some of those boxes are critical, some are not so much. Some are severely punished, some are not so much. Some have extremely high costs and are a PITA, some not so much.
- FiatLuxDave 8mo agoThis is a really good idea. Somebody build this!
- smeej 8mo agoThe 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 8mo agoI 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.
- mike50 8mo agoThey do sell ir dongles for android but the reviews on amazon don't look great.
- bryanlarsen 8mo agoIndependent dongle, you don't need to plug it into your phone: https://www.tvbgone.com/ https://www.tvbgone.com/
- mfkp 8mo agoJust got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
- frumplestlatz 8mo agoIn 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.
- 8mo ago
- jofla_net 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoRF 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 8mo agoThat sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
- lloydatkinson 8mo agoThat's actually where I thought the article was heading
- samrus 8mo agoOne problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
- sejje 8mo agoWhat's the risk? You turn on the TV when it was off? And then detect the noise and turn it back off?
- elcapitan 8mo agoThank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
- amelius 8mo agoTo be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
- tartoran 8mo agoBut there are devices out there that can be tuned to any frequency. Flipper and other clones could pull this feat for example.
- amelius 8mo agoYeah, but you still need luck. In reality it will not work out e.g. because their setup uses an IR control. Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- kingo55 8mo agoFunnily 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 8mo agoIs this a felony?
- throwaway150 8mo agoSince there are people from all countries here, the answer to your question depends a lot on who you ask. I don't think even the specific word you used is relevant in all parts of the world.
- sejje 8mo agoIs it a felony where you live?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway150 8mo agoThat term doesn't exist in the legal language where I live. And I don't know your term well enough to know what it maps to in our law.
- sejje 8mo agoIn the United States, there's felonies and misdemeanors. Felonies are a big deal, and misdemeanors are a small deal. Felonies carry sentences over a year, and time is served in state or federal prison, not in a local jailhouse.
- bschwindHN 8mo agoThat 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 8mo agoThere 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 8mo agoAnd 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
- PunchyHamster 8mo agowhy would there be irda on server ?
- nmstoker 8mo agoWith line of sight too?
- eps 8mo agoBonus question is which PCs had IR ports.
- nathanlied 8mo agoSome laptops had them, and came with IR remotes. Some of the marketing was around using those laptops as "media centres", and you could control them from the sofa while it was plugged into a TV.
- dadrock 8mo agoI bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
- frogpelt 8mo agoI know you’re downvoted but every time I read a story like this I get the feeling it’s mostly fiction.
- nephihaha 8mo agoEmbellished, maybe, but parts of it ring true. I know from bitter experience that confronting a neighbour about noise rarely works. They can often be drunk or aggressive.
- throwaway150 8mo agoOn 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 8mo agoWhat 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 8mo agoThe collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
- anal_reactor 8mo agoOne 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.
- sejje 8mo agoFrogs and crickets want a word.
- shibel 8mo agoReminds 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 8mo agoBut did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
- unsupp0rted 8mo agoUsually people who are that inconsiderate don’t change. Or they quickly change and then quickly change back.
- tensor 8mo agoMorning people are often inconsiderate to night people and let alone change they simply judge night people for not getting up at fuck you o’clock. Usually morning people don’t change and are inconsiderate their whole lives.
- LoveMortuus 8mo agoBaseless accusations, because what bothers night people in the morning, bothers morning people in the night. The only real difference is how much you care about how your actions impact the environment and people around you. I wake up early, because I work early, I don't make any sound, my flatmate (I rent a room from the company) works late and always stays up late, they make so much noise that they keep waking me up to the point that I had to report them to the company. It doesn't matter if you're a night or a morning person, what matters is, are you considerate or not.
- joncp 8mo agoI’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
- tibbydudeza 8mo agoAwesome ;).
- moltar 8mo agoHaha 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 8mo ago> 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.
- MawKKe 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-channel_interference 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.
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago> That's not "interference" in the technical sense. But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- troad 8mo agoInterestingly, the -fere in interfere comes from the Latin ferīre, meaning 'to hit', 'to strike', etc. My first guess would have been something like facere/fāre or -fer, but that quickly falls apart on reflection (to do across? between-bearer?). Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense. Bonus point: the aforementioned -fer ('bearer', like conifer or aquifer) is distantly related to ferīre, as it is to English to bear, Greek phérō ('to carry'), Slavic brat ('to take'), Sanskrit bhárati ('to carry'), etc. I suppose ferīre itself must be the result of semantic drift along the lines of 'to carry/bear' -> 'to bring forth [blows]' -> 'to strike/hit'.
