Fixing annoying blue standby lights

I recently bought an adjustable bed base which has USB ports on both sides. Each port has a bright blue light that illuminates the whole bedroom at night. I don't use them so covered both with black electrical tape. Problem solved. I've had the same problem with several desk lamps that lit up the world with that blue light even when turned off. I returned a couple of those immediately.

But I looked through the reviews for all of the above and the issue wasn't even mentioned. I thought I was one of the few weirdos that care. It's nice to read here that I'm not alone in this. But we have to complain enough to make the manufacturers care.

I hate electrical tape. It becomes sticky after some time, when it starts to smear because it got moved or stopped sticking to the surface.

I bought a set of nail polish and use the black one to paint over the LEDs, it even allows you to control how much you want to cover it, in case you still want to have a bit of light to see if it's on or off.

Other colors can be used to mark pins on breakout boards or cables. It's really useful to have around.

black gaffer’s tape is perfect for covering LEDs long term without any residue.

maybe i just bought cheap tape, but i've definitely found gaffers tape to leave a residue if left in place for a couple years. especially on electronics that are generating some heat.

There’s some really crappy offbrand gaffer tape on Amazon these days. The “pro gaff“ brand which costs around $30 a roll is the good stuff I recommend. (Source: I run a theater and pay hundreds of dollars a year for gaff tape. I have tried a wide variety of brands and price points.)

The good stuff is like 20 or 30 bucks for a roll. I just pulled off a piece that was stuck to glass for 4 years and it came off residue free.

I would be worried about that.. had some gaffer's tape in my car's interiors, left horrible residue after a year or so.

The really nice thing about electrical tape is that has an extremely high ignition tempature, and strong voltage resistance, so can throw it on stuff that gets hot (in either sense) and not worry about it. I use it to block off the annoying LED "backlighting" on my PS5... that gets warm enough that I'd be nervous about some tapes. Also handy for actual electrical stuff, like that one speaker wire that loves to comeout of the terminal on my stereo if I look at it funny. I've had some strips of it for years and have never had problems with "smearing" or adhesion.

I've had some success with kapton tape, it drops the 'bright blue' down to a dull orange. Not perfect but its adhesive and knocks the brightness of the led down.

The stuff I use (3M) is opaque to anything you’d reasonably think of doing this to.

Got a name? i'm always looking for a cheaper/better options.

I hate electrical tape.

Same. I’ve used aluminum tape to block LEDs, works great.

Oh, yeah. Aluminum foil tape is an all-purpose wonder. It's often used for air ducts, although it isn't what you think of when you say "duct tape."

Duct tape is/was actually duck tape. Duck is the name of a fabric.

I use sticker note tape for these. There are colord variant of it, which comes blue/red/green/yellow. They are tapes, so you can decide how long it is required, while being easily removable without leftover because it is sticker note.

Something like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/aCK31v9x8Ea2uE7P6

Those tapes (which I sometimes describe as just the sticky part of a sticky note) are also great for labeling when you want something that takes ink/pencil more nicely than masking tape.

Gotta buy better electrical tape. Scotch Super 33+ is amazing.

Tape is really backing (whatever) + glue. The glue can vary a lot in quality and properties.

F.ex. Patched a hole in a Miata top with some duct tape = gone in 2 weeks in high summer heat. Used some "high strength" heat-tolerant duct tape = still there, 3 years of summer and winter later. The latter was ~$5 more expensive.

Blue Tac?

Seems to be similar to UHU patafix which I also do use to cover LEDs on devices like ESP32 boards.

https://www.uhu.com/en/product-page/patafix-white/35211

I'm not intending to suggest there aren't better solutions than periodically taping & cleaning, but a can of adhesive cleaner stuff will make short work of that mess, worth having.

(The one I use - mainly for barcode etc. stickers with shitty adhesive that doesn't peel off nicely - is by 'Pro Power' which I think is CPC's house brand, so that's not helpful if you're outside the UK.)

I use MG chemicals safety wash in the US -- particularly formulated to be safe on plastics and electronics.

I use blu-tack putty, it’s opaque, easy to apply/remove. Its not flat though

Copper foil tape works well too.

Oil based paint sharpies are an alternative and useful for writing things with as well.

I often wonder that when I use certain products. “How can this obviously terrible design choice not be reflected in reviews?”

I'd love to hear from someone in the consumer electronics business to weigh in on how this happens. Who in the design chain wants LED lights on everything? Probably not engineering--it's more work for them. Probably not the business managers--it adds unnecessary cost to the product. Is it the industrial designers? Do they simply have to have LEDs all over everything? Is it just dogma that everyone follows/accepts: "You have to have an LED light!" How does it happen?

If I have to guess, support & engineering would be the main force behind LEDs.

For example, you have USB port in the bed base, and it does not charge the cellphone, so you call tech support. With LED, it's simple. LED on -> "verify the USB port is not bent or damaged, check your cable, check your cellphone"; LED off -> "verify bed is plugged in, verify outlet has power". Without it? Much harder, especially if you are talking over the phone to non-technical person who does not follow the instructions.

(I made a number of one-off home devices for my own use and there is almost always an indicator LED of some sort. Combined activity/power if I can make one, or at least a power one if it's impossible. Some of them are blue, because blue is a nice color and needs really low current to be visible)

The real questions are: why blue, and why so bright?

LED indicators are useful, but they should be red (which comes with the added benefits of being less expensive and drawing less power than blue ones), and shouldn't be bright enough to light the area around them.

the "why so bright" part is simple: given same current, blue is noticeably brighter. A 5 mA current will make passable red, but flashlight-level blue. If you are old-school designer who got used to red and green LEDs, all your blues would be super bright. I still worry when I see 2K or a 5K resistor next to a LED: "Wait, that's too much resistance and too little current, user is not going to see it... hm, which color is it? Are you sure it's that sensitive? Maybe decrease resistance a bit just to make sure you don't have to redo the PCBs?"

