[HN Gopher] Analog Terminal Bell
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Analog Terminal Bell
Author : tenderlove
Score : 215 points
Date : 2020-09-10 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (analogterminalbell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (analogterminalbell.com)
| war1025 wrote:
| I love the cheesy informercial [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8VpN6Z_YA
| jedberg wrote:
| One of the comments on the youtube video says "I need an analog
| carriage return".
|
| Now _that_ would be cool. Having a physical bell ding every time
| you hit enter, like an old typewriter!
|
| Edit: I'm aware that typewriters ding before you get to the end,
| but that would be much harder to implement than just doing it
| when you hit enter, which would be a close representation. :P
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Wire up your editor to trigger the USB bell when the cursor
| reaches the floor(0.95N)th column?
| 205guy wrote:
| There was a similar thread about typewriter emulators a while
| ago, and I found this one online:
|
| https://uniqcode.com/typewriter/
|
| It is an accurate simulator with all the sounds and quirks of
| using a real typewriter. All it's missing is the view of the
| ribbon moving up and down, and of course the letters hitting
| the paper.
| n3k5 wrote:
| On a typewriter the bell rings _before_ you return the
| carriage. (By pushing it - if it 's manual, there's no such
| thing as 'hitting enter'.) It happens a few characters before
| the end of the line, as a warning that you should go to the
| next line after the current word, or if it's a long word, think
| about hyphenation.
|
| Oh, and the typewriters used to perform that song made famous
| by Jerry Lewis are hacked so the bell can be triggered ad lib
| -- but the sheet music still says to do it _before_ pushing the
| lever :)
| jedberg wrote:
| I know I was just trying to get close to the typewriter
| experience. :)
| n3k5 wrote:
| I assumed as much, just couldn't stop myself from writing a
| clarification anyway in case some younger readers would get
| confused.
|
| Initially I found the idea to make it more authentic more
| fun, but now that you've mentioned ease of implementation
| -- yeah, it wouldn't be that much fun that I could be arsed
| to, say, patch a terminal emulator.
|
| A text editor plug-in would be easier, though. Get a subtle
| ding when a line of code is about to get too long, instead
| of dreading the approaching cliff of a strict ruler :)
|
| Btw., this is quite neat, too: https://youtu.be/qb43-hn_-_c
| (The download link for the sound pack in the video
| description still works!)
| reaperducer wrote:
| I think your memory is confused. It was the other way around.
|
| The bell was a signal that you were running out of space and it
| was time to return the carriage.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Sales are spiking for this product in Brooklyn zip codes 11231,
| 11201, 11217, 11215, along with typewriters and handlebar
| mustache wax.
| abhinuvpitale wrote:
| I love the idea of physically disconnecting the bell, when you
| want to `turn off` notifications.
| every wrote:
| Manual typewriters were noisy little beasts. "Tack tack tack
| tackity tack" (keys). Thunk... thunk (shift). "Chunka chunka
| (backspace). Ding (bell). Ziiiiiiip (return). All of these and
| more are lovingly preserved in US-ASCII:
|
| https://every.sdf.org/.webshare/us-ascii.txt
| chaoticmass wrote:
| On Debian the default is to use the pcspkr beeper for terminal
| bells... and first thing I do on a new system is remove the
| pcspkr module.
| holstvoogd wrote:
| Aaron! Should have guessed it was him haha
| jcims wrote:
| Would be cool to do an analog (ultrasonic) DTMF detection circuit
| and then build a WAV file that triggers it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The IBM Displaywriter had a margin bell. It was an odd experience
| to be using a digital computer that acts like a mechanical
| typewriter.
| kps wrote:
| xterm and compatible terminals have a margin bell; enable with
| ESC [ ? 4 4 h
| 30minAdayHN wrote:
| This should also ring every time a user edits a sent message on
| Slack... May be a slack app to interface with bell.
| cbsks wrote:
| That video was amazing! I bet you could crowdfund it into a
| product :)
| hackbinary wrote:
| The terminal bell is completely abused, and as irritating as
| heck.
|
| I turn it off as soon as I can upon installation of any
| distribution.
| [deleted]
| adchari wrote:
| Emacs absolutely overuses it, every time you scroll to the end
| or beginning of a file it beeps.
| outworlder wrote:
| True. One of the first things I disable.
| gorkish wrote:
| I ran across an old and very nice portable Smith Corona
| typewriter the other day and of course I opened it up and gave it
| the required typewriter inspection: holding down tab until the
| carriage rings the bell. What a delight.
|
| This project is really great, but I cant help but want to remix
| it to hide the guts within the bell! I also kinda want to hook it
| up to a pinball knocker and put it under my coworkers' desks.
|
| Anyone else have the unending list of cool projects to build that
| you can never seem to start?
| antongribok wrote:
| I like your idea of putting everything inside the bell. I
| wonder if you could replace the solenoid with just an electric
| magnet that would pull down the button from inside.
|
| Totally unrelated, I have one project that I keep thinking
| about starting every time I turn on my monitor in the
| morning...
|
| I want to connect an RPi Zero to the serial port on my monitor,
| so that instead of pressing multiple buttons to change the
| input or color profiles (for day vs night), I could hit a
| dedicated set of buttons instead.
