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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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Sounds like this guy has too many new expensive gadgets that he should send to someone who appreciates it more.
But do they run linux?
Jay | http://oldos.org
So there.
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?
Looking around, I can't see any blue LEDs. There is one blue light on my Bluetooth docking station, which might be an LED, but it's covered by a clouded plastic button, so I can't tell, and it certainly isn't bright. Does anyone else have as many blue LEDs around them as thing guy says he does?
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.
I think the writer of that article needs to get a life! Of all the things to gripe about geez...
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!
Just the other day, one of my friends just got a new Nextel and the mobile DC cigarette lighter plug has this annoyingly bright Blue LED on it. He's pissed, says it totally destroys his night vision and it's about 100x brighter than it needs to be to verify the cigarette lighter adapter is bottomed out.
I remember when Blue LED's were first introduced in the April 1 issue of Byte Magazine (sometime around 1987 IIRC) as an April Fool's joke! Finally, two or three years later they were actually invented!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
As for the color, the blue LED does mark the quantum barrier surpassed by nichia a decade or so ago.
Now, roughly 10 years after the introducion of the first practical blue LEDs, we see a whole range of LED products based on the leap made at that time. For example, UV leds are becoming more and more common, and find applications in money checkers, forensics and scientific appliances.
Also, LEDs are becoming very usefull light sources in torches, automotive (brake)lights, traffic signals etc. etc.
Also, keep in mind that many other colors of LED are based on the work by Nichia.. new bright green leds are, white leds are (using a blue led and a phosphor), and also advances in red and yellow leds were achieved.
I think that idicators are just an over the top use of a technology that will bring us more and more interesting light-emitting devices for all kinds of uses.
Single-person boycotts don't work.
Individuals deciding what they do and don't like then buying what they like and not what they don't is exactly how markets do normally work.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
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.
this
It really pisses me off.
The Blue sky has a piercing clarity that draws the eye immediately, and which can mesmerize. And at night, the stars shimmer, they twinkle, and they can be incredibly intense for such tiny points of light -- they're really quite beautiful. The problem is they're suddenly everywhere.
Sorry...I must've rolled out of bed the wrong side too.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
I recently bought a whole bunch of blue LEDs for $0.45 each from LSDiodes.com. This was a whole lot cheaper than ANY other place I could find. They shipped promptly, too. I got my diodes about 4 days later. They are on the west coast, I am in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so thats pretty good. Equals the fastest shipping I have gotten from Amazon.com. Other places wanted like $2.75 for a blue LED. LSDiodes has 3mm, 5mm and two different sizes of surface mount: Tiny and miniscule.
/usr/games/fortune
Its the cycle of technologie. Invent/expenisve/affordable/plaster it everywhere/anoyance/praticality.
My bluetooth usb hub just got some electical tape to cover its flashing blue light. For a long time I was wishing I didn't have usb port in the frount of my case.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
damn Black light LEDs
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
The Blue LED howto:
Part 1 - dimming.
1. Go to the hardware shop and pick up some masking tape.
2. Cut a piece sufficiently large to cover the offending LED
3. Place the tape over the LED
4. Repeat from step 2 until the LED is sufficiently dim.
Part 2 - Blocking
1. Go to the hardware shop and pick up a nice hammer drill and a drill bit of similar diameter as the LED
2. Turn the device with the LED off.
3. Drill the shit out of the LED*
*Or, drill the shit out of your eyes. Therefore, removing the need to block any other blue LEDS that you may have on your "look at me I am a techy" gadgets.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Ian Johnson, I feel your pain. Why, just the other day, my butler Jeeves remarked to me, "Sir, I find myself incapable of sleeping ever since you installed your 100" plasma computer monitor. The blue LED keeps me up all night."
And I'm regretting giving the cleaning staff new blue-LED-equipped brooms last week. Those hundreds of dancing broom-handles put me in such a dreadful mood. How can I concentrate on exploiting those massively regressive tax-cuts when all those lights keep dancing in my brain?
Indeed.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
HEY!!!
I stick valve stem lights on my tires.... My motorcycle tires, that is.
I bought a set of white tire lights and replaced the LED's with 10000mcd whites and now my motorcycle can be seen more easily at night by traffic in the next lane.
You'd be suprised how invisible you are on a motorcycle at night without sufficient side lighting. Now people can at least see rings of bright white light from my wheels. I've even noticed less of a tendency of people trying to pull over into my lane thinking nothing was there. Then again, if the morons would remove the supposedly "cool looking" dark filters off of their headlights, they might see the reflection off the chrome.
