12 ms·

Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense

158 points by tobr 5y ago

throw3849 5y ago
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.
- Talanes 5y ago
  >I refuse to "interact" with my thermostat. You... refuse to feel temperature? I'd wager that more people operate their thermostats based on their ambient reading of how hot/cold the room is rather than a data-forward approach.
DerekBickerton 5y ago
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.
tyingq 5y ago
There's nullsoft's beep: http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/
phkahler 5y ago
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.
tlhunter 5y ago
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 5y ago
  This is a common thing no?
  - pritambaral 5y ago
    >> certain patterns signaled patterns in noise (static), not in the signal (game audio)
hattmall 5y ago
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.
zozbot234 5y ago
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.
rangerdan 5y ago
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.
corysama 5y ago
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 5y ago
  That's a nice idea! That or a light would be more convenient than logging if it's triggering a lot.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    I suspect that it's much easier to hear the audible pattern than to see the pattern of a blinking light.
    - ta988 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
    - 5y ago
ape4 5y ago
There is still the occasional time delay - when you say something isn't right.
samsquire 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 https://github.com/vshymanskyy/awesome-wasm-tools
- exikyut 5y ago
  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-recording-a-trace-the-ultimate-easy-way/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/xperf-basics-re... and https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/ 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-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocked-by-seven-instructions/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-in-wmi/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-i... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invisible-icons-in-quadratic-time/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows-handle-leaks-in-chromium-and-others/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows...
stryan 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
nayuki 5y ago
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.
amelius 5y ago
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?
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  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.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
unixhero 5y ago
Well there is always dtrace, strace and ptrace.
- exikyut 5y ago
  And <confused screaming> BPF, if you can figure it out :D
_jal 5y ago
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.)
BoppreH 5y ago
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.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Brendan Gregg did something similar for wifi signal strength with bpf. https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.ht...
- yummypaint 5y ago
  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.
  - jmiserez 5y ago
    It's like living in a noisy apartment or on a busy street. Yes noise does fade into the background but subconsciously it still affects concentration/sleep/mood/creativity/etc. You won't know what you're (not) missing until you try it without the noise.
Phileosopher 5y ago
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.
bediger4000 5y ago
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.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Cars too. I learned to drive stick on a Honda Civic without a tachometer, but I learned to do without and tell what state the engine was in purely by its noise and vibrations.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    This was how I was taught to drive stick, though all the cars I learned in definitely had tachometers. Nobody even brought them up.
  - hashkb 5y ago
    I have a 90s pickup, manual, no tach. I use it to plow snow on my steep, long driveway. It has "shift up" light, but it's always wrong. Without the windows open I have no idea when to shift.
Wistar 5y ago
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.
- sitkack 5y ago
  That is fantastic.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Yes. And he later went back to school and became a user experience research scientist.
- joshu 5y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Dangling-String-by-Natalie-Jeremijenko-The-two-pictures-show-a-quiet-and-a-busy-red_fig4_268509885 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Dangling-String-by-N...
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology 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.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technology/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190508225438/https://www.karls... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5387055 https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore... PDF: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/papers/03-weiser-origins.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/paper... [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4065 https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.u... PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170810073340/https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/4065/paper.pdf?sequence=1 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_(Dangling_String),_1995 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://mediaartists.org/content.php?sec=artist&sub=detail&artist_id=216 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526023949/http://mediaartis... [10] https://web.archive.org/web/20100701035651/http://iu.berkeley.edu/IU/stories/storyReader$397 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/articles/sensors/Ubiquitous-Computing.htm 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.
eitland 5y ago
I'm just missing the small led that used to indicate disk activity until someone decided laptops looked sleeker and less cluttered without it.
psychomugs 5y ago
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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3171221.3171276
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
buro9 5y ago
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.
alonchb 5y ago
