Inspired by this thread.
I could have sworn when I was in highschool (y’know, like 25 thousand years ago) you could order a bag of like 50 3.5mm audio jack plugs but with no wire or connection after the plug. I'm searching for these now, but the closest I'm seeing are legit components designed to be an adaptor or connect to a wire.
It was just a 3.5mm audio plug with matte black plastic cap on the end, so you’d plug it into a TV’s headphone jack and some models of TVs would be permanently silenced until someone unplugged the cap, because it was sending its audio to the ‘speakers’ that were just plugged in. And once plugged in, it just looked like a screw cover cap - nothing protruding. But also didn’t damage anything, so you couldn’t get in any real trouble for doing it.
Shoddy photoshop to illustrate the gist:
…am I just imagining shit? If anyone knows what I’m talking about and figure out the magic search terms to actually pull it up, please drop a link to a product that can be ordered.
Anyway, the TV in my work's breakroom is one of the culprits, so I'd love to hit it with one of these and see how long it takes for them to figure out why it won't vomit out the misinformation they're addicted to.
Audio jack sabotage aside, any suggestions on how to otherwise fuck with it would also be golden.
Thanks all!
I used to have a little gizmo that would transmit the turn off signal for a large range of tvs. It was the size of a car key fob. I tried it once in my company cafeteria that had a tv that was set way too loud and this woman would always come in and blast soap operas when I was trying to relax. I usually just sucked it up but this time I tried my device from about 20 ft away and the tv turned off. I made sure I looked innocent. She looked confused but turned it back on. lol
The TV-b-gone.
Was fun to turn off various advertising.
Would transmit 50-100 known IR-off-codes from a range of TV manufacturers.
I had a phone that did that! The feature was called 'IR Blaster' IIRC, and there was an app that had all the frequencies for different brands of TV on it. I don't think they put those in smart phones anymore lol
The Samsung Note 3 had this. I too am very upset that they removed this feature
They still have them. GSMarena lists 261 models released in the last 17 months with IR blasters. 86 in 2025.
For me I feel like the real move with one of these is to have it rapidly increase the volume instead of turning off the TV because it will probably make the person who is playing it loud feel like people think it is them who is turning it up that much intentionally.
In most cases I think this would mortify them, leading them to turn it back down further than it was originally, or even turn it off themselves since they don't want to be seen as an asshole and don't want the attention on them.
Subconsciously I would also think this would prevent them from turning it up again in the future.
Depends on the person though.