A previous PC I built had faulty grounding with the headphone jack and would constantly play static mixed in with whatever intentional analog signal was being played. When I played single player games certain patterns signaled a big boss fight was about to happen.
I do really like the concept of this and keep a full bar of monitors going in my top panel on desktop. I've also done things like tailing the ssh apache logs to watch real time traffic. I've also setup a streaming audio server that played sounds on various events like someone visiting a website or auctions, triggering the stairway camera, making a sale and tracking updates.
I also thought about, but never implemented some sort of lighted display, possibly a dollar sign that slowly turned from red to green as an indicator of the days profit from sales on my e-commerce channels.
Modern computers and peripherals tend to come with a lot of RGB lighting that's mostly there to boost performance, but could ideally be used to expose this kind of background information.
This is how you know you need a vacation from computers - when you write an article literally fetishizing sounds they once made. The whole piece is symptomatic of a fried brain. To the author: go outside for a long walk and shut your devices off.
the frequency range of pulsing audio is much higher than pulsing light thats for sure. sound was used a lot to calibrate analytical instruments in labs. throw a frequency divider a tiny amp and a tiny speaker and you could easily find if your frequency is stable, drifting...
Waterfall display might work though, or coloured sequences give each function it’s own colour then draw the last stack as a pattern of colours, humans are really good at spotting anomalies in patterns, probably because tree,tree,tree,wolf,tree was useful to our ancestors.
This was common in home computers that could run a routine at every VBL (Vertical Blanking) interrupt, often chosen as the main timing 'tick' interrupt. Change the overscan border color for each part of the subroutine, and the timing gets reflected quite directly in the colored fringes that are displayed as the program executes.
Sure, I wasn't suggesting it was an improvement. I also assumed the actual pattern isn't important in a strict sense, just as an indication of when and frequency?
But of course, in general either could be the case. And perhaps don't want to wear earphones (or disturb colleagues) etc. only meant it as an additional similar idea.
At one point I wrote a program that would tail a log file and play very short samples of different engine noises for each line that matched the corresponding pattern. The idea was that if something changed about the running of the system, I'd hear the noise change.
It didn't work spectacularly well though, and I gave up on the idea.
I wrote a terminal emulator in Forth on my Apple ][ that had different sounding key clicks for different classes of keys. Upper and lower case letters had different tones, and the sequence of digits had rising tones, and certain control characters like return and backspace and escape and punctuation and space all had their own unique sounds, so you could hear what you were typing and know that you typed the right keys when you were typing ahead quickly on a slow 300 baud ARPA TIP connection.
Also each time it beeped the bell it would start at a higher and higher tone rising to a fixed pitch, each starting higher and lasting less time than the last, so a lot of bells in a row would ramp up in tone and shorten out to a high buzz, so they weren't so annoying. Then it would decay back down after you didn't receive any bells for a few seconds. It was inspired by the way of an excited guinea pig squeals for lettuce.
Also, the underline cursor floated up and down and up and down in the character cell, so it was very easy to see where it was, and it drew a wavy line in the phosphor as it moved across the screen!
One of my ideas is for application windows to have a button to flip to the internals of the application - see threads, connections, progress bars, concurrent loops, memory allocations, even stacks. This is what I call an encyclopedic desktop.
The JVM more or less allow you to do that. Its debugging and profiling abilities are amazing. You can also do most of these things (and more) with the various tracing systems of the linux kernel. (edit: typo)
One approach that I find interesting is to use Wasm because it was designed as a portable execution format for lots of language types. It has an amazing amount of flexibility for byte working and execution.
It is fairly trivial to see all of main memory and single step execution of a wasm program. If one runs wasm3 in wasm3, you can then trace the inner interpreter as well. Check out the section on trace visualization.
I'm of the understanding it's actually possible to get 99% of exactly what you're describing if you're prepared to (learn how to) poke around with and squint at debugger-style tooling. Progress bars might be a bit tricky, but threads and connections are fair game, and tracing different kinds of loops is even viable too.
When I get back into the game with Windows again, I'll be seriously looking into ETW, Event Tracing for Windows.
The 2nd link above has a bunch of links to other pages, but is a few years old, so while the old info is still relevant, a quick poke around this blog's tags finds the following additional, newer posts that also demonstrate real-world insights of ETW saving the day in a bunch of practical situations:
In my old office I used to be able to tell if any of the machines in the lab were having issues just by walking in; the machines were old enough that if there was any issue (too much load, hard drive failing,etc) the difference in background noise was noticeable. My new office is unfortunately too loud by default and everything is too new for me to do it anymore.