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago
- submeta 8mo agoMany 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 8mo agothis just made my day, thank you.
- readthenotes1 8mo agoIf 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 8mo agoAnd--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 8mo agoThis 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. ___________ 1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smoking_neighbors_hate_this_little_trick/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- tom86150 8mo ago[dead]
- blazers777 8mo agoit's impossible to tell who is normal in these stories. for example, the guy can start smoking inside, and it will always smell like smoke. or, the guy can get his own buzzer. i've had oversensitive neighbors sit there and bang on pots all night because fireworks or construction noise. like another comment mentioned, apartments are just built really badly. you can hear anything. which leads to friends of mine complaining about stompers, but to me, they're clearly not stomping. they're just tip-toeing around as quietly as possible. when you get people actually harassing you daily, then you figure out the difference. if you have to set up a machine or device, then you might be the bad neighbor. this is especially true if they don't set up a machine back at you. that means they're just taking in your harassment and not escalating. people aren't total idiots. they figure someone is messing with them for their level 15 volume and keep it lower. For anyone with a TV, try putting your volume to 15. Is is unreasonable volume? It's very hard to say who is the psychotic neighbor. I've been on both sides: neighbors that were loud but normal (maybe they had bad hearing, or worked at night), and neighbors that were oversensitive, who were petty and bought machines and devices and sprays to really hurt all of the people who lived around them.
- godsinhisheaven 8mo agoRemimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
- ErroneousBosh 8mo agoA 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoNot 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 a very real baseline stressor.
- tartoran 8mo agoI'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.
- sejje 8mo agoI live in a similar place, though I'm not off-grid. The drawbacks for me are that "town" is about an hour away. But amazon delivers here. There's no city life, no ordering to-go food or pizza, no movie theater, no ice cream runs to sonic. You have to plan ahead. Socialization happens online or with people in your own home, pretty much exclusively. It's often hard to find anyone to fix your stuff--you become a framer, a plumber, a roofer, a mechanic. I consider this a net benefit, but it can be taxing at times. That being said, not everyone does it quite like I do. All my neighbors have jobs in the city, for instance.
- nntwozz 8mo agoI have no electricity except solar. It works well for all my needs, technology has solved this depending on your needs and how much money you have. I have no water except the one I bring when I buy food weekly/every two weeks. I'm still renovating/building so I'll have a well in the future. I heat my home with wood that I cut on my own property, I enjoy this very much. It's a workout that also produces something of value. The drawbacks can be many depending on what kind of lifestyle you're after. Sartre said "if you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company". I do mountain biking, nordic skating and I have a dog; it works for me. A lady friend might be nice eventually :] It's silent, I can hear my own heartbeat; civilization is 30 min away. This is in Sweden.
- mstaoru 8mo agoWe 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 8mo agoFwiw, 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 https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/wled-15w-color-bulb
- skulk 8mo agoThis 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 8mo agoWhether 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.
- blazers777 8mo agoit might not be anything, but the neighbor simply yielding to every little rule in the head of another neighbor. we haven't established that the neighbor knows whether or not someone is screwing with him. when my building had a person like that, who played these games all day for decades, some either just ignored all of it, while others simply moved out when they could.
- internet_points 8mo agothis is why I read hn
- pjdkoch 8mo agoGenuine web 1 vibes.
- ncr100 8mo agoSadism. Am I wrong?
- deathanatos 8mo agoUgh, 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.
- phyzome 8mo agoIf you were to disable the speaker, they would probably never notice...
- LoganDark 8mo agoThose devices are specifically designed to ward off young people. It's not an anti-rodent thing, it's a "get off my lawn" thing.
- Ekaros 8mo ago[flagged]
- Markoff 8mo agomy mother's neighbor had in garden this anti-mole device, quite annoying to hear this frequent high pitched sound in regular intervals, maybe talk with neighbor about other ways how to get rid off moles
- direwolf20 8mo agoThese are commercially produced as teenager deterrents to "prevent loitering" (whatever that means).
- 8mo ago
- neverminder 8mo agoI 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bravoetch 8mo agoIt'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 8mo agoYeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.
- phyzome 8mo agoYou think the direct approach would have worked?
- riversflow 8mo agoI think people should be allowed to be noisy.
