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Using Your Computer to Repel Pests
circletimessquare writes "A Thai guy wrote a program that uses your computer speaker to repel mosquitoes, cockroaches, and rats! Just when you thought you heard it all before (pun intended for no good reason). " Thats nothing- CowboyNeal can
repel all known lifeforms just by playing his massive collection of boy band
MP3s.
Just a thought.
I hate cleaning up all those broken dishes every morning.
Table-ized A.I.
The software program they talk about can be found on (an almost all Thai) web site here.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Cockroaches, Blood Suckers, and Rats!?!
Better not fire up that baby in congress!
Yeah, I know it's lame, but this is funnier.
tcd004
If this thing can repel them, I wonder if they have something that could be used to attract them somewhere else.
As most geeks probably realize, it's generally much easier to repel a given organism than it is to attract it.
That would make a nifty virus. When it infects a computer, it plays sound through the speakers to attract all sorts of critters. Since the victim can't hear it, they'll never know why.
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
We can do it in the polls, but you, his boss -- no fair! Man, if I were CowboyNeal, I'd be thinking of talking to the Labor Commissioner about workplace harassment.
Infuriate left and right
If I scared rats away then who would power my computer?
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
According to a colleague at Rutgers: .... Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that electronic mosquito repellers do not prevent host seeking mosquitoes from biting. In most cases, the claims made by distributors border on fraud.
Hand-held electronic devices that rely on high-frequency sound to repel mosquitoes have become surprisingly popular in recent years
While your downloading this software, if you buy a NYC landmark from me, I'll throw in a set of Mr. Chiu's immortality rings at no extra charge!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
It's not so much that they're designed to emit sounds humans can't hear, as it is that they can't really be designed *NOT* to emit sounds humans can't hear.
No matter what you do, you're going to be producing harmonics that may well lie outside the human range of hearing, and what with materials being imperfect, you could never perfectly limit the sound emissions to the normal human-audible range no matter how hard you tried. Even if you wanted to (and why?), there'd be the small matter of cost-effectiveness.
Paying an extra $500 per speaker just so your dog doesn't get to hear something you can't isn't really a good investment.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
In my house, which was overrun by mice when they demolished a run-down building beside us. Dozens of mice, everywhere. The device produces little high frequency clicks that drives mice totally crazy. They just love it! All the mice descended on my kitchen, where I put the thing, and ate my cat's food. The cat just watched. Finally I had to poison them with old editions of MSDN, which they chew and swallow but cannot digest. They explode in little blue puffs.
Cockroaches and mosquitos are less common here in Belgium, where I'm writing from, but tomorrow I'm going to download Punyaratanabunbhu's (that's Puny for short) Anti-Mal and try it on the cat.
This has to be one of the weirdest uses for old PCs that I can imagine, following my neighbour, who gave an old laptop (no HD, no battery) to his kids as a toy. It really hurt to see them drop it and squeal with joy.
My blog
Such a trick may only work for so long. Eventually bugs and pests will evolve a tolerance to it. Being that bugs reproduce pretty quickly, it may only take a few years before it is ineffective I would guess.
That's the joy of a software solution -- it can keep up with evolution.
Download Bug Repellant 2004 - now combats Roach 1.1 and Ant 2.0
(FWIW, products like these have been out for some time and still seem to work effectivly. They're *repellants*, not killers. The only place a large-than normal tolerance would develop and grow/multiply is among roaches that decided to live within the range of the repellant.)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
As a PhD student in animal behavior, stories like this really irk me.
Although bats do emit ultrasound, only a few species of moths (the Noctuid moths) actually have the capacity to hear and respond to bat calls. They typically fold in their wings and just fall to the ground.
Mosquitos have no such hearing capacity. Repeated studies by scientists and the FTC have demonstrated that the ultrasonic mosquito repellant systems fail to work as promised. Those devices, and the program described above, may be fun to tinker with, but they cannot help you.
Don't give them a reason to get near you in the first place! Take a bath every day--it's a great excuse to get away from your computer for a while (and I promise that a little soap won't hurt you). That, and why not take a minute to clean up all the soda cans and pizza boxes lying around your desk/room/office. Unless you work outside, live in a dorm, or some other run-down dwelling, I don't see why you would need to repel anything in the first place. If you are attracting rodents, maybe you need to get a little better with the personal hygiene.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Mosquitos have no such hearing capacity
A simple Google search found this at Earthlife.net: Sound is very important to mosquitos for a number of reasons one of these is the location of mates. The antennae of male mosquitoes are sensitive to the sounds created by the beating wings of females of the same species. Because females are usually larger than the males, the wings of males and females beat at different frequencies. This makes it possible for males to distinguish females from males based on the sound of the beating wings and helps in the detection of females of the right species
So they do hear high sounds (and probably very faint sounds, too), though there is no mention of them actually recognizing their enemies from sound. There are lots of those electronic gadgets available, though.
- FF
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
First, clean your kitchen and bathroom with a bleach-based cleaner (Soft Scrub) -- this will erase scent trails. Put all food in plastic bags or the fridge and be sure there isn't any water left in the sink.
Next, follow them to estalish their points of entry and spackle them up if possible.
Now, remove all pets/young children from the house and use the RAID ant killer. Spray it into any crevices you couldn't spackle. Kill 'em all.
Finally, douse your home with liberal amounts of gasoline and light the place on fire. If you have connections with Air Guard personnel, convince them to check out an A6 and perform a follow-up napalm strike.
Of course, this will only stop the ants for a while, but should still be a much-welcome reprieve from the things.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
use gdb to get rid of bugs.
In Borland compilers, there was an example in the online help demonstrating proper usage of the sound() function... There's a brief description here. And yes, this was really in the help files :)
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I guess because the software effectively repels bugs.
badum-tshh. Thanks! I'll be here all week, tip your waitresses.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's been done. My code has been attracting bugs for years.
managers...why god invented purgatory
I played the sounds backward and all the pests came back.
Table-ized A.I.
If this thing can repel them, I wonder if they have something that could be used to attract them somewhere else.
As most geeks probably realize, it's generally much easier to repel a given organism than it is to attract it.
Except if that organism happens to be at the other end of the tech support phone line, asking where the "any" key is in Linux.
*Bashes forehead on keyboard*
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Hey since this thing repels bugs, I think MS should license this technology and make it part of their OS, and we would get a bug-free system, wouldn't we?
Gives whole new meaning to "RAID array"
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
i've used my computer to repel women for years...
Free Webmail
So does this mean if your speakers emit the wrong frequency, instead of repeling those bastards, you will get hundreds mosquitos trying to hump your speakers?
Mini-Me, stop humping the laser. Why don't you and the frickin laser get a room.
I created a "testuser", chmod a+rw /dev/dsp* and ran the thing. It seems like it's doing absolutely nothing. Though I'm curious was the experts can say about the strace
Makes you wonder what the Windows version does. Too bad. I could use a working solution :(
Does it only work on mosquitos and roaches, or will it debug your software as well?