Similar issue with the newer laptops that include power buttons as part of the keyboard. The power button no longer has a noticeable change when pressed, and if the laptop is fanless or just very quiet, it can be impossible to tell if the damn thing is turned on or not.
Sometimes I wonder if the manufacturers are doing this on purpose, to make the customer feel more distant from their devices and willing to part with them easier.
I have a Dell XPS 13 with an OLED screen (so no backlight). It has one of those power buttons in the keyboard. Luckily, however, Dell has included a "sign-of-life" option in the BIOS that will turn on the keyboard backlight, turn on the large white LED on the front edge of the case, and spin up the fans to max immediately after pressing the power button, if the computer is off and not in sleep mode. The instant feedback is so good.
Meanwhile, I used to have a Surface Pro 3 that did none of those. Pressing the power button did nothing for several seconds, and sometimes I would have to push the power button again after some seconds, for some reason. Quite irritating.
In the past, the clicking of hard disk drives has told me a lot of things: An unexpected I/O intensive application running, lots of random seeks, or even failures like bad sectors. Now with SSDs, that aural indication is gone and the only noticeable effect is system lag.
I'm not sure this would really work. I mean, remember the modem sounds from the 80s? Could you really tell what was going on based on the sound alone other than the difference between connecting/transmitting/disconnecting?
I could tell a successful handshake from a bad one. After the handshake, it would only signal data transmission, so I always activated the sounds only for the handshake
Earlier with my tape based computer I could tell what program was loading by the sound, and if it had an error.
I could tell from the sounds of the connection if it had negotiated the max 56k or something lower. Of course I could always see it in the connection properties later on, but I could tell just from the initial sounds.
Differences in handshake sounds would give you some idea of the negotiated speed as others mentioned, but also a good idea of if the handshake was going to succeed. Sometimes you'd get a bad modem or bad line and the handshake would sound wrong and try several times and either not connect or connect at a very low bitrate; cutting that off early was useful.
Of course, in a single line household, sometimes you'd catch the line in use, and the speaker would confirm that vs no dialtone error. Ocassionally, you might also get glare --- picking up an incomming call before it rings, and listening in might help recover from that as well.
Speaker on while connected could be useful for monitoring for connection disturbances (and maybe forcing a lower speed on a reconnect) or call waiting beeps, but was usually too low signal to bother. Also, I had a phone that would click/chirp on call waiting even when on hook which was a lot more actionable.
As computing environments mature, a lot of the instrumentation that used to be presented to users has been going away. I do think that's too bad. One of the first things I install on any new machine is a visible network/CPU/memory monitor.
Humans constantly monitor their environment, and tend to only become conscious of something when it is behaving differently than it had been. Think of long drives - unexpected motions, odd noises, etc. trigger conscious attention.
Computers, especially of the 'cloud' variety, lack the incidental physical environmental interactions that give us those, so intentionally building them in is required. (And because they're intentional and artificial, they're at risk of manipulation, something else to worry about.)
This is why I'll never try to build a silent system. Coil whine + fans communicate quite alot, but also fade into the background. Something about the noise from the fan just modulating slightly makes it less intrusive for me than a sound coming out of silence.
It's like living in a noisy apartment or on a busy street. Yes noise does fade into the background but subconsciously it still affects concentration/sleep/mood/creativity/etc. You won't know what you're (not) missing until you try it without the noise.
This alludes to a concept I've been wrestling with: "hard" versus "soft" understanding.
A professional in _any_ industry will pick up a notable difference between extremely similar states. This article is expressing the fact that older computers were easier to read.
I'm convinced it's a product of sophistication. Distributed systems used to be an enterprise thing, but now everything is technically a distributed system. Memory registers are quantum scales more than they used to be. Drives now have no moving parts.
There are still ways to get an intuitive understanding, but they're...different, and certainly not audible. I've noticed that I can feel out I/O speeds when I'm power-using. I'm fairly convinced that many knowledge workers prefer a specific OS because this intuition pulling up false-positives in a new environment.
In the mid 90s, I worked with magneto-optical disk systems. The noises they made helped me (and others) diagnose their problems.
This type of "sixth sense" is also not limited to computers. When I worked in the aerospace industry, I heard a story about McDonnell Douglas replacing the F-15 cockpit fairing with a sleeker, fewer-piece version that reduced drag. Pilots found that without the noise from airflow over the metal joints, they didn't have as good a feel for speed and maneuvers.
