The worst are wireless chargers on the bedside table. Too dim, and you can't tell they're charging in the daytime. Too bright, and they're obnoxious at night. And the lights are actually needed because the chargers are so finicky to position, so you can't just slap a piece of electrical tape over them, which is my usual solution to LEDs. I suppose manufacturers could have the brightness level adapt with an ambient light sensor, but then the price goes up. Ugh.
My personal least favorite LED ever, however, was a temporary apartment I lived in that put a wifi router with a blinking blue LED directly over the bed. WHY?!
I agree wireless chargers are super finicky, but don't most phone screens wake up when they start charging? I always used that as the indicator for when I had gotten it to the right spot.
There is some digital communication between Qi chargers and devices so they can stop charging at 100% battery. So everything's there for some kind of "night mode" communication to exist, whether the phone's clock or DND mode or ambient light sensor triggers it.
Too dim, and you can't tell they're charging in the daytime. Too bright, and they're obnoxious at night.
I have a device designed for the bedroom that does a pretty good job with this problem.
When it's off, the light is on. When it's on, the light is off.
It sounds counterintuitive in an office environment, but since the device is meant to be kept next to the bed and used at night, turning off when in use makes perfect sense. Especially since if you want to turn it on in the dark, the light is illuminated and helps you find the thing.
I put power strips with switches on most electronic stuff to make sure they are switched completely off when I don't need them. Gets rid of the annoying lights as well.
I especially like those with foot switches on a separate cord. The power strip on all the power adapters can remain hidden, but you can still easily switch everything on and off.
Oh god, I hate these foot-switched power cords. I still remember my second job, when in the middle of some work I accidentally stepped on the foot switch. Hearing the distinctive "click", I froze. At that moment, I felt like a character in a war movie, who just stepped on a land mine. Instinctively, I pulled a knife from my pocket, carefully slid it under my shoe, held the button down with it, asked a co-worker to fetch me my bag, and duct-taped the switch along with the knife.
The switch stayed that way ever since, until eventually we had to move to a larger office.
Multiple layers of electrical tape on most of my devices to bring the lights down to a reasonable level. A brand name battery charger and an off-brand HDMI splitter are the worst things I own for intensely bright blue LEDs.
And why do my friends' Bluetooth speakers have both a power on light and a loud sequence of beeps when you turn them on or off? Not to mention the beep when you press a physical volume button on them.
Same here. So easy to pull off and re-tape if I ever need to actually see if a light is on.
If I "just" want to dim a led instead of completely cover it, you can by packs of hundreds of small circular stickers in various colours for next to nothing. I bought 400 black ones several years ago, and most leds are dimmed enough to be a lot less annoying by one of them. Some take 2-3 - especially super-bright blue leds.
But usually either one of the dots or electrical tape is what I want.
I use little bits of gaff tape instead of electrical tape, for less sticky residue. If I still want an indicator, I poke a hole in the tape with a pin. Stickers are probably a better idea though!
Of course I've done this to myself too. "This network switch would look cooler with purple LEDs". oops.
FWIW electrical tape transmits infrared. Not a concern here, but it can be if you're expecting it to trigger an optointerrupter!
SOoo much electrical tape around my house covering LEDs and displays. Products are designed in isolation - where one crazy-bright blue LED might be tolerable (in the bright testing environment). But get a house full of devices, and that's a lot of LEDs.
The one that annoys me the most is my thinkpad. Apple made the slow, gentle "heartbeat" indicator when your laptop was asleep. It was a unique, delightful touch... for a while. Then everyone copied it (making it far less unique and delightful) - except they made the blinking faster, and the light red?!
Then Apple realised it was annoying and useless, and got rid of it... but everyone else kept them.
I hate both solutions. Many ThinkPads are okish with just a faint red led. But some also have a pulsing heartbeat blue light on the side when they're sleeping. How is that useful?
On the other hand with Macs now you can't tell what it's doing sometimes. Doesn't turn on, but the haptic feedback works on the touchpad? Is it just waking up from the disk? Is it hanging? Is the battery below minimum? Who knows...
Apple’s sleep indicator is more like breathing than a heartbeat - it is a 5 second cycle time on my old MacBook. Not many people have a 12bpm heart rate!
I use a couple of sheets of pre-cut blackout dot stickers in various sizes. More expensive than just using the duct tape, but the cleaner look is nice.
