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Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

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Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Op mentions later there are no sensors. So either a light/shadow thing or a sound/vibration thing.

Engines sound deeper when you put them in gear, if he’s driving a muscle car or something, though I’d expect coming home in the evening would do it too in that case.

It's a WRX.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#272
post #82

This reminds me of a “bug” I found when working for a company that sells package lockers to apartment buildings. We used iPads for the user interface and had monitoring in place to alert us if an iPad went offline. At only one location with two iPads one would go offline almost every day (but not every day) between 12pm and 1pm, for 10-20 minutes. Never the same time of day, and never the same length of time. It was…

I was working in a place that used to be a food store. Talked to the former owner, they had a big problem with all the freezers turning off during the nights and when they came to work all food was unfrozen and had to be thrown away. Turns out the timer to the sign outside was connected wrong and also turned off the freezers in the night. I do understand them, the electricity wiring in that building was not fun to work with... The place had been several different stores, all adding to the cables and connections over the years.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#273
post #82

This reminds me of a “bug” I found when working for a company that sells package lockers to apartment buildings. We used iPads for the user interface and had monitoring in place to alert us if an iPad went offline. At only one location with two iPads one would go offline almost every day (but not every day) between 12pm and 1pm, for 10-20 minutes. Never the same time of day, and never the same length of time. It was…

I setup several emergency call beacons at a college (push a button, and 911 is immediately dialed, and a big blue light on the pole strobes, to help police find you). After 2 weeks of random alerts for a single beacon, we eventually determined it was the sun hitting the face of the device, expanding the button a bit. Rotated the face of the device 90 degrees, and never had an issue again.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#274
post #47

Got a kick out of this gem from the reddit comments: > My S2000 car alarm would be set off whenever I microwaved blueberries. Some experimentation revealed it was anything with excess water. Buying a new microwave solved the issue but I don't like thinking about how poorly shielded the old microwave was. I tried moving the for further from the kitchen or keeping the keys far away to no avail.

When I lived with my brother and played a lot of WoW I would get disconnected almost every night at around the same time, and usually in a Raid which was quite annoying. Eventually I tracked it down to microwave usage. Whenever the microwave was in use, I lost WiFi.

Did your brother ever use the microwave offensively against you? https://xkcd.com/654/

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dog was similar, but the sound he triggered on was the CRT turning off. You could sit perfectly still and press the off button the remote (so as not to give any body language signs) and he'd wake up, and wander off to the bedroom for the night.

When I was young and my hearing was better, I think I had a slightly-better-than-normal upper end to my hearing. Often, I would hear CRTs whining that no one else did. I vividly remember when I realized it. One day in class we were watching a tape and the TV was whining the entire time. After the tape was over, the teacher started talking about what we'd seen, but didn't turn the TV off. I asked him to, because the s…

I can also hear a CRT on anywhere in a house/office. One of the best things about the transition to flat screens is that the annoying high-pitched whine that accompanied CRTs has gone away. Now I only hear mode scanning/input skipping flat screens. At the same time, i do feel like I've lost a bit of a super power.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#276
post #172
post #82

This reminds me of a “bug” I found when working for a company that sells package lockers to apartment buildings. We used iPads for the user interface and had monitoring in place to alert us if an iPad went offline. At only one location with two iPads one would go offline almost every day (but not every day) between 12pm and 1pm, for 10-20 minutes. Never the same time of day, and never the same length of time. It was…

Ha! Many years ago I had an optical mouse that would act erratically in the afternoons (just wouldn't register movement). It seemed to be ok if I squeezed it while I was using it so I figured it was a connection somewhere. Eventually I realised that it was the afternoon sun streaming in through the plastic seam and somehow stopping the sensor.

Reminds me of a wireless mouse I had that would intermittently become stuttery, but would usually fix itself whilst I tried to troubleshoot. I eventually realised that my laptop was between the mouse and its receiver, and any higher than normal utilisation of WiFi would interrupt the signal. Moving the receiver to the other side of the laptop completely resolved the issue.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making sauce or heating up a muffin, I guess? Or frozen blueberries, but why would anyone buy frozen blueberries.

> Or frozen blueberries, but why would anyone buy frozen blueberries. Because they are available and inexpensive year-round, and they defrost well and are good in many applications. Outside of the peak of local season, its the best way to buy blueberries.

[deleted]

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#278

I posted this before in the "My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays" discussion [1], but it's worth repeating: I heard a story about a terminal in a public terminal room that a user was able to consistently log in to if they were sitting down in a chair in front if the terminal, but never if they were standing up. They thought it might be static electricity, or some mechanical problem, or…

I used to have a work computer that would get a bsod when someone other then myself logged in. I took a knife and scraped all the letters off the keyboard. It solved my problem in the sense that no one else tried logging on to my system.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#279
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it just me who'd love something like this to happen to me? I love reading about interesting problems and creative ways to solve them. I used to wish for the same. But then I was given a super annoying one. In my apartment I heard this beep about once every 90 seconds or so. I tried ignoring it for a while hoping it'd go away. And just so at the right frequency and infrequent enough Impossible to determine direct…

I might be mildly evil, but I have deliberately caused a situation like this once in my life. I lived in an apartment with someone above and below me. At some point a woman moved in above me and my gf, paying way more than I did (par for the course in SF at the time). She was a super bitchy lawyer, and pretty shortly we started getting complaints that we were making too much noise at night. Keep in mind she was above…

This is some brilliantly satisfying pure evil.

Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

#280

I guess this could be fun depending on how much you liked your neighbors. I had something like this happen once that was interesting. We had recently got a Simple Human automatic soap dispenser and had it sitting in the kitchen by the sink. I was bored and started playing with a small RC helicopter and kept hearing a weird noise but didn't know where it was coming from. For whatever reason, every time I would throttl…

Was it one of those cheap RC helicopters that uses IR for control and the IR blaster on the remote was triggering some kind of IR sensor on the soap dispenser that is normally trigger by a nearby hand?
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