The Universal Off Button

jcr13 writes "Wired news is running a story about TV-B-Gone, a new weapon in the fight against the pervasiveness of television in our society. With this device, which takes the form of a keychain fob with a single button, you can turn off virtually any TV set. How does it work? By rolling through all known IR power-off codes, one by one, trying codes from the most popular brands first. Personally, I am terribly annoyed by TVs in restaurants and airports: they grab my attention over and over, no matter how hard I try to ignore them, and they distract me from the conversations that I should be having with my human companions. Unfortunately, the TV-B-Gone website seems to have already been swamped by the Wired coverage, so we cannot order these just yet. In the mean time, those of you with DIY proclivities may want to think about wiring one of these up yourself using a PIC chip or other micro-controller." An anonymous reader adds links to mentions at CNET, TV station KESQ and Ananova.

Comments

Re:Now

[cayenne8]

I used to have one of those digital watches, that had a remote control built in that would control on/off/channel changing on tvs and functions on VCR's. You'd just point the watch at the unit..and cycle through the different codes manually. Once you locked on..the fun began.

We had more fun one time in a bar...a bunch of us were in there drinking..barmaid came out and we asked that the channel on the main tv be turned to a game. She'd flip the remote...I'd flip the channel back with my watch...she go, I'd go...we'd go through this periodically...she couldn't figure out why the tv was acting so weird. At one point, we had her so confused, we actually got her to take the batteries out of the remote...and try it that way. "Magically" it worked properly..when she'd click a button, I'd do it from my watch.

I don't think we'd all ever laughed so hard. In the end we tipped the poor girl so much money to make up for it...but, man, that was fun. I think we tipped her near $200 or so...it was worth it.

But, always was useful...go into a bar...turn the volume how you like it...change the channel to what you want to watch. I need to find that damned thing, get some new batteries and see if it still works.