I once configured a Jenkins instance to play different sound effects when certain builds would fail. Originally these were played out of our big office TV, but its speakers broke at some point. A few years later, a couple of new hires came up to me to tell me they thought their laptops were infected with malware, because it would sometimes make weird noises. Turns out they had Jenkins open in a browser tab, and it would play the sounds when builds broke.
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
141–150 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#142In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement. All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly eve…
Yes, this. Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or laundromat emitting sound effects constantly. Quite the dystopian hellscape.
>Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or laundromat emitting sound effects constantly.
This a non-that-inaccurate depiction of how life in Japan is, but thankfully one adapts quite quickly to that.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#143In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement. All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly eve…
I worked at a help desk one summer and every inbox had a different sound effect. We had several different external customers each with a dedicated machine to handle their tickets. The most critical customers (i.e. the biggest fines) got the loudest, most annoying sounds. Everything was an animal sound so the place literally sounded like a zoo on busy days. The manager absolutely hated bringing various big shot tours through our call center because of the ridiculous noise but we also had a perfect record.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#144Yes! I wish there were better tools for getting sound out of the terminal. I got bored waiting for long running scripts to finish one day and wrote this bash one liner. Now I can run a command and put a pipe and the zzz alias on the end and it will tell me when it’s finished. > alias zzz='echo "zuhg zuhg\n" "work work\n" "lowk taar\n" "jobs done\n" "sawobu\n" "dabu\n" "i can do that\n" "be happy to\n" "OK\n" "no time…
Upvote for the excellent Wacraft II reference. Those are some of my favourite sound effects, and they are often quoted among my friends.
Here's all of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gntGbsmTY_E
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#145It isn't exactly what you have in mind, but I use `play` as well as a terminal theme color change to tell me when I'm using one or another language's keyboard layout. If you put & in front of play, you can make chords. Here's an example: # Define notes for major seventh chord starting on A 440 A=440 C_SHARP=554.37 E=659.25 G_SHARP=830.61 if [[ "$layout" == "Finnish" ]]; then # Play a major seventh chord ascending kit…
Forking each sox command to the background causes samples to play non-deterministically and step over each other. Here's a better way: # Define notes for major seventh chord starting on A 440 A=440 C_SHARP=554.37 E=659.25 G_SHARP=830.61 case "$layout" in Finnish) kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Apprentice & play "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $A" \ "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $C_SHARP" \ "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $E" \ "|…
Relatedly, I once saw someone realize that the sound they played at the end of their build was running synchronously so they were blocking themselves from a faster feedback loop and reporting unusually long builds in their profiling. Properly backgrounding the sound fixed their issues.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#146For very long local builds, like a full bitbake, I do `&& bell` so I know when to tab back to my build terminal. i.e. `bitbake bsp-vendor-full-image || beep && beep` so I get a sound when things finish, whether it failed or succeeded.
I added an alarm to my prompt so it happens every time a command finishes. I only use a visual bell, which propagates through tmux and my window manager. So basically, if I'm focused elsewhere when a command finishes, I have a nice indicator reminding me to go back.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#147If 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.
I use this, which I use for exactly those kinds of scripts, but I don't really like noises: https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#148My first thought was some kind of 16-bit sound when you open and complete different brackets, perhaps a different sound for each depth, but I imagine that would become annoying pretty quickly!
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short answer: no. Was forced to move to a new place. Had to buy a secondhand fridge. Thermostat was out of whack. Instead of calling a technician, I decided to have fun, replaced the thermostat by an Arduino with a couple of thermometers (top shelf, bottom shelf), a relay driving a contactor, and a beeper. Firmware stayed in "beta version", never thought about publishing it. When I moved again to a new place I ditche…
Projects line Frankenfridge are a blast until you want a product that "just works".
Things work surprisingly well when you don't have an engineer or two figuring out how cheap you can go.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#150It isn't exactly what you have in mind, but I use `play` as well as a terminal theme color change to tell me when I'm using one or another language's keyboard layout. If you put & in front of play, you can make chords. Here's an example: # Define notes for major seventh chord starting on A 440 A=440 C_SHARP=554.37 E=659.25 G_SHARP=830.61 if [[ "$layout" == "Finnish" ]]; then # Play a major seventh chord ascending kit…
When I read that Finnish was a major seventh I was hoping that English would be a minor seventh or something even more subtly different. A minor 7th vs a minor 7 flat 5 etc. Would be funny to create an elaborate system of notification tones that are only discernible by a trained musician
> Would be funny to create an elaborate system of notification tones that are only discernible by a trained musician
Oh man, could this concept be turned into an esoteric programming language where to program you use a musical keyboard and all the symbols in your lang are different chords or intervals
Absolutely no visual feedback for extra pain