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Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#181

Post by samatman »

ElFitz wrote: post #85

For those interested, Xcode lets you configure sounds to be played when a breakpoint is reached. It can also be set up to conditionally play a sound. Those breakpoints can also be configured to continue running the app instead of pausing. It can quickly get out of hands though.

I've avoided XCode thus far, but I'm going to have to see if there's a way to add this by Python scripting LLDB, because there are certain kinds of tracing where sound is probably the optimal medium. It's mind-numbing to try and catch unexpected orderings using printf debugging, and step debugging makes this worse not better.

I'm thinking that for up to five events (which covers a lot of ground) this would be pretty sustainable with the pentatonic scale. Any combination of pentatonics is reasonably pleasant, and it would be very easy indeed to hear a permutation in the expected melody. I think this is something I could keep doing without suddenly developing an extreme aversion to it.

It would still be necessary to use headphones to prevent casuals from being exposed, though. It wouldn't be that melodic...

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#182

Post by whalesalad »

gorkish wrote: post #132

From [1] The story of PING: ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure. [1] https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~m…

macos has the "say" binary which is fun to play with for stuff like this

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#183

Post by lowdownbutter »

I can't help envisioning such a thing with *Command and Conquer* announcer or *Warcraft 2* peasants.

"Building ..." "Cancelled" "Unable to comply, building in progress" "Construction complete" "Cannot deploy here"

"Job's done"

etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW1qfrx_Lg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoMhMZZjbGg

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#184

Post by markhahn »

Rygian wrote: post #46
slig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your fridge on GH? Mine is outdated and I'd like to download a newer one.

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…

that project deserves a permanent web presence, if only a blog post!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#186

Post by KaiMagnus »

rgbrgb wrote: post #177
cal85 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one does the same thing but with beeps, with higher pitch for heavier DOM updates. It’s not as nice as the geiger click but I’ve found it more useful for figuring out exactly where the UI is slow. https://github.com/tomhicks/react-audible-debug

Cool! Found this little video of it in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM_DrpCK5i0

That’s pretty nice and intuitive. The panning is heavy as expected, the emoji picker surprisingly quiet. But something is seriously wrong with the context menus.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#190

Post by Kozmik1 »

The classic audio diagnostic on Linux/Unix is some beeps occurring and kernel debug text on all virtual terminals when something really horrible has gone wrong.

If you want to make a beep in a linux console, try adding this to your shell scripts. It should trigger the default system "beep" sound. I used to include this in my scripts that ran really long tests or cluster jobs to wake me up and check the results.

Sadly, on many laptops and PCs today, there seems to be no action on the PC speaker at all, but you can configure this system beep code to trigger a sound of your choice from your favorite gui console application.

In Python I believe you can trigger the system 'beep' sound with one of the following: print("\a") # cross platform print('\007') # linux only

My gui favorite, Konsole does not make any sound using these standard methods unless you manually configure it to play a file for "Bell in focused session" under Notifications. Of course this plays a wav/ogg file instead of triggering the PC speaker.

It can be really hard to make a little beep these days, when you consider you may have 4 different sound outputs (one for each display and video card, one or two for the motherboard), application specific audio levels that get set to quiet or muted by default arbitrarily, and then application specific opt-ins needed just to support a little sound that was kind of a failsafe notification in earlier times.

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