Posted on 10/19/2004 6:48:37 PM PDT by leadpencil1
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - A lot of people love television but apparently some people have had enough of it, too. A new keychain gadget that lets people turn off most TVs - anywhere from airports to restaurants - is selling at a faster clip than it would take most people to surf the channels on their boob tubes.
"I thought there would just be a trickle, but we are swamped," the inventor, Mitch Altman of San Francisco, said Monday in an interview. "I didn't know there were so many people who were into turning TV off."
Hundreds of orders for Altman's $14.99 TV-B-Gone gadget poured in Monday after the tiny remote control was announced in Wired magazine and other online media outlets. At times, the unexpected attention overloaded and crashed the Web site of his company, Cornfield Electronics.
The keychain fob works like a universal remote control but one that only turns TVs on or off. With a zap of a button, the gizmo goes through a string of about 200 infrared codes that controls the power of about 1,000 television models. Altman said the majority of TVs should react within 17 seconds, though it takes a little more than a minute for the gizmo to emit all the trigger codes.
Altman, 47, first got the idea for TV-B-Gone a decade ago when he was out with friends at a restaurant and they found themselves all glued to the perched TV instead of talking to each other. No one was around to turn the TV off.
The self-described geek with a masters in electrical engineering started tinkering full-time on the project a few years ago with help from money he had earned from a company he co-founded, data-storage maker 3ware Inc.
Altman remembers spending most of his childhood unwittingly captivated by TV, watching shows like "Gilligan's Island" and others, whether they were entertaining or not.
He quit as an adult and hasn't owned a television since 1980.
He has tested the TV-B-Gone remote discreetly in many places, including in other countries, and - with the exception of Hong Kong - says he usually gets little to no reaction from others after the background TV noise and glare disappears.
But he said he would never dare silently kill the machines in places like sports bars, where patrons expect TVs to be on.
"I can be mischievous, but I'm not going to do anything malicious, and I don't want to make anyone's life more difficult," Altman said. "I just don't like TV, and I'd like people to think more about this powerful medium in their lives."
Altman does not contend that all TV is bad. "There's just so little time in all of our lives," he said. "Why should we spend so much time on something we don't necessarily enjoy?"
So beware: Next time you're at a Laundromat or restaurant, the blaring TV might just mysteriously turn off.
I don't know but I can imagine using this guy's keychain to great effect in an enemy sports bar, say in Dallas or New York. GO EAGLES!!!
My TV is going out... Currently flickering every 5 seconds and the remote IR went out tonight. Probably will go out during the World Series. Guess I need to start pricing new sets.
That guy needs a hand model.
ug.
Ahhhhh pickle.
mark
Don't even bother considering anything without HDTV capability.
You can give one of those watches to your teenage kid with instructions to use it to surreptitiously turn off any videos his leftie-lie-beral teachers are trying to use to brainwash their students.I had one of those programmable calculators that I modified to do just that!
Teachers go ape-schumer trying to finger out who's doing it...
I want one of these!
Seems that I and a neighbor had the same Idea.. hook up an appliance controller to the TV, and turn it on or off from the comfort of the bed.. ( This was before remotes were everywhere for everything )
Problem was, we evidently both had the same controller code.. for something.. ( anyway, mine was the TV.. )
One night my TV went off.. no reason.. I "punched" it back on.. a little while later, it went off again... I turned it on again.. off again, on again..
I waited a while, then turned it on manually.. Everything was fine for the rest of the night..
Next night, the "war" started again, about 10 pm..
I finally figured out what must be going on, and changed my code.. on every module in the house.. ( I had 8 of them, plus the controller itself..)
No moral to the story, just thought it applied here..
The more things change, the more they stay the same..
Just different technology..
Welcome to the TV Zapper Wars..
I've been doing this for awhile with my PocketPC that has remote capability. While visiting my uncle, who was in the other room, I turned the TV off before my aunt touched touched the power button in order to leave. She jumped back, surprised. "Did you do that?" she asked. I obviously denied it. When my aunt turned it back on, I'd turn it right back off. I kept doing this until she finally called for my uncle.
I played along, and agreed with her that it was indeed turning on and off on its own. But I wouldn't do it with him in the room. He would leave, and I would start all over again.
So she'd call him back in and...nothing. The TV worked perfectly. Now my uncle was mad and walked into the other room again. My aunt was going crazy, because it wouldn't do it when he was in the room.
I left it off for awhile until my uncle returned. I waited for him to say something like, "TV's don't just turn on and off by themselves." Then I did it and he got white as a ghost.
He would get up and turn it off, and I let them get confident that the "haunting" was over, and when they started to get ready to leave I would turn it back on again and start flipping through the channels furiously. My uncle would unplug the TV and then plug it back in again. I'd wait about 10 seconds and then "click" -- on it would go again.
When my aunt would say "It keeps turning off," I'd turn it off. Then she would say, "Now watch, it will turn on." So I'd wait to throw her off, and then she would throw her hands up in the air in frustration as it turned back on. She said, "A lady died in this apartment, do you think it could be her?"
I even had them round up the remotes, remove the batteries, and lay the remotes on the concrete porch all to no avail. He still gives me a hard time about doing that.
Sounds like a good way to start a fight!
I wish they had a gizmo like that that would work on these d**n boom boxes in cars!
real kill your television ping
I'll shell out $15 for one of these! I am so sick of everywhere I go, from restraunts to airports, etc etc etc.. there's a damned TV going.
When I was growing up and everyone had the cable box with the identical remotes, a friend of mine took his remote and went through his neighborhood at night screwing with all his neighbors. Switching channels, turning TVs on and off. He even got one guy to destroy his cable box in anger. I wonder how many haunted house stories sprang up from that one.
You naughty naughty little boy! :)
Does it change channels to? That would be funny having CNN changed to FNC in the airport or something.
its not cool to mess with stuff that doesnt belong to you. if you are in a bar with a tv on , and you dont like whats' on, you ignore , or leave the bar.
yep, it works for most TV's that I have tried, althought it is not as comprehensive as a "real" universal remote.
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