Which also means that blue LEDs draw _less_ power than red and green ones, for the same brightness. Thinking about this, this could be a one reason to use them in battery-backed devices.

The "less expensive" part may be was true in the past, but is bogus today: a random search shows $0.01468 for red[0] and $0.01572 for blue[1] in 10K quantity. 0.1 cent is not going to affect your final cost, unless you are into super-cheap devices.

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/beking-optoelectr...

[1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/beking-optoelectr...

If all of that is true, then I guess I'm just doomed to having to cut the blue LEDs out of the devices I buy forevermore? That's a bit depressing. I was hoping that this was the result of a fad that would eventually pass, eliminating a common irritation from my life.

Thermodynamics is into blue LEDs. ;p

Your only hope is the transition to post-LED technology.

Wonder if some of it is due to blue still being perceived as high tech. For people over a certain age, red was the default LED color for decades as may have become associated in the average person's mind with outdated technology.

I don't think you need someone in the industry. It is added because without a light people don't think it is working, and the bright blue lights are tiny any cheap, and adding a way o dim them or turn them off is more expensive.

Blue LEDs were a lot more expensive when they were first introduced than red, green, amber, etc. Putting blue LEDs on products was seen as premium or trendy, but by this point, they’re not as special, but they are still more expensive than other colors. White LEDs are typically blue LEDs with phosphor that is excited by the blue light so it emits white(-ish) light. White LEDs are often similarly priced to the blue LEDs they’re based on.

[product designer who’s designed in countless indicator LEDs on products based on the product requirements and also often ends up adding tape or funtack over the LEDs on products to avoid blinking in the bedroom]

I think it comes up in at least some product reviews, but where it's glaringly obvious, it doesn't show up in the reviews because people purposely look for products that aren't like that. Buying a TV for my bedroom, one aspect of the search would include looking in the manual and seeing if has a suppressible standby light or checking for a non-aggressive standby light color.

An unrelated example is that, at Target stores in the US, there are these (paper) notebooks/journals/diaries that have writing on the front that label them as such. The designs are really nice, but the labels make it ugly - as many people who chose not to buy the product will say "why do I need it to say journal on the front? I know it's a journal" and "I don't want to use it as a journal... I want to use it as a cookbook!" In this way, the reviews self-select only for people who don't care about the labels.

They should really have antireviews where people can write why they didn't buy the product. It would give sellers some kind of signal that there's an issue with their product or its documentation causing people to avoid it.

some kind of signal

Low sales is a signal. Also, they can hire a UX researcher.

I realize I wasn't clear about that - these notebooks are well-liked and have tons of positive reviews. There is no low sales signal, because people who don't care about the labels still buy the notebooks. It's that they're missing more sales from the people who don't buy them because of the ugly labels on the front. That would be the same with TVs, the only way a TV maker would really know is if they sold a "bedroom TV" and saw no one was buying it or it was getting a lot of returns for the LED indicators being too bright. Even then, if you have consumers who are cognizant of bright LEDs and can't find any information about it, it might still not be indicated in the sales that certain consumers don't want it.

Will they even know to hire a UX researcher?

But even then, as just a consumer, antireviews would be super helpful.

With a category rank by 'least bad'.

I imagine the signal they measure is AB test / throw crap at a wall type scale i.e. they trial lots of lines of product and scale-up and restock those doing great margin/numbers and drop those that don't. They don't care too much about subjective product picker's design opinions or user reviews - if it sells, it's stocked.

I also expect the demographic they are selling to are impulse buyer notebook neophytes. The lettered purpose on the front triggers those buyers. They buy the product and put it to one side, never to use it. Repeat buyers that care about the notebook design probably turn to specialist brands they multi-buy online.

one aspect of the search would include looking in the manual and seeing if has a suppressible standby light or checking for a non-aggressive standby light color

as if modern TVs had manuals or that was an information listed on any modern appliance manual

There's a brand on Amazon called LIGHT DIMS that sells differently sized stickers, in both ultra-dim and full-blackout forms, which do _exactly_ what they say on the tin, and it's amazing.

I used the ultra-dim for the (white) temp display on my Dyson fan in my bedroom, and the blackout for the brighter-than-the-sun blue LED on my charger brick. Also used the dim one on a smoke detector because my 5-year-old thought it was watching her or something.

They're absolutely great, and you can even keep a couple in your suitcase and fix horrible lights in hotel rooms or AirBNBs if you're so inclined.

Not sure if you can post AMZN links here, but it's this product and its cousin the blackout version: https://amzn.to/3RGV3My

I am wondering, why would you share affiliate link (;tag=robstah78-20;) instead of the direct link to the item ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CLVEQCO )? The direct link is just barely longer and probably even faster to make (at least on the desktop)

Are you hoping to just make some money from strangers? You cannot get much commission from the $1.50 item, so I am imagining you hope someone clicks on your link and then buys unrelated expensive item.. This feels really sleazy, does this bring you any actual money?

His other comment mentioned an "extension" so it's possible that he himself isn't responsible.

Within reason I think you can basically share any link, but there's probably a much higher than normal concentration of people that would prefer a tracking-less amazon.tld link here than elsewhere.

Ah, sorry about that, forgot my extension did that

I have them.

However after a while it became annoying to try to peel the small stickers off the backing, then fumble to center a small sticky thing over the offending LED.

so... I use painters tape. I started with the blue kind, but switched to black. Easy to tear or cut, easy to size. electrical tape isn't sticky enough.

I choose an appropriate number of layers for the problem.

Most lights just need one layer. Sometimes I need to kill the LED directionality to be acceptable. And some indicator lights need to be dim, not off. Think an HDMI switcher where you need to know which port is active, or router port activity lights.