As far as expensive gadgets go, the Shuttle SB75G2 has a blue power LED that lights up my ENTIRE LIVING ROOM when pitch black. The room is lit with a ghastly blue hue just enough to where you can navigate after shutting out all the rest of the light.
:(
This guy is right on target with this new "blue" craze because it's starting to take the coolness out of all the things I've custom modded with blue LEDs
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Things from today:
Care to add?
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
... I saw this story accompanied by a ThinkGeek add for a "cool new LED clock" - blue, naturally :)
Have you ever stood in front of a SUN Fire 6800 cabinet? They have a big sucker of a SUN logo illuminated by those blue LEDs...
:-)
So shiny... Happy happy happy... Must drool and watch... can't resist...
I'm still waiting for the Octalus-like big mouth with needle-sharp fangs coming out of the cabinet snatching for my head
Yalla.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
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.
I don't need a bright blue blast visually screaming "HEY! YOU! EVERYTHING'S OK! I'M STILL ON!" all day long.
The article was worth it because this line reminded me of Homer's Everything's OK Alarm:
BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEP, IT WILL KEEP GOING, BEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP, EVERY 5 SECONDS, BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP, UNLESS EVERYTHING'S NOT OK, BEEEEEEEP.
Now I'm going to spend all day searching through Simpsons tapes trying to find that episode.
At any rate, hasn't this guy heard of duct tape?
"None of us are as dumb as all of us." - meeting mantra
>2. Turn the device with the LED off.
>3. Drill the shit out of the LED*
4. Turn the device back on, and find out if the LED was actually part of an important circuit as well as being an indicator.
Alternate step 3: Use black electrical tape to cover the LED. Peel it back off when you're taking the eBay photos a couple years from now.
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
Even better:
1. Disassemble device
2. Locate offending LED
3. Apply heat (solder iron) and remove LED
4. If so desired, replace it with an LED of different color using the solder iron and resin.
5. Reassemble device
$cat
Paint works well too...
Even a sharpie marker..
Choose a blue color and you can still have your light, at a reduced amount of luminosity..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The attraction is that for many years blue LEDs were nearly impossible to fabricate. Next, they were expensive and inefficient. Next, just expensive. Now, the old problems are gone and they have the highest light output per watt of all LEDs, and they're filling a pent-up demand dating back three decades.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
One of the best waste of money I have found in a long time. Its even a feature of the watch that blue LEDs are the second most expensive LEDs you can get.
Pimpin aint easy watch by PIMP
A note that came with the watch said the battery only lasts 6-9 months if I need to know the time 15 times a day but who cares when you have such a rockin wrist peice.
Apple kit comes with white LEDs. The worst one is the one on the front which indicates the machine is in standby mode by gently pulsating. The problem with this is that it's really hypnotic. First the machine goes into standby mode, then my brain does...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Then why can't I find a single pair of pants that don't have those fucking ridiculous "stonewashed" bleach stains all over them?
one word : Jumbotron
I swapped plain ol' leds for premium-priced blue ones not so long ago.. Now the reverse?
Why the hell do humans always take a good things way to damned far? Huh?!
Soda pop, sex, religion, blue leds, and on and on..
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.
6. Throw it away when you realize you broke it.
Ok, most of this time this isn't a problem, but have you see how small some of those LEDs are these days? Most people are inexperianced with their iron and are not willing to drop molten metal inside of their several thousand dollar home theature equipment.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
.. I love blue leds-in my flashlights, I have several now with these, and I hope much cheaper replacement home lighting is to follow with them. I prefer the other colors for data indicators. Blue IS too intense for the background indicators.
Of course, he forgot his early geek training, his monitor annoyance is easily fixed with duct tape....
4a. Replace corresponding series resistor.
Blue LEDs typically have a forward voltage greater than standard red/green/yellow ones. If you don't use a correctly-calculated series resistor, a lower voltage LED will receive more current and become a super-high-tech Black LED shortly after powerup.
It might also be that red is the color of our blood-- it might be evolutionarily optimal to respond most strongly to the a color that is guaranteed to be emitted when we are badly injured.
I got an M-Audio Firewire 410 soundcard and the blue LED was beyond obnoxious. It was MUCH brighter than the red and green LEDs on the thing, by several times. Since it is the power LED, it was ALWAYS on. Also, if you powered the unit down, but left it connected to Firewire, it would proceed to blink at you, very frequently. I had put a peice of masking tape over it to dampen the light (and I could still see it through that). Finally, however, it just broke, and I'm not sending it in for service.
