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Comment by Baldbvrhunter | Hacker News Reader

great hack

my pet peeve is flashing indicators, especially when it means "all normal"

God the worst is bluetooth headphones. Oh people would never use these in the dark and especially not with other people trying to sleep directly next to them.

I like the way Sony's wh1000xm4 deal with this issue. The LED is inactive when you're wearing the headphones and wouldn't see the LED anyway.

They aren't needed at all. For pairing, they are kind of nice to have, but why not put them in the earcups instead of outside (at least for over-ear headphones)?

Looking at you, SuperMicro: Every other “normal” LED on our server room is green. Theirs is amber.

We have some Cisco kit at one office all from the same product line purchased at the same time. On the switches ”normal” link lights are green, but on the firewalls the “normal” link lights are amber!

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.

That's evil.

The giant blue LED on the LaCie Little Big Disk is the most annoying thing ever. It flickers on hard drive activity.

Hotel room smoke detectors seem to be set up to flash at just slightly inconsistent frequencies.

How do you feel about the (more common in previous years) flashing indicators for disk activity?

It made sense when HDDs were universal, it provided a quick check for a common cause of major slowdowns (you would then go hunt for the source of the IO).

Also on most cases you can / could just not plug that header in. Not an option for external drives tho.

You didn’t even need a light, you could hear the disk.

Such a missing feature honestly. You could tell if the program had actually crashed or if it was running still. New macbooks should play drive noises through the speakers like new Mercedes do with engine sounds.

I'm actually thankful for the coil whine on my GPU because I can tell if it's still running my compute tasks. I've even started being able to pick up on parameter misconfigurations based on the sound patterns.

They were amber, and quite dim. Just enough to notice if you were looking.

I miss those! I like knowing what the machine is doing, and think some (subtle) status LEDs are very helpful. Power/charging, disk activity, wifi.. good baseline minimum. I guess its too much to hope for the glorious return of the blinkenlights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights). The BeBox had some great ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox#%22Blinkenlights%22).

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