how to create custom sound effects in your car

Car horns are very one-dimensional. We might use it for multiple purposes, but it always sounds the same. So what if you had different buttons for different types of car horns to serve various purposes? For example, if the car in front of you at the traffic light fails to notice the light turned green because their phone is interesting, you can let them know. Or maybe you want to get someone’s attention but it’s not an angry or dangerous situation. Mark Rober has designed an upgrade for the standard car horn that I really like.

It looks doable for even novice engineers and not very expensive, so it would be a good DIY project. But why stop where he did? His is built for functionality, which is good, but what about fun?

Notice that he said you can load any wave file you want. (A wave file is like an MP3, just uncompressed. It’s just a file that contains music or sound effects.) Wouldn’t it be nice if you had some buttons in your car that played certain sound effects or music clips on-demand within the car? There’s much potential for fun here. A couple of ideas:

1) The obvious idea is fart sounds. Your passengers would be amused (or maybe annoyed in an amusing way), and you could use it to punctuate your conversation. A few people have “Active Gas On Command”, but most of us don’t, so if you haven’t experienced that, just imagine someone saying, “Every time Donald Trump speaks it makes me feel like” [pushes button] PHVRRRT! (Yes, some people actually have the ability to do that.)

2) Dramatic music — This could be clips from movie soundtracks to set the general tone for a few seconds, like if you wanted to activate stealth mode (e.g., the Mission Impossible theme), or you need to speed up to pass someone, or if you’re in a hurry.

3) Sound effects — Back to the idea of adding emphasis to your conversation, you could have the losing sound from the TV game show The Price Is Right, or the buzzer from Family Feud, or the pseudo-sad sound of a trombone going wah-wah-wah-wah (with the pitch going lower each time). I’d have a clasp of thunder for dramatic emphasis. (That would be so cool!) You could also have a thunder clasp followed by The Count from Sesame Street laughing, for anytime you say a number. You could have the transforming sound from the original (G1) Transformers cartoon. Maybe you’d want different car engine sounds — like a muscle car revving up or broke-down-barely-running sounds.

4) Vocal clips from movies and TV shows and YouTube videos:

  • “We’re in hot pursuit!” by Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit
  • “YEE-HAW!” by Bo Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard
  • “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” from the classic meme
  • “Wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world?” from Dumb & Dumber
  • “Crazy Taxi!” from the arcade game Crazy Taxi (story in the comments)
  • “MUWAHAHAHA” — an evil laugh from a mad scientist or evil genius
  • various sayings by KITT from Knight Rider
  • “Inconceivable!” from The Princess Bride

5) Prank sounds — If you have friends who strongly dislike certain sounds or songs, you could have it queued up for the right moment. Regular blog visitor Mango-Man would certainly hear the Sanford & Son soundtrack — I don’t know why it bothers him, but it’s a good time to play it around him. You could also have general-purpose clips, like to Rick-roll someone with that Rick Astley song. Or play part of the Macarena.

This would be the audio equivalent of an animated gif in a text message. It needs to happen…

Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Saving America While Playing Video Games

It’s hard to save the world. So let’s start with saving America. It’s hard to save, too, of course, but I have a plan. Now, if you’re a regular patron of Buffet o’ Blog, you might think this will be silly randomness, but there is an actual actionable plan here layered amongst the randomness. That may seem to not go together, but part of the reason most people don’t save the world is because it is so difficult and it’s hard to think of something you can do that will make a difference. It may seem like there’s not any easy solutions, because most of the “low hanging fruit” of ideas have already been thought of. That’s where thinking outside the box (AKA randomness) helps. But that’s enough intro — let’s get to the meat and potatoes (and gravy — don’t forget the gravy!).

The United States of America is slowly running out of potable water. (Here, potable means safe to drink.) Here’s a link to read about how serious that is and what it all means: Why is America running out of water? Long story short (or TL;DR in modern parlance), it means if we don’t start conserving clean water, we will have major shortages of drinking water. The current filtering process at sewage treatment plants is slow and costly and ineffective. The last part is critical, because current “real-time” filtering methods cannot remove many chemicals like caffeine and medications. We can’t have random medications and drugs in our drinking water — that would get bad quick. You may be wondering about the natural way of filtering water — nature. Of course it is great, but it takes time, and the problem is that America is using water faster than it’s being replenished by nature (and droughts out west hurt this, too). If we the people don’t find a solution on our own, the government will have to force people to conserve water. (We’re already seeing this in Nevada, where lawns in some places are being banned. And the government just announced a deal to get Arizona, California, and Nevada to conserve large amounts of water in exchange for $1.2 billion.)

That’s a lot of seriousness above, probably more than is allowed in a post here, but I want you to know this is a serious problem affecting our country that is on a path to get much worse. So how can we do anything about that by playing video games? The answer has to do with America’s #1 crop. Can you guess the plan yet? It’s not about farming. The number one crop in America is lawns. Millions of people grow lawns. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But it is a luxury — that is, it’s nonessential. Now, I’m not suggesting we get rid of our lawns. I enjoy playing in my yard with my kids. But here’s the angle on it — how green does it need to be? And to tie this with the problem above (don’t forget about the upcoming water shortage), how often do you need to water your yard?