It's not the use of blue LEDs that bothers me, it's how damn bright most of them are. An indicator that my gear is turned on is nice. An indicator that my gear is turned on that I can see from outside at night (makes the room glow blue) is more than just a bit of overkill.
ever hook up a stock LED to the power pack taken out of a polaroid camera.... LED went bright, then dim, then exploded hitting me above the eye with a chunk of plastic...
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I just went on a walking tour of the house, and I don't have a single thing with a blue LED in it. My crap is ancient. I'm poor. Jesus.
They sell pants under their own brand called Member's Mark. They are nice, plain, dark blue jeans. They are also well made and like $13/pair.
...when I see them along with red LEDs on a Crown Victoria in my rearview mirror.
Seriously though, more and more companies are starting to use LEDs for warning lighting on emergency vehicles. They don't draw huge amounts of power like incandescent systems, sometimes requiring additional batteries and/or heavy duty alternators; they don't require high voltage triggers like like strobe systems; and they've gotten bright enough to handle about any application other than illumination. It's taken a while for the blues to get bright enough to useful for these tasks; some early iterations are barely visible next to their red counterparts in daylight (though they've gotten to the point now where some of these LED systems are so bright they seem to be giving you eye surgery).
One interesting thing if you look at the pricing: blue and white still often cost more than double the price of red, amber, or green.
4. If so desired, replace it with an LED of different color using the solder iron and resin.
And watch your new LED smoulder after a while. Blue LEDs trigger at 3.2 volts as compared to 0.7 volts for red and green LEDs. You also need to place a larger resistance in series with it, which is at best hardto do on a PCB that wasn't designed for it.
I vague recall seeing LEDs with curren-limiting resistances built in though somewhere, so make sure you use one of those.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
The color, though, is correct. The standard NEMA rules for indicator colors, used on industrial gear for decades, are
-
GREEN Normal status.
-
AMBER Abnormal status. Operator should be aware that an amber lamp is lit.
-
RED Trouble status. Operator should take action to make the red light go out.
-
BLUE or WHITE On, or other non-specific meaning.
So blue and white are actually the default colors. Red should be used only for trouble indicators. We're still getting over the cheap red LED glut of the 1980s, when everything had red LEDs.Anything that rackmounts should follow these rules. It's not only annoying, but a headache, to have red lights for non-trouble conditions in a rack of equipment. IBM always has.
Why can't the manufacturers include an option to turn that shit off? Most of the devices usually have some way to change the settings, either an on-screen menu or a computer control panel applet. It should be rather simple to add a "disable LED indicator" option. I have an ADSL modem and a switch, sitting on the table. Honestly, I don't care about what these devices are doing 99.99% of the time. And in those rare cases when I do care, I can usually afford 30 seconds to enable the LEDs. To think of it, I probably can use the program on the PC they are connected to to find out how they are doing. So the manufacturer can save the cost of those LEDs and make the product less annoying.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
6. ....
7. Profit!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
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".
Ignoring the quantity of his purchases, it *is* really annoying that so many different devices, presumably from different manufacturers, would all be so-festooned.
But what really irks me is the idiots who put blue lights all over their cars - usually silly little Honda cars with 3" diameter coffee can exhaust tips (despite the 1" diameter pipe coming from the puny little 1.6L engine).
Blue side markers, taillights, parking lights? Non-conformant with SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, look closely at your taillight lenses) standardized coloring and therefore dangerous. Illegal. Police should be cracking down on these the way they used to crack down on 50's hot-rodders who were putting the blue dots into their red taillights.
LEDs (especially blue) on calipers, brake rotors, rims, windshield washer nozzles - what are you, stupid? It might have looked a little neat the first time someone did it, but now it's every home-boy who doesn't know how to put on a baseball cap who is doing it. Why would you spend your money being a brainless clone, when instead you could save it to put a real motor into your Civic? (Now, if you've got a Civic with a 4-bolt mains Chevy 350 under the hood, *then* I'll be impressed - takes a little more skill to do that than to put silly lights on the car.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
...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.
"I've got a bone to pick with Shuji Nakamura."
I hate how people keep crediting Nakamura as the sole inventor of the blue LED. Yes, he did make the first working blue LED, but Dr. Theodore Moustakas here at Boston University developed the buffer-layer process for GaN months before Nakamura.
Here's an article.
Dr. Moustakas is an awesome professor too. He loves to teach and does it well. He deserves so much more credit.
Here is the math:
:)
Wavelength: Minimum @ 400nm (violet). =: lambda1.
Maximum: 800nm (red) =: lambda2.
Energy E=h*f, with f=c/lambda => E=h*c/lambda, voltage difference per electron: U=h*c/(e* lambda).
=> pocket calculator => U_red approx 1.6V, U_blue approx 3.1V.