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-infrastructure-dashbaords https://mymakerspace.substack.com/p/another-look-at-infrastr...
mkeeter 5y ago
One fun example is the "malloc Geiger counter", which clicks whenever memory is allocated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vn6aGgLKfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vn6aGgLKfQ (Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832)
- gnramires 5y ago
  Cool! It doesn't really differentiate in terms of allocation volume (only frequency). It would be interesting if the tick rate was proportional to something like log(allocation rate) so you could get an idea if something really heavy is allocated.
ancode 5y ago
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?
- Talanes 5y ago
  >Why sound? why not just a.. oh idk. disk access light? Maybe add other little leds for other stuff? Meanwhile, I'm over here with every LED in my apartment that's not tied to an IR reciever taped over with black electrical tape. I don't mind fan noise at all, but the sea of twinkling LEDs that come from modern electronics drives me insane.
  - hcs 5y ago
    https://increpare.com/game/heaven-on-earth.html https://increpare.com/game/heaven-on-earth.html
  - kilroy123 5y ago
    Yes I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one!
awinter-py 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
- Smaug123 5y ago
  You're thinking of North Paw, perhaps, which is an anklet (https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/ https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/)
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    Commercialized: > The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück 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.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  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.
zanethomas 5y ago
haha, back in the day my dad used a transistor radio to understand what his mid 70s microcomputer was doing
gmueckl 5y ago
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.
- dharmab 5y ago
  I heard stories about this type of troubleshooting used in production from a colleague and friend about 40 years senior to me.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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/ http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
ramboldio 5y ago
Dell got you covered: get a pleseant humming noise when your GPU is busy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxR9FyBrVw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxR9FyBrVw
scott-smith_us 5y ago
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...
yummypaint 5y ago
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.
jFriedensreich 5y ago
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.
masswerk 5y ago
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.
whalabi 5y ago
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.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I use Task Manager to monitor the progress of some long-running tasks that have no progress feedback in their application. The memory and CPU use graphs follows familiar patterns and I get a sense of how far it's got and some confidence that it hasn't crashed. It would be nicer in audio though.
GenaroHR 5y ago
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
adrianmonk 5y ago
I never tried it, but ~20 years ago there was a project called Peep for auditory monitoring of networks. From the Usenix (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...) abstract: > We created a network monitoring system, Peep, that replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. This system combines network state information from multiple data sources, by mixing audio signals into a single audio stream in real time. Using Peep, one can easily detect common network problems such as high load, excessive traffic, and email spam, by comparing sounds being played with those of a normally functioning network. The SourceForge page is still up: https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/
mattxxx 5y ago
I like this idea at first pass! I think augmenting reality with a tap into the digital could be a nice new dimension to how we look at the world. I do however think that giving tech companies + ad companies the ability to tap into this is risky. As a result, rather than have a call-to-arms to invest more in such tech, maybe it's better to just start the conversation on how we can interact with the digital world safely. ...Or maybe which digital worlds are safe to connect to? :thinking_face:
yissp 5y ago
When I'm compiling a big project, I'll often go read some emails or whatever and listen for the fans on my PC to quiet down again to know when it's done. It's actually become a pretty important part of my workflow lol.
jonhohle 5y ago
I recall a classic Mac OS hard drive indicator icon to the left of the Apple menu that would roughly correspond to the crunching of the physical disk. I had no idea what this article was going to be about, but determining behavior based on physical characteristics of the hardware is something I miss with modern, quiet machines.
jart 5y ago
See also: https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/ https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/
rektide 5y ago
Linux has a very flexible LED framework, and there's a variety of different "triggers" one can use to drive the LEDs. CPU usage, disk usage, network device usage, backlight level, usb port usage, audio are all different triggers one can control an LED via, that are baked into the kernel[1]. There's userland devices one can use to do whatever else one wants. This isn't as aesthetic as say, the LiveWire[2] mention in the comments. But it's readily available on almost all systems, and is a very flexible ambient indicator. There's a lot of really really fun good stuff in the comments here. Ambient is good, but to me, I want computing that exposes the causal relationships of what is happening as it's processing, as it's running. "This button was clicked so I'm trying to change the screen brightness now." All of the entities of computing, the data, these user events, should be reified, should be made into a logged sequence of what is happening. From that basis, we can all be free to explore computing, and to- EventSourcing style- extend the graph of computing as we might see fit. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/leds/trigger https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/leds/t... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348148

