You know those ads that pop up at the bottom of the TV screen when you're trying to watch a show? They annoy me and Mrs. ToughDiamond, so I began looking for a solution.
First attempt: Fixed a carefully-measured strip of cardboard to the bottom of the screen.
Result: Not very good. The cardboard was somewhat distracting, and as we only watch recorded video files that we send to the TV screen from a computer, it was then impossible to see the player's transport controls or the taskbar and system tray without removing the cardboard.
Second attempt: My preferred player, Media Player Classic, has a feature where you press a control key to make the picture zoom in a little bit, and another control key to move the picture down a little bit. By trial-and-error I found the correct number of keypresses to zoom and move the picture just enough to push the ads off the bottom of the screen. It would have been tedious to do that manually every time we wanted to watch a video, so I wrote a macro to do it automatically at the press of a single button.
Result: It works pretty well. We can still see the very top of the popups, but that's a lot less invasive than the whole thing, and every time I notice one I get a good feeling that I've thwarted another unsolicited ad, so it's a plus. There's nothing worth seeing on the "lost" section of the videos, so we haven't lost anything important.
Solving practical problems like that makes me happy.