We’ve had two Bosch dishwashers, one of which I was sorry to leave behind with the house we sold, and a newer one about 95% that good. The one thing that drives us crazy about them is that they beep when the load is done.
Four long, loud beeps. Five seconds apart.
Which will not stop repeating at 15-minute intervals until the door is opened.
Are the Germans really that fucking anal about emptying the dishwasher? Are they afraid the plates will wrinkle, or the Housenperfectordercheckin Polizei will come stomping by and give them a ticket?
When I have to spend the night in a hotel room. I always unplug the tv. I can’t remember the last time that I watched tv in a hotel room anyway. I wonder how long it goes before anyone gives a shit.
I routinely use a black Sharpie or small bits of black Gaffer tape to cover offending l.e.d. lights. When in a hotel room, I’ve got a handful that are my fault. Cell phone charger, charger for spare cell battery, headset charger, MacBook Pro charger ( the charge magnetic plug against the laptop glows green, then there’s the slow " hey I’m a Mac and I’m asleep- cool right? " glow from the leading edge of the machine ), and a random other charger or two.
In a hotel room that has very little to no ambient light spilling in from around the curtains, the collective glow of the various l.e.d. lights is maddening. I like to sleep in the dark dammit !! A few distributed dirty socks and such cover the l.e.d. lights, but it’s a pain in the arse to have to take the time to arrange such every single night.
The big offender is the intense blue l.e.d. embedded in the buttons of my C.P.A.P. machine. It sits quite near my head off the side of the bed because it kinda has to. I’ve taped over a piece of thick black duvateen to block the light out.
The mouse on my PC at work came with a blindingly-lit illuminated blue LED scroll wheel. I opened it up and snapped the LED off the circuit board (I did wonder if this would stop it working - an LED is just a diode, after all - it could conceivably have been a necessary component, but it wasn’t).
It doesn’t always work. One time we tried to use a Dell desktop (tower) PC in our lab. We were troubleshooting a very sensitive spectrometer with its cover off, which meant we had to have the lab completely dark.
The PC had 3 very bright blue LEDs inside the case, along the front air intake. Which meant the only way to block the light was to cover up the whole air intake, which may have overheated the PC. I tried to disconnect the cable to the LEDs, but discovered that it was a large cable bundle which also carried USB and other signals to the front panel. I think I had to physically break the front air intake to get at and cover the LEDs.
My TV has a power status light: it’s blue when the TV is on, and red when it’s off, and I don’t need either! If it’s on, there are things moving on screen and it’s making noises. If it’s off, it doesn’t do that.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. If it’s unplugged, there is no light. So the red light tells you it’s plugged in, but turned off (actually on standby).
It’s called lithographer’s tape. I’m not sure what its purpose is in reality (I guess lithographers use it?), but it is PERFECT for reducing the glare of offensive LEDs. One strip will turn the bright blue into a more pleasing and soothing (duller) red, and two makes the light barely visible.
This tape is on virtually every LED in my house and when you turn off the lights… it’s actually dark in here. You can still see the lights, but not so that they’re distracting.
You may all thank me for recently talking my husband out of including a blinking LED on a piece of electronics he’s designing. One that you’d have in your line of sight while watching TV.
Wow, and I thought it was annoying that the PS3 lets out a single blood curdling beep upon turning it on. Makes it really great if you want to play a game/watch a movie (with headphones to keep it quiet) while other people are trying to sleep.
I had a TV with the lights like that, and I found the ON light to be most annoying and quickly got out the tape. If the TV’s on but not getting a signal, it says “NO SIGNAL” on the screen, no reason for the friggin too bright LED.
Oddly, plenty of old CRT’s had LED’s to indicate they were on, and I never found those terribly distracting, but I guess they were much dimmer than today’s UBERLEDS.
This is a translucent, red tape used with making plates for offset lithography (which are just printing presses to most). The negatives and plates are sensitive to blue, but not red light. You can cover up a hole or void in the neg with this tape, and humans can still see through it (for alignment or whatever), yet it looks black to the camera.
I was out of town with my aunt. I got the plug between the two beds because her charger has a very bright, quite annoying LED light on it. It had to go off to the bathroom where we wouldn’t be bothered by it.
I used to have a Nyko charging station for my Nintendo Wiimotes. This is a great use for LED indicator lights, right? One color will tell you charging is complete and another lets you know it is still charging. Most every human who has lived in a place that has cars knows that green is go, red is stop. This is universal now. We are all aware of this simple, normal idea: green=go, red=stop. So what does Nyko do when they designed the charging station? They used a green and a blue LED! What the fuck? Which one tells me charging is complete, and which one means it is currently charging? I had to use my label maker to denote what each color means.
I feel your pain – my video camera uses a green dot to mean “stop” (it’s on standby) and a red one to mean “go” (it’s recording). I have to remind myself to watch the counter for few seconds, which is incrementing only if it’s recording, or else I make the mistake of thinking it’s recording when it’s not or vice-versa.
I hate icons, beeps, blinks and colors which have ambiguous meanings when text would have been clear. RECORDING or REC would remove the ambiguity.
