We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room. Why not just have a tiny green LED? Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe). So why is it that every cheap random fly by night Chinese manufacturer feel the need to add a tiny blue torch to their products?
Anyway, when blue LEDs became feasible they were the epitome of cool and every device had to have them. So in my opinion it was a fashion trend that stuck.
I remember being wowed by the blue power LEDs on VA Linux servers in the early or mid 2000s! Now any stock photo of a server room is covered with blue lights.
The last time I saw a blue room-illuminator was on an ancient Belkin Bluetooth dongle. IMO the practice has gone out of style with most name brands (including Apple).
ETA: I'll add that it takes real time, effort, and crucially taste to get an LED indicator to not be a retina-searing nuisance. You have to be willing to devote time to getting it right, and for someone just trying to pump out cheap units at volume, that's not an easy sell.
I don't know but I'm sure allergic to red. I don't understand why so many devices are using red for standby or even to indicate work (I'm looking at you Raspberry Pi).
To me red is "blood" and blood is "bad". Red means error.
Thankfully some devices, like ethernet switches, are using proper colors: green for trafic, orange for "degraded" link (say 100 Mbps on a gigabit switch). I look at the rack and there are tens of LEDs and it's all blue, green, orange. That's correct. Zero red. That's what I expect when everything is working fine.
Orange for standby is acceptable, I guess.
I like blue. Maybe not bright blue but blue is way better than red IMO.
If I see something red, it better be an error: alarm / motion detector / garage door opened / whatever.
For us oldies red is just the normal LED colour since in the 80s this was the only colour that was available. Our alarm clocks, microwave displays, indicator lights and even some watches and calculators used red LEDs :)
I’m color blind and hate this color choice. Damn near impossible to tell apart. Around 8% of men would agree.
I suppose that colour preferences may be cultural.
I tried covering it with a post it (several layers) and after a month I noticed that the yellow colour had whitened completely where the LED is. Probably contains an unhealthy level of UV as well. Yuck.
I tried opening it up to replace the LED but it's clipped somehow. Very hard to open without damaging it.
The craziest one is the subwoofer my parents bought for their home theater - this is a device you would exclusively use in a darkened room while watching movies...and it has a full size eye-searing 3mm LED to indicate "power on" (it's been electrical taped over for about a decade now).
I agree 1,000% that they're ridiculous though. But the colors are definitely about achieving an up-to-date "look".
I wish I lived in a world without marketing idiots so much.
Had the same issue, thankfully a piece of black duct tape was heavy enough to fix the issue. Really annoying to have a device which is essentially unusable out of the box.
> Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe).
They do have an indicator led on the magsafe plug, which is either amber or green, and is pretty bright but easy to unplug.
The old MBPs also used to have a white but pretty dimmed led "breathing" during sleep, it was quite pretty unless you wanted to sleep then it was annoying. If easy enough to put a thing in front.
I also have a ugreen mini dock with a white led, no idea why. It's a passive dock, if it's plugged in it's on, I don't need to have a reminder.
* Red: stopped or off (preferably dimmed of completely off)
* Yellow/Amber: startup or error state in which the device needs intervention
* Blue/Green: running properly
But I agree, Apple is good about not annoying you with LEDs.
But I looked through the reviews for all of the above and the issue wasn't even mentioned. I thought I was one of the few weirdos that care. It's nice to read here that I'm not alone in this. But we have to complain enough to make the manufacturers care.
I bought a set of nail polish and use the black one to paint over the LEDs, it even allows you to control how much you want to cover it, in case you still want to have a bit of light to see if it's on or off.
Other colors can be used to mark pins on breakout boards or cables. It's really useful to have around.
Same. I’ve used aluminum tape to block LEDs, works great.
(The one I use - mainly for barcode etc. stickers with shitty adhesive that doesn't peel off nicely - is by 'Pro Power' which I think is CPC's house brand, so that's not helpful if you're outside the UK.)
Something like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/aCK31v9x8Ea2uE7P6
I used the ultra-dim for the (white) temp display on my Dyson fan in my bedroom, and the blackout for the brighter-than-the-sun blue LED on my charger brick. Also used the dim one on a smoke detector because my 5-year-old thought it was watching her or something.
They're absolutely great, and you can even keep a couple in your suitcase and fix horrible lights in hotel rooms or AirBNBs if you're so inclined.
However after a while it became annoying to try to peel the small stickers off the backing, then fumble to center a small sticky thing over the offending LED.
so... I use painters tape. I started with the blue kind, but switched to black. Easy to tear or cut, easy to size. electrical tape isn't sticky enough.
I choose an appropriate number of layers for the problem.
Most lights just need one layer. Sometimes I need to kill the LED directionality to be acceptable. And some indicator lights need to be dim, not off. Think an HDMI switcher where you need to know which port is active, or router port activity lights.
Sometimes I put a second layer when I need less or no light.
One of the Amazon reviews did mention this. But I always see stupid bright LEDs that people haven't covered with tape so there are probably people sleeping with these on at night.
An unrelated example is that, at Target stores in the US, there are these (paper) notebooks/journals/diaries that have writing on the front that label them as such. The designs are really nice, but the labels make it ugly - as many people who chose not to buy the product will say "why do I need it to say journal on the front? I know it's a journal" and "I don't want to use it as a journal... I want to use it as a cookbook!" In this way, the reviews self-select only for people who don't care about the labels.
They should really have antireviews where people can write why they didn't buy the product. It would give sellers some kind of signal that there's an issue with their product or its documentation causing people to avoid it.
