Annoyingly bright lights on modern gadgets have always been a pet peeve of mine. I especially hate the abundance of blinding blue LEDs that have been popular in everything from hard drive enclosures to paper shredders in recent years. Nowhere are extraneous lights more annoying than the equipment rack below my TV.

Originally, I planned to solve this problem with black electrical tape or gaffer’s tape. I wasn’t really happy with either of those solutions since an ugly piece of tape on my nice equipment is like putting an eye patch on a BMW. Luckily, the Internet is awesome.

With a little bit of searching, I came across LightDims, the perfect solution to my problem. They offer three flavors for about $6 with pre-cut shapes¹: one that blocks 50-80% of light, one that blocks 100%, and a silver edition. I opted for the total blackout variety (with less packing because I love the environment and hate excess packaging). The results were fantastic.

A view of my equipment rack with the lights and equipment on.

Before applying LightDims with the lights out.

With LightDims applied, all those annoying LEDs have vanished.

This may seem like a lot of effort to solve a really minor problem, but to me it was very much worth it. The lights are much brighter in real life than they show in the photos. Now I can enjoy great films without being stabbed in the eye by little pin pricks of light.