[HN Gopher] Computers should expose their internal workings as a...
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Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense
Author : tobr
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-08-27 16:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (interconnected.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (interconnected.org)
| masswerk wrote:
| As much as I enjoy quiet computing (finally!), I have to admit
| that all these noises (hard disk access, fans spinning up, etc.)
| provided important feedback. I could think of a thin, rather dimm
| light bar with various sections for indicating processor load,
| bus and IO and network activity, etc.
| stryan wrote:
| 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.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| 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.
| GenaroHR wrote:
| As field support engineer for a large company I can relate to
| what the author is exposing... I work with LED screen
| installations and most of the times I can detect a bad
| installation issue way ahead of any failure because this screens
| have some High Voltage capacitors that may produce sound if there
| is something wrong with the power quality, once I detected
| harmonics way ahead of the initial test, because of that we saved
| like 2 o 3 days of installation
| nayuki wrote:
| 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.
| mkeeter wrote:
| One fun example is the "malloc Geiger counter", which clicks
| whenever memory is allocated:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vn6aGgLKfQ
|
| (Previous HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832)
| amelius wrote:
| 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?
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| unixhero wrote:
| Well there is always dtrace, strace and ptrace.
| exikyut wrote:
| And <confused screaming> BPF, if you can figure it out :D
| tlhunter wrote:
| 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.
| dmead wrote:
| This is a common thing no?
| pritambaral wrote:
| >> certain patterns signaled
|
| patterns in noise (static), not in the signal (game audio)
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| ancode wrote:
| 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?
| _jal wrote:
| 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.)
| awinter-py wrote:
| yes 1000%. I remember my first impression of automatic updates
| was to feel profoundly out of control; software could now change
| itself without anyone even knowing. The transition to broadband
| was cool as I could pirate enough music to fill up my hard drive,
| but also profoundly unsafe: _other_ things could come down that
| pipe.
|
| Making the invisible processes of change and exfiltration legible
| to humans, even only as background noise, would humanize these
| awful OSes in a big way.
| zepto wrote:
| Back in the days of 8 bit microcomputers running in the 1-2 MHz
| range, this was possible through EM interference that you could
| hear by putting a radio nearby.
|
| I could tell whether thee machine was crashed, and a lot about
| what part of a program was running by the texture and tone of the
| noise.
| a9h74j wrote:
| In sixth-sense terms, I once heard of experiments with a belt
| which would vibrate to indicate magnetic north. Apparently people
| really missed it when they had to give it up.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Where I've lived my entire life I have a long river immediately
| due south of me that runs east to west parallel, years ago I
| internalise north as away from the river.
|
| It's really discomfiting when I'm away and lose track of that
| completely.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| You're thinking of North Paw, perhaps, which is an anklet
| (https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/)
| a9h74j wrote:
| Commercialized: > The original idea for North Paw comes from
| research done at University of Osnabruck in Germany. In this
| study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt.
| They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported
| successive stages of integration.
| BoppreH wrote:
| I miss being able to know if my program is frozen because of CPU
| (fan noises), disk access (HDD noises), or network (silence).
|
| 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.
| yummypaint wrote:
| 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.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Brendan Gregg did something similar for wifi signal strength
| with bpf.
|
| https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.ht...
| Phileosopher wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| 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.
| psychomugs wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3171221.3171276
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| i think if we combine modern monitoring and metrics systems for
| cloud computing with sound synthesis we could get valuable
| intimate insights that offer something dashboards or anomaly
| detection and alerting systems can not reach. if we listen to our
| companies systems noises, sounds and clicks thorughout the days
| and weeks we would naturally learn to read them and get that
| connection we had to our 90s workstations. the problem is its
| easy to make something like a novelty show room in eg. a facebook
| foyer, but to get the perfect balance of not being annoying or
| drawing too much attention from work and still representing
| enough real world data requires the best sound designers we have.
| ideally the result would be something that the kind of devs that
| like to listen to white noise and rain or ocean recordings at
| work would enjoy.
| [deleted]
| zanethomas wrote:
| haha, back in the day my dad used a transistor radio to
| understand what his mid 70s microcomputer was doing
| scott-smith_us wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense to me.
|
| MS Windows could really use a "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING
| ABOUT?" feature. From the first version of Windows with
| networking, a Windows install had a lifespan of a few years,
| after which simple things like clicking on the Start menu would
| take several seconds to respond. You expect this when connecting
| to an external disk share, but it was woven into the OS so that
| it happened at weird times.
|
| I didn't know enough about Windows internals at the time to
| figure out why this was happening. After a few days/weeks/months
| of irritation, I usually ended up doing a fresh install and re-
| installing/configuring all of my apps.
|
| Just in the last month or so, my Windows 10 development system
| will sometimes take several minutes to pop up a File Explorer
| window. Default File Open/Save dialogs are affected as well. I'm
| not using any shared drives and I disabled the stupid One Drive
| thing. At this point, a reboot resolves it, but I sense another
| reinstall in my future...
