Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.
Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.
I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.
I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.
I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window.
That was the end of nuisance.
Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
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.
"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."
No smokers in my neighborhood, but people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings and often during the day. Not sure how to train them. And unfortunately, there are too many. Burning wood should be forbidden in residential areas. It’s similar to smoking in restaurants, except you can’t escape them.
If you want "fresh air", why do you live near other people? Especially an entire neighborhood full of people who burn things, if you hate smoke. You can't have everything exactly how you please.
Nothing worse than a busybody neighbor who thinks he owns the patent on how to live in a neighborhood.
I live way out in the country exactly so I can live how I choose without some judgmental ass breathing down my neck. Maybe you should do the same to escape the terrible, obnoxious smell of burning wood.
I'm sure there's weed smokers in the neighborhood causing you serious quality of life problems too. Escape while you still can!
Good neighborhood = keep your emissions low. Be it sound, light, or smell. These rules apply to almost all public places. If you want to be loud, burn shit or have floodlights, move to a place outside of the city.
I had this problem ... a smoker who would religiously sit on their patio and smoke so much that it would smoke us out of our house.
After speaking with them didn't help ... my next response was to religiously water the garden at the same time with my jet spray ...
I have amusing videos (from our CCTV) of our neighbour regularly diving for cover from an "accidental" spray of water.
"Sorry. I'm just watering our plants, sorry about that".
I wish I could say this solved it ... but the subtlety of the point that their smoking was impacting the enjoyment of our home, in the same way as my water spray was impacting his enjoyment of his garden was lost on them ...
We eventually settled it the old fashioned way. Not with pistols or swords ... but an old-fashioned chat after reporting them to the local council.
Luckily the problem is resolved ... but largely due to the threat of the Council taking action against their landlord.
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.
Smoking tobacco got rarer here, but smoking marijuana has gotten much more common. I don't know if it's just that I grew up with tobacco, but the skunk-like smell of marijuana bothers me a lot more.
I'm smoking a corncob pipe full at the moment. I smoke weed like this all day, every day. It's just what I do. Weed smells amazing to me; like incense. I'm loving it out here in the boondocks where I can be at peace and live how I choose with nobody's judgment to worry about.
By the way, the "health concerns" are complete bullshit, as are the supposed mental deficits among frequent smokers. It's all lies. My lungs, mind, body, and spirit are in exceptionally good condition.
As for mental health, read back through my posts; do these sound like the rantings of a moron? I smoke enough weed in an average hour to put most people in a coma. Far from being harmed, I've benefitted greatly from the Sacred Herb, as do so many others.
I'm agnostic as to the harms vs. benefits of smoking marijuana, it's the smell that bothers me. I personally love the smell of frankincense, but I would understand if my neighbors objected to me burning it regularly.
Inhaling any particulate seems like a pretty bad idea. I knew a Jamaican guy who thought people were silly for smoking it and said tea was the best. I have no opinion, not my vice of choice.
The problem with tobacco isn't the tobacco itself per se, it's all the adulterants.
Same problem with food, and everything else. There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example--there is only glyphosate intolerance. (RoundUp, a toxic poison that is banned in civilized countries.)
That said, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor--quite literally a poison. In combination with the adulterants and with frequent use it's ultimately harmful.
THC and other cannabinoids are however vasodilators. They enhance blood flow and are antimicrobial, antifungal chemicals which are sort of like ammunition and messengers for the body's immune system and healing mechanisms.
My lungs are perfectly healthy. Want to challenge me to a sprint, or to a marathon? Let's go, right now. Think you can outwork me in the middle of an Alabama summer? Guess again. I will be throwing hay long after you've expired.
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example
[citation needed].
I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which presented at the age of 3 comorbidly.
If I ingest gliadin, my immune cells take the gliadin, run a nice little check on it, and then raise holy hell and destroy my gut villae.
If I come into contact with wheat, I get a histamine response. Even a bag of (organic, locally produced) wheat flour opened in the same room as me used to be enough to make my airways close up.
It makes me a little sad to see a lot of peoples comments here about how they're annoyed by xyz thing someone does that doesn't stop at there fence line or unit. So many are being downvoted.
They are not "awful people". You chose to live in a multi-unit apartment building with balconies close to windows, where so many neighbours smoke on the balconies that there is _always_ someone smoking close enough to make your apartment smell disgusting, then you judge them all as if they knew how much gets into your home and how sensitive you are to it. Instead of proposing an hourly half hour no smoke compromise on the next meeting of the building's co-owners, you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives. They live in a city and can't "just quit". That doesn't make them awful people.
Tbh, I'd rather live with most of them than with you. Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
> Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
They’re more pleasant to coexist with because they let their smoke drift into my home instead of their own? What? They’re just externalizing the negatives of their own vice.
