- cross-posted to:
- custardfist
- cross-posted to:
- custardfist
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/19798927
Sure, the whole world is on fire right now, but there are also little things to be upset about. ☝😉
There was a time when blue LEDs were the white whale of electronics, always out of reach and everyone wanted to figure out how to make them work. When someone finally did it, it was considered a massive breakthrough, and rightly so. Now they have somehow become the default cheapo LED, moreso than red or green. Could it be an industry-wide ‘fuck you’ to physics? “You tried to keep us from making blue LEDs, hah! Now look at us!!!”
At one point, blue LEDs were super expensive because of their difficult production.
So any product that has a blue LED was considered premium. I guess they were also considered futuristic and high-tech.
Somehow, this is still in the mind of some manufacturers.
All I want is a barely-visible-in-soft-daylight diffused/frosted red or amber LED.
But no, it’s always some 5w lensed blue LED at somehow produces a tighter beam of horrendous blue light that’s brighter than most flashlights.Reminds me on a German proverb “to add your mustard to it”, which apparently came from a time at which mustard was rare and exquisite. So they added it to any kind of food just to “up it’s prestige”.
What a great origin. I Googled it, and it now means “to add your opinion”.
- Seinen Senf dazugeben
Literal translation: To add your mustard to it.
Actual meaning: To give your opinion on something./To give your two cents.
Where there are sausages, there also must be mustard. If you want to ask someone for their opinion and sound like a fluent speaker when doing it, you better invite them to add their mustard.
https://www.mondly.com/blog/german-idioms/
In the process, I found some other great German proverbs with hilarious literal translations.
Literal translation: To talk around the hot porridge.
Literal translation: To ask for an extra sausage.
Literal translation: I believe I spider. (Edit: I believe I spin, see comment).
Literal translation: To have tomatoes on one’s eyes.
Literal translation: I can only understand ‘train station.’.
Literal translation: You’re walking on my cookie.
Literal translation: The bear dances there.
Literal translation: Everything has an end. Only the sausage has two.But, I guess that’s always the case with idioms. Their literal translation/meaning is useless. Regardless, I find German ones particularly titular
As a German they are all technically correct, but one of them isn’t a proper translation.
I believe I spider.
“Ich glaube ich spinne.” isn’t in regards to spiders, the last word is a verb. “spinnen” means “to spin”, originally coming from spinning yarn, which then became spinning a thought :)
That makes a lot more sense!
I’ve edited my comment. Feel free to contact the blogger. “I believe I spider” is hilarious. But “I believe I spin” is much more believable!
Yeah sorry, forgot to mention the actual meaning :) But I can add some more:
- My dear Mister singing club
- shit at the wall
- one has seen horses puke Maybe I’ll remember some more with good English “translations”.
Something else I just remember is a discussion between Erasmus students (Erasmus is a student exchange program in Europe, so you study for a semester in another country, ergo that group was quiet diverse) about how you call very strong rain: German: is raining cow shit (although that might be local, because those phrases often differ quiet much between German dialects) British: is raining cats and dogs Greek: is raining the legs of Zeus I don’t remember the others… But anyway… what is the deal with English speakers and cats??? A lot of languages have a proverb like “many paths lead to Rome”… But in English apparently it is “there are many ways to skin a cat”… dafuq?
- I believe my hamster is sweeping
- I believe my pig is whistling
- you don’t have all cups in the cupboard
Veritasium did a bit Why it was almost impossible to Make the Blue LED
Yeah, the history of the blue LED is actually really interesting. It basically exists because one Japanese dude refused to take no for an answer, and continued working on developing them even after his company stopped funding his LED project.
And when blue LEDs just started being available prop designers for scifi loved them because LEDs work much better on screen than incandescent bulbs, and as blue lights were something people didn’t have yet in their household objects they looked new and interesting. Look at the Doctor Who and Torchwood props from the mid 2000s, everything from the iconic Sonic Screwdriver to alien zappers and bleepers and greebles of all kinds were full of tiny blue lights because it screamed “scifi” to the viewer.
Very quickly, though, blue LEDs got cheap enough for everyday junk and manufacturers immediately shoved them into every consumer product because they were new and interesting and, thanks in part to the scifi trend, made stuff look like scifi future tech you could have in real life.
Now, a couple decades on, we’re still kind of stuck there.
You even see them in Christmas lights. They’re so retina piercingly stark, like not a chill light at all (though obv on the “cool” end of the spectrum). I’m out here walking my dog looking at the nice twinkly warm lights - no one wants to see your damned pinprick holes into the Tron dimension
They’re the “literally” of LEDs? Wrong in almost every context but people can’t stop using them?
