Some people have the common sense to get alarm systems. Others set up all sorts of lights and timers to make the bad guys think they're home when they're not. I thought I was pretty smart for being a member of the latter group — until last week when my neighbor asked, "Were you gone Monday and Tuesday? I noticed your light timer was on."

Of course, there's no way this revelation would convince me I should cough up $40 a month and sign a monitoring contract that would lock me in through Jenna Bush's second Presidential term. No — I needed to improve my ruse; make it so convincing that even the savviest scoundrel wouldn't dare desecrate my domicile.

Lucky for me, the Sound & Vision editors stumbled upon FakeTV, a $39.99 device engineered to make it look as if a TV is on in your home (with the assumption being that people will think you're in there watching it). It's a tiny plastic unit a tad more than 3 inches across, packed with red, green, blue, and white LEDs that flash in semi-random patterns. The idea is if you place it in a room with translucent shades or drapes, or flash it against a wall, it looks like a TV's running. A switch on the back lets you turn it on and off, and you can also set it so it flicks on automatically at dusk and runs for four or seven hours.

The wizards at Opto-Electronic Design, Inc., who created FakeTV, say they did all kinds of scientifical-type analysis to figure out how to make a little field of LEDs look just like a real TV. Of course, we at Sound & Vision don't take manufacturer claims at face value unless they buy us a really nice dinner. And since Opto-Electronic Design, Inc., is in Eden Prairie, MN, and we don't yet have a satellite office there yet (the lease is in the mail!), that wasn't going to happen. So the only thing left to do was request a product sample and actually test the thing.

I was the perfect guy to do it. My Los Angeles neighborhood of Canoga Park recently earned fame as home of the city's most-wanted gang leader. That means the most dangerous gangbanger in the city that invented gangs is my neighbor. By my reckoning, that makes this the most dangerous neighborhood in the country. (Never mind that I live in the 'hood's quiet western quarter, where many of the denizens live on fixed incomes and fuss about "those kids from the next block and their damned minibike.")

Now the only question was: How would I test the FakeTV? I could just turn it on, go club-hopping for a few hours, then return to see if I'd been burglarized. But thanks to my ferocious guard dog, I've never been burglarized in the first place.

I decided to put FakeTV in my office, which happens to have thin, white plastic blinds that work perfectly as a diffuser for FakeTV's LEDs. Then I stood in the street for a while to watch.

For the most part, it looked pretty much like a TV was on in the room. Sometimes the "image" looked too monochromatic — usually too uniformly blue — but most of the time it looked uncannily like someone was watching TV in there.

When I went right up to the window and looked hard at the light, the ruse became obvious; I could see the bright LEDs through the blinds. But I seriously doubt any burglar would come so close. They'd move on to the next house. Maybe they'd even steal that damned minibike.

Still, what did my reaction count for? I've never broken into a house. I've never contemplated breaking into a house. I've never even broken a law, outside of occasional speeding and once smoking a cigar in an elevator. However, I do have a friend who, in his misspent youth, ran afoul of the law on many occasions. So when he came by for a beer, I asked him to look at my office window and tell me what was going on inside. "Did you get a new TV?" he asked.

Bingo.

Whether you use the FakeTV to make burglars think you're home, or whether you buy several to make your neighbors think you have a flat-panel TV in every room of the house, or whether you buy one to light up one of those tacky silver Christmas trees, it works.