Friday, June 3, 2005
Those Blue LEDs Are Keeping Me Awake And Suppressing My Immune System
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "NEWS" @ 02:00 PM
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67574,00.html
"When Australian applications consultant Martin Pot bought an LCD monitor last December, he got an unwanted extra: a dazzlingly bright blue LED, or light-emitting diode, just below the screen. Pot found the LED "distracting" and "annoying," and finally resorted to covering it up just to get some work done. A rare sight only five years ago, blue LEDs now seem to be everywhere: on laptops, DVD players, air ionizers and even toothbrushes. And they have some consumers seeing red."
:soapbox:
I wrote about this almost 3 years ago and the situation has gotten much worse. My current Pocket PC has several green, red and blue blinking abominations. Our rec room looks like Mission Control in Houston with the blinking and solid lights from a 802.11g USB adapter on a TiVo, the cable modem, mouse, printers, power supplies, routers, etc. And the blue lights are the most annoying in the extreme. My old Media Center PC had a huge blue ring on it that looked like a blasted spotlight when you had all the lights out and were trying to enjoy a movie. It is ridiculous to have to disable my bluetooth stack on my XDAIII just to go to sleep, but I do because in a dark room, that LED looks like a flash of lightening. Manufacturers, they were cool several years ago (slightly), but enough already!
"When Australian applications consultant Martin Pot bought an LCD monitor last December, he got an unwanted extra: a dazzlingly bright blue LED, or light-emitting diode, just below the screen. Pot found the LED "distracting" and "annoying," and finally resorted to covering it up just to get some work done. A rare sight only five years ago, blue LEDs now seem to be everywhere: on laptops, DVD players, air ionizers and even toothbrushes. And they have some consumers seeing red."
:soapbox: I wrote about this almost 3 years ago and the situation has gotten much worse. My current Pocket PC has several green, red and blue blinking abominations. Our rec room looks like Mission Control in Houston with the blinking and solid lights from a 802.11g USB adapter on a TiVo, the cable modem, mouse, printers, power supplies, routers, etc. And the blue lights are the most annoying in the extreme. My old Media Center PC had a huge blue ring on it that looked like a blasted spotlight when you had all the lights out and were trying to enjoy a movie. It is ridiculous to have to disable my bluetooth stack on my XDAIII just to go to sleep, but I do because in a dark room, that LED looks like a flash of lightening. Manufacturers, they were cool several years ago (slightly), but enough already!
