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Argh! These darn blue LED's

Rod


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Gosh it's difficult to get a device without a blue or green or at the very least red LED that indicates activity. Last night we had a power failure, not an unheard of event here in Bali and I was reminded again how common these little things are. Because it was about 9pm we decided to just have an early night and I thought I would listen to a podcast I had saved on my iPhone with my Bluetooth JBL earbuds. About 5min in my wife nudged me and asked what was that flashing? I realised it was the little activity light on the earbud controller. A little blue light the size of a pinhead which was like a lighthouse in our pitch black bedroom. Needless to say I had to swap to my less convenient plugin earbuds but it is only one example. Power boards, chargers, electrical components in sleep mode, the list goes on and on and it strikes me that Apple is one of the few manufacturers that does not put activity lights on all of its devices. If they did my bedroom would look like a Christmas tree at night.
Obviously these little indicator lights are meant to be visible in daylight conditions but in a pitch black room they are incredibly bright. We also have a plugin wireless doorbell unit which we have in our upstairs bedroom, that also had a blue LED which we had to mask with black tape, a TV with a red activity light (have to live with that), an Indonesian power board with a blue LED (masked) and an air conditioner with a green and orange LED.
needless to say trying to keep our bedroom dark at night is impossible.
Obviously these things are very efficient, long lasting and cheap but do they have to stick them in everything?
 

Slydude

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I feel your pain. One night I forgot to turn off the monitor on my desk and it basically went into sleep mode where the pwoer button blinks to let you know it is still powered on and not fully off. My wife woke up in the middle of the night and said that the blinking blue power button looked like some kind of lighthouse beacon. lol
 

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I guess I'm just the opposite. In our bedroom I have a red led that shows the portable TV is ready to come on with the push of the remote, another red led that shows the speakers are ready to give audio, a series of blue and green leds that show my router is routing, and finally my nice large red led clock that shows what time it is. No problem whatsoever going to sleep with the lights.

I almost forgot... our master bathroom has two led night lights which stay on at all times. ;D
 

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The lights generally don't both us but that one is annoying. It's brighter thann it needs to be and blinks constantly in sleep mode.

That's not the worst of it though. In the days when iChat was still being used the chhat window was usually covered by something else and I would often miss messages for several hours. My solution was to set up iChat so it spoke messages as they were received. I was using one of the aluminum Mac Pro models at the time and as you know the speaker could be quite loud.

One night I left the Mac on because I was converting some video in the background. I forgot to shut down iChat when I went to bed. Sometime around 2:00 a.m. my time one of Denis's friends in California sent me a message which the computer dutifly read -- quite loudly I might add. Let's just say my wife didn't appreciate that kind of wake up call.
 
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I remember a few years back when I had had some minor surgery and the doctor suggested that I sleep that first night in a chair. I have a fairly comfortable chair in my office, so that was the designated substitute bedroom. With the lights off, the LEDs on the router, cable box, Apple TV, television, network hub (six of them), laptop, printer, UPS and charger all flashed all night. It was like trying to sleep in the middle of a Christmas tree. I could almost read by the light of the LEDs. Had they all been incandescent bulbs, the temperature would have been unbearable from all the heat.

First world, twenty-first century problems.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot the LEDs on the external drives, too. Joy!
 
OP
Rod

Rod


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Yes of course its not a real problem. These little LED's work so well and usually last the life of the device but it's amazing how many of them we have and how bright they are in a dark room. My wife likes a pitch black bedroom, she must have thinner eyelids than me, when i close my eyes everything is dark so she has taken to wearing an eyepatch thingy.
 
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This is why electrical tape was invented. Now I realize electricians use it for a different purpose but since I am married to an electrician and we have roles of it around the house this makes it free for me! Once I discovered it was perfect for the blinking time light on the VCR I never looked back. You can trim it to fit any annoying blinking light.

;D

Lisa
 

IWT


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Can even be used to silence husbands, I understand, Lisa!:D:D

Ian
 
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Duct tape would not be very kind on my beard :'(

Our router is a BT jobbie and there's a timer on it so that you can turn the blue light off when you want. Ours is timed off from 23.00 to 07.00.

We have a led lamp/clock/thermometer in the front bedroom and the light on the clock is bright enough that the door has to be closed overnight or it lights most of our bungalow. I also have 2 remotes for the small lights in the living room, 3 of them. One of the remoted is in our bedroom. That's so that when SWMBO is a-kip I can get undressed by the lights in the livingroom and turn them off without having to wander out there and back in the dark. no led on that remote :Cool: I do have to be a bit careful though with 5 channels on the remote. If I hit the wrong one the bedside lamp lights :Evil::Evil:
 
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Weird...I couldn't swore I posted to this thread a few days ago, but now I don't see my post. I had said I wish all manufacturers would all put a switch or program a keypress (e.g. press the pause button for 3 seconds) to toggle LED indicators on and off. My LG TV has an option to toggle the standby light on and off, and that makes a lot of sense.
 
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Rod

Rod


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Jonathan, I agree that for fixed devices (plugged into AC power or permanently connected to a device) that would be good.
 
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Jonathan, I agree that for fixed devices (plugged into AC power or permanently connected to a device) that would be good.

But why not for all devices? I have a Bluetooth speaker I use at night that has lights on the front and the back. The front one is recessed under the speaker grill, so even covering it with tape doesn't fully block the light spilling out into the room. Seems like it would be a pretty simple thing to design such devices with a specific button press or separate switch as I described. I don't think using such devices at night while one is sleeping is a rare use case. Quite the opposite I'd say.
 
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Rod

Rod


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Well, I had supposed that being able to disable the pinhead sized blue LED on my Bluetooth earpods would be out of the question. This was the item mentioned in my first post and the one that caused me to start this thread.
 
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If it's just in one earpod you could always swop them over so the likkle blue light is on the side away from SWMBO:Cool::Cool::Coo

Would that work, or would the reversed channels screw that idea up :Oops::Oops:
 

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