Inspired by this thread.
I could have sworn when I was in highschool (y’know, like 25 thousand years ago) you could order a bag of like 50 3.5mm audio jack plugs but with no wire or connection after the plug. I'm searching for these now, but the closest I'm seeing are legit components designed to be an adaptor or connect to a wire.
It was just a 3.5mm audio plug with matte black plastic cap on the end, so you’d plug it into a TV’s headphone jack and some models of TVs would be permanently silenced until someone unplugged the cap, because it was sending its audio to the ‘speakers’ that were just plugged in. And once plugged in, it just looked like a screw cover cap - nothing protruding. But also didn’t damage anything, so you couldn’t get in any real trouble for doing it.
Shoddy photoshop to illustrate the gist:
…am I just imagining shit? If anyone knows what I’m talking about and figure out the magic search terms to actually pull it up, please drop a link to a product that can be ordered.
Anyway, the TV in my work's breakroom is one of the culprits, so I'd love to hit it with one of these and see how long it takes for them to figure out why it won't vomit out the misinformation they're addicted to.
Audio jack sabotage aside, any suggestions on how to otherwise fuck with it would also be golden.
Thanks all!
I did some looking around and found a product called Mic-Lock which can do what you described, but it's not quite as small as you wanted.
If you are willing to get your hands dirty, you could buy TRS connectors and solder 8 ohm resistors from each channel to ground. Might have to shave down the pins and print some caps for them.