Sometimes I put a second layer when I need less or no light.

toothpaste works well and it's easy to wipe off

I had a friend once who used to be a security guard. He said one of the things you have to learn is to sleep with your eyes open.

I couldn't tell if he was serious, kidding, terrible or a genius.

...and your comment asks me those questions too! lol :)

Thanks for the information. I have a set of stickers for blocking camera lenses on tablets and phones but never thought to look for LED dimming stickers. Seems a bit obvious now but guess I'm so accustomed to using electrical tape that I never gave thought to another solution.

ive done this for all the phone chargers in the house

Please do add your own review. It's bizarre that manufacturers think unnecessary lights, and especially bright blue ones, are a good idea. Manufacturers have fallen a bit too much in love with blue leds.

I've got to admit, the desktop cases I got from Fractal Design also use bright blue leds. I didn't think about it until I had guests sleep in that room.

You are definitely not the only one.

Something similar: I recently bought a white noise machine for sleeping (a short term fix for noise at night). It has a bright blue LED that also lights up the whole room at night. You're literally for sleeping and you're going to illuminate the whole room with blue light?!

One of the Amazon reviews did mention this. But I always see stupid bright LEDs that people haven't covered with tape so there are probably people sleeping with these on at night.

Why is it that manufacturers go for blue or bright white LED indicators? I assume that they are cheap enough that it doesn't matter, but green would probably still be slightly cheaper.

We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room. Why not just have a tiny green LED? Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe). So why is it that every cheap random fly by night Chinese manufacturer feel the need to add a tiny blue torch to their products?

Why is it that manufacturers go for blue or bright white LED indicators?

I don't know but I'm sure allergic to red. I don't understand why so many devices are using red for standby or even to indicate work (I'm looking at you Raspberry Pi).

To me red is "blood" and blood is "bad". Red means error.

Thankfully some devices, like ethernet switches, are using proper colors: green for trafic, orange for "degraded" link (say 100 Mbps on a gigabit switch). I look at the rack and there are tens of LEDs and it's all blue, green, orange. That's correct. Zero red. That's what I expect when everything is working fine.

Orange for standby is acceptable, I guess.

I like blue. Maybe not bright blue but blue is way better than red IMO.

If I see something red, it better be an error: alarm / motion detector / garage door opened / whatever.

Red doesn't bother the eyes in a dark environment.

Unfortunately it does bother me. It's so bad I must turn off or at least cover red LEDs before I can sleep. E.g. TVs. Thankfully for our bedroom TV we recently switched to a Sony TV recently which doesn't seem to have a standby LED at all – such a godsend as it can be turned off simply by pressing the remote and it turns off without a standby LED.

It's not bothering your eyes. It's bothering your brain. In a dark room a red light will not make your eyes lose their ability to quickly see in the dark like the other colors do.

It's not just bothersome; red is in the sweet spot of visible but doesn't interfere with your night vision.

There's a reason lots of camping lights have a red mode, and why astronomers use it exclusively while observing.

https://stellarium-labs.com/blog/nightmode/

For me red is pomegranates. A very happy colour.

I suppose that colour preferences may be cultural.

I don't know: red seems to be the color of blood, a bad omen to witness. Green is the color of grass, quite okay. Blue is the color of the sky and yellow of the sun. Colors are not absolutely random I think, and could just as well cross cultural boundaries. But maybe "preferences" are sort of subjective: China really likes yellow and red a lot more than France for instance, even if they have the same meaning sort of (the red communist flag does suggest the blood of the people for both culture, for instance, and yellow does seem "valuable" for both as well - we like our gold statues just as much in both).

Funny, I imagine you're pretty young?

For us oldies red is just the normal LED colour since in the 80s this was the only colour that was available. Our alarm clocks, microwave displays, indicator lights and even some watches and calculators used red LEDs :)

proper colors: green for trafic, orange for "degraded"

I’m color blind and hate this color choice. Damn near impossible to tell apart. Around 8% of men would agree.

I would prefer that manufacturers use the traffic light colour scheme:

* Red: stopped or off (preferably dimmed of completely off)

* Yellow/Amber: startup or error state in which the device needs intervention

* Blue/Green: running properly

You don't want to make things indistinguishable for the color-blind.

What would be an appropriate set of color choices then?

Like traffic lights, physically separate can be different colors. Red-green colorblindness is most common though, so your easiest bet is to only pick colors where red or green is always zero, then vary the amount the other and blue. If choosing LEDs, most are single-frequency, so ignoring anything orange or lower frequencies removes most of the redundant choices; leaves green, yellow, blue, violet. They're plenty of good websites out there for details.

Constant, blinking slow, blinking fast, Morse code blinking

That's an important consideration, for sure.

For battery powered devices, red should be “charging”.

Blue/Green: running properly

this would be redundant as you'd know that the device is running in most cases

This is how I remember it: For some time LEDs were red, yellow or green. Power LEDs were almost universally red. You can see this on devices from the homecomputer era (Amigas, Ataris, etc.). I'm not sure if red was chosen for technical reasons (red LEDs have the lowest voltage drop), maybe economical reasons or it was already a convention before LEDs became available.

Anyway, when blue LEDs became feasible they were the epitome of cool and every device had to have them. So in my opinion it was a fashion trend that stuck.

Indeed, red was the first visible LED color to be practical in production. Blue came much later.

Blue LEDs were deemed a huge breakthrough at the time; they enabled full-colour LED displays (think large panels viewed from a distance) by adding the long-missing B in the RGB.

Enough of a breakthrough to be worthy of a Nobel prize, even:

https://medium.com/predict/why-blue-led-earned-nobel-prize-i...

They also enabled bueray DVDs.

