Electrical tape to black it out.

Painters tape to dim it.

I get to be that guy! I’m so excited!

In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They’re cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.

Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.

Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays

Because they’re cheap and look “modern/futuristic” so shit manufacturers love them. I have also used electrical tape on power strips, chargers, smoke detectors, etc

Agree. When my DVD player back in 2000 came with a bright blue power-on LED, that crap started to bother me. Sitting right under the TV, so watching anything in a darkened room means I had that fucker blinding me all the time. Nothing a little duct tape can’t fix, but that’s not exactly helping.

Ever since I’ve been actively avoiding devices where I can’t dim & disable the LEDs.

I have a similar complaint about almost all “gamer gear” having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I’m not even opposed to the “gamer” aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it’s time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what’s going on.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it’s a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There’s no specific amount of current that produces light that’s bright enough in a lit room, but isn’t too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I’m in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won’t think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I’ don’t like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there’s a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

I miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that’s passed.

I don’t know if this is the right place to complain about this but since it’s LED related… Why are all the automakers putting the brightest fucking LED’s in their new vehicles now?? They are legit brighter then how high beams used to be only a few years back!!

What did we all used to do when headlights used to be slightly yellow??

Electrical engineer here who also does hobby projects. I’m with you. I think some of the reason may be that modern GaN-type green or blue LEDs are absurdly efficient, so only a couple mA of drive current is enough to make them insanely bright.

When I build LEDs into my projects, for a simple indicator light, I might run them at maybe only a tenth of a milliamp and still get ample brightness to tell whether it is on or not in a lit room. Giving them the full rated 10 or 20mA would be blindingly bright. I also usually design most things with a hard on/off switch so they can be turned all the way off when not in use.

Of things I own normally I also have two power strips with absurdly bright LEDs to indicate the surge protection. It lights up my whole living room with the lights off. If I had to have something like that in my bedroom, I would probably open it up and disconnect the LEDs in some way, or maybe modify the resistor values to run at the lowest current I could get away with.

I feel like designers have lost sight of the fact that these lights are meant to be indicators only-- i.e. a subtle indication of the status of something and not trying to light a room-- and yet they default to driving them at full blast as if they were the super dim older-gen LEDs from 20+ years ago.

Next level pro-tip: Use a “dot” or dab of dark nail polish to tone down the intensity. It’s more permanent than the tape method but will allow you to see if the LED is on or off so doesn’t remove functionality.

I have a lamp and that has an LED that is on all the time.

Why would a lamp have a permanently on LED? That’s what I get for getting cheap crap from China, rather than premium crap from China.

I have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.

I don’t seem to find it mentioned: LEDs at night are terrible for your sleep, especially the blue ones. Among other things they suppress the melatonin release.

An article that goes into more detail and provides a citations for further research.

It’s hard to find a PC case that doesn’t look like a disco.