Charlie Sorrel
Gear

Gadget Bill of Lights: End the Flashing. Now

As somebody who often works from home, I know the problem of trying to sleep alongside all my gadgets, winking and flashing at me, from the hideous bright blue LED on the external hard drive to the pulsing sleep lights on my Macs. To be fair to Apple, their lights do a pretty good job of communicating the state of the computer, but they are a little bright, and the general race to out-LED the competition reminds me of the Spectrum Analyzer overload on the stereos of the 1980s.

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Something has to be done about flashing lights, says Mike Elgan at Computerworld, and he has published an extremely entertaining rant to prove it.

As somebody who often works from home, I know the problem of trying to sleep alongside all my gadgets, winking and flashing at me, from the hideous bright blue LED on the external hard drive to the pulsing sleep lights on my Macs.

To be fair to Apple, their lights do a pretty good job of communicating the state of the computer, but they are a little bright, and the general race to out-LED the competition reminds me of the Spectrum Analyzer overload on the stereos of the 1980s.

Mike sums up the overload in this quote:

My PC and other computing equipment make my office look like a jet cockpit. I have two LCD monitors, each of which has two indicator lights that flash even when the PC is turned off. The attached sound control has a light on it. My keyboard has multiple lights. The power cord has lights, the printer has lights, and the power button is illuminated. My cable modem and Linksys router flash like crazy all the time. Together, these useless lights create a visual cacophony of blinking, multicolored lights that make me feel like I'm taking part in a NASA stress test for astronaut candidates

What do you think? Do you like the photon bling of your gadgets or do you wish for a little less light pollution?

We the people demand a Gadget Bill of Lights [Computerworld via Slashdot]