Live disk activity
The LED brightens with real disk throughput. Bursty I/O reads as flicker; sustained transfers glow steady. Adaptive sampling means it's responsive when your disk is busy and quiet when your Mac is at rest.
Disk light + swap meter, in your menu bar · v1.0
Bring back
the blink.
A small red lamp in your menu bar, brightening when your disk is working. The ambient HDD-activity LED of pre-2010 personal computers. Restored, as software.
What it does
Quietly alive. Always honest.
Memory pressure
A slim amber bar fills with swap depth relative to your RAM. Warms toward orange when your Mac is leaning on the swap file. A glanceable second indicator beside the LED.
The numbers, on click
Open the dropdown for read & write totals since boot, RAM in use, swap on disk, and the kernel's pressure level. The same metrics Activity Monitor shows, one click away from anywhere.
Why
For people who miss when computers told you things.
Personal computers used to talk to you. A red LED flickered when the hard drive was working. A green light glowed when your modem connected. Tiny VU meters jumped to the rhythm of your music. The machine was alive on its surface, and you knew, at a glance, what it was doing.
Then came laptops, sealed enclosures, unified memory, silent SSDs. The lights went away. The machines became opaque. You can still see what your computer is doing, but only by stopping what you're doing, opening Activity Monitor, and looking.
Blinken brings the LED back. As software, in your menu bar, exactly where it was on a beige tower in 1998. Ambient. Quiet. There when you need it, invisible when you don't.
Yours. Local. Quiet.
Blinken reads your Mac's disk activity through IOKit and memory stats through standard macOS APIs. That's it. No accounts, no telemetry, no servers, no data ever leaves your machine. Your preferences sit in your user defaults. The app is open source under the MIT license.