I remember an old TV I had that had no remote… to turn it on and off “remotely” I hooked it’s power up to my mothers sewing pedal… then when I wanted the TV on, I put a weight on the pedal, and off, simply lifted it. :) Didn’t control volume or channel, but, hey, it was a child’s hack. ;)

Imagine if this would have been patented. A royalty earned for every television that has a remote mute button would be a lot of money. I guess a patent isn’t worth much if you don’t have the means to protect it.

This is a dangerous hack, tv’s of that time used tube amplifiers with an impedance matching transformer, using those without a speaker load can damage the tubes.

@Bob: Tubes weren’t worth a fortune in that age. :+)

What amazes me is that the people in that time were so deep into black and white that they used black, white and grayscale colors in *everything*! They even dyed their skin!

Colour and skin pigment wasn’t invented till the 70′s duhhhhhh!

I have a VCR that does automatic commercial skipping. After recording, it will (very slowly) go through the tape and figure out where the commercials are. Then when you watch the tape, it will automatically fast forward through them. I’m sure Tivo would’ve implemented something to do this if they could’ve without a ton of legal troubles, but they can’t, and VCRs aren’t allowed to do it anymore either. The stations want you to have to manually skip the commercials. I think MythTV can automatically skip commercials in recordings, but i’ve never gotten it working, so I’m not too sure (and now my tuner is irrelevant because it’s analog)

30-some years ago when I was a pretty young kid I remember visiting an older couple who had a difficult time getting up/down from their sofas to change TV channels, volume, on/off (I know now it was arthritis). That was in the days of the knobs to turn to change channels UHF thru 13.

He wired up a pot for volume, on/off and a pushbutton doorbell that activated a motorized turning of the channel tuner. Put the button and pot in a small box and had a 15ft wire to the back of his TV leading to the internals.

I was 6-7yrs old and thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen!

I always liked my 90′s picture-in-picture VCR with recording functionality. That was great fun.

@Marco: I always thought it funny that some stations are quite happily to draw all over the programs they show, but not the precious adverts. Shows you who the real customer is.

@MoJo
@jay

Magnavox and RCA both had their varieties of Smart Sound in the mid 90s. It reacted to increases in volume and normalized it.

My dear old grandma made one of those for his big mahogany colour set. I made one too but was careful to use only sets with transformers, and not the cheaper ones that had ac running through the ground (having ac in the speaker lines). When grandpa got a new transformerless black plastic monstrosity we tried to hook up a remote speaker and “commercial killer” (as he called it) to the new set. I stupidly had the set on while I was working on the speaker wires, as soon as I touched my soldering iron to them it shorted the set out and it was dead dead dead…

I remember a comic book from the Boomer days in which Donald Duck asks Gyro Gearloose to build a similar button which would mute his nephews. Gyro gives a short list of (supposedly) colloquial names for the devices, ending with “a gab-muffer, among other names!”
Until I saw this article, that was the only time I’d heard of such a gadget. Not that I was around at the time… this comic belonged to my mother when she was a nipper.

My aunt and uncle had a VCR with a wired remote control that came with about 20 ft of wire. It was one of the first remote controls I had ever seen and thought it was the neatest thing to not have to get up and go across the room to futz with things, even if the wire was a tripping hazard