The problem with indicator lights is, that they're useless, until you actually need that info. If i turn my head just a bit, i can see a 48 port ethernet switch with 50+ blinking lights here in the office, and 99.9% of the time, they're all useless. But, if something doesn't work, one quick glance, can tell me if the switch is on (lights), if the data is sent through (random blinking), if the ethernet connection to my pc is up (one specific light), is it waiting for spanning tree to set up (light color), is there a loop (all lights on, or blinking synchronously), and also if the connection is slow during a calm time, I can see who's sending most traffic (frequency of blinking).
I literally never look at them when all is ok, but when it's not, i get the status info in literally a second.
Same with my home router with 8leds (especially the "internet" one), same with my PCs (on/off, hdd activity) etc.
My prefered solution would be just to keep those things away from the bedroom. Currently, in my bedroom, there is only one visible led (TV), and even that one is very very dim red.
My HP ZR2440w screens have this. But I don't need it there, because it isnt glaringly bright. Some other stuff I have could profit from it, but lacks that setting. Dark tape does wonders :-)
Would also be very easy to add a switch that turns the indicator lights on while pressed. At least any indicator lights I look at already require me to be at arm's length from the device to discern which light is which.
Note that this is not one of those things that sound simple but would complicate the design a lot. It's literally just adding a switch to one of the line supplying power to the lights. It can be done completely modularly -- probably even hacked into place after the fact.
Yes! My internet box has this and it's practical: one button turns on and off the status LEDs. They are off mostly, and on on boot or rare times I need to check the status.
Electrical tape for complete blackout, and little small black dot stickers for LEDs you want to dim instead of completely cover.
For the black dot/circle stickers, just search for "black dot" on Amazon. The 6mm / 1/4 inch ones tends to fit neatly over most LEDs.
The electrical tape is easy enough to remove and reattach or replace for the rare occasion I actually need to see an indicator light.
I thought I'd need to remove it more often when I "snapped" and put electrical tape on every device in my living room a while back, but I've yet to remove a single bit of it. I'm sure I'll have to now and again, but it's worth the hassle.
Sound like it might also be an option to take a pin and poke a tiny aperture into the electrical tape over the lights you do want to see, only dim down.
That'd probably work fine too, but anywhere where I care about appearance I need to cut the electrical tape while the dot stickers are available in just the right size for fractions of a penny per sticker, so I have what appears to be a lifetime supply of stickers anyway.
I find that most tapes are not blacking out everything I want, and often light can leak through the cases of cheap equipment. For those cases I usually use a combination of tape (of any kind) with pieces of tin foil underneath, which reliably blocks all the light. Of course make sure to not use it on any contacts, but that's usually not an issue for consumer grade hardware.
I ended up putting some tape inside my Hue bridge to block out multiple bright blue LEDs. The cheap tape I used not blocking it completely (even with two or three layers) ended up working out pretty well - they're now _just_ bright enough to see if you need to check the status, but even in a dark room they won't catch your eye unless you're looking directly at them.
I sleep with a fan at night - when my fan from college finally died after a decade of use, I replaced it with a similar tower fan. It had a nice speed, timer function that went long enough for me to use the auto-shutoff as an alarm clock to avoid being jarred awake by an actual alarm. Oh, and it also had
FIVE, HUGE, BRIGHT BLUE LEDS WHICH WERE ON CONSTANTLY WHEN IT WAS RUNNING.
What idiot thought this was a good idea? Oh, and snipping them from the circuit also made sure the fan wouldn't work in high speed for some reason. So I had to solder a piece of wire from one end of the removed leds to the other.
My theory is that the prevalence of blue LEDs to this date is an after-effect of people who grew up back when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, and who came to see blue LEDs as a way of signalling higher value and who got used to wanting to put blue LEDs in everything for that reason long after the signalling effect was lost.
(it was first in the early 90's that bright blue LEDs became available, at least at reasonable price points)
This reminds me of going for an interview at Durham University in the early 80s. A professor in the physics department proudly showed me a prototype blue LED that they had developed. It was indeed quite a novelty at that time.
Undoubtedly I agree with both of you. Unfortunately, since the introduction of blue LEDs little thought has been given to the way people react to them. From my experience, they seem to raise the most criticism of all colored indicators.