I've got to admit, the desktop cases I got from Fractal Design also use bright blue leds. I didn't think about it until I had guests sleep in that room.
my pet peeve is flashing indicators, especially when it means "all normal"
Our help desk gets a call about once a month from someone reporting the “orange lights” which are visible through a small window in a door.
Also on most cases you can / could just not plug that header in. Not an option for external drives tho.
All of that to make sure the room stays as bright as possible the whole night. I am always impressed with the efficiency of these little, bright, things. In terms of a brightness per cubic meter efficiency.
Or use a black permanent marker.
A great many households will already have one or the other of these already.
But I presume that none of these would particularly serve the purpose of the article, allowing infrared signals to pass through. Can’t say I’ve encountered the combination of a bright LED and infrared receiver, myself.
I've a USB charger with a blue led so bright permanent marker only dims it, even after several layers it still lights up the room.
1. Color. Blue is more rare in nature than other colors and it has a known association with daylight that is disturbing for sleep. Why not something more neutral like orange (not red, not green)?
2. Intensity. I think the manufacturers don't even think about this. For indoor use, full brightness makes no sese, but bad UX is the default choice for most, what TV manufacturer pays attention at their user experience with the standby led? I guess they never think about it.
Since the sky and the ocean are blue, that suggests a majority of visual field in nature contains blue in most cases.
With all the screens in midern cars, even the minimum brightness is too bright for me driving in the night.it wont let your eyes adapt to the dark.
My last Hyundai had a moon button to turn off screen but that was an exception ithink.
I have driven hours with a cloth over the screen of my skoda octavia in the night.
Please let me turn off the screen for dark night driving, thank you.
(edit: though I have no idea if it'll let infrared through like this post covers. I luckily haven't had any devices sharing IR windows like that)
Now if only I can find a way to disable its annoying on/off chimes.
Because of course they're just on the flat top, where cats like to climb and stand.
My main complaint is when using the laptop in dark bed to read ebooks and it is utterly blinding. I end up folding a bit of duvet over the bloody thing.
* need blocking entirely (like on my LaserJet, and a UPS) -- black tape
* too bright, but still need to see, and to differentiate colors (like on one of my living room servers) -- white tape, cut to size with hole punch
* too bright for when i use it in dim lighting, and trying to avoid blue light then (like the ThinkLight on my ThinkPad T520) -- orange or red tape
Some of this tape, I would move to behind the bezels, if I had the device open for service.
Black tape also good for covering up cameras on laptops. If I sometimes use that camera, I make it a strip with a folded-over pull tab, and when I temporarily remove it, I stick it poking up from the top of the bezel as a reminder that the tape is off.
For "hole punch" Pixel cameras in the screen, a hole-punched bit of labelmaker tape works, but IME falls off every few/several months. Secondary purpose: when I have multiple phones, different colors of labelmaker tape color-codes their identities on the screen, to help avoid accidents. (Color-coded cases would be better, but the case series I prefer only comes in black.)
TP-Link's TL-WPA4220 powerline extenders (and presumably other models) let you turn off the status LEDs in software (there should be a list of hardware that lets you do this).
I think my household lighting is still more efficient than the incandescents we had when I was growing up. But there sure is more of it, in terms of fixtures as well as light output.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/09/electronic-a...
Two layers of yellow tape changed the colour and dimmed it enough to make it imperceptible.
A good example in how different management styles can lead to products with fewer or more annoyances. Some CEOs would shrug off a product going out that could never operate in a typical house due to bright always on LEDs. Others would call it out, go down the chain as needed to make sure that mistake never happens again.
Electrical tape for everything else.
Worked well for my pocketbeagle board which was annoying me, my initial attempts a desoldering the blue one were unsuccessful (no hot air), but a nice amber one in parallel worked great.
My favourite discovery, though, was in Spain. I started to notice all the hotels were wired up with a separate consumer unit per room. Me being me, I looked inside one and noticed someone had simply flipped the switch on the emergency exit sign to disable the green glow all night. Genius!
Unfortunately not all hotels have individual consumer units nor do they put the exit sign on its own circuit.
A subtle glow is the best for an indicator light.
Someone beat me to the “dimmer sticker” idea several years ago [1], there’s clearly a problem here.
I’m a huge smart home enthusiast and have played with many devices and the only ones I’ve ever thought got dimness correct on indicator lights is Lutron.
We frame it the other way around in our lab: “The IR shield was purchased from Amazon [footnote: item XYZ, which was delivered with a free spectrometer]”
I don't know why they would do this. The first headlamp I got from them had red, yellow and green battery indicator LEDs, now they have 3 blue ones. It's really annoying. I should probably write them an email and ask them to fix it.
It's actually pretty interesting to look at the world with an IR camera (e.g. Pi NoIR) - red wine looks like clear water, black actrylic looks plate glass, black t-shirts appear pale.
Yellow vinyl "headlight film" seems to have worked to make the blue LEDs on Unicomp Model M green.[1] I didn't think that would have worked, and I don't expect all film to be created equal with regards to which wavelengths they let through.
If they spread in popularity there definitely will be a backlash.
I have multiple layers of blue packing tape over them to deal with it.
I need "sleep hygiene" and for me that involves reducing sensory inputs to as close to zero as I can get.
I put some tape over it, fixed forever.
https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-turquoise-automated-driving-li...
Get ready for the future :)
A little hax but it works Adequately.