I often put a piece of duct tape on power indicator LEDs, some of them are incredibly bright to the point that it’s hard to read the display. The LED is generally still visible under the tape …
I have a fan with a special silent mode to be used at nighttime. Guess what: The LED indicating silent mode is on is bright enough to read by its light.
If I meet the person responsible for that decision I will put them to sleep.
I bet the person responsible for that is the type to use a night light.
Same here. I put two rings of jet-black electrical tape over the speakers I bought online because someone thought it was a great idea to blind me whenever I use the computer. There’s no way to turn them off when they’re plugged in. WHY??
At that point, you open the case and snip the leads going to the LEDs :D
Aww, I wish but my nephew loves the LEDs. He takes off the covers whenever he comes to play video games. 😅
Try gaffer tape instead. It blocks all the light. It doesn’t reflect much light at all. It generally sticks to anything. You can get it in a variety of colors. It doesn’t leave as much sticky residue when removed or repositioned. I’ve not encountered many surfaces (expect painted surfaces) that it actually damages when carefully removed. I use black gaffer tape on basically all my electronic stuff: one strip to cover the whole light, two strips a razor’s edge width apart so that I can still see the indicator if I try but otherwise 99.9% of the light is blocked, or a strip with a folded over tab at one end for the displays I want to block %100 of the light %90 of the time.
Duct tape, duck tape, electrical tape, masking tape all really suck unless you love that sticky gunky residue they inevitably leave on everything. Gaffer tape isn’t perfect, but it’s much better for this kind of semi-temporary light blocking without too much surface damage kind of job.
TBH I have no idea which one of these the stuff I use qualifies as. It’s called “Panzertape” where I live, and the residue when you remove it doesn’t really seem to be in line with what you describe from duct tape (i.e. it’s very little).
Panzertape can either be sort of like duck tape or like gaffer tape (with the actual fibers inside visible/noticable).
The way I usually distinguish gaffer from no gaffer is: can you easily (and I mean easily!) rip it into the desired size and does doing so sometimes/potentially leave small strands of “thread” at the end of the roll? If yes it’s very likely gaffer tape and awesome!
You can’t rip duct tape? That sounds absurdly and unnecessarily impractical!
Well I specifically thought about “without using tools or tools like things” aka without needing fingernails or teeth…
And yes, most duck tape (not the actual brand stuff mind you!) I have encountered in my life we’re pretty much tear resistant to the point of folding over and crumpling multiple times before even looking separable! Unless I used a pair of scissors to cut it or switched to gaffers tape which was insanely easy to separate even with only one hand! (While holding it in said hand!)
Now that you mention this though, I might just have interacted with very ‘badly’ (for a sufficiently narrow definition of badly) made tape up to this point 😅
This feels like one of those small innovations that will become a marker of quality once somebody thinks about them for a while. Someone will figure out how to make the perfect indicator visible in a dark-ish environment without emitting much light otherwise, or some other way to confirm something is charging and it’ll become the way you can tell which electronics are expensive. I, for one, can’t wait. My fiber box is wrapped in so much tape you could drop it from a tall building and it’d be just fine.
I wonder if just like a super small piece of like color e-ink display might work right.
Off it’s just white but on it becomes a red square. Doesn’t have to emit light but could add a gentle backlight but you can see it from pretty much any angle and it would be immediately identifiable.
Bonus points if it says something useful on that tiny piece – like a battery charge percentage or volume level.
Electrical tape gang here checking in. Less residue than duct tape – for the stupid bright LEDs you can still see them through the black tape even.
Time to get roasted again but I dislike LEDs and I always tape black electrical tape on them.
I have an air purifier that is stupid bright, I tried painters tape but ended up using the aluminum foil tape to block the lights
I like my air purifier because there is a button on it specifically for dimming AND turning off the damn lights.
Two fer one. You also blocked its cloud features!
Why the fuck does my air purifier need to be cloud connected?
It wants to show you a graph of your air quality.
It wants to sell my air quality data. How often I fart, what the dispersion rate is, geolocation correlations for wildfire air quality monitoring, how often I replace filters.
Also just wants to leak your pii with the next inevitable breach.
Invaluable information for the coming robot revolution no doubt.
I mean it makes sense because it needs to be bright in daylight.
This, but I use washi tape because it is less gunky.
My TV has a red LED that will blind you when the TV IS TURNED OFF
But how would you ever know the TV was turned off if it didn’t have a light to tell you?
I laughed at your reply, upvoted, and started to scroll when I remembered my TV has a “screen off” feature. I use it at bedtime to listen to futurama without the light making my sleep bad.