I have an air filter with the same similarly bright blue LEDs. But, it has a night mode which you specifically have to enable each time where those are turned off. So the people who designed this thought of this problem and still wanted to have the overly-bright LEDs with no function. I don't quite understand.
I did this for LEDs, and I also took the opportunity to cover up all the logos on my electronics/appliances. It's nice having my home now be entirely free of Samsung/Sonos/Apple/Dell/etc. logos.
Took several different colours and types of tape to get everything looking nice.
Same goes for usb keys.. they used to come with leds and then not anymore. Sometimes you'd like to know if the IO layer is blocked or if it's just slow pace.
The ones I pick up in the checkout line at Microcenter still have I/O indicators (on top of being phenomenally inexpensive). It's a shame that more don't anymore.
The interesting question is, could it work the other way? Light up ones that aren't on in red. Light up ones that haven't sent data recently in yellow. I'm not sure what is ideal but the question might be is it more important to indicate success/normal or failure/error?
Who uses the indicator lights? - people looking behind a computer or at switchgear. They aren't regular users, they understand how networks operate and what the green/yellow lights mean. They're typically debugging a problem, for which you want the truest indication of what's happening on the wire.
For regular users who just care about working internet, you can notify the user of connection failure where they look - the screen.
> I literally never look at them when all is ok, but when it's not, i get the status info in literally a second.
I'd say this is an argument for simply not having them on until something goes wrong.
I'm fortunate enough that almost all LEDs in my living room are dimmed green, with the exceptions being my speaker set with a very bright blue (covered with a black tape, they're always on anyway), and my external monitor (dim white, not on when in standby).
Unfortunately, my Thinkpad has an annoying blue power indicator and I can't keep my mic turned off via a keyboard shortcut since that turns on another blue LED. Especially annoying when the night light turns on.
My router has 4 ethernet ports, 3 of them have cables plugged in. One of the cables are broken. One of the computers on the other end lost it's power. I want a cheap router and i don't want to configure which ports that are supposed to be in use. How many error-leds do you expect to be flashing?
One of the reasons I bought a FRITZ!Box was that I can control all the LEDs. Lets me change the brightness or completely turn them off. I wish more devices had a feature like this.
My tp-link actually has a button next to the LEDs that turns them all on or off. If I want to know whether it's my router that's broken or if the DSL line is down, I press the button and look at the indicator for DSL. The same-brand powerline adapter has it in the webinterface, I find that less nice but it works as well.
My last ADSL router/modem from Vodafone (UK telecoms/broadband company - unsure who the OEM was) was amazing in this respect. You could configure it to have all the lights off by default, and it had an infrared proximity sensor built into the top - wave your hand to activate the blinkenlights.
LEDs on most networking equipment are software-controlled. I can disable them on my OpenWrt devices and even the Devolo stock firmware also included a feature to disable LEDs.
I have 2 LaCie Little Big Disk firewire drives. They each have a 1/2 inch diameter blue LED for hard drive activity. Needless to say I have to turn them around to face the wall otherwise I would go blind and insane.
I don't know why these infuriate me so much, but this is the absolute worst. Maybe because it looks so obnoxious. It seems like it should not be legal.
I also have irrational thoughts on the matter. Few feelings:
- looks toyish and immature
- marketing trick to sell whatever as new and improved
- actually badly designed, something is wrong in all animations I've seen, it doesn't convey a warning but attracts attention and the light output is probably less contrasting because instead of full on / full off cycles, you get length of 5%, 10%,... up to 100 then off. [0]
It will probably pass but in the mean time, enjoy the trigger.
[0] reminds me of this era of electronics who are more absorbing than helpful
I think it's mostly because the eye is drawn to motion/change, which hijacks your attention. When the turning light is blinking on-off, it only distracts you for a fraction of a second each time it blinks, while alerting you to the driver's intention.
The animated turning lights are in motion closer to 90% of the time, so it takes a second to tell you what blinking light tells you in 10 milliseconds, and uses far too much of your attention bandwidth compared to how much information it conveys.
I think they should be illegal. The light should alert you and let you focus attention elsewhere, not mesmerize you with useless fanciness.
yes that's about what I feel. The led animation was made I assume to indicate direction but the location of the light already gives you this.. and the blink is a better signal/noise. So the animated LED is both worse AND redundant information.
