Idea: pipe stdout and stderr through a text-to-speech program. Programs with noisy logs would be running around screaming like lunatics.
"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."
[0] http://www.askapache.com/hacking/ping-unix-darpa-muuss.html
Since then i found myself pondering how we limited our computing interaction to our visual sense, where as interacting with mechanical devices also involve auditory and tactile feedback. A fridge moment was when i was waiting for my coffee machine to do its thing, and how i instinctively responded to changes in the noises made.
Never mind the analog modem days where i got into the habit of leaving the sound on for the handshake, as i could then tell if i got a good or bad connection based on the sounds heard.