Blue light makes me see Red

Some time ago our broadband cable modem stopped working and after waiting a week for somebody to come and look at it they left us with a replacement which doubled as a Wifi hub. A new bit of free kit would have been welcomed, even though we already had a Wifi router that distributed the old signal, if only it didn't come with a little flashing LED on the front of the device.

As the broadband is provided by our cable TV company the wire comes through a hole in the living room wall next to the television, which means the router has to go in the front room next to the television, the same can probably be said for 90% of their customers, so why would they put a flashing signal light on the front of the device. How distracting is that when you are trying to watch TV? Very, I can tell you. And to make matters worse the light is blue, if you make the mistake of looking at it your eyes will go funny for a few seconds because they have trouble focussing on blue light and the intensity of blue LEDs is greater than red or green ones.

Within hours of owning it I had turned the device around so that I couldn't see the offending LED. That cured the problem until it got dark, when the light was reflected off the white walls illuminating the corner of the room in a ghostly shimmering blue glow. A DVD from a nearby shelf propped up against the back of the device, which used to be the front, cured that. I was hoping that the title of the DVD would be something amusing or prophetic but sadly not, except that 'No Way Back' does sort of describe the situation we find ourselves in.

The event got me wondering about the LEDs and user interfaces of the other devices in the front room and elsewhere in the house. When everything is turned 'off' there are five red LEDs (Wii, PS3, TV, cable TV receiver and a sub-woofer), one green LED (good signal on the cable TV box) and if the lights are out the slight glimmer of the aforementioned blue LED. And if the cable TV box is recording its full quota of programmes there are another three red LEDs. A few more and we'll be giving W.O.P.R. a run for its money. 

 

Moving into the dining room the hifi displays a clock with a blue backlight when off and the adjoining kitchen has a microwave with a clock - no backlight this time. The dishwasher turns its myriad of LEDs off when it is turned off, as does the washing machine in the utility room. The clock on the microwave is useful but I can't understand the logic of putting a clock on a hifi or yet another dreaded blue light, thankfully it isn't in the front room next to the television (that hifi has no LEDs even when it’s on).

Interestingly the dishwasher has a timer on its display which shows you have many of the 2 hours 15 minutes are left before the wash is complete, a pretty pointless feature because if you need something out of it before the wash is complete you just open the door and take it out. The washing machine on the other hand, which is made by the same manufacturer, doesn't have a timer despite sharing most of the other controls with the dishwasher. That timer would be really useful because we often find ourselves waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the wash cycle to complete so that we can hang the washing on the line before we go out.

We have another hifi, television, freeview box and an old fashioned video recorder in the bedroom and more LEDs. The hifi has a power button with a blue backlight when it is off, but thankfully it’s on the top of the device and can't be seen. The CD player has a red LED and the freeview has a blue LED when it’s off and no LEDs when it is on - probably demonstrating that somebody has thought about usability even if they haven't considered that users might put it in a bedroom that they want to be dark. The old video recorder has no LEDs but it does have a nice pale green clock which means it is still powered up years after we last used a video tape. It tells us what time we visit the loo in the middle of the night – an essential requirement that I cannot explain or justify.

I was going to say that the CD player doubles as a DVD player but it's probably the other way around because there is no track display on the device, instead the track details and timer appear on the TV screen, fine if you're watching a DVD but not much good when playing a CD, who'd want to have the TV on to listen a CD?

So what  have I learnt from this quick study of the LEDs in our house? Not a lot really except that there are a lot of them on the newer devices and very few, if any, on the old devices. There are more blue ones than I expected and some are off when on while others are on when off, and yet more are on all the time. I've also discovered that clocks and timers are deployed liberally but not logically.

Time for bed now where I'll have to remember to turn my head to the left to avoid that damned blue LED on the freeview box.