Before animated turn signals, NA's red turn signals should be illegal. And even more so the utter insanity that is using the same light as turn and braking signal.
A turn signal should be amber and absolutely not confusable with a brake light you absolute monsters.
Likewise. I've decided to give it a few years, perhaps by then I'll have made peace with it. At this point though, I get that same odd feeling... how can these be legal?
I can't even pinpoint what it is that irritates me about them, but I'm assuming it's just them being a complete deviation from what has been the norm for so long fucking with me.
Bought a PC case last year which has a green power LED. It's infuriating how bright it is in the dark, and despite being placed below my desk I can still see it e.g. when playing a game in the dark. I wrote a message to the manufacturer and suggested that this is pretty annoying. They were quite dismissive and replied that it's "impossible to make it darker". I'm not an electrical engineer but I'm positive even I could accomplish that task with some additional resistors.
Edit: I should also add that the LED is part of the power button, so it's not so simple to just tape over it. If I want to play in the dark, I put a piece of paper / cardboard on top of the PC.
On my desktop PC, the plug to the power button + lights is actually split into its component parts, and each component is labelled. So I can connect to each pin on the motherboard header separately. This made it easy to yank the power and HDD activity lights, while keeping the power and reset buttons enabled.
Search for "black dot" on Amazon. You can find stickers in various sizes that are good for dimming LEDs. Unless it's a really awkward shape you should be able to find one that'll cover the LED while keeping the button usable.
My ASRock motherboard has a 'goodnight LED' setting - the power LED turns on for a couple of seconds when the computer first turns on, then turns off the rest of the time.
Otherwise you can just disconnect it from the motherboard, it should be wired separately.
It's a shame that these LEDs aren't exposed to the OS so you can control them in software; so the firmware turns them on by default to indicate power, but then once the operating system loads it is able to turn them off if necessary.
Cheaper than buying a pack of single-use round stickers is using a sewing needle to make a tiny hole in a piece of electrical tape, and sticking that over the LED such that just a little light can come through the hole. It's enough to see the state of the indicator when you care, and also enough to keep it from annoying when you don't.
I use this to reduce the volume on piezo buzzers. A needle hole punched in cellophane tape over the port. With sewing needles, the tip has a taper so you can tune the volume by gradually opening the hole.
The indicator light for the macbook pro camera is an example of an led used correctly. Off when the camera is off and on to show that the camera is on.
And it stays on for a minimum of 3 seconds no matter how long the camera is on. So there's less worry about micro-activations either from malware or badly-made Hubs For Teamwork.
Seems like at least one company solved this problem. I have Asus TUF monitor (I don't remember exact model, but they should be similar) and LED indicator is almost unnoticable at night, but enough to see if the monitor is on.
The first thing I usually do in a Hotel room is to unplug the TV.
What drives me really crazy is that lately there seems to be a trend to have smoke detectors with regularly blinking LEDs above the bed in Hotel rooms. I make sure I always have some stickers with me when I go to Hotels, but I find it really hard to understand how anyone could think this is a good idea or even acceptable...
I have put black masking tape over so many LEDs in my life. Often more than one layer. Once I can no longer see them lighting up the nearby environment when the lights are off, I am done.
Agreed that there’s a market for home electronics that doesn’t try to sell on looking coolest in a store, but are reliable and work well in real life. No beeps, no unnecessary LEDs or LCDs, no fancy branded™ features. Just simple, basic, sturdy design that looks right in a home.
You could probably sell commodity hardware with high margin if you sold it with this promise and story.
Agreed that there’s a market for home electronics that doesn’t try to sell on looking coolest in a store, but are reliable and work well in real life. No beeps, no unnecessary LEDs or LCDs, no fancy branded™ features. Just simple, basic, sturdy design that looks right in a home.
Start reading magazines about gardening, retirement, group travel, birds, and other topics that skew 40+. Plenty of ads for such things there.
I get an inkling that this is very different from what I was trying to suggest, but maybe not. Is there some way to read more about these products without subscribing to some magazines I don’t care about?
I've got a set of $30 wireless earbuds, the Soundpeat Trueaudio, which are surprisingly decent for its price, except for one fatal flaw. It has an indicator light that blinks when it's on. Which is fine when it's bright, but in a dark setting the blinking is so obnoxious it is pretty much unusable.
