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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

There was a time in the electronics world when bright, house illuminating leds first came about and manufacturers used them in place of the dull red/green indicators. Black tape everywhere. Macbooks were one of the worst offenders. They had an extremely bright and worst of all pulsating led that was on when the device was in standby. Used to shine right through laptop bags and keep everyone nearby awake.

Fortunately that fad is somewhat over and manufacturers mostly learnt not to put in the brightest led they could source.

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The situation still hasn't improved all that much. Just looking around I have electrical tape over the LEDs of my modem, router, computer monitor, soundbar, humidifier, fan, entryway intercom, thermostat. And these are all new devices.

I use stickers designed for dimming LEDs. They’re almost like a thick window tint cut into various shapes. Dim enough to stop the LED from being annoying but you can still see its status.

A little more expensive, but they look a little nicer too.

https://www.lightdims.com/

I think those are the ones. I’ve been working on the pack of them for years.

Very interesting and worldwide shipping for pennies! Thanks!

When I needed to dim the backlight on a new bedside clock, I asked a local window tint company for a couple of pieces of offcut film. I'm glad someone had the idea to turn that into a business.

You can buy a sheet of LED blocking stickers on Amazon for a few bucks. I keep some in my suitcase and leave every hotel room a little better than I found it.

The one that got on my nerves recently is a little bedside 3-in-1 wireless charger.

Has one of the brightest LEDs I've seen lately right on front of the charger whenever a device is on it. Why would they put a bright light on a night-stand accessory, and put it in the front where its shining right into your eyes as you try to sleep?

Or better yet, why have an LED on it at all in the first place? Any device I'm putting on it has its own charging indicator, I don't need the charger itself to have one.

I’ve clipped the RGB lights from multiple computer fans I’ve bought. Gawdy and unnecessary, and sometimes you can’t find items without them.

Don’t get me started on kids toys that are too loud!

Many toys can be physically dampened, but another way is throwing a resistor in parallel across the speaker. I did this with a Little People princess castle my daughter had when she was very young and it was quite a nice way to do it— same bright and unmuffled music when you put the dolls on the stand, but at about 20% the volume.

>Don’t get me started on kids toys that are too loud!

V-tech have a lot to answer for. As do all well-meaning relatives who buy them as presents. Straight under the stairs they go.

IME consumer electronics have gotten a lot better about this, but appliances and other things outside the tech sphere are still awful. My portable AC unit has a bright-as-hell seven-segment display for the temperature which shows "--" even when it's turned off!

This might just be amateur EEs doing their thing in an organization that doesn't constrain these aspects of the product. Data sheet says If(cont)=20 mA? Okay, 20 mA it is.

At least it’s pretty easy these days to increase the résistance of an SMT resistor (if you can find it).

(Just scrape it down a bit)

I much prefer two or three coats of black nail polish. It looks much nicer than tape, is more durable, and the light can barely be seen - just enough to see it when you want to. Like it should have been from the factory.

I bought a sticker pack that does this. Still being able to see the light is pretty useful

Plasti-dip also works.

Does that dim the light or completely occlude it? (Both options would be handy in different situations.)

yeah my routers' LEDs are obnoxiously bright, luckily they have an option in the app to turn it off on a schedule. The super bright green LED in my smoke detector unfortunately does not have this option. Nor do the blue LEDs in my smart outlets...

The smoke detector is mandated by legislation in a lot of places. The premise being it can break, you don't know, and thus die.

Not a fan of LEDs, but I at least understand why this as it is.

I had the tenant before me install fake fire detectors once. Always a green flash every few seconds but that was the only electronics in there. I only noticed because after a few years, I never had to change the batteries, so I decided to check them.

When you move into a new place, always check they are real and work.

New anxiety source: not that I will move into such a situation as yours, but that I do so and not remember to check.

Also, shake the ABC fire extinguishers. The powder can clump in the bottom of the cylinder. Or replace them if they're 15+ years old - the local fire station will take them to use in their training classes.

Most of my devices have had ways to turn them off.

Router has a button which disable all lights until it's pressed again, monitors have the setting in their menus.

The only device thats shining brightly in my home is a storage controller I've got in my home server, with no way of turning it off - or at least dimming it down

Two words: LED clocks.

I think I've used more electrical tape covering LEDs than I have for any other purpose.

My brand new Netgear router I just bought is so bright it's actually blinding if I catch a glimpse late at night so we might not be out of the woods just yet.

The pulsing macbook leds were horrible. I was in college then, living in dorms or other shared housing where my laptop was always in my bedroom overnight. I got in the habit of putting a dark shirt over it.

I still have electrical tape right now over the power LED on my computer case: it's a pretty bright white LED that pulses in sleep and as far as I know my motherboard won't let me turn that behavior off. I guess I could have just pulled the leads to the LED instead.

Now that I think about it, that was probably actually one motherboard ago and it might be different now... but the tape's working just fine so who needs to check?

My 2024 Lenovo Thinkpad inexplicably has that red light. Constantly fading in and out too. It could be my only reason not to buy a Thinkpad again.

Can't vouch for every model, but on all the ThinkPads I've owned every single LED can be disabled, including on the X13 I got last year.[1] This is actually one reason I buy ThinkPads. Other models I've had were T61, X270, E585, X280. I've heard the Carbon models are quite different from the T/X ones, so maybe you can't disable on those? That would be disappointing.

If you're on Linux the dot on the cover is /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::lid_logo_dot. See the other files in that directory for other LEDs.

I don't know about Windows off-hand because I don't use it, but the BIOS exposes the functionality so there should be a program to do it. In a quick search: https://github.com/valinet/ThinkPadLEDControl

FreeBSD doesn't support it, but quite easy to write a patch for it if you want it (I actually wrote a patch for this, but didn't really put the finishing touches on it and submit it as my previous one got no feedback at all, so *shrug* – I ended up just installing Linux again). Same for the other BSDs.

[1]: You need to compile your own kernel for the charging/power LED which wasn't needed on older models, because that's registered as "unknown LED" and protected behind a compile option. It's a tad annoying, but it's possible.

Oh that's perfect, thanks! Let me give it a shot.

Was just about to post this - thought I was neurotic for taping over LED displays in the 2000s. My sight and hearing get annoyingly sensitive when I'm in bed at night.

Although there are a number of charging stations designed for IOS devices that have bright blue LEDs that you can't turn off. Some good number of these devices are going on someone's nightstand where a bright blue LED is exactly what most buyers don't want.

When blue LEDs first became available they screamed “premium” and “high tech” and it seemed like a race to put the brightest, most-blue LED possible in every device. That was hell.

Remembering the blue power LED on my old 2007 Dell laptop, that thing would light up the whole room and yes, it did flash ("softly", at least) in sleep mode.

My electric toothbrush has a pulsaring led like that when charging. Which is especially annoying (in hotels etc.) because charging happens overnight.

That’s because the router and printer makers have bought all the superbright LEDs on the market.

That time is now

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