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Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

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Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#41
post #3

In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down. Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it. But I wouldn't know where to…

"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur."

- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#42
post #30

My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.

I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood

Concrete is more expensive to build with than wood, and many "apartment buildings" are built with a target towards "minimum possible build cost".

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#43
post #3

In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down. Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it. But I wouldn't know where to…

People who smoke on the balconies of multi-unit buildings are awful people. It’d be a beautiful day but I can’t keep my windows open because there’s always somebody smoking to make my unit smell disgusting if I just want to enjoy a cool breeze going through.

Thank goodness smoking is becoming rarer here and is no banned pretty much everywhere indoors and near entrances.

I don’t mind if people have a vice (I’ve got mine) but keep me out of it.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#45
> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.

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.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#47
Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.

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.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#50

I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone! 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 ultim…

TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.

Unless you manage to aim a strong IR blaster at their window/the ceiling behind it.
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