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Comment by magicseth | Hacker News Reader

My wife can't stand having little LEDs on all over the place. We've hidden our wireless router, our battery charger and everything. One night my laptop was on the floor as we were going to sleep, and I said, "Oh! Let me put away my MacBook," and she said, "Don't worry about it, I find it soothing."

This is definitely a detail that is appreciated.

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Totally agree with your wife, for the most part. I always cover the exposed LEDs on my various devices before going to bed. However when I'm not trying to sleep, my MBP's pulsing light is mesmerizing.

My tower has a blue power-LED. To cover it up, I stuck a dark post-it over it. Still too bright.

5 layers later, and it was about 1/2 the brightness of my MBP's snoozer. About right for a dark room. A couple months later, when I packed my tower up for xmas vacation... the post-its were bleached white, all the way through, in front of the LED. Way too much power.

My MBP? Still too bright for the night, IMO, but I tend to like dark. It's at least not annoying, like damn-near every other light-emissive device in my house at night.

My router and desktop are both black with blue leds.

Best solution? Electrical tape. You can't even see it unless you look close and I really couldn't care less about the led. If the router isn't working I'll know.

Heh, I can't stand any kind of blinking light. This whole trend has me going nuts every night as any random peripheral not utterly killed dead and smashed with a hammer is liable to suddenly decide to start blinking in the middle of the night and wake me up.

My wife is the same. She doesn't seem to appreciate my comments that I close my eyes to go to sleep and so don't notice the LEDs.

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