Indeed, and they are also the basis of single element white LEDs, which are a blue led covered by a white phosphor. The inventor of the bright blue led worked for a chemical company that made phosphors, and invented the white one as well.

the epitome of cool

I remember being wowed by the blue power LEDs on VA Linux servers in the early or mid 2000s! Now any stock photo of a server room is covered with blue lights.

Speculation: Perhaps they are trying to distinguish themselves from the "cheaper" products by using the "new" blue LEDs? IIRC the technology for them was figured out much later than green or red, so maybe there is a bit of leftover "futuristic" feel to them.

The last time I saw a blue room-illuminator was on an ancient Belkin Bluetooth dongle. IMO the practice has gone out of style with most name brands (including Apple).

It's basically this, yes. Blue LEDs were such a game-changer that the inventor won a Nobel prize for it. When they became cheap enough to use in consumer electronics, manufacturers went absolutely nuts and put them in everything as a sort of whiz-bang look-what-we-can-do thing. But since everyone did that, they stopped feeling distinctive almost immediately. The only designers still using them for indicators are the ones who can't tell when a fad is over. They're still very important technology for LED light bulbs; white LEDs are blue LEDs with a yellow phosphor.

ETA: I'll add that it takes real time, effort, and crucially taste to get an LED indicator to not be a retina-searing nuisance. You have to be willing to devote time to getting it right, and for someone just trying to pump out cheap units at volume, that's not an easy sell.

Looking at flashlight runtimes on battery, it seems like white LEDs (blue with a phosphor) or blue, are much more efficient per lumen than any other color. Perhaps that could be a reason as well? I'd generally prefer green and red.

I expect that has to do with the properties of the human eye, and the fact that the lumen is defined in terms of those properties. I doubt white LEDs are significantly more efficient than any other color in terms of EM flux per watt, but a relatively large proportion of those emissions are at wavelengths to which the retina is sensitive.

I remember thinking the blue led on the PS2 was so cool when it first came out.

I remember, it was extremely cool! 23 years later the novelty has worn off a bit.

AppleTV 4k has super bright white led on the front (outwards to user) while the device is on. So annoying!

Don’t want to dismiss your complaint, but I find mine generally is not even that noticeable considering the main function of the Apple TV is playing media on my tv that lights up the whole room. What annoys you about it?

It's a white light sitting below my tv constantly shining a light at my face. What is the point of it? I already know the thing is powered on because I powered it on and it's playing a movie or whatever. Facing it backwards helps but then all the wires are exposed and look ugly.

Anyway, it wasn't really a strong complaint, but parent poster said Apple generally doesn't do it, but I have it on at least two generations of apple tv.

As someone with a fair bit of astigmatism... a visble white dot maybe 6 inches from the edge of the TV is just about worst case for making any sort of dark scene look blurry.

This is why you get a mount for the AppleTV and mount it behind the tv itself. I use a total mount, the same one sold in apple retail stores.

Yeah my external HDD has a blue LED that's so ridiculously bright it lights up the whole room and puts a really bright blue spot on the other side of the room.

I tried covering it with a post it (several layers) and after a month I noticed that the yellow colour had whitened completely where the LED is. Probably contains an unhealthy level of UV as well. Yuck.

I tried opening it up to replace the LED but it's clipped somehow. Very hard to open without damaging it.

I have good experience with drilling a small hole in the side of the housing and through the LED. You need to aim well. Its not a good technique for all annoying LEDs.

Sometimes the indicator LED acts as a voltage reference for some circuit. In that case, destroying it is a bad idea.

Also, I think most hotels would object ;-)

Only the cheapest of cheap electronics would use an LED as a reference.

Because a good number of customer service calls come from people who have a device plugged into a dead outlet. The led at least tells you the device is getting power. It can also indicate whether any internal fuses/breakers have tripped. And many manufacturers blink that one led for error codes and such. They have a purpose, and can generally be blocked by any bit of cheap tape.

That doesn't explain why they're blue - which is a much brighter and more intense LED color then green or red.

The craziest one is the subwoofer my parents bought for their home theater - this is a device you would exclusively use in a darkened room while watching movies...and it has a full size eye-searing 3mm LED to indicate "power on" (it's been electrical taped over for about a decade now).

My theory is that blue lights stand out more in Amazon search results.

I think blue just feels "modern". Red LEDs feel like they belong to the 80's, and green to around 2000. While white feels "clean".

I agree 1,000% that they're ridiculous though. But the colors are definitely about achieving an up-to-date "look".

Blue just feels tacky and cheap to me. Maybe "modern" and "cheap" are just the same thing.

I think we are rounding another curve where the blue will start to fade away and white will be the new color

We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room.

Had the same issue, thankfully a piece of black duct tape was heavy enough to fix the issue. Really annoying to have a device which is essentially unusable out of the box.

Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe).

They do have an indicator led on the magsafe plug, which is either amber or green, and is pretty bright but easy to unplug.

The old MBPs also used to have a white but pretty dimmed led "breathing" during sleep, it was quite pretty unless you wanted to sleep then it was annoying. If easy enough to put a thing in front.

I also have a ugreen mini dock with a white led, no idea why. It's a passive dock, if it's plugged in it's on, I don't need to have a reminder.

I think the latest MBP M1/2 also have it still.

There was a time when industry did not know how to produce blue or white LEDs, only red, orange, yellow and green ones, so you see, red, orange, yellow or green LEDs are old tech, and consequently not suitable for our magnificent product.

They could make them decaying blue in a white matted plastic rather than piercing your eye and a wall bs. I tape all these useless components on everything I have. They are useless, because people tape them or turn off and then can’t test the outlet power loss anyway.

I wish I lived in a world without marketing idiots so much.

My guess is that next to zero actual thought goes into the design and production of most items these days. Companies are getting cheaply designed cad files and whacking them onto an assembly line and shitting them out into a shipping container bound for a nameless Amazon sellers page.

