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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.
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.
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...
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.
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 played the sounds backward and all the pests came back.
Table-ized A.I.
i've used my computer to repel women for years...
Free Webmail
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 :(