Added to my "Stories from the Internet" collection :) https://dbrgn.ch/stories-from-the-internet.html
Nice, I love reading about these things.
Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
201–210 of 316 posts
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
When working on plain old telephone system (POTS) multiplexers, I came up with the following story which a service engineer insisted was true: An elderly lady with several pets called the operator to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called; and that when it did ring, her dog usually barked first. The engineer went to investigate. He climbed a telephone pole next to the house, connected his test…
> OK, this story has a definite "urban legend" ring to it. Mythbusters wouldn't have tested it with a real dog, I guess. It would be easy enough to test without involving a dog. They've done plenty of electric-shock myths with ballistic gel dummies.
Fair enough, but they'd have to build a voltage-triggered barking device in the gelatin dummy to make it sufficiently life-like.
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when I was a child than my next door neighbour had a remote control on their TV, which was connected to the actual set via a 5m thin cable. I thought it was pretty cool that she could sit on her chair and change the channel & volume without getting up. I suspect that if a dog had been involved that cable would have quickly become a tangled mess! (I'm not sure how common "wired remotes" were, that was certa…
I only ever saw one wired remote to the best of my recollection. It was on an old Sony Beta tape deck my parents owned. (This is from the 80s as well.)
g͓̽o͓̽o͓̽g͓̽l͓̽e͓̽ p͓̽a͓̽y͓̽ 97$ p͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽ m͓̽y͓̽ l͓̽a͓̽s͓̽t͓̽ p͓̽a͓̽y͓̽ c͓̽h͓̽e͓̽c͓̽k͓̽ w͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ $8500 w͓̽o͓̽r͓̽k͓̽i͓̽n͓̽g͓̽ 1o͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽ w͓̽e͓̽e͓̽k͓̽ o͓̽n͓̽l͓̽i͓̽n͓̽e͓̽. m͓̽y͓̽ y͓̽o͓̽u͓̽n͓̽g͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ b͓̽r͓̽o͓̽t͓̽h͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ f͓̽r͓̽i͓̽e͓̽n͓̽d͓̽ h͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ b͓̽e͓̽e͓̽n͓̽ a͓̽v͓̽e͓̽r͓̽a͓̽g͓̽i͓̽n͓̽g͓̽ 12k͓̽ f͓̽o͓̽r͓̽ m͓̽o͓̽n͓̽t͓̽h͓̽s͓̽ n͓̽o͓̽w͓̽ a͓̽n͓̽d͓̽ h͓̽e͓̽ w͓̽o͓̽r͓̽k͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽b͓̽o͓̽u͓̽t͓̽ 22 h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽ w͓̽e͓̽e͓̽k͓̽. i͓̽ c͓̽a͓̽n͓̽t͓̽ b͓̽e͓̽l͓̽i͓̽e͓̽v͓̽e͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽w͓̽ e͓̽a͓̽s͓̽y͓̽ i͓̽t͓̽ w͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ o͓̽n͓̽c͓̽e͓̽ i͓̽ t͓̽r͓̽i͓̽e͓̽d͓̽ i͓̽t͓̽ o͓̽u͓̽t͓̽i͓̽t͓̽!.
ＡＭＡZＩＮＧ ＪＯＢＳ
°°°°°°http://ow.ly/pqaC30fgvnI
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That story is so incredibly far-fetched, and further comprised by the not-so-subtle product plugs liberally sprinkled at every turn.
It sounds like it was written or told by an engineering person and then mangled into this BusinessExecutive™-speak by some marketing person. And the story doesn't have that big a payoff to justify that either. All the plugging did was make me slightly annoyed and averse towards the brand and that bloody catchphrase.
The story has apparently been recounted and rewritten many times since at least the "June 1978 issue of Traffic Safety magazine".
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic to the discussion, but you hit on something that struck a nerve with me so I'm going to go with it . . . Oh good God, this happens to me every time one of my smoke alarm batteries starts to go. I have 6 smoke detectors and an older home where they're not all wired/battery back-up but rather all battery powered. The "chirp at 90 second interval" thing is the worst design in the universe and it bites me every…
The whole house hard wired smoke alarms are just SO FUN when they start to fail. The one that is failing immediately sets all of them off, but only once at 3AM every night for two weeks. So you get woken up by a brief ear piercing alarm from around the whole house and have no idea which one it is.
I had a battery powered one that randomly triggered in the small hours. I'm very sensitive to loud high-pitched sounds, so I woke up with a fright that must have aged me 20 years. Tore that thing off the ceiling, nearly pulling a chunk out with it. Landlord was very unhappy with me doing that, but it was right over my bed.
If I'd had a baseball bat or wooden sword, I'd have smashed that thing free like a piñata!
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic to the discussion, but you hit on something that struck a nerve with me so I'm going to go with it . . . Oh good God, this happens to me every time one of my smoke alarm batteries starts to go. I have 6 smoke detectors and an older home where they're not all wired/battery back-up but rather all battery powered. The "chirp at 90 second interval" thing is the worst design in the universe and it bites me every…
Vaguely related - I once met a parrot that had learned to imitate that exact chirp . Maddening.
Back when Facebook used a "pop" sound when you get a message, I was able to imitate it well enough to make my friends in the same room check their computer for messages!
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#207Reminds me of "story of a car that wouldn’t start every time its owner bought vanilla ice cream". http://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-to...
That story is so incredibly far-fetched, and further comprised by the not-so-subtle product plugs liberally sprinkled at every turn.
[deleted]
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#208Got 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.
Why would someone microwave blueberries?
To make them explode.
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#209I 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 "problem exists between keyboard and chair", but finally they noticed something else was amiss...
It turns out some joker had re-arranged the 1234567890 keys to be 0123456789, so when the user was standing up, they looked down at the keyboard and typed their password (which contained a digit, of course) by looking at the keys.
But when they were sitting down, they touch typed without looking at the keys, and got their password correct!
Re: Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse
#210When we were kids (dating myself here), my friend had a TV with a remote control back when almost nobody had a TV with a remote. You would push the channel-change button on it and the channel knob (!!!) on the TV would mechanically turn and the channel would change. Well, apparently, the remote used an almost-audible high frequency to signal a channel change and when his dog ran through the living room, the dog's tag…
We had one of these as well -- a fairly standard routine of TV after dinner before going to bed quickly taught the dog that the ultrasonic sound made by the "Off" command to the TV meant "everybody go upstairs and go to bed". You could actually just press that "off" button at any time, and the dog would look around and do that funny "Dog shrug" thing they do, and go upstairs and lie down, even if it was the middle of…
Fantastic story, thanks!! ;-)