I don’t know about you, but I’m a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over again. I came up with this Arduino-based solution to mute my TV so that I don’t have to hear about Donald Trump’s feud with whomever or Charlie Sheen’s most recent rant. Using the Video Experimenter Shield, the Arduino is able to decode the closed captioning transcription track, which is transmitted along with the NTSC picture signal. The incoming text is processed for a set of keywords such as “KARDASHIAN” or “SNOOKI” and sends my television’s IR remote control mute command, muting the TV for 30 seconds and then unmuting it (as long as a keyword isn’t mentioned again). 
 
 
 
 
 
 The code for The Enough Already is a mashup of the closed captioning example code for the Video Experimenter Shield and Ladyada’s infrared tutorial. I added a few lines of my own code to search for the keywords and mute and unmute the TV at the right times. Now I’m curious to know: what keywords would you use in your own version of this project? And how might you use closed captioning data or IR in your project? How about a TV drinking game light? Or perhaps a flashing beacon light that’s activated when a keyword you do want to hear about is mentioned on TV? 
 
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 In the Maker Shed: 
 
 Make: Arduino ||||| (CNN) -- When Matt Richardson works from his home in Brooklyn, New York, he likes to keeps the TV on to stay informed, but some celebrity or another is always taking up airtime and bugging him. 
 
 "A while ago it was Charlie Sheen. And then it was Sarah Palin. And then it was Donald Trump," said Richardson, who is a video producer for Make Magazine. "And after a while I realized there's sort of always someone who I don't really want to hear about." 
 
 Like any good hacker, Richardson decided to come up with a fix: He developed a do-it-yourself TV remote control that will automatically mute the television when certain celebrity names are mentioned. 
 
 He plans to debut and explain the hack at the upcoming Maker Faire event in New York. The name of his talk is "Enough Already: Silencing Celebs with Arduino." 
 
 Unless you're speaking at that do-it-yourself inventors' conference, you may be wondering: "What the heck is Arduino?" It's basically a piece of computer hardware that can be programmed to do anything you want. In this case, Richardson combined a couple of Arduino circuit boards with an infrared LED light -- that little red bubble on the front of your TV remote -- and programmed the whole thing to interact with a TV's closed-captioning system. 
 
 The DIY gadget reads the closed-captioning transcript as it's aired and then automatically mutes the television for 30 seconds when it picks up certain words. That list of unspeakables can be re-programmed (so if you really love Sarah Palin, don't worry -- you could mute President Obama or Sen. Harry Reid references instead). 
 
 As long as that person's name keeps coming up, the remote keeps muting the TV. The first time he got it to work, Richardson said he "was in silent bliss for that 30 seconds I didn't have to hear about Kim Kardashian." 
 
 The whole thing cost about $70 to make, he said, and he built and coded it in about a week, working only in his spare time. It's worth noting that this isn't a product Richardson expects to be commercialized -- it's just for fun. He posted the code online so other people can play around with it. 
 
 The implementation itself is pretty crude, he said. Closed captioning doesn't always appear in real-time, so sometimes the system will miss a first reference. 
 
 If you're interested, he explains the process in detail in a blog post. 
 
 In the comments below that post, Make Magazine readers chime in with all kinds of ways this sort of closed-caption-reading tech could be used. 
 
 "You could generate the list of key words dynamically. E.g., by monitoring Twitter's trending topics or by parsing Google's zeitgeist lists," one reader suggests. 
 
 Another wants to use it to mute all commercials: 
 
 "Does the CC (closed captioning) stream contain any kind of marker for indicating commercials? Because I'd tweak this in a heartbeat to mute the deliberately louder commercials that seem all the rage these days." 
 
 The Maker Faire, which is dedicated to all kinds of cool and bizarre crafts, machines, computer hacks and mousetraps, will be held September 17 and 18 in New York. You can see a full schedule on their website. 
 
 Neither Kardashian nor Snooki is expected to be in attendance.
– If you just can’t take any more Snooki, we have good news for you: Video producer Matt Richardson has come up with an ingenious way to mute her automatically. Richardson hacked a remote control, making it possible to automatically mute the TV whenever a certain word—in this example, "Snooki"—appears in the closed captioning. The best part? The remote can be programmed to automatically ignore anyone you deem distasteful, be it Snooki, Donald Trump, or Kim Kardashian, CNN reports. Richardson’s hack, which he will debut this weekend at New York’s Maker Faire, automatically mutes the TV for 30 seconds every time the offending word appears—and continues to do so as long as the word keeps popping up. Of course, it’s not a perfect system, as closed captioning isn’t always real-time—but the first time Richardson got it to work, he experienced “silent bliss for that 30 seconds I didn’t have to hear about Kim Kardashian.” He has no plans to commercialize the remote, which cost about $70 and took about a week to make, but you can check out the code he posted here.