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The Blues for LEDs
Corey Burger writes "Seems somebody rolled out of bed on the wrong side today. The Globe and Mail's Ian Johnson delivers up a rant about the ubiquity of the new blue LEDs."
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simple solution: don't buy things with annoyingly bright blue leds on them.
or cover them with insulation tape.
next
In any event, isn't unification what we're looking for now in computing? Isn't it a nice thing (that has spun an entire cottage-industry of mods and such) that we can get our computer "look and feel" to match our decor? To match itself, for that matter? Looking around my desk, I see some green, red, yellow, and orange LEDs. I would be tickled if they could all be more unified. With, of course, the exception of my HDD LEDs, which I like to be able to notice out of the corner of my eye.
Sounds to me like someone's got a case of the (pre-)Mondays. ;)
Single-person boycotts don't work. Also, sometimes with the abundance of these things it's hard to avoid them.
I'm a fan of blue LED's, but I'm kinda getting sick of them, they're everywhere. Companies need to realise that there are other colours too... why don't we see more purple ones (I did have a burner that had a purple one, but that's the only device I've seen that came with one)? Or maybe a light green rather than the regular boring green?
First I don't believe his list of items. I buy a lot of high tech items and unless I just bought everything new yesterday and hunted around for blue LED versions of products, I don't think I could gather a list of devices so extensive, all with blue LEDs.
That said....unless someone gives him all his devices for free then geesh just buy different devices! If you are getting all your devices for free and then you have the nerve to complain about the color of the LED then shut your friggin pie hole before I give you a punch in the throat.
It's those Xenon HID headlights I hate. You know, the ultra-bright, kinda bluish ones that blind you late at night as they come around the curve. Those seem bright enough to be unsafe.
It's a matter of popularity. We've seen red, green, yellow and amber colored LED's since some 30 years now, they're "passe". Blue LED's on the other hand (as well as White and Cyan) are colors that have become possible just 10 years ago, and they where still very expensive and not really efficient. It's in the last 4 or 5 years, that techology has allowed cheap, efficient and bright blue LED's.... maybe that's why they seem to look so.... cool!
Exactly what I was thinking. If he doesn't like blue LEDs, then he didn't really need to buy a new monitor, handheld scanner, webcam, USB hub, Bluetooth access point, WiFi adapter, desktop volume control for his speakers, external hard drive, video editing peripheral, keyboard, home theatre, wireless music gateway, USB keychain drive, and portable MP3 player, all apparently in the "recent months".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
no-one buys an item because of its LED colour, or if it has them ata ll - you buy by the spec/brand/etc. It just so happens that they all have blue leds nowadays, so telling him to buy a different product is useless advice.
Telling him how to take theproduct apart and replace the led with a different colour one... now that's the kind of answer I like.
I'm sure that blue LEDs will fade in time. They were cool because they were new and rare. But novelty, by defintion, cannot last. Just wait a few years and everyone will think that blue LED are just so so early 2000's.
Of course, by then we'll have some other over-used new display technology. Perhaps consumer electronics makers will use OLEDs to form a glowing full-color brand name logos. Then the space around our desktops and dens will look like a miniture cityscape with tiny glowing neonesque billboards for all the brands that we buy.
Oh, and wait 20-40 years and blue LEDs will be back as a retro fad. The aging youth of today will look back to this time and will revel in the glory days when devices only had a single simple little blue light.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I tend to agree with the guy, personally. Blue LEDs, because they're usually stupidly bright, get really irritating, really fast.
;-)
There are great uses for them - for example, my new keyring light is one, and I can not only see to open doors etc but could probably blind a mugger permanantly as well
I think the use of super-bright blue LEDs for indicator lights is rather silly, though. I've replaced a couple in hardware I own, and put electrical tape over a couple of others I can't easily replace, because they were really god dammn annoying.
My PC sits in the living room (connected to the TV), and I used to have to put something in front of it if we were going to watch a film to avoid blinding anyone on the opposite side of the room. The power LED produces almost as much light as my 19" monitor. This is stupid.
As for posters who say "don't buy things with blue LEDs then" - (a) often you don't know until you've installed it, and (b) it's downright stupid to have to select devices based on whether or not the power light will drill a hole through your skull, instead of minor things like reliability or required features.
This chap is clearly just a ****. Anyone calling himself the 'chic geek' must be a ****. (I believe the mods should mark this as insightful)
Things from today:
Care to add?
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
Bittorrent and ISO downloading. We're in the UK so we actually have to pay more than 10p/year for our power too.
I also run a public-access VMS account service.
That's why we have to leave our computers on. Perhaps you could consider that your usage patterns aren't the same as the next person's before you open your mouth... huh?
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
But just as many animals use other colors. Poison arrow frogs are a good example. They come in a many range of colors: blue, green, orange, and red, jsut off the top of my head. Gila monsters are the most poisonous lizard in North America, and they're pale or bright pink. The idea is that bright colors act as warnings, not a particular color. At the risk of grossly over simplifying, animals tend to use either camoflauge to hide from predators or really bright colors to warn away predators. Either "you can't see me" or "here I am, but if you touch me you die".
w %2 0frogs&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&sa=N&t ab=wi
;)
Here's the link to a GIS for poison arrow frogs:
http://images.google.com/images?q=poison%20arro
Not that google should be taken as a true random sample, but out of the first 16 pictures, 3 are red, 3 are green, 4 are blue, and 4 are yellow and 2 are combinations of green, yellow, and blue.
A GIS for poisonous snakes shows mainly brown, one bright yellow and one a really nice bronze sort of color. No true reds though.
Because people are accustomed to red as a warning, they have a tendancy to remember re-inforcing examples. That seems to be what you have done here. SO watch it with the dumbass, dumbass.
Blue LEDs aren't the only ones that can be irritatingly bright - I was in Prague a couple of weeks ago, and the LEDs on the thermostat were so bright that they lit up the hotel room at night! I had to put a sticker over them so that they would stop burning my retinas so that I could sleep. He's right - why do they need such bright lights for something that I don't normally care about, e.g. the mood of the heating system at the time?
My theory is that it's a selling point on the sales floor - I imagine that a lot of customers, like me, gravitate towards the shiniest and/or brightest option.
~Ben
Then why can't I find a single pair of pants that don't have those fucking ridiculous "stonewashed" bleach stains all over them?
Then why can't I find a single pair of pants that don't have those fucking ridiculous "stonewashed" bleach stains all over them?
Cause you are not looking hard enough. Get out of the GAP and you might find plenty of denims in normal colors.
No sig
I think some of you people need to take this article a little less seriously/literally. It was a hyperbolic rant intended mainly for the amusment of newspaper readers and the venting of a minor annoyance, not some sort of manifesto on How Things Should Be.
Like the guy says, having a bright blue LED power-on indicator on your monitor is incredibly annoying, especially since it's so obvious when the monitor is powered off.
It's kind of like having a smoke alarm that beeps _unless_ it smells smoke, isn't it?
BTW - a bunch of people have suggested putting several layers of masking tape over LEDs. It's easier (and tidier) to just put a little dot of tinfoil and a piece of transparent tape.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
...and you can probably pick it up at virtually any local hardware store, or even an auto supply store.
:)
It is called black tape. Very unobtrusive, electrically inert, and completely opaque. It does leave a little gummy mark when it eventually falls off, but that's ok. Just cover it with more black tape.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.