158 points by tobr 5y ago

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.

Talanes 5y ago
>I refuse to "interact" with my thermostat. You... refuse to feel temperature? I'd wager that more people operate their thermostats based on their ambient reading of how hot/cold the room is rather than a data-forward approach.

DerekBickerton 5y ago

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.

tyingq 5y ago

There's nullsoft's beep: http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/

phkahler 5y ago

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.

tlhunter 5y ago

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 5y ago
This is a common thing no?
- pritambaral 5y ago
  >> certain patterns signaled patterns in noise (static), not in the signal (game audio)

hattmall 5y ago

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.

zozbot234 5y ago

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.

rangerdan 5y ago

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.

corysama 5y ago

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 5y ago
That's a nice idea! That or a light would be more convenient than logging if it's triggering a lot.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  I suspect that it's much easier to hear the audible pattern than to see the pattern of a blinking light.
  - ta988 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
  - 5y ago

ape4 5y ago

There is still the occasional time delay - when you say something isn't right.

samsquire 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/vshymanskyy/awesome-wasm-tools
exikyut 5y ago
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-recording-a-trace-the-ultimate-easy-way/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/xperf-basics-re... and https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/ 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-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocked-by-seven-instructions/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-in-wmi/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/on2-again-now-i... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invisible-icons-in-quadratic-time/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis... https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows-handle-leaks-in-chromium-and-others/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/finding-windows...

stryan 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

nayuki 5y ago

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.

amelius 5y ago

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?

marcosdumay 5y ago
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.
perryizgr8 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.

unixhero 5y ago

Well there is always dtrace, strace and ptrace.

exikyut 5y ago
And <confused screaming> BPF, if you can figure it out :D

_jal 5y ago

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.)

BoppreH 5y ago

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.

bostonsre 5y ago
Brendan Gregg did something similar for wifi signal strength with bpf. https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2019-12-22/bpf-theremin.ht...
yummypaint 5y ago
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.
- jmiserez 5y ago
  It's like living in a noisy apartment or on a busy street. Yes noise does fade into the background but subconsciously it still affects concentration/sleep/mood/creativity/etc. You won't know what you're (not) missing until you try it without the noise.

Phileosopher 5y ago

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.

bediger4000 5y ago

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.

tomc1985 5y ago
Cars too. I learned to drive stick on a Honda Civic without a tachometer, but I learned to do without and tell what state the engine was in purely by its noise and vibrations.
- Talanes 5y ago
  This was how I was taught to drive stick, though all the cars I learned in definitely had tachometers. Nobody even brought them up.
- hashkb 5y ago
  I have a 90s pickup, manual, no tach. I use it to plow snow on my steep, long driveway. It has "shift up" light, but it's always wrong. Without the windows open I have no idea when to shift.

Wistar 5y ago

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.

sitkack 5y ago
That is fantastic.
- Wistar 5y ago
  Yes. And he later went back to school and became a user experience research scientist.
joshu 5y ago
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Dangling-String-by-Natalie-Jeremijenko-The-two-pictures-show-a-quiet-and-a-busy-red_fig4_268509885 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Dangling-String-by-N...
DonHopkins 5y ago
Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology 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.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technology/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190508225438/https://www.karls... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5387055 https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore... PDF: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/papers/03-weiser-origins.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/paper... [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4065 https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.u... PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170810073340/https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/4065/paper.pdf?sequence=1 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_(Dangling_String),_1995 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://mediaartists.org/content.php?sec=artist&sub=detail&artist_id=216 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526023949/http://mediaartis... [10] https://web.archive.org/web/20100701035651/http://iu.berkeley.edu/IU/stories/storyReader$397 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/articles/sensors/Ubiquitous-Computing.htm 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.

eitland 5y ago

I'm just missing the small led that used to indicate disk activity until someone decided laptops looked sleeker and less cluttered without it.

psychomugs 5y ago

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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3171221.3171276

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

buro9 5y ago

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.

alonchb 5y ago

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-infrastructure-dashbaords https://mymakerspace.substack.com/p/another-look-at-infrastr...

mkeeter 5y ago

One fun example is the "malloc Geiger counter", which clicks whenever memory is allocated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vn6aGgLKfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vn6aGgLKfQ (Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303832)

gnramires 5y ago
Cool! It doesn't really differentiate in terms of allocation volume (only frequency). It would be interesting if the tick rate was proportional to something like log(allocation rate) so you could get an idea if something really heavy is allocated.

ancode 5y ago

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?

