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Combating Harassing Use of Mosquito Noise Device?
amicold asks: "For a while now my neighborhood has had to deal with an elderly neighbor who has displayed a slightly paranoid attitude towards myself and the fellow younger-adults of the neighborhood, believing us to be attempting to harass him in our day-to-day activities. Recently, he installed a Mosquito ultrasonic noise device as an apparent attempt to 'get back at us' for our harassment. As the Mosquito emits a sound that's well out of his hearing range, he can't hear it, while most of the rest of the neighborhood is under 40 and can; at which point it's causing everyone a great deal of discomfort. Unfortunately, because the police also can't hear it, we can't get the authorities to do anything about it, leaving us empty-handed in our attempts at getting some peace and quiet back. What can we do to either help the police realize how disturbing this device is, or counteract it so that it's no longer disturbing us? And is this the first of what may be a growing trend of civilians using high-tech discomfort weapons as a method of neighborhood warfare?"
You could start by getting off his damn lawn.
http://www.psywarrior.com/rockmusic.html
And record the "noise" phase shift it by 180, and play it on your stero. Viola, no mosquito.
Get off my lawn!
If you can't get a young police officer, kidnap a young police officer's young child and strap him to your neighbour's lawn. This will give the police someone to trust, and will also get you away from the house for a few years.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Do it yourself. If you're annoying people, DIY Hendrix is better than recorded. Be sure to wear your American Flag suit when you step out on your back deck to serenade him. An old Heathkit amp with some bad solder joints for extra distortion will help as well.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
slice its power cord or something at 2AM in the morning
Dispite the redundancy in there, I think that's a great idea! If you keep complaining about the damned thing after you've disabled it, he won't even know it's broken.
Well, if the cops don't care, you don't need to stick to legal means. I hear BB guns work pretty well for destroying plastic things. Paintball markers are also quite excellent for this purpose. Or use a nice big water gun on it. Of course, I recommend you just call the cops again. There are plenty of cops under 40.
Just egg his house. That will surely make him realize his immaturity and bring a swift end to his harassment.
Several (disjointed) ideas sprang to mind:
1) Get a sound meter (dB meter, noise level meter, or whatever it's called where you are) and call the cops again. Show the meter to the officer.
2) Buy big speakers and send some noise his direction that he CAN hear. I recommend NES chiptunes.
3) Disconnect the device without his knowledge. He can't hear it, so he can't tell if it's working or not.
4) Kick the neighbor in the nuts. If he gets angry, kick him in the nuts again. If he threatens you, proceed to #5.
5) Shoot him. You didn't need the curmudgeonly bastard anyway. Take his stuff and tell his family he went on vacation to BFE. Be sure to dispose of his body properly - through a wood chipper, then burn the chunks. Invite other young neighbors over for BBQ. Display a big cookbook with a cover that says "To Serve Annoying Old Neighbors".
(And just for the humor impaired, options 4 and 5 are not serious. I am not the voice in your head telling you to assault or kill your neighbor. That voice is named Larry. I'm Matt.)
I recognize this situation. The woman is a sociopath. She is doing all this to make people around her jump, for the purpose of her own amusement.
There's really only one thing to do when faced with a sociopath, and that's to completely stay our of her life entirely. She's so completely emotionally different from you that she's practically not human. Really, her only purpose in life, the only way she can break the monotony of feeling only primitive emotions is to think of ways to make all the people around her jump.
But since you don't have that option, you can at least fight back. This will NOT solve your problem because she can't stop what she's doing. But it'll be fun.
I recommend that if she has a dog or cat, kill it, paint the inside of her car with the feces and blood, dump the organs down her chimney, and throw what's left through her front window. Let her stew on that a while. After she gets her car and house cleaned up, get a can of gas and burn them both to the ground. That's about what it's going to take to stop this old lady if she's truly a sociopath, short of putting her in the hospital or worse.
If you're not willing or able to do this, then you really need to consider what you're going to do. Measured responses are going to be worse than doing nothing at all. Maybe you should disable her noisemaker device somehow. She can't hear it anyway, how will she know it's broken?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
What redundancy? Dude, he should do it at 2AM in the night, when it's dark out. He'd get caught if he did it in the morning.
Our neighbors are firing Katyusha rockets at us.
- Tal Cohen
Two years ago, the building next to mine was being totally renovated (they gutted everything but the outside walls).
And they had that big honking alarm that would go off each time a cat or a bird would go inside the structure.