Cars too. I learned to drive stick on a Honda Civic without a tachometer, but I learned to do without and tell what state the engine was in purely by its noise and vibrations.
I have a 90s pickup, manual, no tach. I use it to plow snow on my steep, long driveway. It has "shift up" light, but it's always wrong. Without the windows open I have no idea when to shift.
Computers should have normal auditable log files, board schemes and spare parts. If it works right, it should be invisible. If it stops working, I call plumber who will fix it very cheaply.
This "computers are magic" is just BS. I refuse to "interact" with my thermostat. Soon this 6th sense will feed ads into my subconsciousness.
You... refuse to feel temperature? I'd wager that more people operate their thermostats based on their ambient reading of how hot/cold the room is rather than a data-forward approach.
I know this feeling. I remember playing Minecraft in a Windows 10 virtual machine, and the fan was roaring. Windows 10 is bad enough, but throw in a resource hogging game & a VM and you're asking for trouble. The game was so laggy as to be unplayable.
This is an important but seemingly understudied subsection of my field (human-robot interaction). From some well-cited work:
"Our goal is to enable robots to express their incapability, and to do so in a way that communicates both what they are trying to accomplish and why they are unable to accomplish it... Our user study supports that our approach automatically generates motions expressing incapability that communicate both what and why to end-users, and improve their overall perception of the robot and willingness to collaborate with it in the future."
I'm not as plugged into human-computer interaction work, but as a user, it seems like this is sorely missing and getting worse. I wish I could get a happy medium somewhere between a full stack trace and silent failure, e.g. when my iCloud documents won't sync.
Feels like the culture series "aura" for droids could fit here. Subtle colours indicating mood in the books by Iain M Banks, but could indicate system health.
I second, we have improve in many aspects of the UI, others like visibility, no so much.
Take a look a my experiments exploring ways to sense the virtual environment
Cool! It doesn't really differentiate in terms of allocation volume (only frequency). It would be interesting if the tick rate was proportional to something like log(allocation rate) so you could get an idea if something really heavy is allocated.
Computers should be noisier is an interesting take.
I can't tell you how much of a relief it was to have finally have a computer with solid state everything, an insulated case, 120mm fans. Turned it on, silence. It's good for recording sound, it's good for anyone else who happens to be in the room.
Why sound? why not just a.. oh idk. disk access light? Maybe add other little leds for other stuff?
>Why sound? why not just a.. oh idk. disk access light? Maybe add other little leds for other stuff?
Meanwhile, I'm over here with every LED in my apartment that's not tied to an IR reciever taped over with black electrical tape. I don't mind fan noise at all, but the sea of twinkling LEDs that come from modern electronics drives me insane.
104 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadpatterns in noise (static), not in the signal (game audio)
I also thought about, but never implemented some sort of lighted display, possibly a dollar sign that slowly turned from red to green as an indicator of the days profit from sales on my e-commerce channels.
But of course, in general either could be the case. And perhaps don't want to wear earphones (or disturb colleagues) etc. only meant it as an additional similar idea.
It didn't work spectacularly well though, and I gave up on the idea.
Also each time it beeped the bell it would start at a higher and higher tone rising to a fixed pitch, each starting higher and lasting less time than the last, so a lot of bells in a row would ramp up in tone and shorten out to a high buzz, so they weren't so annoying. Then it would decay back down after you didn't receive any bells for a few seconds. It was inspired by the way of an excited guinea pig squeals for lettuce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jfoxSeJzWo&ab_channel=It%27...
Also, the underline cursor floated up and down and up and down in the character cell, so it was very easy to see where it was, and it drew a wavy line in the phosphor as it moved across the screen!
It is fairly trivial to see all of main memory and single step execution of a wasm program. If one runs wasm3 in wasm3, you can then trace the inner interpreter as well. Check out the section on trace visualization.
https://github.com/vshymanskyy/awesome-wasm-tools
When I get back into the game with Windows again, I'll be seriously looking into ETW, Event Tracing for Windows.
It seems the best startpoint to learn about ETW is https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/xperf-basics-re... and https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/.
The 2nd link above has a bunch of links to other pages, but is a few years old, so while the old info is still relevant, a quick poke around this blog's tags finds the following additional, newer posts that also demonstrate real-world insights of ETW saving the day in a bunch of practical situations:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-i...
