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Add USB LED Notifications To Your PC With Just a Bit of Soldering (Video)
Arvydas Juskevicius (say that five times fast) is an independent software developer and hardware hacker based in London (which is where I got a chance to talk with him) who's decided to bring the useful LED signalling capabilities of many modern smartphones into the world of desktop or laptop computers. With his £10 BlinkStick kit (£15 pre-assembled), you get a programmable multi-color LED that's about the size of a flash memory key. Deceptively simple -- it's essentially one giant pixel, after all, which might not sound exciting when you have millions of them on a dense display surface. But that LED light is something you can use as a signal for alarms, or to tell you that you have a message from one app while another is at full-screen, or practically anything else that you can devise software to notice and react to. I get the sense that Juskevicius would prefer that people get the kit version, to help spur interest in actually soldering some hardware rather than just plugging it in. If you're allergic to paying in other than U.S. dollars, the BlinkStick is also available from Adafruit Industries. Watch the video below to see it in action.
All of the *lock keys are mostly useless. Plenty of people (myself included) have remapped our Caps Lock key to TAB. The number of times I've wanted Caps Lock has greatly outweighed the number of times I've sit hitting it 1-2-3 times making sure it's not toggled wrong. Ditto for Scroll Lock. The number of times I've wanted it on versus the number of times I've said, "Hey, why isn't that scrolling right?!?"
Using those keyboard lights for notifications is OLD NEWS. We've been doing it forever... ...for about £15 less than the £15 in the slashvertisement.
OR.. Brace yourself.... Write a program that pops a dialog box... You can do it for free, no hardware, soldering irons or USB port required.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
We get it. You think it's a better idea to do this with software. That's fine and there are no shortage of such programs.
But what about when I'm playing a game in full screen? (as mentioned in the article). What if the monitor's gone to sleep? What if I'm listening to music with the monitor off?
Just because there's another way to do this doesn't mean this do-hickey isn't useful.