Oh, I remember when blue LEDs became readily available (late 90s for me) and I would mod all my stuff to blue.
Had this MS ergo keyboard, with the LEDs in the middle hump, came with green. So, I replaced with these 2.5 hi-blues and I was blinded by my own Numlock-Beam. Had to cross a resistor over there to take the edge off.
Anyway, I think HN should get a black-bar because the blue LED is so cool.
I have a laptop charger with one that I taped over with kapton tape: the orange kapton is almost the exact opposite of the blue LED so you're left with a dim white indicator, no blinding brightness.
I hate them with a passion for this reason but on second thought maybe I can't really blame it on the LEDs themselves. People seem to give them too much forward voltage and don't always use diffusing packaging, which would have made them much more pleasant to look at.
Then again, I rarely see such problems with products with red or amber LEDs.
I have a synthesizer with blue LEDs that's particularly obnoxious. It's probably feeding them 5V and there's of course no diffusion at all. I've taped all of them over with a layer of duck tape and they're still too bright.
Allegedly blue LEDs are supposed to be really disruptive to sleep (not just due to brightness but due to wavelength. Body interprets blue as daylight and red dusk or something)
Well, you're right sort off. Blue light is related to the production of melatonin, which is used regulate our sleep cycle.
Blue light (aka shorter waveforms) blocks the melatonin production, most likely a genetic factor as the blue wavelength is related to the sun's day cycle.
I used to have the all transparent plastic Harmon Cardon speakers (iSub?) but I had to get rid of it because the power lights were so bright. And since it was transparent you couldn't cover them up.
Yeah, I feel sorry for this man's family and loved ones, but I wish he'd never invented the damn things. Blue light scatters in air more than non-blue, and it's just garish to look at.
Worst one for me is on an older pair of Sony's flagship NC headphones. Putting them on at night is like flying a plane with landing lights on, and of course it shines right in the face of my partner.
I did the same thing to my Dell laptop in college when purple LEDs first became available. And a year or so prior to that (when my google results were still fruitless), I swapped blue LEDs in like you, and got a purple-ish result by putting some pink paper between the LED and the numlock icon (or whichever it was). I was fascinated to find that the paper faded to white after a few weeks as a result.
These days I like yellow, but am lazy and just put kapton tape over the white LEDs on my desktop...
Panasonic initially picked a teal LED for its notebook because it was really, really expensive back in nineties. Few percents of the laptop cost was that single power LED.
The legend is that they secured an exclusivity agreement with Nichia for that colour for some years, but the reality is much likelly be it just being expensive, and hard to source.
Had this MS ergo keyboard, with the LEDs in the middle hump, came with green. So, I replaced with these 2.5 hi-blues and I was blinded by my own Numlock-Beam. Had to cross a resistor over there to take the edge off.
Anyway, I think HN should get a black-bar because the blue LED is so cool.