Yeah, it's a bit worrying that some people don't seem to understand that just because you enjoy smoking, doesn't mean the rest of the units downstream of you want to breath it in too.
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
My neighbor is smoking on the balcony, and smoke goes to my home with little kids. I talked with him several times, didn't help. It's his territory, so not much I can do, besides closing the doors. But at least i can use this fake smoke detector with VERY ANNOYING random buzzer. It starts buzzing when i connect to it my iPhone via BLE. Makes it not as relaxing to smoke on the balcony as it planned to be for him. I'm going to train this mofo with reinforcement learning like a fkn Pavlov Dog.
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping soind insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
He might have, and my experience is that you cannot teach inconsiderate people, they lack social object permanence: as soon as you don't stand in front of them, they become unaware of your existence and thus are also unaware that their music at two in the morning might be annoying to you.
Better windows don't help either - but they're great for noise outside. The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors.
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 ultimate power over the wireless noise in my immediate vicinity - awesome .. but seeing someone empty their pockets at the airport and a Flipper Zero in the inspection box - not so fun.
It’s going to be a wild and woolly future, the more these kinds of shenanigans become relevant.
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote.
As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief!
The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to come downstairs to the tv turned on, blaring full volume and on channel 99 (static). This continued for a while until I realized that my father, who is HAM operator, and an early riser, would somehow be injecting into the remote sensor on certain frequencies occasionally. Needless to say it was thusly unplugged afterwards!
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
As a side note, intentionally jamming or interfering with other peoples signals can carry up to a $1m fine and several years in prison. =3
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.
One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.
I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
For a passive read-only device (like most satellite/cable receivers 20 years ago), it was probably more important to allow customers to easily replace their lost remotes than it was to prevent pranksters (who could often be dissuaded by more physical means).
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.
Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Since there are people from all countries here, the answer to your question depends a lot on who you ask. I don't think even the specific word you used is relevant in all parts of the world.
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.
Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
Something I've seen with renovations is construction companies not understanding how to attenuate sound, and not bothering to learn or, even better, consult someone who knows.
Well meaning PMs read up on products and throw them at the problem and it's treated as a great success because there are no hard targets, just a general desire to reduce noise, and that happened.
Ironically it was quiet enough in our previous apartment, but moving to a house we now have the neighbor using their awfully loud snow-spitting machine before 6AM after snowy nights... (And it snows a lot)
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
A quick google suggests that British Columbia's building code only requires STC 50 which is "you can hear but not understand a neighbor's loud conversation" levels of isolation. Though maybe your city has stricter requirements?
Majority construction anywhere is whatever can be built with the least cost.
In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.
I assume they meant “five-over-one”, five floors of stick built (framed with dimensional lumber, not timber) apartments on top of a concrete and steel first floor.
Timber framing is something else entirely, you can construct buildings taller than six stories with engineered wood products.
> The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood-frame stories above a concrete podium, usually for retail or resident amenity space.
A bit higher possibly, but from firsthand experience let me tell you it's not enough by far. Effective noise isolation does not magically arise from used materials, it has to be planned and included in the building project. And it makes the building more expensive.
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.
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
Embellished, maybe, but parts of it ring true. I know from bitter experience that confronting a neighbour about noise rarely works. They can often be drunk or aggressive.
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.
Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.
I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.
Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.
I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.
I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.
I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.
But yeah, I’ll try to pay attention to it”
Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?
In the vicinity of obscenity?
But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?
Usually people who are that inconsiderate don’t change. Or they quickly change and then quickly change back.
This post and your comment has me thinking about STFU, posted here a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649142
Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.
From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window. That was the end of nuisance. Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
did you not read the last line of the post?
No, but he will pay more attention next time.
Bazinga
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 start. :-\
"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
What about a really loud fire alarm outside your house, that goes off whenever it detects even a slight amount of smoke?
No smokers in my neighborhood, but people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings and often during the day. Not sure how to train them. And unfortunately, there are too many. Burning wood should be forbidden in residential areas. It’s similar to smoking in restaurants, except you can’t escape them.
If you want "fresh air", why do you live near other people? Especially an entire neighborhood full of people who burn things, if you hate smoke. You can't have everything exactly how you please.
Nothing worse than a busybody neighbor who thinks he owns the patent on how to live in a neighborhood.
I live way out in the country exactly so I can live how I choose without some judgmental ass breathing down my neck. Maybe you should do the same to escape the terrible, obnoxious smell of burning wood.
I'm sure there's weed smokers in the neighborhood causing you serious quality of life problems too. Escape while you still can!
Good neighborhood = keep your emissions low. Be it sound, light, or smell. These rules apply to almost all public places. If you want to be loud, burn shit or have floodlights, move to a place outside of the city.
> move to a place outside of the city
Now there's an idea I can get behind. Best move I ever made. City living and I just don't mix.
