Le carnet à Michel / Mike's Blog / ミシェルのブログ

I hate sounds. I hate with a passion Windows sounds, in fact. Mac sounds, I can live with, there are really only a few events that trigger a sound, so it's not really a gigantic problem. But on Windows, they seemed compelled to fill in all the available sound positions with something, be it opening a window, a menu, geez, if they thought it would be ok, they would've put a sound whenever you move your mouse.

It's fun in the user interface to be able to put sounds wherever you can, that's cool. To have the ability is cool. To know you can have a different sound for two gazillion events is cool.

But I don't want sounds to bother me.

In other words, I listen to music, I don't listen to user interface.

Last thing I want is to be working, to be listening to some very relax classical music and to hear a very loud "BUD!" from a croaking frog on a stupid screen saver (metaphysical example of course, I don't even use screen savers, it goes directly to energy saver for me thank you).

So I remove all the sounds. I go to Control Panel, then select the "No sounds" scheme, say no to my modified theme (oh the humanity, no I don't want to save that) and that's it.

Only problem is once in a while, I get a PC speaker beep. In other words, I am working, and I receive a mail in Thunderbird and it gets greeted with a BEEP! that not only gets transmitted to my headphones to the maximal possible volume, but that everyone in the whole room (the whole city I'd say by the volume) just jumps.

What the?! When I say I want no sounds, it's not to have it reappear with something even more annoying and loud. Oh no. That's very improper design, Microsoft folks.

At first, I tried to disable it completely, I went to device manager, I tried looking for options, I tried doing whatever I could. To no avail. The PC Speaker is there to stay. Then, I found the problem. The problem is Windows, in its very intelligent way, decides that if you don't have a default sound, it have to find a way to get your attention, so instead of showing some alert, flashing the menu bar like on Mac, or I don't know what, they System Beep.

Hence the tip: In my sound scheme, I use No Sounds. Then, I scroll down a few pages of events until the last one of the first section, and it's aptly named "Default sound". And because there's nothing there, Windows fills in the blank. So I put something there. You could find an empty sound, I could provide one right here, no sweat. But you can choose "Windows XP Start Menu" in the sound bank and it's very close to being "nothing". Totally non-aggressive. And once that is done, no more PC Speaker beep.

Ce n'est pas parce que je trouve risible l'idée de la Zune que je n'ai pas téléchargé le thème XP pour ce dernier.

Sérieusement, le thème est super, sauf pour le brun. Ils ont mis la même couleur dans Vista et je trouve ça idiot, c'est une mode qui va bien durer un gros 5 minutes. Voici mon bureau, pour ceux que ça intéresse (et non je n'ai pas gardé ni les sons - tous désactivés hormis le bip par défaut - ni le super fond d'écran cheesy):

Ah non!

Les sites commencent à revenir dans les premières erreurs des premiers moments dudit Web 1.0.

Ça fait quelques jours que je vois une recrudescence des bannières qui flashent noir et blanc, sans compter les pop-ups, les pop-unders … et toutes ces belles créations. Manque juste le retour des consoles et on va avoir la totale.

Putain, il me semblait que c'était enterré et oublié pour le mieux. Non seulement je ferme les pages qui contiennent ces bannières encore plus vite que les sites qui font jouer de la musique poche dès qu'on y met les pieds, mais en plus, je n'y met plus jamais les pieds. Je peux pas croire que ce soit bon pour ce qu'ils annoncent de donner des crises épileptiques aux gens.