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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

#231

Post by lsaferite »

__david__ wrote: post #225
smlacy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Oh man... I had totally forgotten that sound until you mentioned it.

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

#232

Post by theandrewbailey »

patkai wrote: post #12

Is there a way to vote this as the funniest HN submission of the year? I started laughing and when I thought "what will happen when the vague concept of the Internet-of-Things becomes a reality" I can't stop. I always loved Subarus, but now I want one.

I don't think there's a funniest submission competition, but I marked it as a favorite.

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

#233

Post by dragonwriter »

Anderkent wrote: post #84
mizzao wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone microwave blueberries?

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.

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

#234

Post by hiharryhere »

stevekemp wrote: post #147
chrissnell wrote: post #124

When 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…

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 remember seeing a really old pneumatic remote for a TV a long time ago.

It was basically a rubber squeeze pump (just like on a blood pressure machine) and a rubber tube connected to the tv. When you squeezed the pump, the pressure in the tube would click the dial forward one notch.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by lb1lf »

ptaipale wrote: post #191
chrissnell wrote: post #124

When 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…

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…

I (accidentally!) had the misfortune of torturing the cat in the apartment directly above mine, many moons ago.

I had built myself a simple modem for packet radio (ham radio; very slow modem for use on shortwave bands), and wanted to test it. However, I was at home, and at the time I used either the HF station I had installed at my office in the university or the one at the radio club down the hill.

Heck, I'd only try some local comms, anyway. I got an old transmitter out of a cabinet and strung up a dipole antenna under the ceiling in the living room. I tied one end to the curtain rack either end of the room, called the radio club, agreed on a frequency, and off I went.

When I keyed the transmitter, I could hear a commotion starting upstairs. It died down, and I didn't think more of it. After a while, new commotion.

Next day, I met the occupant of the apartment above at the mailboxes; she said her cat had acted up last night - running around the living room like it had the devil on its back.

Turned out it had a metal collar, and loved to snooze on the floor right under the window, as the radiator on the wall below the window made it real warm and cozy there.

When I keyed the transmitter, I basically had a very high RF voltage at the end of the antenna - and the cat, whose collar was a mere few centimeters away, got enough of a current induced in it for the cat to go ballistic. Poor thing.

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

#238

Post by justjash »

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 throttle up on the controller it would trigger the the dispenser to dispense soap as if someone had stuck their hand under the sensor. I ended up finding a large puddle of soap in the sink and then it clicked as to what the noise was.

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

#239

Post by macintux »

bshep wrote: post #91
tfha wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a fire alarm going off due to low battery once. We searched the house for 3 hours trying to find it. Gave up, slept through the beeping. Next day, enraged, we tried again. Eventually we found it in the bathroom trash can.

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.

That reminded me of an iOS quirk that thankfully has since been resolved.

A few years ago I used "Find my iPhone" to chase down my phone in the house, buried under some pile or another. Unfortunately I had earlier been using AirPlay to play music through remote speakers, so of course the emergency tone played through the speakers, not the device.

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