Video The Oddball Side of CES (Video) 35
Tim: CES has some strange stuff and sometimes that’s what sticks in your head. You can think of them of the surreal joys of the show, there are legions of pod people getting vibrated into jelly, some companies with some pretty oddball names, some companies where they are year after year peddling what seems to me like nonsense of the general magnets and crystals variety, but I also ran into one man—Rein Teder—selling what he is proud to tell you is a genuine fake. And seemingly one of the only electronic devices at the show that is not trying to be part of the internet of things. If you look in Rein’s windows late at night, and see the telltale flicker of a TV screen, you are getting fooled. It is actually his very own fake TV which has been around for a few years now but now it comes in a version that is even faker
A television simulator? Why would there be a television simulator?
Rein: To convince someone you are really home watching TV when you are out carousing at CES in Las Vegas.
Tim: People who don’t watch enough TV at home actually sitting around; the advantage is your home appears occupied.
Rein: Now honestly, I am a really mean dad and I don’t watch TV I don’t let my kids watch much TV, so if you see television coming out from our house you know I am not really home. The idea behind Fake TV is when you see the light emanating from your neighbor’s windows—that means they have a television on, well you automatically assume they are home and so does the bad guy, that is a criminal right there. He moves on to an easier target because he thinks you are home watching television.
Tim: How long have you been making these?
Rein: Since 2008.
Tim: Now you have got two versions here, can you quickly explain what they are and how they are different?
Rein: Well, we’ve done really well in online market at FakeTV.com. We move a whole lot of Fake TVs direct.
Tim: They are live.
Rein: What’s that?
Tim: I stopped your flow there. Alright.
Rein: We have a larger version because it is brighter and simulates a larger television and we have a smaller version that we are intending for brick and mortar, simulate a smaller television for your bedroom, and we would like this to be an impulse buy at Target, Best Buy, Wal Mart. Are you listening Target?
Tim: So are they just random flashing lights?
Rein: No they are anything but. It is a very carefully engineered television simulation. It simulates scene changes, fades, flicks, swells, onscreen motion. We analyzed a lot of television to produce something that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Tim: Now most of the devices here at CES are connected by some means to something else, they’ve got Bluetooth, they’ve got wires, is this connected, can you program it?
Rein: I proudly tell people it is the only thing in the hall that is not connected to the web. It has got a simple light sensor and timer on it. Set this thing to dusk plus seven hours, at 5 ‘clock when it starts getting dark out, it is going to turn on and run until midnight, do the same thing the next night and the night after that, and if your router needs to cycle power and gives everything a new IP address this doesn’t care.
Tim: Maybe insurance companies should just send these out.
Rein: I think they should.
Fark TV, with sweat and dead man's balls (Score:1)
Video articles suck.
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Damn thing sat there, then autoplayed right over a KMFDM song I had playing... took me nearly a minute before I realized the voiceover wasn't part of the song...
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Damn thing sat there, then autoplayed right over a KMFDM song I had playing... took me nearly a minute before I realized the voiceover wasn't part of the song...
The exact opposite happens to me all the time with my Kitaro playlist (there's also an Air Sculpture song in there to mix things up).
It works (Score:1)
Add me to the list of believers. When I travel (which isn't that often) I set one of these up on a random timer - it's on during prime time hours and on/off different times through the night. A couple of times a neighbor has texted me asking why I wasn't answering my door... I'd just reply I forgot to turn the TV off or a family member is at my house, but not answering the door. After about a year of use he still has no idea. This thing is awesome, especially for $20. When used with other timers and lights,
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I also have one of these fake TVs. It works well. But it is nothing new. I bought it from Amazon about five years ago. Mine has a built in timer. Go to Amazon, and type "fake tv" into the search box, and you will see about a dozen to choose from.
Unlike you, I don't have a problem with neighbors thinking I am home. My neighbors haven't talked to me in a long time, ever since that little incident when the pig manure digester caught on fire.
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Yeah my neighbours don't talk to me either or even look at my house, probably because I go out on my balcony and pee off it. Now there's a large patch of burnt grass below. Also the wood floor and balustrade had started to rot at the pee point from dribble so I had to change my preferred spot.
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I go out on my balcony and pee off it. Now there's a large patch of burnt grass below.
The problem may be excessive salt in your diet. Cut back on sodium, and increase your water intake, and the grass should green right up.
Very detailed video... (Score:1)
So the "oddball side" of CES was one guy selling fake TVs.
Thanks for that Timothy...now can I have those minutes of my life back please?
-- Pete.
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For the love of god, turn off autoplay (Score:1)
I clicked the link for the comments, not to play the video...and it starts autoplaying an ad, with sound, with NO volume control, and NO pause button.
I don't often use this word for stupid internet stuff, because it's a pretty strong word, but this design is unconscionable.
Also it says I'm posting as AC even though the upper right says I'm logged in, so go figure.
(CAPTCHA: disgusts)
Correction to headline (Score:4, Insightful)
The Oddball Side of CES (Fucking Auto-Fucking-Playing Video Treating Your Readers Like Idiots)
FTFY
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If you really want to know, what happens in detail is this:
You load the page. You see the massive black box which fills the entire width of the parent element. You see the still image and a play button, and you think "oh, this story has video." You might then think "I'm not interested in the video - at least it's not autoplaying! I'll scroll down and look at some of the comments."
And then, some 7-10 seconds after the page appears to have completely loaded, the video - which, by the way, has no volume contro
LoL (Score:2)
Well, this IS /. By now, Windows people should be using Linux, Linux people should be using BSD and BSD users should have moved on to Plan 9,,,
Its a joke Joyce...
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thank god we phased out flash so things like this wouldn't happen ... oh wait.
pleas choke on a bag of dicks (Score:1)
I thought it was a good idea initially, but... (Score:2)
I left my TV on one day and burglars came and stole it. It being a real TV, it also had sound, but it's plainly no deterrent. A muted fake television wouldn't work any better.
Later I would mount a cheap motion sensing alarm, and that seemed to work for one of the next break-ins.... but the real solution was moving.
Mapping *.ooyala.com to 127.0.0.1 still works (Score:2)
I don't even get a black box... There is a white hole allocated for the video, but no noise or other annoyances.
I wonder if the other companies that use ooyala.com for useful purposes appreciate the damage /. does to their reputation by setting autoplay=yes, as those offended geeks with the power to do so modify their DNS servers to be authoritative for ooyala.com and protect their user base from abuse?
Real TV? (Score:1)