The MagSafe cable still has an LED in it, it's green when you're fully charged and orange when it's charging.

But I agree, Apple is good about not annoying you with LEDs.

great hack

my pet peeve is flashing indicators, especially when it means "all normal"

How do you feel about the (more common in previous years) flashing indicators for disk activity?

It made sense when HDDs were universal, it provided a quick check for a common cause of major slowdowns (you would then go hunt for the source of the IO).

Also on most cases you can / could just not plug that header in. Not an option for external drives tho.

You didn’t even need a light, you could hear the disk.

I'm actually thankful for the coil whine on my GPU because I can tell if it's still running my compute tasks. I've even started being able to pick up on parameter misconfigurations based on the sound patterns.

Such a missing feature honestly. You could tell if the program had actually crashed or if it was running still. New macbooks should play drive noises through the speakers like new Mercedes do with engine sounds.

I miss those! I like knowing what the machine is doing, and think some (subtle) status LEDs are very helpful. Power/charging, disk activity, wifi.. good baseline minimum. I guess its too much to hope for the glorious return of the blinkenlights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights). The BeBox had some great ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox#%22Blinkenlights%22).

They were amber, and quite dim. Just enough to notice if you were looking.

God the worst is bluetooth headphones. Oh people would never use these in the dark and especially not with other people trying to sleep directly next to them.

I like the way Sony's wh1000xm4 deal with this issue. The LED is inactive when you're wearing the headphones and wouldn't see the LED anyway.

They aren't needed at all. For pairing, they are kind of nice to have, but why not put them in the earcups instead of outside (at least for over-ear headphones)?

Looking at you, SuperMicro: Every other “normal” LED on our server room is green. Theirs is amber.

We have some Cisco kit at one office all from the same product line purchased at the same time. On the switches ”normal” link lights are green, but on the firewalls the “normal” link lights are amber!

Our help desk gets a call about once a month from someone reporting the “orange lights” which are visible through a small window in a door.

That's evil.

The giant blue LED on the LaCie Little Big Disk is the most annoying thing ever. It flickers on hard drive activity.

Hotel room smoke detectors seem to be set up to flash at just slightly inconsistent frequencies.

It looks like there is this secret society working hard on making people suffer in a hotel rooms after long trips. Blue TV indicators, white and blue air condition panels, impossible to cover LEDs that are attached to fire detectors.

All of that to make sure the room stays as bright as possible the whole night. I am always impressed with the efficiency of these little, bright, things. In terms of a brightness per cubic meter efficiency.

I've started travelling with a roll of black tape because the problem you describe is so bad

First thing I do is unplug the tv. Been woken too many times by TVs turning themselves on during the night.

I just travel with a mulberry silk eye mask. Seems to do the trick.

Since you went into such specifics (could have just sad eye mask/sleeping mask), why the specific mention of mulberry silk?

I find non-mulberry-silk ones quite bothersome texture wise, as opposed to pleasant.

I would imagine because if they just said "eye mask", someone might imagine negative aspects that don't apply to a more luxurious/premium material like mulberry silk.

I personally find it easier to sleep when my pillow is cool. Silk feels cool to touch. I'd image that it would help. Not sure if it being mulberry makes any difference.

For me it's the alarm clocks or in-room tablets. So much annoying ambient lights in hotels. It's gotten crazy.

What about a silk eye mask? I sleep with them at home even

It seems like it should be a no-brainer that if the light can cast shadows, it's too bright to install in a bedroom. I've started traveling with a roll of electrical tape.

A dollop of toothpaste will usually solve the problem if you've ever forgotten the tape.

Nail polish works just about everywhere too, lasts for years (unlike electrical tape, which is excellent temporarily), and is trivial to find. It can take a couple layers, but if you just want to dim it that can be a good thing.

(edit: though I have no idea if it'll let infrared through like this post covers. I luckily haven't had any devices sharing IR windows like that)

That's a great tip! I bought an air purifier that has a very bright blue light illuminating the entire room at night.

Now if only I can find a way to disable its annoying on/off chimes.

I've gotta find a way to stop the touch-sensitive controls on mine from responding to cats o_o.

Because of course they're just on the flat top, where cats like to climb and stand.

If you have the one I do (GE portable from Lowe's), just put a traffic cone on it. Ugly but works.

I've tried the upside-down rolling chair mats and even DIYed a barbed-wire mesh from chickenwire; nothing deters them. It's a soothing place for them to sleep atop when running.

Condensation forms under textbooks and other flat planks, which will eventually short the controls as water pools on top.

The only other thing that "worked" was having the exhaust from a 1U rack server pointed at it. The heat initially attracted them but when those fans kicked on, cat met ceiling.

A raised plexiglass shelf/cover, perhaps?

Double sided tape. Cats hate it.

NYT Wirecutter top recommend one? Your description fits it to a T.

Nothing that can’t be resolved with a soldering iron and a screwdriver

2 problems here: color and intensity.

1. Color. Blue is more rare in nature than other colors and it has a known association with daylight that is disturbing for sleep. Why not something more neutral like orange (not red, not green)?

2. Intensity. I think the manufacturers don't even think about this. For indoor use, full brightness makes no sese, but bad UX is the default choice for most, what TV manufacturer pays attention at their user experience with the standby led? I guess they never think about it.

Blue is more rare in nature than other colors

Since the sky and the ocean are blue, that suggests a majority of visual field in nature contains blue in most cases.

Yes but not the deep intense blue from most standby LEDs.

Same could be said of green or red though. I think it’s time to stop repeating this just-so story.

Hmm no but the intense deep blue is not good for the eyes and can even damage the retina at intensity.

Green or red don't have this issue.

It also has a noticeably different refractory index which is why red directly beside blue looks 'off'.