Five miles from pavement, and my air quality is perfect 365 days per year.
I hear some gunshots during hunting season, echoing across the valley, but they'd be drowned out by the frogs singing--they're way louder.
Wait until these guys start telling you you don't need a truck.
I had this problem ... a smoker who would religiously sit on their patio and smoke so much that it would smoke us out of our house.
After speaking with them didn't help ... my next response was to religiously water the garden at the same time with my jet spray ...
I have amusing videos (from our CCTV) of our neighbour regularly diving for cover from an "accidental" spray of water.
"Sorry. I'm just watering our plants, sorry about that".
I wish I could say this solved it ... but the subtlety of the point that their smoking was impacting the enjoyment of our home, in the same way as my water spray was impacting his enjoyment of his garden was lost on them ...
We eventually settled it the old fashioned way. Not with pistols or swords ... but an old-fashioned chat after reporting them to the local council.
Luckily the problem is resolved ... but largely due to the threat of the Council taking action against their landlord.
The only solution is leverage ...
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.
Smoking tobacco got rarer here, but smoking marijuana has gotten much more common. I don't know if it's just that I grew up with tobacco, but the skunk-like smell of marijuana bothers me a lot more.
I didn’t even mention tobacco specifically because it’s the same either way.
I'm smoking a corncob pipe full at the moment. I smoke weed like this all day, every day. It's just what I do. Weed smells amazing to me; like incense. I'm loving it out here in the boondocks where I can be at peace and live how I choose with nobody's judgment to worry about.
By the way, the "health concerns" are complete bullshit, as are the supposed mental deficits among frequent smokers. It's all lies. My lungs, mind, body, and spirit are in exceptionally good condition.
As for mental health, read back through my posts; do these sound like the rantings of a moron? I smoke enough weed in an average hour to put most people in a coma. Far from being harmed, I've benefitted greatly from the Sacred Herb, as do so many others.
I'm agnostic as to the harms vs. benefits of smoking marijuana, it's the smell that bothers me. I personally love the smell of frankincense, but I would understand if my neighbors objected to me burning it regularly.
Inhaling any particulate seems like a pretty bad idea. I knew a Jamaican guy who thought people were silly for smoking it and said tea was the best. I have no opinion, not my vice of choice.
The problem with tobacco isn't the tobacco itself per se, it's all the adulterants.
Same problem with food, and everything else. There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example--there is only glyphosate intolerance. (RoundUp, a toxic poison that is banned in civilized countries.)
That said, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor--quite literally a poison. In combination with the adulterants and with frequent use it's ultimately harmful.
THC and other cannabinoids are however vasodilators. They enhance blood flow and are antimicrobial, antifungal chemicals which are sort of like ammunition and messengers for the body's immune system and healing mechanisms.
My lungs are perfectly healthy. Want to challenge me to a sprint, or to a marathon? Let's go, right now. Think you can outwork me in the middle of an Alabama summer? Guess again. I will be throwing hay long after you've expired.
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example
[citation needed].
I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which presented at the age of 3 comorbidly.
If I ingest gliadin, my immune cells take the gliadin, run a nice little check on it, and then raise holy hell and destroy my gut villae.
If I come into contact with wheat, I get a histamine response. Even a bag of (organic, locally produced) wheat flour opened in the same room as me used to be enough to make my airways close up.
It makes me a little sad to see a lot of peoples comments here about how they're annoyed by xyz thing someone does that doesn't stop at there fence line or unit. So many are being downvoted.
They are not "awful people". You chose to live in a multi-unit apartment building with balconies close to windows, where so many neighbours smoke on the balconies that there is _always_ someone smoking close enough to make your apartment smell disgusting, then you judge them all as if they knew how much gets into your home and how sensitive you are to it. Instead of proposing an hourly half hour no smoke compromise on the next meeting of the building's co-owners, you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives. They live in a city and can't "just quit". That doesn't make them awful people.
Tbh, I'd rather live with most of them than with you. Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
> you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives
They're awful people because they are drug addicts who insist on making their unbearable smoke part of our lives too.
> Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
They’re more pleasant to coexist with because they let their smoke drift into my home instead of their own? What? They’re just externalizing the negatives of their own vice.
Yeah, it's a bit worrying that some people don't seem to understand that just because you enjoy smoking, doesn't mean the rest of the units downstream of you want to breath it in too.
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-channel_interference
One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.
Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.
This reminds me of this guy [1]
___________1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...
Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.
Sound pollution is very real baseline stressor.
I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping soind insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.
What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:
- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be
- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.
- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.
So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.
I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)
Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.
I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.
Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.
That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.
He might have, and my experience is that you cannot teach inconsiderate people, they lack social object permanence: as soon as you don't stand in front of them, they become unaware of your existence and thus are also unaware that their music at two in the morning might be annoying to you.