Here’s an article explaining the cost of keeping your yard really green using water and fertilizer. Summary: “grass lawns consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year, 200 million gallons of gas (for all that mowing), and 70 million pounds of pesticides.” Those are some big numbers! You may be tempted to think, “What difference does it make if one person changes their lifestyle?” Well, those big numbers are the total of adding up what each individual person does. We have to start somewhere, and if each person in America conserved merely one gallon per day, it would add up to over 121 billion gallons of water in a year. That would make a huge difference! But if we choose to think it’s not our problem, then the next generation — our children — will have a serious problem to deal with.

I’m not suggesting we let our yards die, but they don’t need to be watered every day or every other day or while it’s raining (which I’ve seen). By watering less often (or not at all), we save billions of gallons of clean water each summer. (On a related note, there is now a push even among lawn designers to leave more weeds because they have an environmental purpose.)

Now what do video games have to do with this? Well, if we water less (or not at all), our yard will grow slower. That’s basic science there. Last year I followed my own advice, and I didn’t even turn on the automatic sprinklers. My front yard didn’t stay as green as my neighbors’ yards during the hot parts of the summer when we don’t get much rain. It certainly didn’t look like a golf course, all well-manicured and dark green. And that’s okay. I didn’t have to mow as often, which was nice. And I was conserving water (and gasoline, too).

Wait, I still didn’t get to the video games! I won’t forget! By mowing less often, that frees up several evenings during the summer. So what will you do with that new free time? Playing video games sounds like fun! Of course, you could use that free time to do other chores, but here’s the problem with that mindset. 1) American adults are typically overworked and stressed already, and video games help with that. 2) If I suggested you could help save America by doing other household chores, you might not be interested in that. Do you really want to save America by cleaning your baseboards more often? Probably not for most people. The key is to make it fun, something people want to do! Would you play more video games if it helped save our great country? You don’t have to be a super zealous patriot to realize that’s a good deal.

So who is with me on this?

why southern weather makes no sense

In this video (below) there’s a person scheduling the weather for the South (meaning southern United States, from part of Arkansas to Florida). Attending this meeting are the four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. What will happen as they try to figure out what kind of weather the South should have this year? (This is comedy, if it isn’t obvious.)

While that’s exaggerated, there is some truth to it. My favorite part is winter planning a few snowflakes to shut everything down. That actually does happen. I know people in the up north don’t get it, but in the South there are very few snowplows or trucks to salt the roads. Also, southerners typically don’t have much experience in how to drive in snow, so there’s that danger. But it’s all okay, because snow is so rare here, so it’s a special occasion. I have a friend that grew up in the South, then moved to Colorado. She said most people there take snow for granted, because they see so much of it. Many of the people there didn’t have any interest in throwing snowballs or building a snowman (or snow castles or snow monsters, which deserves its own post).

While there is a lack of snow most of the winter, it also means much of the winter is somewhat mild. It does get below freezing at times, but that’s usually just for a day or two, then it’ll be back to the 60s by the end of the week, so you can return to shorts and T-shirts. The only bad part is the middle of summer, where extreme amounts of heat and humidity mix together for a rather unpleasant atmosphere. But it’s just two months that are really bad. The same people made a video about that, too:

If you haven’t experienced southern humidity, then you might not get it. There are summer days where you walk outside and within seconds you are sweating. Sometimes it seems like sweating starts instantly. I don’t know how quickly the body can respond to the change in temperatures, but that’s not something I particularly want to research. (I will add that I am extremely thankful for air conditioning!)

There’s a saying in the South that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a day or two and it’ll change. That is mostly true, except for July and August, where there’s a 99% chance of it being hot and humid every single day. So for those months, the weatherman’s job of making the forecast is easy — really hot, with a 20% chance of thunderstorms, almost every day.

What is LOL supposed to mean?

Did you know some people type “lol” without actually laughing out loud? Crazy… Well, now there’s a device that ensures someone actually laughed when they typed it: the LOL Verifier. It’s a USB device that goes between your keyboard and computer and only lets you type “lol” if you truly laughed out loud. There’s a short TikTok video on the page that shows it in use, in a humorous way (by trying to not be humorous).

Does the world need this? No, not really. But the world does need to stop saying “LOL” if they aren’t actually laughing. I still remember the first time I experienced that nonsense. [cue flashback sequence] I was talking to a teenage girl, and I made a joke. She replied, “LOL”, but didn’t laugh. So what does that mean? Was I funny or not? (Probably not.) Was she trying to humor me? Perhaps. But it’s still ambiguous and illogical.

Rant aside, either way, people need to laugh more. It would make the world a better place. And it would make your life better. Well, perhaps the laughing itself isn’t the key factor here, but enjoying life enough that you are laughing is good for you. Although laughing does help you actually feel better. Some say that laughing is like jogging on the inside. 🙂 If you go through a day without laughing at all, ask yourself why and if you want to live that way. Just don’t say “LOL” outloud, please. Only authentic laughing helps.