Daylight sky, with emphasis on daylight, and ocean blue only for people living next to a large body of water. Objects in nature are rarely blue. At night, nothing is blue, most of our history the only color at night is the orange-reddish of the camp fire (and yes, 100 years of light bulbs don't replace 50,000 years of conditioning of camp fires).

I think the blue is still considered "cool" perhaps precisely because it's rare and it was the last LED colour to be available cheaply. It seems to be a rather persistent trend, though. In the UK a blue light on an electric kettle has been standard for the past 15 years at this point. Red/orange and green seem deeply uncool as they are associated with neons and old LEDs that have been available basically forever at this point.

Fully agree with the reason behind blue LEDs, but it does not make it acceptable for end users. I would prefer orange any time, green and yellow have too often a status meaning (good/bad), while orange does not and I think it is more neutral.

Had an USB charger once that would shine through one layer of black electrical tape. Crazy.

The light on the end of a Dell laptop power adaptor is like that. I tried multiple layers of electrical tape, colouring it in with a sharpie and even painting over it and nope, that bastard light cannot be dimmed.

My main complaint is when using the laptop in dark bed to read ebooks and it is utterly blinding. I end up folding a bit of duvet over the bloody thing.

i drop a towel over my laptop if i need to leave it charging overnight

That sounds.. not great, for li-ion batteries. Like you want to stress test the safety circuits which avoid thermal runaway.

A small piece of tin foil under the tape should help with that.

I bought a USB charger to plug into my cars cigarette lighter plug. It lit up the whole cabin with blue light at night. This blue cancer has existed since blue LEDs were invented and immediately became a chinesium electronics favourite. Very tiresome.

LightDims solved the problem of bright and blinking status LEDs in our home, they sell sticker sheets in various colors that dim or completely block the light: https://www.lightdims.com/store.htm

Or just use some mostly-opaque tape, such as masking tape or brown cellulose tape (which is what I remember using on one obnoxious external hard drive many years ago) and add more layers to dim it.

Or use a black permanent marker.

A great many households will already have one or the other of these already.

But I presume that none of these would particularly serve the purpose of the article, allowing infrared signals to pass through. Can’t say I’ve encountered the combination of a bright LED and infrared receiver, myself.

I just use the marker. It's been the best solution all around, especially since you can either dim or fully obscure the LEDs.

Or use a black permanent marker.

I've a USB charger with a blue led so bright permanent marker only dims it, even after several layers it still lights up the room.

Of course, but these are thinner and prettier because of the pre-cut shapes.

Seconded. I learned about these here a few years ago and have gone through two packages of them. The ability to dim for things you still want to kind of see is very nice, and as another person noted, the pre-cut shapes are more attractive. For example, I use them on the air filter level indicator where I still want to be able to see what it set to but don't want it lighting up the room much at night.

Only mildly related but just as annoying; old cars would have a dimmer button to reduce the backlight in the dashboard.

With all the screens in midern cars, even the minimum brightness is too bright for me driving in the night.it wont let your eyes adapt to the dark.

My last Hyundai had a moon button to turn off screen but that was an exception ithink.

I have driven hours with a cloth over the screen of my skoda octavia in the night.

Please let me turn off the screen for dark night driving, thank you.

I had a 97 Saab 900 turbo with an “airplane mode” button that turned off all the dash lights except for the speedometer. It was actually pretty damn useful.

That night-mode option in Saabs is pretty incredible. It simplifies the driving experience to an impressive degree.

I wonder if that might be the result of ((mis-)interpreting) some regulation that mandates the instruments must always be visible.

Hardly an old thing. My 2017 model supports that just fine, and it's not just a button but a circular slider that goes all the way down to the dash lights being practically off.

You can't rely on colors to indicate status because someone might be colorblind. That's an often overlooked problem. You have to make the light do something special, like blink, if you really need it to indicate something important.

Seems like optimizing for edge cases might not be the most practical.

About 5% of men have some kind of colourblindness. It is common enough I would argue it's good engineering and design to avoid using colour to indicate anything important, particularly when avoidable. Red-green rather than light-dark for intensity maps are particularly infamous. Any time I see one of those posted on a forum and it gets traction, some poor commenter complains at the colour choice because they can't see red-green distinctions. Saw such on HN just the other day.

You can use colors, just not ones that look the same to colorblind people. The Sim Daltonism app is great at helping with this.

Quality Street were wrapped in opaque paper this year.

TP-Link's TL-WPA4220 powerline extenders (and presumably other models) let you turn off the status LEDs in software (there should be a list of hardware that lets you do this).

When candy companies and tech companies collude we’re really doomed.

This is what they mean by chocolate chips.

I wish they would remember the setting though. I have turned their lights off multiple times but they are currently on. Any blip in power supply (power cut, fuse trip, maintenance work) and they come back so it's like trying to keep a tide at bay.

And I’m wondering how much power is wasted by the literally billions of these status indicating LEDs…

I wonder if all the gains from phasing out incandescents have already been eaten alive from the probably 10000 leds that appear in the wake of every dying bulb? There’s an LED billboard (the reef) in downtown LA you can plainly see from Mt. Wilson 40 miles away. Throwing a stadiums worth of light all night like that to show junk no one wants to see. And they keep building more of these wastes of resources.

Here's a related term: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I think my household lighting is still more efficient than the incandescents we had when I was growing up. But there sure is more of it, in terms of fixtures as well as light output.

Yeah the energy consumption of even the small advertising displays is insane.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/09/electronic-a...

I haven't had the IR remote complication like the article, but for too-bright-LED purposes, I use different colors of labelmaker tape (Brother TZe type) for different cases:

* need blocking entirely (like on my LaserJet, and a UPS) -- black tape

* too bright, but still need to see, and to differentiate colors (like on one of my living room servers) -- white tape, cut to size with hole punch

* too bright for when i use it in dim lighting, and trying to avoid blue light then (like the ThinkLight on my ThinkPad T520) -- orange or red tape

Some of this tape, I would move to behind the bezels, if I had the device open for service.

