In the early 2010s some flagship Android phones came with IR blasters built-in. You could turn off any TV anywhere, simply by pulling out your phone.
I miss the days when smartphones were fun.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Chaotic Good
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You can still get Androids with them. My phone has one. Only a year or two old.
I would but I made the mistake of giving a foldable a try (got myself a used Samsung Fold 4 for $400). I got too used to having a tablet in my pocket and now I can't go back.
Problem is that foldables are still niche and a fold with an IR blaster is even more niche. Doubt that any exist but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Apparently my honour V3 fold has one. Have yet to try it though
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There’s no reason we can’t make IR stuff a phone accessory. Let’s make a flipper zero phone accessory. Control it with a webUI so that Apple and Google can’t block companion apps by claiming “oh noes, teh Hakurz”
I pissed off so many people with this. 14 year old me had a lot of fun.
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The middle school that I went to had a ~14" crt tv hanging from a sturdy ceiling mount in every classroom.
Displayed things like school bulletins and daily morning announcements, there was a couple educational channels, and a vcr input. Every now and again there'd be some sort of presentation instead of hauling everyone into the gym for a school assembly.
Anyway; it didn't take me very long to figure out the universal remote that came with the satellite receiver at home could be programmed to the school TVs. I'd mess with the one in class, or skip classes and mess with the ones in my friends classrooms through the windows; cranking up the volume and blasting Bill Nye or the announcement channels awful elevator music. Weekends, I'd do a lap of the school turning on all the TVs I could reach from outside and maxing the volume for whoever opens on Monday, or just turning them off again so it blares at whoever turns it on next.
You fucking menace. I love the chaotic energy lol. You pull any more stunts like that one?
Stick a piece of tape on the bottom of laser mice. It stops them from being able to detect motion.
Screenshot your buddies desktop, then save that image to the desktop. Set it as the desktop background. Now right click, select "view" i think, and click "show desktop icons". In theory, nothing should noticably change. But now you can no longer actually click on the icons on the desktop. To take it further, open task manager. Find "explorer.exe" and kill it. Now, you cant even right click to reshow desktop icons.
Easy fix to that is to reboot the computer, but you can also just reopen task manager, start a new process "explorer.exe", and then reshow desktop icons.
You can find a website that has fake versions of windows update screens. Load one of those, hit f11 to fullscreen your page, and enjoy as your friend waits for three hours at a bar that has only gone up 2%.
Open task scheduler. Add a new task. Set it to run every day at like 2 pm. Have it set volume to 3/4, then open firefox with the extra command "https://www.youtube.com/watch/dQw...." and you will have a great time.
For a more malicious prank, get a syringe. Fill it with raw egg. Inject this into the seats of some assholes car. Within two days, their car is not able to be sat in without the windows down, and even then it is horrible. They cannot figure out where the smell is coming from, and even if they do, they have to replace the seat. Optionally you can just throw a dead fish into their gutter, they wont find it for a couple days at least, and it will permanantly make their entire yard smell.
The egg one... My god.. Remind me not to piss you off
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Flipper Zero ftw
Really expensive for the use case.
I considered it recently but then the flipper zero community was like "Spend $15 bucks for a universal remote man."
haha im in the middle of switching careers into IT/CS and I figured it would be a good investment for the future or at least to tinker with. I've just had to focus on other things for certs I need, so no time to really dive into it.
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I really need to get one.
I'd wait a bit. The flipper one is announced.
Citation needed. All I can find are YouTube videos from random accounts that aren't Flipper Devices. Nothing in writing and especially not from the company.
Apparently it was announced but later removed from their website. See this article
That article is over a year old and was itself referring to events a year before that.
If I am to believe this youtuber, the flipper zero creator shared info with him on the flipper one. I know, it's thin, but it's also not a hoax imo. It's just impossible to guess where the development currently is.
And I need to learn to use mine better. All I got is a couple of neat magic tricks like turning off TVs or scanning people's cats lol
Just been too busy learning other things lately I guess
scanning people's cats
... Pardon?
haha some people have their pets microchipped so they can be scanned and returned to the owner if lost. If you run the flipper over the right spot (and in the right mode), generally between the shoulder blades, it'll tell you if they're chipped and read out some of the data.
if chip == True:
print("is cat")
else:
print("might not be cat")
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In fact you can use your smartphone to change the channel on nearly any TV. In the comments on that post some people talk about how to do it. Basically you need a smartphone with either builtin IR or use a USB
I don't think have seen phone with built in IR in a decade.
I saw a video on a new budget phone recently that had IR. I think only the Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Vivo, and OnePlus are the ones carrying the torch at this point... But not even on all phones they release.
I carried around my old HTC One M7 in my laptop bag for YEARS after I had upgraded explicitly for the IR blaster. It's probably in there still right now in fact.
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Oppo is still including them
And Xiaomi, Oneplus R series.
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...isn't there a 3.5mm jack silencer you can buy? Searching now and I can't find it, but I could have sworn when I was in highschool (y'know, like 25 thousand years ago) you could order a bag of like 50 of them for like $10.
It was just a 3.5mm audio plug with matte black plastic cap on the end, so you'd plug it into a TV's headphone jack and some models of TVs would be permanently silenced until someone unplugged the cap, because it was sending its audio to the 'speakers' that were just plugged in. And once plugged in, it just looked like a screw cover cap - nothing protruding. But also didn't damage anything, so you couldn't get in any real trouble for doing it.
...am I just imagining shit? If anyone knows what I'm talking about and figure out the magic search terms to actually pull it up, please drop a link to a product that can be ordered.
Edit - for visibility, I posted this comment as its own thread over on Ask.
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I was at a hospital waiting room one night for an ex’s mother’s injury. I’m not family so I had to wait in the waiting room, which had Fox News blaring. They wouldn’t change it. I couldn’t change it. But I could unplug all the TVs.
Nurse ratchet did not like that one bit.
I sometimes (jokingly) wonder if Hospitals show Fox News to try to get repeat business, and I don't mean repeat business due to people who enjoy Fox coming back, I mean due to health complications caused by the stress of watching it.
Watching fox news does not cause you stress. It causes stress for all the people around you.
My grandpa got a dose of fox news for a while, and it took a long conversation to convince him that there is not a county in Michigan that is more that 50% Somali immigrants.
I think it depends on the person how they react.
These are some interesting articles: https://mhanational.org/resources/negative-news-coverage-and-mental-health/
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Wait, what happened in April and has changed again since?
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
If you work someplace with public-facing tv's, the weather channel is a fucking godsend. If it's on a news station, entitled boomers will want it on their news station. If it's on weather, well, it's just the weather.
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This is the second best thing I do with my Flipper Zero after reading pet RFID chips
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Instead of the TV-B-Gone, there should be a TV-1-Channel-Up device that just changes the channel. If the TV in the doctor's office turns off, it will get noticed by the reception desk and probably be turned back on in a few minutes. If the TV is on a different channel, the desk is much less likely to notice any time soon (at least not before you've been called back into the exam room).
TVs at my local doctors office took the prescription commercials to a new level and now just run an ad feed all day.
Samsung Android phones use to include an IR blaster. I use to install a universal remote app on my phone and change the channels anywhere Fox News was on and nobody could tell because nobody suspected the smart phone.
my universal remote ✂️
I use the kit-built one of these: https://www.tvbgone.com/shop/ -- They gave a bunch of them away at the end of a makefaire I was a part of years ago.
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