Resistor for blue LED @ 5V supply voltage, 20mA current: (5-3.1)volts/(20mA) approx 100 ohm.
Current through red led: (5-1.6)volts/(100ohm)=34mA.
34mA through the LED. Most of my LEDs would out of spec. here, but very often, it works! No warranty!
(Repost because of formatting errors)
Ah, yes, the old "all diodes are light emitting . . . once" rule of electronics.
Nathan's blog
This product might be the solution you need
My bed is only 8 inches off the ground so when I'm in bed at night my PC and all the stuff that go with it shine directly in my eyes. They're not blue LEDs, but they were still annoying as hell.
So I've used little bits of white electrical tape (match the case colors) to block them all out. Even the drive activity LED got covered over, at nights when it was going on-and-off it was exteremely annoying.
Now all I see are tiny dull green-yellow or orange spots, not a huge spotlight shining across the room. So I can still see the lights even during the daytime, but they are no longer the equivalent of little spotlights in the darkness.
Did the same thing to the LED on the speaker on the fridge in the kitchen, it was annoying at 2am when going for a glug of milk in the pitch black apartment to be blinded by the LED on it.
Here's a question - why do so few other people in the world use the BRAINS (you know, those huge amazing things that only we humans have) to SOLVE their problems instead of bitching about it all the time? Everyone always seems so supprised whenever I trot out some tiny little thing that I've done to solve a problem or make a job easy. It's not rocket science.
I have exactly two blue LEDs, and I had them easily 3 or 4 years ago when they were "expensive". It's a long story, but suffice to say I've been a fan of LEDs and their different colors and uses since childhood. I have a full-tower Antec case and I've never really been a fan of case-modding (I like beige just fine, thankyouverymuch), but I once happened to see some blue LEDs from the same online store that I bought my CPU fan from and bought a pair on a whim.
I soldered them in, replacing the green and amber power and HDD LEDs respectively, and turned it on. Looking, of course, directly into them. BIG MISTAKE. I felt like I was temporarily blinded for several minutes. The HDD one is not a big deal since it only flashes occasionally and never stays continuously lit for more than a second or two, but the power LED is on ALL THE TIME and if I turn off the lights it can illuminate an entire half of the room all by itself.
Fortunately, the LED bezel in the case directs most of the beam straight ahead, so it hasn't been that big a deal, though I've been tempted more than once to figure out the current and voltage and solder a resistor in series just to tone it down a bit.
In reality, the color isn't too much of a problem. The problem is that they are so high powered.
While I will admit, the fact is that certain colors appear more piercing than others (due to how much they scatter), the power is the real issue. He mentions that he is bothered by RED LEDs, but in reality, Red is the most gentle color there is. Back when I was making my own home-made LED flashlights, I quickly discovered that red is an awful color to use, because it scatters so much that there's very little light left where you are pointing it. Blue worked well, but too well. It's soo powerful that you loose your night vision, and since LEDs weren't as bright as regular bulbs, you needed your night vision, otherwise the LED flashlights were useless.
Green/Amber are the best colors. No loss of night vision, but enough light to iluminate.
I have a solution to this problem though. What we need is an indicator that is not self-lit at all. Back before LEDs, most applications used a colored piece of plastic/metal to indicate status. What we need is something like that, but updated so they can be a drop-in replacement for LEDs.
I'm thinking maybe a tiny canister, with 3 tiny, colored, magnetized ball-bearings. A simple electro-magnet could move any of the 3 to the display window.
So, it would be just as simple as the multi-colored LEDs, extremely low power, and almost as small. As an added bonus, you won't see these status indicators when all the building lights are out, and you WILL be able to see them when it is bright out. If you've ever tried to see if your LED is on while it's in direct sunlight, you know what I'm talking about, and certainly see the advantage of this idea.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Recent research in Japan has led to the developement of PINK LED lights (4 red to 1 blue) in growing plants. It seems that the low power, high yield (400% higher growth in some instances) are a savior for some countries of the future. LED use so little power, hook them up to solar/wind and you can grow huge amounts of food in low light, basements, attics, etc without the problems of:Heat, replacing bulbs, power supply, cooling of housing from bulb/halogens. This will lead to great developement for 3rd world countries, cold countries, and home 'weed growers' to grow with impunity. GOOD JOB NAKA!
When I first got my new system, I was looking for the power button on the front of my subwoofer. Noticing the little button, looking directly at it, I pushed it in and was blinded by a furious, burning blue LED right above the fucking power button.
Now I like it, because even when I turn the lights off the blue glow of the subwoofer is good reading light.