| buro9 wrote:
| 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.
| rangerdan wrote:
| 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.
| yummypaint wrote:
| Maybe a smartwatch with more detailed tactile feedback could be a
| conduit for this communication. There are some truly tiny 5v
| mechanical relays that could be turned into little fingers for
| touching/vibrating specific spots. Bluetooth would be convenient
| too.
| gmueckl wrote:
| The funniest demonstration that I watched was at the computer
| museum at the University of Stuttgart (it's just a single room,
| but it contains a lot of history!). The guide took an old,
| butchered radio that was reduced to a coil attached to a speaker
| and put on top of the front panel of a PDP-8. Then he started a
| Fortran compiler, which would take several seconds to complete.
| During that time, the radio made kind if hideous digital beeping
| noises from the CPU's EMV radiation that got picked up by the
| coil inside. You could easily learn to distinguish different
| compiler phases and tell whether the program made progress. The
| guide explained that this was a common way for operators back in
| the day to keep track of the jobs they were running while taking
| care of other tasks: were they still running? Did they get stuck?
| Did the job complete and is it time for the next one? Some
| inventive guys figured out that when you wrote certain
| instruction sequences, the EMV noise would become tonal and the
| pitch could even be tuned to some extent. That got them to write
| programs which would compute nonsense, but when you picked up the
| EMV emissions, you would hear music! The museum guide ran a few
| of these programs to our great amusement :).
|
| I've yet to see this mentioned - or demonstrated - anywhere else.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| AM Radio Computer Music:
|
| Conway's Game of LIFE in a DEC PDP-7 w/ Type 340 Display
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4&ab_channel=Livin...
|
| Early computer graphics -LIFE - 4 Gosper Glider Guns on a DEC
| PDP-7 Type 340 display
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhvOw7vW4iA&ab_channel=Livin...
|
| DEC PDP-7 w/ Type 340 display running Munching Squares and
| Spirograph
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc&ab_channel=Livin...
| grafs50 wrote:
| What we can do with EM radiation has always seemed so cool to
| me. It's just crazy how all this info is just flying through
| the air without us even noticing (without tools of course).
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| This reminds me of something really cool I saw a while ago but
| I can't find for the life of me, it was a bit of JavaScript
| that ran in the browser and could be used to send a signal to a
| nearby AM radio! I can't remember quite how it worked, but I
| tried it and it definitely did after turning off my monitor
| which apparently pumps out shit-tons of interference into the
| bottom end of the mediumwave band. I do remember that it was a
| demonstration of a security vulnerability for supposedly
| airgapped systems.
| lgl wrote:
| The first time I ever saw something like this was a program
| called Tempest for Eliza, which would generate patterns on a
| CRT screen that could be captured by an AM radio.
|
| The website appears to still be available at:
|
| http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
| sli wrote:
| This is probably one of the most relatable things I've ever
| read about that era of computing, it reminds me of setting up
| fun little git hooks and devops events to play sounds at
| various stages. Amazing.
| chenxiaolong wrote:
| Not nearly as cool as your what you described, but I took
| advantage of the horrible coil whine on my Dell XPS 15 9560.
| The Intel CPU, Nvidia GPU, and Toshiba SSD all had different
| pitches of coil whine. Based on the pitch and volume, it was
| very easy to tell which component was being stressed :)
| gmueckl wrote:
| I can relate. Around the time I got this tour of the museum,
| I was working on a rendering algorithm that was slow and
| could occupy the GPU for seconds at a time. For some reason-
| whether it was a poorly stabilized power supply or EM
| radiation I do not know - I could hear pretty loud chirping
| noises when I had my headphones plugged into the onboard
| analog jack. It went so far that I could easily tell which
| part of the algorithm was currently running on the GPU and I
| could sometimes even count single iterations. This was very
| helpful because the screen was of course frozen. while the
| GPU was busy with my program.
|
| This computer finally made me buy an external audio interface
| out of frustration. I went on to do some acoustics projects
| and I really needed cleaner audio for them.
| dharmab wrote:
| I heard stories about this type of troubleshooting used in
| production from a colleague and friend about 40 years senior to
| me.
| ktpsns wrote:
| In case anybody is interested, the museum is
| http://www.computermuseum-stuttgart.de/
| rleigh wrote:
| I used to tune my shortwave radio to various frequencies
| emitted by my ZX Spectrum +2A. It had terrible shielding!
|
| You could hear the noise/tone change with various different
| types of computation, and for some frequencies listen to the
| framebuffer scanout (I think) where the sound appeared to match
| the display changes. Definitely not in the UHF range of the
| actual signal though.
| corysama wrote:
| I'm reminded of a programmer who would add click on the PC
| speaker inside function calls so he could listen to the timing of
| them being called.
| OJFord wrote:
| That's a nice idea! That or a light would be more convenient
| than logging if it's triggering a lot.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I suspect that it's much easier to hear the audible pattern
| than to see the pattern of a blinking light.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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...
| noir_lord wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| A colleague 3D printed a stop light that showed red when
| Xcode was compiling and green when it was done.