- lmm 8mo agoImposing your will by being better at technology is morally no different from imposing your will by being physically stronger. There's a reason civilised societies follow processes rather than having people resolve their disputes directly.
- wiseowise 8mo agoThis is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
- phreanix 8mo agoThis incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
- paradox460 8mo agoNah, the VCR was
- zephen 8mo ago> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best. Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning. Pedantically yours, xxxxx
- steveBK123 8mo agoGreat 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.
- socalgal2 8mo agoI hate loud neighbors. But I also am disappointed more apartments aren't built to be sound proof and that even if they are it's nearly impossible to find out if they actually are before moving in. My good experience that told me this is possible is in 1999 I moved in to the my first apartment with a built in washer and dryer. When the agent showed me the apartment and pointed out the washer and dryer, I said something like "I guess I need to be sure not to use it too late so it won't annoy the neighbors". The agent said, "this building was originally built to be condos. Each outer wall is 6 inches of concrete with 6 inches of space between it and the next wall for the next unit. You can run the washer and dryer anytime you want, your neighbors won't hear it. I've never been lucky enough to live in another apartment built that way. My current apartment, the neighbors are up stomping around the room and having loud conversations til 5am. I think they call family in Korea and so are up to match the time. I haven't talked to them about it yet but I wish I just didn't have to and the apartment was designed better.
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- tolerance 8mo agoThis was a terrific Anduril advertisement.
- m463 8mo agothis reminds me of steve wozniak's TV Jammer prank: About 50 people were watching a basketball game on a big set with a rabbit ears antenna. Or were trying to. Every few minutes the picture broke up. It was so bad that a tall guy was permanently stationed next to the set, endlessly fiddling with the knobs and the antenna. Especially the antenna. ... https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2011/03/01/jammin-woz https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2011/03/01/jammin-woz
- gcanyon 8mo agoI have a Concept 2 rowing machine. I've measured: it's about 65db when I'm rowing easy, 70, maybe a bit more, when I'm rowing hard. Most times when I row, it's for half an hour or so, but it can be up to 45 minutes to an hour, or sometimes up to an hour 40, or rarely 3.5 hours (I row a marathon once or twice a year). There are two components to the noise it makes: there's the whirr of the gear as I pull on the chain, and the rush of wind from the fan it spins. I think the whirr is more prominent/annoying. I've carefully crafted a box to fit over the section of the rower where the gears are. That dampens the noise a great deal. There's still the opening where the chain goes in, so if anyone has ideas for that I'm happy to hear them. I also have foam pads for the thing to rest on, in case it vibrates at the feet (I don't think it does). At my old high-rise apartment I'd row until midnight, and no one ever complained. Now I'm in a brownstone, so I'm keeping it to before 10pm. Hopefully that's enough that I'm not a bad neighbor.
- protocolture 8mo agoI love being a social nuisance like this. Great stuff.
- kmoser 8mo agoWhen I lived in a NYC studio apartment, the neighbor directly above me was a DJ and used to mix club dance music at full volume. Around then I discovered the fuse boxes for several adjacent floors were located just down the hall from me in an unlocked utility closet.
- balupton 8mo agoWe had such a neighbour also with an extremely loud TV on nearly all the time. We eventually deduced that he was deaf. We bought him headphones for the TV with a letter explaining the issue. Problem solved.
- QuiEgo 8mo agoHaving the privilege to live in a house without common walls to a neighbor is the biggest quality of life improvement I've ever had the good fortune to experience. I'd take a hell of a long commute to the burbs' before I'd go back to dealing with b.s. like this. Loud music, slashed tires if you called the cops, people smoking weed and cigars and stinking up the whole building, parking space shortages, drunks throwing up in the stiarwells, screaming matches between people in bad relationships, horribly maintained flats and every repair done on the cheap, 4am fire alarms, a rat problem the owners would not put money in to fix properly, the list goes on and on over the 20+ years I lived in rentals.
- rcbdev 8mo agoIt reads like you lived in some third world country. In all my years living in various capitols, I've never had issues close to what you've described here.
- defrost 8mo agoThe GP grew up poor in the US (by their own earlier statement) .. which tracks with your "some third world country" observation. The US is famously harshly tiered by wealth and privilege.
- galaxyLogic 8mo agoI use rain-sounds or white noise plus noise-cancelling headphones to drown out my neighbor's TV. It bugs me that I have to hear advertisements coming over the wall when I wake up. If I'm really pissed off I turn on some reggae music with good bass. It always calms me down.
