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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

#291

Post by AndrewStephens »

diggum wrote: post #255

Shortly after a big upgrade to the application I worked on, we started to get bug reports on our forum about a pretty ugly bug where a modal window would get “stuck” after clicking OK. The window would no longer respond to users but the application would act as if it were still up, and the only way out was to kill the process and lose all the unsaved work. Understandably, the complaints got louder and angrier as no o…

I was a junior developer on a heavily used utility that was frequently pirated. The company tried a few strategies to deal with this but one of the best was incredibly sneaky.

This was before validating license keys over the internet was really possible so a lot of people just used our application with a key from a public cracking site. Of course, we also knew about this list of cracked keys and our application would pretend to accept them. But if you actually tried to use the application, it would appear to be doing something for several minutes but fail with a mysterious error inviting the user to submit a log file to support.

Of course, the log file was secretly marked to indicate that it had come from a pirated copy and the customer would get a polite call from the sales team.

It worked out pretty well, a lot of customers didn't know they were using pirated software (or so they claimed; somewhat plausible given the nature of the utility) and were happy to pay and the sales team got a lot of solid leads. Evil vanquished, good prevailed, and I got paid.

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

#292

Post by srett »

Pharylon wrote: post #257
__david__ wrote: post #225

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 could hear that too! Actually nowadays I hear it all the time because I have a tinnitus that is pretty close to that frequency. :-/

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

#293

Post by testvox »

Pharylon wrote: post #257
__david__ wrote: post #225

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…

Me too! I remember being able to predict that we were going to watch a movie in class because I could hear the CRT whine from the hallways before I even walked into the room.

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

#294

Post by gasbag »

dawnerd wrote: post #98
bshep wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house has 6 fire alarms, when they beep there is NO way to tell which one it is making the noise 2/2 the combination of short beep and irregular beeping interval. My solution is to just change all the batteries at once so i dont have to guess (and if you guess wrong you then you wont sleep tomorrow because of the beeping) I wish there was some visual indicator to tell which one was faulty.

I believe they all beep because they want you to replace all the batteries. I had this happen a few months ago except it wasn't a low battery alarm. It kept yelling "FIRE FIRE" but then turning off. Of course FirstAlert apparently doesn't indicate which alarm is causing it. They say the initiating one flashes a different pattern but I didn't find one. Ended up, after getting no sleep at all, replacing all 9 of them w…

Aren't Nest Protect alarms also linked? This harrowing video leads me to believe they are. It's a couple years old at this point though. (Turn your sound down, video is a poor soul trying to deactivate them.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY

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

#295

Post by roryisok »

roryisok wrote: post #287
roryisok wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here! I remember waiting for a lift where my friends mother worked, a car rental place. I told her I could hear a TV on somewhere, and she insisted there was no TV nearby. I persisted, it was driving me nuts. Finally, she remembered the cupboard above our heads had a TV in it. She opened the cupboard, and low and behold, it was on, on mute. I felt like I belonged in the X-Men.

Lo and behold, oops

Downvoted for correcting my own mistake??

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

#296

Post by mark-r »

remyp wrote: 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…

Reminds me of a story an old coworker told me. He was working as a repair tech back in the days when computers had tape drives. He was called out to a military base where they had just moved their computer one floor up, because the tape drive kept glitching. It would start up fine but then error out some seconds later, seemingly at random. After staring at this for quite some time he finally decided to stretch his legs and wander to the window. And what did he see, but a radar antenna rotating around. The glitches happened every time the antenna was pointed in his direction. On the lower floor it was out of the beam so there wasn't any problem.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

jasonmp85 wrote: post #283
drawnwren wrote: post #171

I drive a modified car, this is obviously the glass break sensors in the house. My car sets the sensors of other aftermarket car alarms off as I drive around because of the exhaust frequency. I imagine the same thing is happening here.

I didn't realize anyone would actually admit to driving such a public nuisance.

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by drawnwren »

jasonmp85 wrote: post #283
drawnwren wrote: post #171

I drive a modified car, this is obviously the glass break sensors in the house. My car sets the sensors of other aftermarket car alarms off as I drive around because of the exhaust frequency. I imagine the same thing is happening here.

I didn't realize anyone would actually admit to driving such a public nuisance.

Not only are you being rude, you're providing no value to the conversation.

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

#299

Post by kalleboo »

digi_owl wrote: post #160
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing car manufacturers have caught onto this. I drove a year 2000 car whose speakers would know I was about to receive a text/call several seconds before receiving it. I don’t think I’ve been in a model later than 2008 that’s had this problem. The noise, like the AOL dialup modem beeps, are one of those things that become cemented in your brain and immediately recall themselves as soon as you think about them…

That, and possibly that newer networks work on different frequencies.

It's not that they use different frequencies (in a lot of places, they've actually recycled GSM frequencies for increased LTE bandwidth) but that they use a different form of modulation (than TDMA) that doesn't cause the same interference

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

#300

Post by astura »

vxNsr wrote: post #265
AndrewHampton wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a story one of my college professors told about the days when he helped automate factories in the 80s. Every night, the control server hey installed would go offline around 1am then come back up a few minutes later. It was never the exact same time or duration. After a few days of diving through the code with no progress, one of his co-workers decided to stay up all night at the factory and just wa…

There's a lot of permutations of this story including life support systems in hospitals I find them all apocryphal. The cleaning staff would notice right away if they just shut down a huge computer. Esp. in the 80s I doubt it even used the same outlet as a regular vacuum cleaner.

Correct, this is just an old urban legend

https://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/cleaner.asp

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