Thoughts, photos and other things.

Light and night.

There are few things which I hate more than sleeping in a room with any form of ambient light.

I can honestly not tell you why, but for as long as I can remember I have found it nigh on impossible to sleep in a room which is not as dark as physically possible. This goes as much for the halogen street lamp, which can impregnate the white walls of any room with a neon orange glow that would not look out of place in a science fiction movie, as it does for that red alert LED that RIM found necessary to place at the top of all their phones.

Even the pulsating ‘invisible’ white light that emanates from the front of my MacBook Pro is enough to drive me insane at night - although I must confess it is truly impressive how bright that light is considering it is impossible to see the opening on the aluminium chassis of the laptop during daylight hours.

I also remember an ‘amusing’ moment when I re-arranged a hotel room so that the built in radio alarm would not cause unnecessary distress whilst I attempted to make the most out of the available hours I had left to sleep without being disturbed by the incessant green glow.

I have even gone as far as to unplug TV’s and other electrical equipment in friends houses purely because I would otherwise not been able to sleep. Of course to many of you this may seem extremely strange, as human beings we all have wonderful eyelids. These ‘covers’ serve to protect our eyes from stray objects and invariably light and yet for me they are not enough.

This brings me nicely onto something which has now been bugging me hugely for a very long time, my radio. I have owned my Revo Heritage for about a year now. It has diligently woken me every morning that I have had it, its dual alarm function proving invaluable on those days where important meetings were scheduled but late nights had preceded. In fact it has proved so useful I once took it with me on holiday simply because it’s one of the few alarms that can actually wake me, its tones seem to evoke some primeval instinct to wake up.

Yet despite this, it is one of the most annoying things in my bedroom, the screen which is a wonderful cyan OLED affair cannot be set to turn off - even when on standby. Being at the high end of the radio market - its functions include DAB and the more useful Internet radio functions as well as Last FM and optical outputs, one would of perhaps have thought that this function would have been a given. But alas it is not. It is almost enough to drive me back to buying a Pure radio - which along with being significantly cheaper now also has all the functions of the above. I would however miss the beautiful industrial design and the brash yellow backlight would only serve to infuriate me if I were to listen to my iPod in bed.

I would have even purchased Revo’s newest radio - the £300 K2 if it had had the ability to turn off the backlight yet sadly as the e-mail below states, Revo have no intention of doing so. It just seems so odd why a premium product which is otherwise perfect would neglect to include such a setting, it is not hard to add to the user interface nor interferes with how the product functions. Truly mind boggling.

Here is the email I received after enquiring:

“Dear Christopher, Thanks for your e-mail.                                                                 There is no way nor are there any plans for the display to be turned off on Heritage or K2.

The only product that this can be done with is our AXiS product.

Kind Regards,

Support Team Revo Technologies Ltd”

I must say I do find the part about the Heritage odd as I do have an email somewhere, that I shall try to dig out, which states that they did have plans to introduce it… I guess they changed their minds. Some of you may ask ‘why not just buy the Axis? Sadly it is not the same product as the K2 or Heritage and if I go with an Axis I may as well just get a Pure. I just find it hard to fathom quite how something as basic as a setting to switch off a backlight is so hard to program and include in a product, so much so that a company seems hell bent on not offering it on their flagship product.

So it seems that at least for now I shall continue to use my current approach of placing my iPad in its dock in-front of the screen of my radio as to minimise the light fallout which is a shame but in this case a necessity of me sleeping well.