Of course, it went off at 2 in the morning many times.
After a few weeks, we got to get pretty pissed at it, so I started to grab a pair of cutters, and enter the place despite it being barricaded (from the third floor, the balconies of the respective buildings are only 2 feet away). Then it's just a matter of finding the wire and snipping it.
Of course, they would fix it, until the next snip...
The last time I did it (at 3 in the morning), I was so pissed that I cut the wire in about 200 one inch long little sections. This must have drove the message home because that's the last time we heard the fucking alarm...
Here's the plan:
1. Spend the next 30-40 years breeding and training vicious attack dogs
2. Now you're over 40 and can hear it any more. (Plus, everyone loves dogs -- bonus.)
It's foolproof.
Gee, all you have to do is play light jazz to drive teenagers off... And that solution is <$10. Quite an invention that light jazz.
Dude! some crazy old man Pwned j00!! ROFL!
Excuse me, sir. I work for the Department of Redundancy Department, and I'm afraid I'm going to need to have to ask you to come with me over here. We've got a few questions to ask.
...they don't know his email address.
Also, pet stores should not ever have ultrasonic store alarms, because rodents can hear them and the sound is very painful. These will kill gerbils from stress. Disclosure: I am not a gerbil, descended from a gerbil, or use gerbils for unnatural purposes, at least not that often.
The old don't tend to sleep well.
The old are rumored to favor shotguns loaded with rock salt.
The old are generally sympathetic figures to those of us who don't deal with them every day.
You are a snot-nosed young'un who's hopping a fence at 3am with a deadly weapon, and just stupid enough to admit that you were planning to vandalize a particular old person's house.
This could go very, very badly for you.
I should know. I'm 35 and I already own the shotgun.
Simply unplug it and place it conveniently behind a tire of their car for safekeeping.
This Slashdot story has more potential for talk about ardware hacking, physics babbling, paranoia nursing and 2AM-James-Bond-action than anything I've read here in months. I don't mind a link to a store in a story this intriguing.
Happy birthday!
Nobody else has this sig.
Now he's parking his car across two spaces so nobody else can use Guest parking.
Odd thing that all 4 tire valves leak only when he parks across 2 spaces.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Go on over to his house, ring the bell, and when he answers, give him your friendliest smile, then cockpunch him.
The population is too large to limit yourself to peaceful solutions. Do what you feel!
More importantly, he can't really do anything with the police about it because to explain how it's broken he'd have to explain what it's supposed to do in the first place, and then he'd be admitting that your complaints about him were true. He can hardly complain "hey, they broke my illegal noise making machine!"
I remember watching an episode of "Cops" once where a guy called to report a robbery, but was very vague about what was stolen. Eventually, he told them that the guy had stole a few grams of marijuana or something from him, which the officers found quite entertaining, to say the least.
Speak before you think
This reminds me of the guy that used to live next door to me. He had a big black lab, and he let the damn dog run all over the place. Cutting the grass was an excercise in looking for dog poop and trying to not step in it. He also liked to start cutting his grass at 7:45AM on Saturday, knowing that he wasn't allowed to until 8AM, but would just say "dude, it's just 15 minutes, get over it" and keep doing it.
Since the guy got himself elected HA president (he's was a professor at the local university, and had a forceful personality), it was hard to get anyone to do anything about it, even with videotape evidence.
He ended up the least liked guy in the development of over 300 homes. Everyone knew him, and generally hated him.
So, we took the easy route. Nobody else in a several house radius owned a dog. We bought a few dog whistles. And they got placed into trees, or on rooftops. On the homes all around his house.
No matter which way the wind blew, one of the whistles would start to sound. And his dog would start to bark. Loudly. At all hours of the night. Since he had a toddler himself, their baby would get woken up constantly, and the parents couldn't sleep well, either. And we kindly kept calling the police about his dog.
Since his dog acted totally normal away from the house, the guy started to suspect something, but he couldn't prove a thing. Eventually, we started to see the dog on a leash outside the house all the time, the lawnmower stopped starting at 7:45, and about a month later, put the house up for sale. Claimed the dog just didnt'like the house.
Cheapest fix ever.
or better still, the loudest noisemaker I've ever heard of... http://www.victorysiren.com/x/index.html A noisemaker so loud it apparently starts fires! 138Db 100' from the unit!
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
The sane response is to borrow an ice cream truck. The noise is universally accepted - it is irritating beyond description, and will attract kids. I think it is the safe and appropriate answer to your problem.
AIK