
The Arduino Solution to Selectively Mute Over-Exposed Celebrities - etruong42
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/08/enough-already-the-arduino-solution-to-overexposed-celebs.html
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danilocampos
I know it's in bad sport to point out a straightforward solution that obviates
a clever one, but...

I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop
imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content
according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber,
ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to
opt out of most of it.

That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic
and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through
the eyes of David Attenborough.

~~~
steve-howard
While I concur that not watching TV is a decent solution, please don't insult
the population. Is mainstream content dumbed down? Certainly. Should people
find a way to entertain themselves without passive consumption? Absolutely.
But let's not get on a high horse.

~~~
danilocampos
You don't see the entropy I've described? What, exactly, is "insulting" about
the observation?

I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her
ass off. But most people around me were.

They _reproduce endlessly_ , these poor, because poverty, religion and
ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation
ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the
mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's,
_grandmothers_. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which,
thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who
don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't
learn how to learn.

They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at
once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their
skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence
or drug abuse.

In aggregate? The population gets _dumber_ because what other outcome can
there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse.
This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that
exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.

~~~
Steko
"You don't see the entropy I've described?"

"They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance
of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just
a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen
years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers."

No I don't see the same trends you do. The birth rate in African Americans has
dropped to near replacement levels over the last 15 years. Teen pregnancy
rates have falled over the last 15 years. Entropy is not the correct word to
describe this and tv has nothing to do with it.

~~~
danilocampos
>tv has nothing to do with it.

...k? I'm making the case for vapid content on television being symptomatic of
declining intelligence/skills. It's not causal.

As to African Americans, well, okay. But my experience surrounds _Latinos_. In
Latino culture, we've got Catholicism encouraging as much reproduction as
possible while declaring contraception sinful. There's also a lot of cultural
misogyny, which entitles men to take what they want, while robbing women of
the agency necessary to assert their own needs. (I was spared all of this
because my mom is gay. Who knows how many siblings I'd have otherwise)

I don't really see a way out of that for several more generations at least.
And I'm not terribly surprised you don't see those trends – statistically, if
you're on Hacker News, you're very unlikely to have had an upbringing where
you got to see any of this firsthand. And that's the point.

~~~
mmcdan
I don't think mainstream tv content is" dumbed-down" because the poor are
getting more ignorant, and the only thing they'll understand is American Idol.
It's 1) consuming content passively is the most enjoyable thing to do after
long hours of soul-sucking work(escapism),2) Living vicariously through others
via a rags-to-riches story(American Idol) gives a misguided and fleeting sense
of hope(like lotto tickets), and 3)Learning about other people's problems(eg
international news) is depressing when you can't see passed your own troubles.
If it helps my point, I alsilo grew up around this environment.

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ChuckMcM
I think this is a clever hack, and good clean fun. +1

In the way back times, at a place called Sun Labs, there was a very bright
engineer whose name escapes me (he lurks here so perhaps he will fess up) who
built a system which would record the full CNN feed and then 'decorate' that
feed with the text from the closed caption decoder.

He would store both the text and the SMPTE time codes for the video into a
simple round robin database (RRD).

You could then sit down and say "What news stories mentioned X over the last
24 hrs?" and it could cue up video snippets around the places where the CC
data had that key word in it. As a bonus (because back then a big disk was
500MB) if the closed captioning was identical it could 'de-dupe' the video
(basically it wouldn't store story repeats. I thought it was quite clever at
the time. I'm surprised its not part of the DirecTV product or TiVO today.

On a related note, this engineer discovered that generally advertisements
_were not_ closed captioned, so he could have the mute follow the close
captioning stream and the commercials would automatically be muted. Nice eh?
Actually one could probably do that with the Arduino hack too...

~~~
Jun8
Nowadays advertisements are generally CC'ed. However, since most commercials
have music, they have the music symbol in the CC stream, you may want to hunt
for cues like that.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Since the caption text is always the same, you could set it up so you could
push a button when a commercial came on and push it again when the commercial
was over. Then it could scan backward to the previous black transition before
each button press to find the actual beginning and end of the commercial, and
store the caption text in between. The next time it sees that caption text,
automute. :-) At least this way you'd only have to see a specific commercial
once.

You'd probably need to do some tuning of the number of keywords it sees before
going to mute -- it'd be a tradeoff between false alarms and having to listen
to more of the commercials.

~~~
Wilya
In other words, use your regular antispam system on TV programs.

I wonder if it would effectively work.

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xbryanx
I wonder how well this works. The closed captions I look at on TV from time to
time are so regularly garbled and misspelled that it might miss most of the
proper nouns I am filtering for.

~~~
shabble
Add some sort of edit-distance metric? Might need a bit of tuning for your
specific interference and the nature of the words you're matching for, I
suspect.

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fuzionmonkey
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss
people."

\- Eleanor Roosevelt

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mhd
Never mind that this specific example isn't that practical (assuming you're
not one of those people who has their TV on in the background all the time),
it is a nice example of arduino-ing your TV…

IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other
than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).

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Caligula
There was an open source app that used sphinx to filter for the word twitter
and mute it called twitterkiller. Shame it disappeared but it was listed at:

<http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/sphinxinaction>

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katherinehague
This is awesome. You could probably take the same type of concept to create
some sort of recommendation app that brings up current news results, or links
to items for sale, based on the closed captions.

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swah
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search_for_information),
now in hardware!

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yarone
I'd like to detect commercials and reduce volume to 50%. Possible?

~~~
Jun8
Detection of TV commercials using video analysis is now considered an almost
solved problem, which systems having a high rate accuracy. However, you won't
be able to such a thing using an Arduino (the BeagleBoard may be an option).

If you want a simpler solution, a better way to detect commercials than trying
to analyze CC info, I think, would be to check the average loudness. See this
article: [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-
consumer_ne...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-
consumer_news/t/why-are-tv-commercials-louder-show/), basically what it says
is that commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not
allowed to). The _peak_ level is the same as normal programs but the _average_
audio level is way higher. This should be easy top detect.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed
> to)_ //

The UK Advertising Standards Authority recently took action saying they had
proven that TV ads were being amplified above general volume levels -
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-
fin...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-finally-
censured-turning-volume-ads-annoyance-millions.html) (not the best source but
good enough here).

US Congress voted in the CALM Act,
[http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-
comme...](http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-commercial-
volume-law.htm) to curb excessively loud TV ads.

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yason
Uh, I don't get this. Why is he watching television (or having it turned on)
if there's nothing interesting on? How about turning off the television? :-o

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sixothree
I wonder if it could be used to mute commercials too.

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nickpinkston
I prefer to just use my <http://tvbgone.com> that I put in a hollowed out old
cellphone. Great for those sports bar moments when I just want to stop
hearing...

~~~
carbonica
Sports bars certainly aren't my favorite bars, but this just seems rude. It's
supposed to be a loud place.

~~~
nickpinkston
I actually haven't used it - it's just for fun. Full disclosure - I live in
Pittsburgh where sports are annoying everywhere: bar, doctor's office, etc.
That's what I hate - having everything be covered with TV glow - especially
sports fetishism...

