• friend_of_satan@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Once when some friends and I had a hotel room to ourselves while their dad and his GF had a different room, I discovered that if you switched to the ppv channel and quickly started toggling the volume either up or down and continued doing this for 15-30 seconds, the channel would not scramble for about 5 minutes. You could then switch away and back and do the volume thing again.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        I learned in my late teens that the channels were scrambled by a little filter in the cable line at the main connector box on the street. So I removed mine, and then charged other people to unblock their cable. I subsidized my beer money for a while by going to people’s houses, breaking into their cable boxes, and removing their filters. In my early 20’s I managed to get my hands on some of the tags that the cable companies put on your cable line when it’s supposed to be connected, and some black boxes, and then I charged people to hook up their free cable. It was a pretty rad gig for a while.