Black tape also good for covering up cameras on laptops. If I sometimes use that camera, I make it a strip with a folded-over pull tab, and when I temporarily remove it, I stick it poking up from the top of the bezel as a reminder that the tape is off.

For "hole punch" Pixel cameras in the screen, a hole-punched bit of labelmaker tape works, but IME falls off every few/several months. Secondary purpose: when I have multiple phones, different colors of labelmaker tape color-codes their identities on the screen, to help avoid accidents. (Color-coded cases would be better, but the case series I prefer only comes in black.)

FWIW I bought a set of like 200 small dot stickers of diff colors, barely opaque. They’re perfect. You can stick em on and use the color system you described. Like what teachers use for small crafts and such.

That works. I use labelmaker tape because I love labelmakers, and already have various colors of tape anyway. (White for most, black for more discrete labeling on black electronics, colors for color-coding things like employer-owned WFH equipment, and for rare warning labels for certain IT purposes.)

Bought a Hisense tv for two reasons: status light turns OFF when the TV is on, and there is a physical disable switch for the microphone. Verified both in reviews and in person before buying.

Electrical tape for everything else.

I would rather my television not include a microphone at all. But should they want to listen, they can always just use the speakers as a mic.

Yea agree with you there. Do any new ones come without mics these days though?

Had this problem with an air conditioner whose one blue LED was bright enough to keep me awake.

Two layers of yellow tape changed the colour and dimmed it enough to make it imperceptible.

Huh, all the ACs I've used so far did have a switch on the remote to turn off all the lights.

Consider yourself lucky.

The early Intel based Macbooks lit up the whole room with an extremely bright standby led. It's one of those cases where a dictator style CEO is needed. The dictator experienced this and issued a reasonable directive to never allow standby leds on any of the company products ever again. If it's on standby it's dark. And that rule has now stuck.

A good example in how different management styles can lead to products with fewer or more annoyances. Some CEOs would shrug off a product going out that could never operate in a typical house due to bright always on LEDs. Others would call it out, go down the chain as needed to make sure that mistake never happens again.

I know this advice is like 10 years too late, but if you leave the lid open on a MacBook in a dark room it will be able to use the light sensor that controls the screen/keyboard brightness to also dim the power indicator light.

This amount of overengineering is what brings me coming back to Apple. Though I don’t even use the MacSafe charger anymore

Tape is cheap, removable and blocks light.

and the author explains why it doesn't work for this use case

Soldering a nicer coloured SMD LED over the top of the blue LED works well. Most colours have a lower voltage drop, so the blue doesn't glow at all.

Worked well for my pocketbeagle board which was annoying me, my initial attempts a desoldering the blue one were unsuccessful (no hot air), but a nice amber one in parallel worked great.

For desoldering without hot air, "chip quik" products are excellent. They make low melting point solder (like 60C). Add some to each pad of the led, and they will stay liquid long enough to remove the led with tweezers.

It would be interesting to have consumer standards (perhaps even regulatory standards) about the brightness and color of LED indicator lights on devices.

Someone beat me to the “dimmer sticker” idea several years ago [1], there’s clearly a problem here.

I’m a huge smart home enthusiast and have played with many devices and the only ones I’ve ever thought got dimness correct on indicator lights is Lutron.

[1] https://a.co/d/h9QbBRL

My bedroom clock radio had a backlight that was super bright (and super annoying). I stopped by a local car tinting shop and asked them for a piece of 5% limo tint that they might have had leftover from a job. It took two layers to dim the display to get it tolerable.

Hotel rooms are the worst for unwanted LEDs! I now carry blackout tape when I travel.

Yes. I've had to place objects in front of LEDs that can't be disabled before. But there are smoke/heat detectors that apparently need to blink all night and I wouldn't want to go taping those up. I now wear an eye mask.

My favourite discovery, though, was in Spain. I started to notice all the hotels were wired up with a separate consumer unit per room. Me being me, I looked inside one and noticed someone had simply flipped the switch on the emergency exit sign to disable the green glow all night. Genius!

Unfortunately not all hotels have individual consumer units nor do they put the exit sign on its own circuit.

Just yesterday I opened a USB charging station to rip out the LED's. Don't want to mess around with tape. I also remove big obnoxious logos with toothpaste.

Ever read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson? The main character has an allergy to logos, removes them from everything they can. Thanks for the toothpaste tip.

One of the best things Apple did that no one talk about but everyone definitely appreciates is the almost complete removal of status lights from their devices.

Unfortunately makes it harder to know that they're doing anything.

A subtle glow is the best for an indicator light.

PSA: black acrylic is opaque to visible light, but transparent to IR - so a bit of that will nix the light but not the IR.

It's actually pretty interesting to look at the world with an IR camera (e.g. Pi NoIR) - red wine looks like clear water, black actrylic looks plate glass, black t-shirts appear pale.

I’ve previously seen 3M 616 ruby red lithographer's tape recommended for this on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33278895

I use felt, tesa or fitness tape. It’s almost like adhesive cloth, so it has small holes in it that leak light but block most light almost like polarized lenses. Put it on all kinds of devices and it numbs the bright LED lighting substantially.

I just bought sheets of small stickers.

They sell packs of various size stickers specifically for blocking these lights on Amazon. They’re very cheap and work perfectly.

I remember years ago i was over at a friend's place and ended up crashing on the sofa in his living room overnight. Right in front of his panoply of media and entertainment devices. When the room lights were off it was like being in a planetarium.

I bought a roll of red brake-light tape off Amazon when my daughter was born. Covered every little light in the house. Highly recommended!