If you permit me an unsolicited suggestion, I've had success using a black permanent marker to dim overly bright LEDs to an acceptable level. For really bright ones, which are causing trouble when the area is otherwise dark, I've also had success covering them with black insulation tape. It leaves them bright enough to be clear but not so bright as to cause annoyance.
The power LED on the sub-base next to my TV bright I couldn't even watch TV as I was squinting. I put about five layers of masking tape over it to dim it enough that I could still see when it was powered, but it didn't light the whole damn room up.
The clock in my bedroom uses an orange display, which I figure is better than one emitting blue light when you're trying to sleep.
And speaking of blue light when you're trying to sleep: a CPAP machine with blue back lit control panel so bright that I drop a face washer over it to block it out. That one feels particularly ironic.
The display on our old cable box was green, and I had no trouble reading the time from across the room; whereas the replacement has a blue clock and I really struggle to read the numbers (the look-to-the-side-of-the-thing-you-want-to-see trick kind of works).
I always assumed bedside clocks were red due to it being least detrimental to your night vision
Your eyes can't focus the blue light. That's one of the reasons blue LED displays are so irritating. A low-intensity LED segment or dot panel is the best for a clock, but because they require a driver module and calibration to not look terrible, they cost a lot (relatively speaking).
A calibrated amber 5x7 matrix is, to me, an unsurpassed technology in digital display.
199 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadMy personal least favorite LED ever, however, was a temporary apartment I lived in that put a wifi router with a blinking blue LED directly over the bed. WHY?!
I remember the days when blue LEDs were too expensive to use in consumer products... Wish it was still like that.
I have a device designed for the bedroom that does a pretty good job with this problem.
When it's off, the light is on. When it's on, the light is off.
It sounds counterintuitive in an office environment, but since the device is meant to be kept next to the bed and used at night, turning off when in use makes perfect sense. Especially since if you want to turn it on in the dark, the light is illuminated and helps you find the thing.
I especially like those with foot switches on a separate cord. The power strip on all the power adapters can remain hidden, but you can still easily switch everything on and off.
The switch stayed that way ever since, until eventually we had to move to a larger office.
And why do my friends' Bluetooth speakers have both a power on light and a loud sequence of beeps when you turn them on or off? Not to mention the beep when you press a physical volume button on them.
If I "just" want to dim a led instead of completely cover it, you can by packs of hundreds of small circular stickers in various colours for next to nothing. I bought 400 black ones several years ago, and most leds are dimmed enough to be a lot less annoying by one of them. Some take 2-3 - especially super-bright blue leds.
But usually either one of the dots or electrical tape is what I want.
Of course I've done this to myself too. "This network switch would look cooler with purple LEDs". oops.
FWIW electrical tape transmits infrared. Not a concern here, but it can be if you're expecting it to trigger an optointerrupter!
The one that annoys me the most is my thinkpad. Apple made the slow, gentle "heartbeat" indicator when your laptop was asleep. It was a unique, delightful touch... for a while. Then everyone copied it (making it far less unique and delightful) - except they made the blinking faster, and the light red?!
Then Apple realised it was annoying and useless, and got rid of it... but everyone else kept them.
Thankfully there is electrical tape.
On the other hand with Macs now you can't tell what it's doing sometimes. Doesn't turn on, but the haptic feedback works on the touchpad? Is it just waking up from the disk? Is it hanging? Is the battery below minimum? Who knows...
The small red led on x1 carbon is my favourite.
I literally never look at them when all is ok, but when it's not, i get the status info in literally a second.
Same with my home router with 8leds (especially the "internet" one), same with my PCs (on/off, hdd activity) etc.
My prefered solution would be just to keep those things away from the bedroom. Currently, in my bedroom, there is only one visible led (TV), and even that one is very very dim red.
Note that this is not one of those things that sound simple but would complicate the design a lot. It's literally just adding a switch to one of the line supplying power to the lights. It can be done completely modularly -- probably even hacked into place after the fact.
For the black dot/circle stickers, just search for "black dot" on Amazon. The 6mm / 1/4 inch ones tends to fit neatly over most LEDs.
The electrical tape is easy enough to remove and reattach or replace for the rare occasion I actually need to see an indicator light.
I thought I'd need to remove it more often when I "snapped" and put electrical tape on every device in my living room a while back, but I've yet to remove a single bit of it. I'm sure I'll have to now and again, but it's worth the hassle.