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis...
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows...
Similar issue with the newer laptops that include power buttons as part of the keyboard. The power button no longer has a noticeable change when pressed, and if the laptop is fanless or just very quiet, it can be impossible to tell if the damn thing is turned on or not.
Sometimes I wonder if the manufacturers are doing this on purpose, to make the customer feel more distant from their devices and willing to part with them easier.
Meanwhile, I used to have a Surface Pro 3 that did none of those. Pressing the power button did nothing for several seconds, and sometimes I would have to push the power button again after some seconds, for some reason. Quite irritating.
Earlier with my tape based computer I could tell what program was loading by the sound, and if it had an error.
Of course, in a single line household, sometimes you'd catch the line in use, and the speaker would confirm that vs no dialtone error. Ocassionally, you might also get glare --- picking up an incomming call before it rings, and listening in might help recover from that as well.
Speaker on while connected could be useful for monitoring for connection disturbances (and maybe forcing a lower speed on a reconnect) or call waiting beeps, but was usually too low signal to bother. Also, I had a phone that would click/chirp on call waiting even when on hook which was a lot more actionable.
Humans constantly monitor their environment, and tend to only become conscious of something when it is behaving differently than it had been. Think of long drives - unexpected motions, odd noises, etc. trigger conscious attention.
Computers, especially of the 'cloud' variety, lack the incidental physical environmental interactions that give us those, so intentionally building them in is required. (And because they're intentional and artificial, they're at risk of manipulation, something else to worry about.)
I've thought of "reimplementing" that for troubleshooting my own projects. Imagine `clang --sounds`, so that it makes a sounds when
- Accessing disk.
- Sending something on the network.
- Allocating large buffers.
- Waiting for locks.
Or, alternatively, there's a constant background sound that is modulated on every function call depending on
- Call stack depth.
- If it's my code, library, or syscall.
- How long the last call took.
- Or just a unique modulation for each major function.
I think that's a nice, easy, and useful step before the more advanced applications mentioned in TFA.
https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.ht...
A professional in _any_ industry will pick up a notable difference between extremely similar states. This article is expressing the fact that older computers were easier to read.
I'm convinced it's a product of sophistication. Distributed systems used to be an enterprise thing, but now everything is technically a distributed system. Memory registers are quantum scales more than they used to be. Drives now have no moving parts.
There are still ways to get an intuitive understanding, but they're...different, and certainly not audible. I've noticed that I can feel out I/O speeds when I'm power-using. I'm fairly convinced that many knowledge workers prefer a specific OS because this intuition pulling up false-positives in a new environment.
This type of "sixth sense" is also not limited to computers. When I worked in the aerospace industry, I heard a story about McDonnell Douglas replacing the F-15 cockpit fairing with a sleeker, fewer-piece version that reduced drag. Pilots found that without the noise from airflow over the metal joints, they didn't have as good a feel for speed and maneuvers.
Computers should have normal auditable log files, board schemes and spare parts. If it works right, it should be invisible. If it stops working, I call plumber who will fix it very cheaply.
This "computers are magic" is just BS. I refuse to "interact" with my thermostat. Soon this 6th sense will feed ads into my subconsciousness.
You... refuse to feel temperature? I'd wager that more people operate their thermostats based on their ambient reading of how hot/cold the room is rather than a data-forward approach.
"Our goal is to enable robots to express their incapability, and to do so in a way that communicates both what they are trying to accomplish and why they are unable to accomplish it... Our user study supports that our approach automatically generates motions expressing incapability that communicate both what and why to end-users, and improve their overall perception of the robot and willingness to collaborate with it in the future."
I'm not as plugged into human-computer interaction work, but as a user, it seems like this is sorely missing and getting worse. I wish I could get a happy medium somewhere between a full stack trace and silent failure, e.g. when my iCloud documents won't sync.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3171221.3171276
https://mymakerspace.substack.com/p/another-look-at-infrastr...
(Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832)
I can't tell you how much of a relief it was to have finally have a computer with solid state everything, an insulated case, 120mm fans. Turned it on, silence. It's good for recording sound, it's good for anyone else who happens to be in the room.
Why sound? why not just a.. oh idk. disk access light? Maybe add other little leds for other stuff?
Meanwhile, I'm over here with every LED in my apartment that's not tied to an IR reciever taped over with black electrical tape. I don't mind fan noise at all, but the sea of twinkling LEDs that come from modern electronics drives me insane.