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
Veritasium did a bit Why it was almost impossible to Make the Blue LED
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
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.
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.
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??
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!
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.
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
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.
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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.