I have two devices on my desk (in my bedroom) that each have one these "bright-as-the-brightest-star" blue LEDs and it is simply too much.

I have multiple layers of blue packing tape over them to deal with it.

I need "sleep hygiene" and for me that involves reducing sensory inputs to as close to zero as I can get.

I'm pretty sensitive to petty annoyances, but for some reason this doesn't bother me. Having a couple of random LEDs around the house helps with walking around very late at night. And in bed I wear an eyemask, so...

These become a real problem when my first son was born. I got some stickers on Amazon done specifically for this and it was just perfect.

I’ve used lightdims for years. Great product to lesson the bright lights.

I've been using black diamond headlamps. In recent years they replaced their battery indicator LEDs to some really strong blue ones. I use the red light a lot, and when I turn it off, the battery indicator LEDs will light up the entire room. I have covered mine with electrical tape, but the blue light shines through the plastic so it doesn't really work and my headlamp looks ugly.

I don't know why they would do this. The first headlamp I got from them had red, yellow and green battery indicator LEDs, now they have 3 blue ones. It's really annoying. I should probably write them an email and ask them to fix it.

Edit: didn't read the article carefully enough.

I will just dab some orange or red acrylic paint on and call it good. No IR needs though.

A little hax but it works Adequately.

I use 1-3 layers of Kapton tape to dim blue LEDs. Interestingly it turns the painfully monochromatic blue light into a more pleasant teal color with two or more layers, probably by blocking out the blue peak more than the longer wavelengths.

I had a similar problem with the power/standby LED on my living room PC, but I fixed it with a resistor to cut the brightness and some capacitors to make it fade out instead of just blinking on and off. I wrote a bit about it in the "Power/Standby LED" section on https://pcpartpicker.com/b/LYjypg

That's nothing:

https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-turquoise-automated-driving-li...

Get ready for the future :)

A point I didn't notice in the comments is that Nestlé have replaced the previous biodegradable cellophane and foil wrappers with biodegradable paper, so this hack is no longer valid.

You can buy led light blocking stickers on amazon

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=led+light+blocking+stickers

Hugged to death? Here is the Wayback version: https://web.archive.org/web/20240101100336/https://www.fullc...

I've put electrical tape over those things, like other commenters. In one or two cases, I put a tiny pinhole into the electrical tape right over the LED, in order to still see the light, but at a severely reduced brightness.

I had that problem and used an old remote's visible light filter and some glue to block the led light of the TV in my bedroom.

Kapton tape.

Certainly every product designer knows how annoying these things are. Who are the pointy haired bosses forcing them add these leds?

A free fix and you get to eat the chocolate. What could be better?

We frame it the other way around in our lab: “The IR shield was purchased from Amazon [footnote: item XYZ, which was delivered with a free spectrometer]”

It may not be feasible in some cases (e.g. chargers) but unplugging devices entirely may be smarter than taping LEDs. Not every device needs to be in standby all the time. my granddad was obsessed with reducing power consumption and had built actual light switches into his living room walls that cut power for all TV devices at once. So in a way, the annoying LEDs also serve as a reminder that there’s a device consuming energy that we may not even be using 90% of the time.

A new phenomenon is for people to mark their driveway entrances with little blue LEDs. (At least here in Sydney). It is very annoying.

If they spread in popularity there definitely will be a backlash.

Technology Connections rants about this too. I agree.

https://youtu.be/oHeehYYgl28?t=823

I hate those blue retina blasters. Few years ago I bought USB disk and when I connected it to PC it had nice white light. Finally the blue LED fad is over, the white LED lights are the new cool. A year passed and I had to buy new motherboard. When I connected that same USB disk it suddenly light in bright blue because I connected it to USB 3 port that the new motherboard had.

Blue is the worst color for a bedroom. Physiologically it's the most "alert" light, like a blue sky. It ruins night vision, too.

Black electrical tape was my solution for a Dell PSU for an Alienware laptop, with a particularly obnoxious bright blue LED on the power plug, it would practically illuminate a room while the machine was powered off and just charging.

I've fixed this problem on 2 devices by snipping the LED off the circuit board. Of course it might brick the device but in some cases its worth the risk.

One can often open the cases of electronics to expose the PCB and then use a razor blade to cut the offending traces. This gives an excellent cosmetic result (no tape!), and most electronics don’t mind their LEDs becoming open circuits. And IR receivers are entirely unaffected as long as you cut the right traces.

A suggestion I saw here on HN was to use red lithographers tape. It's great,the LED's status is still visible but it doesn't blare and bounce off the ceiling.

I really appreciate that on my ThinkPad, I can turn off most of the LEDs: the power LED, and the LED on the back that dots the 'i' in ThinkPad. However, annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be any way to turn off the bright charging LED that's present when the device is charging.

Personally, I find fixing them to be easy: I remove the LED.

I got a Thermaltake Core Chassis back in 2019 and its blue LED was so strong that the first time I took a nap on the couch in that room I was awaken by it in my eye like a police flashlight. It was super annoying, and unexpected.

I put some tape over it, fixed forever.

I can not stand blue LEDs either. I have replaced them with white LEDs when they haven't been surface-mounted. I also have my computer equipment connected via an outlet with a power switch so I can turn things off completely.

Yellow vinyl "headlight film" seems to have worked to make the blue LEDs on Unicomp Model M green.[1] I didn't think that would have worked, and I don't expect all film to be created equal with regards to which wavelengths they let through.

[1]: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=26454

What I want is a phosphorus tape that stoke shifts the blue LED light into a dimmer, longer wavelength green or red light. When we replaced our older oven that had a pleasant, dim, yellowish indicator light, we ended up with a new oven that has murderously bright blue LED that casts a ghoulish glow across the kitchen for those 3AM refrigerator raids. The new coffee maker is just as bad. Sometimes ‘progress’ moves backwards.