Better windows don't help either - but they're great for noise outside. The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors.
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 ultimate power over the wireless noise in my immediate vicinity - awesome .. but seeing someone empty their pockets at the airport and a Flipper Zero in the inspection box - not so fun.
It’s going to be a wild and woolly future, the more these kinds of shenanigans become relevant.
It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).
RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.
TV-B-Gone Kit:
https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit
TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.
A spark gap does pretty well. But the FCC fowns on such things.
Unless you manage to aim a strong IR blaster at their window/the ceiling behind it.
Indeed. It works with infrared light, the same way most TV remotes do.
Can you see their window?
Pick up a cheap CCTV infrared floodlight, gut it, and gate it with Ye Olde Bloody Great MOSFET driven by your TV-Be-Gone microcontroller.
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).
He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.
If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
I had a very similar story related to this as well.
For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote. As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief!
The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to come downstairs to the tv turned on, blaring full volume and on channel 99 (static). This continued for a while until I realized that my father, who is HAM operator, and an early riser, would somehow be injecting into the remote sensor on certain frequencies occasionally. Needless to say it was thusly unplugged afterwards!
RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.
As a side note, intentionally jamming or interfering with other peoples signals can carry up to a $1m fine and several years in prison. =3
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.
One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.
My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.
Third party app. Un-uninstallable
That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.
My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.
Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.
I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
Independent dongle, you don't need to plug it into your phone: https://www.tvbgone.com/
They do sell ir dongles for android but the reviews on amazon don't look great.
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great
In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.
I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.
And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
why would there be irda on server ?
With line of sight too?
Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.
Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.
It's a feature not a bug
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.
For a passive read-only device (like most satellite/cable receivers 20 years ago), it was probably more important to allow customers to easily replace their lost remotes than it was to prevent pranksters (who could often be dissuaded by more physical means).
Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.
The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.
But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.
Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.
That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.
I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.
I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.
I did this but with my absolutely crap interpretation of Van Halen's Eruption. It's so bad, I may be the only person who knows I'm trying to play an actual song but, hey, I get to practice tapping with my amp at full volume!
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULEBSxP725w
We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.
Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!
Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.
Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.
Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.
To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.
But there are devices out there that can be tuned to any frequency. Flipper and other clones could pull this feat for example.
Yeah, but you still need luck. In reality it will not work out e.g. because their setup uses an IR control. Reminds me of:
https://xkcd.com/538/
That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.
One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"
That's actually where I thought the article was heading
Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.
I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.
One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.
Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)
I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).
This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).
Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.
Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!
When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.
Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.
The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.
One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.
I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.
Ultrasound whistle?
Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel
loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
Genuine web 1 vibes.
Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"
Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.
Is this a felony?
Since there are people from all countries here, the answer to your question depends a lot on who you ask. I don't think even the specific word you used is relevant in all parts of the world.
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
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.
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.
There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.
Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
Something I've seen with renovations is construction companies not understanding how to attenuate sound, and not bothering to learn or, even better, consult someone who knows.
Well meaning PMs read up on products and throw them at the problem and it's treated as a great success because there are no hard targets, just a general desire to reduce noise, and that happened.
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
Ironically it was quiet enough in our previous apartment, but moving to a house we now have the neighbor using their awfully loud snow-spitting machine before 6AM after snowy nights... (And it snows a lot)
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.
Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.
One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.
Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
A quick google suggests that British Columbia's building code only requires STC 50 which is "you can hear but not understand a neighbor's loud conversation" levels of isolation. Though maybe your city has stricter requirements?
STC 50 is a common requirement in the US too.
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
Majority construction anywhere is whatever can be built with the least cost.
In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.
I'm pretty sure you meant something other than "buildings under about 6 feet".
I think they meant what they wrote, they just forgot some punctuation.
'timber framing (for buildings) under about 6 feet'
I assume they meant “five-over-one”, five floors of stick built (framed with dimensional lumber, not timber) apartments on top of a concrete and steel first floor.
Timber framing is something else entirely, you can construct buildings taller than six stories with engineered wood products.
> The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood-frame stories above a concrete podium, usually for retail or resident amenity space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
Concrete is more expensive to build with than wood, and many "apartment buildings" are built with a target towards "minimum possible build cost".
A bit higher possibly, but from firsthand experience let me tell you it's not enough by far. Effective noise isolation does not magically arise from used materials, it has to be planned and included in the building project. And it makes the building more expensive.
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
this just made my day, thank you.
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.
Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (
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.
Awesome ;).
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.
Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.
Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.
So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.
The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.
Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....
... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.
The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.
Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.
I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.
On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.
I know you’re downvoted but every time I read a story like this I get the feeling it’s mostly fiction.
Embellished, maybe, but parts of it ring true. I know from bitter experience that confronting a neighbour about noise rarely works. They can often be drunk or aggressive.
It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.