| jazzychad wrote:
| Was it me??
| azinman2 wrote:
| Yes :) I almost forwarded the comment to you lolz!
| ta988 wrote:
| you can have both and put a sound and/or light trigger to the
| logs with a grep and a tiny script.
| jstanley wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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!
| ape4 wrote:
| There is still the occasional time delay - when you say something
| isn't right.
| whalabi wrote:
| I remember having this thought while watching TNG - if the
| computer was having trouble processing a "recursive algorithm"
| you'd know about it from a series of hesitant chirrups.
|
| I've thought about making an app that lets you know what's
| happening in the background with a black bar that has jets of
| colour move across it when something happens, with different
| speed, colour, and shapes based on various attributes, like which
| app the activity came from, and what type of activity it was.
| ramboldio wrote:
| Dell got you covered: get a pleseant humming noise when your GPU
| is busy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxR9FyBrVw
| throw3849 wrote:
| No!
|
| 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.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| 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.
| samsquire wrote:
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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)
| seg_lol wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/vshymanskyy/awesome-wasm-tools
| exikyut wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| alonchb wrote:
| 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
|
| https://mymakerspace.substack.com/p/another-look-at-infrastr...
| phkahler wrote:
| My next motherboard will have 8 rgb LEDs on the bottom (vs 6 on
| old gen). I'd like if these could be colored per CPU core load.
| Say a dim blue for idle ramping up to bright red for full load.
|
| Which reminds me I need to update the case for 8 lights now that
| the 5700G is available and worth doing an upgrade to the
| Mellori_itx.
| Wistar wrote:
| In the late 90's, the ops mgr at our studio hooked a network
| cable up to a little motor and attached a 5-6 foot long string to
| the motor shaft. He hung the motor-string thing in the corner of
| his office with the string dangling.
|
| The motor made just a little bit of noise and the string would
| wiggle around indicating network activity. Soon he was able to
| know what was typical string movement and what was atypical
| frenetic motion that indicated a need to investigate.
|
| He called it an "ambient interface" and said he had read about it
| somewhere.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser:
| Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology
|
| >Calm Technology
|
| >History
|
| >The phrase "calm technology" was first published in the
| article "Designing Calm Technology", written by Mark Weiser and
| John Seely Brown in 1995.[1] The concept had developed amongst
| researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in addition
| to the concept of ubiquitous computing.[3]
|
| >Weiser introduced the concept of calm technology by using the
| example of LiveWire or "Dangling String". It is an eight-foot
| (2.4 m) string connected to the mounted small electric motor in
| the ceiling. The motor is connected to a nearby Ethernet cable.
| When a bit of information flows through that Ethernet cable, it
| causes a twitch of the motor. The more the information flows,
| the motor runs faster, thus creating the string to dangle or
| whirl depending on how much network traffic is. It has
| aesthetic appeal; it provides a visualization of network
| traffic but without being obtrusive.[4]
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190508225438/https://www.karls...
|
| [3]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore...
|
| PDF: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-
| sp2007/paper...
|
| [4]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.u...
|
| PDF:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170810073340/https://uwspace.u...
|
| >According to Weiser, LiveWire is primarily an aesthetic
| object, a work of art, which secondarily allows the user to
| know network traffic, while expending minimal effort. It
| assists the user by augmenting an office with information about
| network traffic. Essentially, it moves traffic information from
| a computer screen to the 'real world', where the user can
| acquire information from it without looking directly at it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jeremijenko#Live_Wire_...
|
| >Natalie Jeremijenko
|
| >Live Wire (Dangling String), 1995
|
| >In 1995,[9] as an artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC in Palo
| Alto, California under the guidance of Mark Weiser, she created
| an art installation made up of LED cables that lit up relative
| to the amount of internet traffic. The work is now seen as one
| of the first examples of ambient or "calm" technology.[10][11]
|
| [9]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110526023949/http://mediaartis...
|
| [10]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100701035651/http://iu.berkele...
|
| >Weiser comments on Dangling String: "Created by artist Natalie
| Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of
| plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor
| mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to
| a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that
| goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy
| network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic
| noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few
| seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long
| string is visible and audible from many offices without being
| obtrusive."
|
| [11]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120313074738/http://ipv6.com/a...
|
| >Mark Weiser suggested the idea of enormous number of
| ubiquitous computers embedding into everything in our everyday
| life so that we use them anytime, anywhere without the
| knowledge of them. Today, ubiquitous computing is still at an
| early phase as it requires revolutionary software and hardware
| technologies.
| sitkack wrote:
| That is fantastic.
| Wistar wrote:
| Yes. And he later went back to school and became a user
| experience research scientist.
| joshu wrote:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Dangling-String-by-N...
| eitland wrote:
| I'm just missing the small led that used to indicate disk
| activity until someone decided laptops looked sleeker and less
| cluttered without it.
| tyingq wrote:
| There's nullsoft's beep: http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/
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(page generated 2021-08-29 23:01 UTC)