Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

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.

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.

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!

When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.

Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.

I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.

Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.

I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.

I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.

I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.

But yeah, I’ll try to pay attention to it”

That's not "interference" in the technical sense.

Interference actually causes signal degradation, distortion, or loss.

This is the system "working as expected" technically. It was just set up wrong.

A simple, thoughtful fix is to gift them a wireless TV speaker designed for this exact problem.

The Sony SRS-LSR200 sits close to the listener, so dialogue is clear without blasting the TV for everyone else. It lets them enjoy their shows again without turning the volume knob into a neighborhood event.

  My neighbor is smoking on the balcony, and smoke goes to my home with little kids. I talked with him several times, didn't help. It's his territory, so not much I can do, besides closing the doors. But at least i can use this fake smoke detector with VERY ANNOYING random buzzer. It starts buzzing when i connect to it my iPhone via BLE. Makes it not as relaxing to smoke on the balcony as it planned to be for him. I'm going to train this mofo with reinforcement learning like a fkn Pavlov Dog.

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit

But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\

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

I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.

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).

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death

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.

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.

Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.

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.

But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.

Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same