On a side note, also black electrical tape for laptop camera covering :)
FIVE, HUGE, BRIGHT BLUE LEDS WHICH WERE ON CONSTANTLY WHEN IT WAS RUNNING.
What idiot thought this was a good idea? Oh, and snipping them from the circuit also made sure the fan wouldn't work in high speed for some reason. So I had to solder a piece of wire from one end of the removed leds to the other.
(it was first in the early 90's that bright blue LEDs became available, at least at reasonable price points)
This reminds me of going for an interview at Durham University in the early 80s. A professor in the physics department proudly showed me a prototype blue LED that they had developed. It was indeed quite a novelty at that time.
Ah, yes - a quick search confirms there was research in this area going on at the time: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/16/6/02...
Took several different colours and types of tape to get everything looking nice.
For regular users who just care about working internet, you can notify the user of connection failure where they look - the screen.
I'd say this is an argument for simply not having them on until something goes wrong.
I'm fortunate enough that almost all LEDs in my living room are dimmed green, with the exceptions being my speaker set with a very bright blue (covered with a black tape, they're always on anyway), and my external monitor (dim white, not on when in standby).
Unfortunately, my Thinkpad has an annoying blue power indicator and I can't keep my mic turned off via a keyboard shortcut since that turns on another blue LED. Especially annoying when the night light turns on.
Nice username BTW!
[0] reminds me of this era of electronics who are more absorbing than helpful
The animated turning lights are in motion closer to 90% of the time, so it takes a second to tell you what blinking light tells you in 10 milliseconds, and uses far too much of your attention bandwidth compared to how much information it conveys.
I think they should be illegal. The light should alert you and let you focus attention elsewhere, not mesmerize you with useless fanciness.
A turn signal should be amber and absolutely not confusable with a brake light you absolute monsters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA
I can't even pinpoint what it is that irritates me about them, but I'm assuming it's just them being a complete deviation from what has been the norm for so long fucking with me.
I nearly had an accident once because I was that distracted trying to figure out what the weird animation on a back of a car was suppose to represent.
Edit: I should also add that the LED is part of the power button, so it's not so simple to just tape over it. If I want to play in the dark, I put a piece of paper / cardboard on top of the PC.
Otherwise you can just disconnect it from the motherboard, it should be wired separately.
To pick one category, status indicators on older Dell Latitudes and Macbook Pros.
These were small, pleasant, and very useful.
The “breathing“ pattern is also amazing. So simple, yet nice.
https://youtu.be/kG-0V-85H_0?t=101
Reminds me, Dell Workstations have multiple numbered LEDs on the front panel that pretty much describe an error in binary.
Aluminum foil blocks all light and is thin and cheap.
You can also cover windows in places without effective light blocking devices like roller shutters.
[0] https://www.pcomp3000.pl/images/produkty/Monitory_32/VG32VQ/... (I couldn't find higher resolution image, the indicator is on the bottom right)
What drives me really crazy is that lately there seems to be a trend to have smoke detectors with regularly blinking LEDs above the bed in Hotel rooms. I make sure I always have some stickers with me when I go to Hotels, but I find it really hard to understand how anyone could think this is a good idea or even acceptable...
For extra fun, put a sticker over it that says "THIS IS NOT A CAMERA". Something like this:
https://twitter.com/JimStLeger/status/762008969153908736/pho...
The staff re-plugging the TV makes sense since their checklist likely requires them to ensure that the equipment in the room is functioning correctly.
You could probably sell commodity hardware with high margin if you sold it with this promise and story.
These probably don't sell because when you go into a store the first thing you see is the one lit up like a Christmas tree.
Start reading magazines about gardening, retirement, group travel, birds, and other topics that skew 40+. Plenty of ads for such things there.
Got an icepick and stabbed it until it was no more. Highly satisfying.
The clock in my bedroom uses an orange display, which I figure is better than one emitting blue light when you're trying to sleep.
And speaking of blue light when you're trying to sleep: a CPAP machine with blue back lit control panel so bright that I drop a face washer over it to block it out. That one feels particularly ironic.
I always assumed bedside clocks were red due to it being least detrimental to your night vision
A calibrated amber 5x7 matrix is, to me, an unsurpassed technology in digital display.