At some point the show stops playing and goes to a menu. You actually wouldn’t know the TV is on if it wasn’t for the light. 😑
To be fair to the tv, it’s not letting you know it’s off, it’s letting you know it’s still on but in sleep mode. TV’s are just giant tablets now. If it was off, you’d have to wait for it to boot into its operating system the next time you wanted to watch TV.
I have dumb TV’s still with the same problem. It’s to communicate that it’s plugged in and receiving power. If the TV isn’t working properly, that’s easy to verify rather than having to worry about the surge protector, outlet, circuit breaker, etc.
The fact that TV’s are “smart” is a whole other issue I could get curmudgeonly about.
I have a TV with a WHITE LED that does this and we have to wait for it to boot. Luckilly, no one sleeps on the livingroom couch enough for this to matter.
It’s how you know that it’s waiting for your remote controller signals, right? Otherwise how would you know that the TV is waiting. Always waiting. So lonely. Please send it signals!
At least with my LG TV you can switch that off. It’s in general settings “Standby light” :)
Electrical tape is cheap
It also falls off too easily. My favorite for this use case is black Gorilla tape. Like duct tape but thicker.
Real Gs open the device and desolder the LED.
I use metallic permanent markers. They apply a nice, thick coating so that the light still works but is severely diminished. It also can be done to some devices without opening them if they don’t have the light recessed too far.
I’ve been raging lately about the fact that when you put most devices into sleep mode, they begin blinking incessantly. So much for me actually getting any sleep.
The comments show it’s not the color, but the intensity. Any color too bright is going to be annoying. I’ve got some monitors that have the perfect level for their power and controls, it’s just enough to be able to see in daylight, and not at all in the face in the dark. There’s no reason to have HID lights on electronic indicators (or on automobiles, but that’s a different topic).
It’s the very colour we’re not supposed to see at night though, if we want to sleep.
Sleep studies have found that even the standby light on a TV impacts sleep negatively.
Blue is percieved as brighter by the human eye at the same luminosity of other colors.
Also eyelids don’t block as much of it, so can still perceive blue lights with your eyes closed.
Also blue LEDs tend to be more efficient and higher luminosity…
Some electronic devices let you dim the status LEDs in the settings, e.g. for Fritz!Box routers.
I have black electrical tape over most led indicators. It’s stupid because now I can’t tell the battery charge on a lot of devices, but I hate the involuntary nightlights everywhere.
I use white electrical tape. It drastically reduces the light brightness but allows enough though to know the light is on.
You can get tape that’s not clear nor is it completely opaque.
You can find dark colored “clear” style tape.
Alternatively, take a sharpie to some Scotch tape. Color to preference.
The slimline AV receiver I bought for the bedroom has a fucking blue LED standby light. I had to put a piece of electrical tape over it.
Blue is meant to be calming and nice. The brightness probably needs lowered on these chargers.
Blue light makes you awake. They should use red.
Oh yeah, let’s just make the room comfortable for fucking demons and shit.
This is why you should THINK before typing.
red is more than demons and blood. a warm red light is often much more comfortable than blue
Like being BURNED ALIVE?
You don’t want your room to look like it has a nice cozy fireplace?
So the conclusion is, amber LEDs for everyone
Bluetac - no light gets through and it’s usually pretty easy to remove when necessary.
Dry erase. Just dab it to adjust darkness levels.
Is it because blue is the newest of the LED colours and so as the last to be made is still considered “new” and “fancy” by manufacturers?
“Modern”
I remember when everything used red LEDs, especially alarm clocks. It was nice.
Read “fornicates” like a Greek hero
You’re the first to even mention it. ☺️
These are what I use to dim them without blocking them entirely: https://lightdims.com/
I had a mine pickup that had a blue LED for the indicator that the buggy whip was on. That thing was a fucking laser at night, shining right into my eyeball. I eventually got fed up and made a duct tape flap to put right above it so I could still tell it was on (my feet would be blue) but my retinas would still be intact
Yeah, it’s way worse in vehicles haha. I have an aftermarket entertainment system in my 2006 Matrix – it has three modes: Daytime colours (bright), nighttime colours (dark blue but still bright), and screen off. Highway driving at night means the only real option is screen off. I otherwise really like the system, but it seems like a huge oversight. It seems that none of the developers of these things ever actually test them in nighttime driving/working conditions.
I don’t miss much about the 2013 Prius but it had what was basically a blackout mode, akin to the old Saabs, where almost everything inside the car that was illuminated would turn off.
Great for cruise control on the highway at night.
I’m sorry, but what on earth is a “buggy whip”
A tall flag that attaches to your pickup. It has a light on the end.
It prevents this from happening:
Interesting, I think that is about the last thing I would have guessed but it makes sense
Yeah it’s not intuitively named. I suspect the term came from Australian miners that made their way to north america.