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> and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load). This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more dir

by IanCal 3y ago

> and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load). This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more directly now. Fans had increased, but I've plenty of cores so nothing else was slow. I then checked and found some linting process that I'd killed was still running in the background using up a couple of cores. I do kind of miss things like dialup tones and knowing how things had gone wrong by sound. I wonder if there's other fun ideas around that. I'm picturing either a ferrofluid or textured display that becomes more grumbly as my computer works harder. I can't hear disks thrashing now we're on solid state but big steady waves of water vs turbulent waves feels like a good analogy.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
As much as I dislike skeuomorphism, I sometimes dream of recreating those noises. More than that - on the list of projects to in spare time (read: retirement, if I'll live that long), which surprisingly I haven't seen anyone do already, is a system performance monitor that exposes metrics as sounds instead of graphs. A cross (or a blend) between fan noises, HDD murmur, and the bridge of Enterprise-D[0] - an ambiance of non-distracting sounds, but every single one correlated with an actual system metric - so that you'll learn to "feel" the machine by the sound this monitor makes (much like many drivers learn to "feel" their car by how it sounds). If you (or anyone else) knows of "prior art" / some implementation of this idea, please let me know. Indicators in the tray, or semi-transparent graphs in the corner of a screen, generally don't work for me - my visual system just filters them out without parsing (except when they overlap something I care about, or find their way onto a screenshot, at which point I become annoyed). However, I believe sound would work for me, as it's a nice, additive channel, not very busy while I'm working, and such ambiance could actually substitute for pink noise (or the video from [0], which I sometimes use in lieu of noise). -- [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU

by IanCal 3y ago

TeMPOraL 3y ago

As much as I dislike skeuomorphism, I sometimes dream of recreating those noises. More than that - on the list of projects to in spare time (read: retirement, if I'll live that long), which surprisingly I haven't seen anyone do already, is a system performance monitor that exposes metrics as sounds instead of graphs. A cross (or a blend) between fan noises, HDD murmur, and the bridge of Enterprise-D[0] - an ambiance of non-distracting sounds, but every single one correlated with an actual system metric - so that you'll learn to "feel" the machine by the sound this monitor makes (much like many drivers learn to "feel" their car by how it sounds). If you (or anyone else) knows of "prior art" / some implementation of this idea, please let me know. Indicators in the tray, or semi-transparent graphs in the corner of a screen, generally don't work for me - my visual system just filters them out without parsing (except when they overlap something I care about, or find their way onto a screenshot, at which point I become annoyed). However, I believe sound would work for me, as it's a nice, additive channel, not very busy while I'm working, and such ambiance could actually substitute for pink noise (or the video from [0], which I sometimes use in lieu of noise). -- [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU