Sometimes I'll add a chime to a long running build, eg `make || aplay fail.wav`
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
101–110 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> gas pump Most of them play advertisements while you fuel up. I hate it. The only thing that I like about New Jersey forbidding me from touching a gas pump is that I'm not subjected to ads for diarrhea medication or low-APR loans every time I fuel up.
Pro tip: on most pumps, the second button from the top on the right side mutes the volume.
A local station had (I think past tense, though it made it a lot less likely for me to go there to check) their pumps playing ads in "attract mode" when nobody was using them. So going there late at night and filling up involved listening to a poorly-timed round of "BUY NOW" utterances from eight different sources (because of course they weren't synchronized). And you couldn't really mute it because it was all the other pumps.
It was horrible.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#103I have made sysm specifically for this: https://github.com/jafarlihi/sysm
> sysm makes your system play custom sounds when any configured system or external event happens
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#104When making my own editor I found one place where I wanted to have sound: When searching, and the search has reached the end - I added an auidble beep as well as a shaking effect.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#105Yeah I sometimes say like BOOM or NIAAAOOOMM when I get things working
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#106Absolutely not. Cubicle farms are noisy enough as they are. The occasional beep from an ASCII Bel character is more than enough. I also surprise myself regularly by finding that I'm still wearing noise-cancelling headphones long, long after the Zoom or WebEx has ended. When I take the headphones off, I'm surprised again by how noisy the background is, particularly the howling of the ventilation system.
Oh man, I'm jealous that you get cubicles. When I moved from Big Corp to startup land, I did not realize how much I would miss having a cubicle.
Corps don’t do cubicles anymore either, since the pandemic it’s all open spaces with hot desks
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#107I have. You can assign sounds to stuff in IDEs, which I had some fun with in the early days of Visual C++.
I was the tech lead on a project at a Big-6 consulting firm, so my friend and I set the team's machines up to point to wave files on the network for basic compilation events. Success, warning, error. And the Windows startup sound.
This allowed me to change any of these sounds at any time, unbeknownst to the team. At some point, I changed the "build failed" sound to my own voice saying "That's crap!" It was amusing to hear this randomly coming out of this cube or that... especially my own, when I had a build fail and said "That's crap" right before my computer said it in the exact same intonation.
Yeah... easily amused in the days of "Compaq Business Audio!"
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#108I listen to the sounds of my code loading from my cassette tape drive. And my modem makes sounds too, when I'm doing stuff in the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#109If I am running a command that runs long enough such that my attention will drift but short enough such that I can't start something else, I'll append `echo "\a"` or equivalent. It's nice to know when the command completes. Loosely related, I am almost always running some white noise into my IEMs.
On osx you can use `say "long command is done"` or whatever is descriptive.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#110I’ve set my shell to discreetly play the sound of a mouse button click upon completion of any command that ran for longer than 20 seconds. That choice of sound has the convenient effect that no one else seems to consciously notice it.