Talanes 5y ago
>Why sound? why not just a.. oh idk. disk access light? Maybe add other little leds for other stuff? Meanwhile, I'm over here with every LED in my apartment that's not tied to an IR reciever taped over with black electrical tape. I don't mind fan noise at all, but the sea of twinkling LEDs that come from modern electronics drives me insane.
- hcs 5y ago
  https://increpare.com/game/heaven-on-earth.html https://increpare.com/game/heaven-on-earth.html
- kilroy123 5y ago
  Yes I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one!

awinter-py 5y ago

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 5y ago

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 5y ago

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.

Smaug123 5y ago
You're thinking of North Paw, perhaps, which is an anklet (https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/ https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/)
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Commercialized: > The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück 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.
noir_lord 5y ago
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.

zanethomas 5y ago

haha, back in the day my dad used a transistor radio to understand what his mid 70s microcomputer was doing

gmueckl 5y ago

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.

dharmab 5y ago
I heard stories about this type of troubleshooting used in production from a colleague and friend about 40 years senior to me.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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/ http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

ramboldio 5y ago

Dell got you covered: get a pleseant humming noise when your GPU is busy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxR9FyBrVw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxR9FyBrVw

scott-smith_us 5y ago

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...

yummypaint 5y ago

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.

jFriedensreich 5y ago

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.

masswerk 5y ago

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.

whalabi 5y ago

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.

exporectomy 5y ago
I use Task Manager to monitor the progress of some long-running tasks that have no progress feedback in their application. The memory and CPU use graphs follows familiar patterns and I get a sense of how far it's got and some confidence that it hasn't crashed. It would be nicer in audio though.

GenaroHR 5y ago

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

adrianmonk 5y ago

I never tried it, but ~20 years ago there was a project called Peep for auditory monitoring of networks. From the Usenix (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...) abstract: > We created a network monitoring system, Peep, that replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. This system combines network state information from multiple data sources, by mixing audio signals into a single audio stream in real time. Using Peep, one can easily detect common network problems such as high load, excessive traffic, and email spam, by comparing sounds being played with those of a normally functioning network. The SourceForge page is still up: https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/

mattxxx 5y ago

I like this idea at first pass! I think augmenting reality with a tap into the digital could be a nice new dimension to how we look at the world. I do however think that giving tech companies + ad companies the ability to tap into this is risky. As a result, rather than have a call-to-arms to invest more in such tech, maybe it's better to just start the conversation on how we can interact with the digital world safely. ...Or maybe which digital worlds are safe to connect to? :thinking_face:

yissp 5y ago

When I'm compiling a big project, I'll often go read some emails or whatever and listen for the fans on my PC to quiet down again to know when it's done. It's actually become a pretty important part of my workflow lol.

jonhohle 5y ago

I recall a classic Mac OS hard drive indicator icon to the left of the Apple menu that would roughly correspond to the crunching of the physical disk. I had no idea what this article was going to be about, but determining behavior based on physical characteristics of the hardware is something I miss with modern, quiet machines.

jart 5y ago

See also: https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/ https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/

rektide 5y ago

Linux has a very flexible LED framework, and there's a variety of different "triggers" one can use to drive the LEDs. CPU usage, disk usage, network device usage, backlight level, usb port usage, audio are all different triggers one can control an LED via, that are baked into the kernel[1]. There's userland devices one can use to do whatever else one wants. This isn't as aesthetic as say, the LiveWire[2] mention in the comments. But it's readily available on almost all systems, and is a very flexible ambient indicator. There's a lot of really really fun good stuff in the comments here. Ambient is good, but to me, I want computing that exposes the causal relationships of what is happening as it's processing, as it's running. "This button was clicked so I'm trying to change the screen brightness now." All of the entities of computing, the data, these user events, should be reified, should be made into a logged sequence of what is happening. From that basis, we can all be free to explore computing, and to- EventSourcing style- extend the graph of computing as we might see fit. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/leds/trigger https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/leds/t... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348148