Have you tried a TV-B-Gone?
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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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/
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.
I have one, for a year now or so. But haven't use dit much really. And now the flipper one is announced. So I wished I waited and bought that one instead.
I really need to get one.
I'd wait a bit. The flipper one is announced.
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
Yeah same here. Not really using it for anything other than that. Oh and opening tesla charge ports.
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")
my universal remote ✂️
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.
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.
Oppo is still including them
The last one with IR I had was a Siemens mobile. Not even a smart phone. That was about 25ish years ago.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Android+usbc+ir+blaster
Me either, but the phone will commonly have a USV-C port
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.
Yeah, since it was mostly used for data connections between phones. It was replaced once bluetooth got a little bit better.
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