|
| One physical button might issue multiple commands over serial
| to the monitor.
|
| I'm thinking of doing this with a Raspberry Pi simply for
| convenience... I'm sure someone here will suggest doing it with
| something much smaller, and they'd probably be right.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Look into DDC; a lot of monitors can be controlled through
| that and it doesn't require any extra hardware:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel
| SamBam wrote:
| Or replace it with a single spin of a motor (inside or
| outside the bell) that had a small ringer on a spring.
|
| Simple motors are even more plentiful, at least in my random-
| electronics-stuff drawer.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The teletype/typewriter is one of mine. Ideally it'd be a
| Selectric (https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode), but an
| electronic one would probably be an easier task.
|
| Also much cheaper. Shipping to Ireland is horrendously
| expensive.
| dylan604 wrote:
| With the bell used in the video, can you (putEverythingInside)
| && (haveOriginalPlungerWork)?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Terminal bells trained me to be very cautious about what files I
| jam into stdout, or its equivalent.
|
| There's nothing worse than accidentally cating a binary file and
| filling the computer room with a string of un-cancellable bells
| with all eyes on you. It was like a noob detector.
| mprovost wrote:
| When I used to "lose" a shell I would just cat a bell character
| (^G) to the process's tty and see which screen window went
| "Wuff, Wuff!!".
| hisham_hm wrote:
| omg, I just had a horror vision of a university lab full of vim
| newbies using this.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| printf("\a");
| Animats wrote:
| Older Teletype machines, Model 15 and earlier, have two or three
| bells. The big bell is triggered by the BELL character. The bell
| is almost 3 inches across and produces a really nice "bong" sound
| that lasts more than a second. That bell was intended to get the
| attention of people in the room for important incoming messages.
| News services would send messages with one to ten bells. UPI used
| 3, 4, 5 and 10 bells.
|
| What it sounded like: The Teletype March: [1] Good pictures of
| the big bell.
|
| The small bell is triggered at column 73 or so. Just a quiet
| "ding".
|
| On a Model 14 printer, which prints on a narrow tape, the third
| bell rings continuously when the blank tape supply has run out.
|
| All that is what's being emulated by the "bell" sound on
| computers.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/b2QPy-igBLA?t=218
| mbar84 wrote:
| Sounds like a missed opportunity. ASCII maybe could have had
| BLL, BLM, BLH (low, medium, high) with different frequencies
| and you could have encoded something in those bells instead of
| having to count a sequence.
| gumby wrote:
| If you actually look at the ascii chart broken out by
| bitfield you'll see that the codes and key tops reflect a
| tight mapping (remember old teletypes were electromechanical:
| an electric motor drove the platen but all the keystroke
| decoding was mechanical. The usual ascii chart (e.g. man
| ascii) obscures this by using hex or decimal codes.)
|
| So they had a block of 31 control character (forget null, and
| delete obviously wasn't in there because of paper tape).
|
| Many of those control characters were and are useful (^s for
| stop, ^r for resume) much of the space was empty and so
| randomly assigned. There would have been room for more bell
| characters, but that wasn't really the mentality of the day.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have two bells _exactly_ like that one. One of them has a
| distinctive tone (and a sizeable dent) because it used to sit on
| a colleague's desk and people "rang him up" as they came up to
| him until one day he just lost it and threw it across the room
| (almost into the garbage bin - it hit on edge and dented).
|
| Good thing we're working remote, because I would not be able to
| be near one of those things during an intensive terminal session.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| This thing would be ringing every couple of seconds in my world.
| tenderlove wrote:
| Here is a link to the product video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8VpN6Z_YA
|
| I sent a patch to iTerm2 for support:
| https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/428
| dylan604 wrote:
| The gag about not being to plug the USB cable in correctly was
| a nice touch
| 1f60c wrote:
| I also liked the fast spoken disclaimer at the end.
| djsumdog wrote:
| "Requires a patched version of iTerm 2"
|
| "Not actually for sale"
| joshu wrote:
| it's unrealistic. in real life there would have been 3+ flips
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know why physicists are looking for higher
| dimensions, instead of investigating the 4-dimensional
| nature of USB-A cables.
| dylan604 wrote:
| sure, that's the unrealistic part of this video.
| OJFord wrote:
| Since it's a control character I don't think a 'custom build of
| iterm2' should be necessary?
| gugagore wrote:
| It is not transmitting every displayed character over USB. The
| terminal emulator needs to send a command (e.g. not just a
| character, though the distinction is besides the point) to the
| device.
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| It's necessary because normally, when iTerm encounters a BEL
| character it plays an audio file through the default audio
| output device. It needs to be patched to instead interact with
| the device over HID instead.
| legohead wrote:
| That title brought back memories of some really old MUDs that
| would let you chat escape codes (mostly meant to make colorful
| chats in ANSI color), and you could chat the bell escape code to
| make everyone's PC beep. But it also kind of froze the computer
| for a second, so you could send a bunch of them and freeze
| everyone (including yourself).
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(page generated 2020-09-10 23:00 UTC)