- feydaykyn 8mo agoWhile we are on the topic, any idea of how I could teach the same lesson to people listening to their phone without a headset in public transports ? Asking them is out of question most of the time, for safety reasons...
- wanderr 8mo agoI had a neighbor who mounted his TV directly on the shared wall to my bedroom in violation of the lease terms. The wall was hollow and seemed to not only conduct the sound into my bedroom but act as a natural amplifier. I offered him a nice speaker system I wasn't using but he said he didn't know how to connect it to the TV. I offered to do it for him but he refused. I offered to pay a professional and he still refused. I was forced to move my bed into the living room so I could sleep through the night as he started his day by watching the news at full blast at 3am. Naturally, in response I propped those speakers to the same wall and played whale calls at a low volume any time I wasn't home.
- hcfman 8mo agoSo he never tried turning on the TV at full volume when his neighbor was sleeping? Maybe he left out mentioning that part. Seems kinda obvious.
- trumbitta2 8mo agoI actually did this with my teenage neighbor. He was learning electric guitar at hours the building had rules against. Hours I was studying throughout because of said building rules. Whenever he switched his amp on, his landline would ring. Whenever he loudly stomped toward the phone, his landline would stop ringing. Took three afternoons, but he learned it.
- bambax 8mo agoExcellent story! There's an episode of Friends a little bit like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYGdstEVJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYGdstEVJQ
- Jamesbeam 8mo agoI think the biggest problem is, everyone basically living on their own these days instead of treating neighbors like a collective of individuals that can absolutely have life changing consequences for you, if you either get along with them very well or if you annoy each other. We humans are not build to spend our lives in front of small or big screens. It makes people angry, sad, lonely and weird and sometimes they turn the tv up just so they can have someone come by and make them feel like someone recognizes they are existing, even if it’s just to complain that they are too loud. If people like you, they will be more willing to go out of their way to not annoy you. It’s basic psychology. In Aghanistan I could take my helmet and body armor off, sit down next to a teenager on a piece of rubble and share my chocolate bar with them and a good laugh, watching a few guys burn an American flag in sight without being afraid I will get shot or killed. I fixed peoples kitchen sinks and made sure they could wash their babies in water that would not make them sick, I vaccinated their children from my bonus payments, I played soccer with their kids and treated them like human beings and in return they protected me from any harm while I was in their neighborhood. If people in a war zone can be decent human beings to each other, why can’t we do the same in our, what we think is a more civilized, superior, society? There is a ton of stuff you can do to get along with your neighbors that neither costs you extra time or money. Say good day and good night with a genuine smile if you meet them. Help the elderly out carrying groceries if you’re already on your way up or down. You have no idea how often people watch through their door spy what is happening in their house, they will see it and respect you for it, even if you don’t see them. I am a stress baker, so instead of making cookies for my own, I make a whole rack and ask my direct neighbors in the evening if they could take some off my hands so I don’t get a sugar shock. What’s better than cookies after a shit day at work? If the parcel dude asks me if I can take a package for someone while getting my own, sure thing. If you pick it up same day I will gladly do it again, if you don’t respect my time you can drive to the post office next time. Easy as that. Need some sugar, eggs or some papers for your joint because your stoned ass is too lazy and you forgot to buy new ones every few months, sure thing enjoy your weed brownies or smoke dude. I can easily just kill any neighbor that annoys me. But instead I choose to find out why they do stupid stuff. And then I fix it without much noise or help them to recognize themselves there is a solution to their problem. It might be my military mindset but I swore an oath to serve the people and protect them and that doesn’t end with being a civilian now. I am not perfect and get angry and yell at people on the internet just like any other idiot on here, but I see my neighbors more often than I see my parents and I want to live in peace, and peace is something that requires cooperation. Dont go to war with your neighbors, try to figure out why they do stuff and offer a solution for their problem if they can’t see it themselves for whatever reason. You’ll be a lot happier and healthier if you get along with the people living in the same house. Or you could fuck with their tv and eventually get shot in the face. It’s a choice.
- 7bit 8mo agoInfra-Red is light. How is it possible that an IR remote controls a device downstairs?
- waffletower 8mo agoI believe there are victims on both sides here when people "choose" (quotes to indicate -- "where you live isn't entirely under your control") to live in dense developments. I own subwoofers, which is a big motivation to have land and air between my walls and my neighbors. Modern constructed homes are also well sound insulated.