HDD Clicker – HDD Sound Simulator
retrokits.de
retrokits.de
I think you could make a pretty good product by doing something similar (varying beep, boops and clicks) for database accesses, server reboots, etc. and making an acoustic uptime monitor. Keep it in a pinned tab and you'll notice right away when your web server's RPS goes way down or way up.
In order to get the best latency/bandwidth, you need to point the antennas with precision at each other, and in order to know if you're pointing it right, you need to run some tool on a display at the same time, like `ping`, and see when it gets lower when you're pointing it right.
So rather than having to look with one eye towards the horizon, and one eye on a screen to see a tiny number (which I found impossible), I made a quick script that outputs a beep each time ping returns output, with the frequency being higher when the latency got lower. So now I could focus solely on the horizon while using my ears to hear if I was getting in the right direction.
Lots of fun, super useful and makes me wonder (just like you) what other tooling we could use more senses with, rather than just our eyes.
Similar vain: the vim foot pedal: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch
Once you start accelerating up or down, it's sometimes difficult to tell what your rate is which is the reason for the instrument. Whether you are climbing or sinking, not having to look at the instrument is really helpful. This is particularly true in turbulent/rowdy conditions where you're 100% focused in on flying the glider.
Each character corresponds to one line in the debug log, and is determined (via hashing) by the subprocedure writing to the log.
It gives me a "general feel" of what's going on, and makes it easy to, at minimum, detect infinite loops.
This was inspired by a yet even older discussion with someone who was listening to the dot matrix printer printing his logs.
Eventually the commotion of their whiteboarding session became very quiet and they returned to their computers to hunker down. Our UX contractor was twiddling some magnets in his hands, clicking them together and unclicking them, while starting at his screen and chewing through the design problem.
A few moments later, a pretty loud scratching noise started. Peter, the UX guy, started to start up at the white drop-panel ceiling with a concerned look, "I think there might be a rodent in the ceiling"
I knew this sound almost right away, and could also tell it was coming from directly in front of him, not the ceiling. PETER! GET THE MAGNETS OFF YOUR LAPTOP!
He had inadvertently stuck them to the palm rest, directly above the spinning rust drive that was still standard for this time period. The machine quickly became unstable and then stopped booting. Poor guy was in the Apple store for the rest of the day.
Hilarious in hindsight, but a lot of work was lost that day. I still remember seeing poor Pete staring up quizzically at the ceiling while the entire contents of his HDD got vaporized.
That said, it doesn't sound like failure, but I think it's missing the deep bass resonances that a real HDD has.
Good (unintentional) product design.
It also indicated insufficient caching. "Why is the disk spinning endlessly? I just clicked the open dialog! Did the OS suddenly forget about the 10 files that I have in my home folder?"
Not quite the same as what TFM has made (which is awesome), but hearing the crunch of a hard drive and seeing that LED flash or the activity indicator blink are so pleasantly nostalgic.
We had it on our Mac Classic and it definitely conjures up a ton of nostalgia to me too!
You could tell when the CPU was busy and to some extent, what it was working on.
The TRS-80 Model II, from which those machines were derived, had a single thicc Shugart drive that was even noisier. The solenoid that engaged the heads made a loud "thunk" when activated (and changed the size of the screen, its magnet was so powerful!).
I like this idea but it's not getting at my itch.
For some, the sound and feel of real hardware is definitely part of enjoying the hobby. I still use real floppy disks instead of a Gotek for this reason, despite their flaws.
"Sonification of network traffic flow for monitoring and situational awareness"
I've seen discussions on this concept back to the 90s but haven't found one yet. I think one is in this book:
And when you are not after performance, you'll be after small size.
I can certainly expect "consumer" devices to move towards more of a silent profile, but workstations will still keep aiming for as much performance as possible.
Even today, witness MacBook Air vs Pro lines: Air arguably gets enough performance from very similar hardware, but... you get the point. And in your example of consoles, sure, but also take into account that 8k screens are also around the corner.
Edit: even the two stages of development today involve reducing power in one phase, then pushing that model to the max through pushing the power envelope (eg. Nvidia RTX 3000 -> 4000, AMD Ryzen 5000 -> 7000...).
I used to use this to attract attention to a particular machine in a datacentre, before things like iLO and ridiculously bright blue LEDs.