Driving home tonight I was looking for the button for the rear window demister and my eye fell upon the dashboard light dimmer button. What a waste of effort that is. I have never brightened or darkened the instrument display on any car I have ever driven.
My watch has a host of never to be used functions - world times, stopwatch (I use a stopwatch for that), countdown timer, phone book (I use a phone for that).
My blender has a pulse setting if you switch the dial the other way. Why bother? You have to hold it there as long as you want it to “pulse.” I just switch it to 1 and back to off. Same result without the holding.
Surely there are hundreds of these things? Do you have any?
I propose that nobody sitting here reading this thread has ever had a purpose to use the “Scroll Lock”, “Pause/Break”, or “SysRq” functions on their keyboard, and few have found a situation where “Delete” was preferable to “Insert”.
I use “delete” all the time, I’ve never used “insert”. I must not e the only one who doesn’t use it, since “insert” isn’t even on this keyboard at all.
Oh, and I’ve also used the dimmer for my dashboard lights when driving on completely unlit country roads late at night.
For me, and I’m perfectly clear about the fact that it’s well used by others, it used to be the camera on my phone. Then I discovered that when I don’t have time or the artistic inclination to be able to capture the whiteboard after a meeting a quick snapshot with my phone solves the problem. I now have a camera roll on my phone tracking all the design decision on my project.
One that I haven’t found a use for yet - the single rack only setting on my dishwasher. I can’t imagine that it saves that much water either.
Why would I need a digital clock on my stove, coffee maker, fridge, DVD player, cell phone, TV, stereo, et all… It’s like we need to know, to the micro-scond, the exact time whichever way our eyes are turned.
A couple of years ago I removed the 'caps lock" button from my keyboard, I was tired of hitting it accidentally, one of my supervisors questioned me about that, and the next day when I came to work, it was back on my keyboard!
The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M-16 rifle. The forward assist is used to seat the round in the chamber, as the weapon supposedly has a problem doing this all by itself on occasion. The only time I ever used it was when inserting a fresh magazine and releasing the bolt, to make sure the first round was seated.
Actually, it’s useful if you want to show someone something on a laptop screen without having them over your shoulder. I’ve used this feature before to show picture slideshows and websites. It’s also good if you have a projector that isn’t or can’t be oriented correctly; it’s easier to flip the laptop screen than it is to flip the projector.
Likewise, the dashboard dimmer is helpful if you need to have the car on or at least run the battery, but you don’t want a lit dashboard distracting you. I do this at drive-in movie theaters when I want to watch the screen.
My contribution to the thread: 1st or 2nd gear on any automatic transmission vehicle. I guess there’s a theoretical purpose for those to be there, and I’m sure some people use them, but I’m not one of them.
The Scroll Lock key gets a lot of use in software that isn’t very esoteric. (Excel, for example.) The break key, too. I haven’t used SysReq for its original purpose with any regularity since about 1995, but I hit that bad boy several times a day to take screengrabs.
Now, my contribution for inexplicable/useless features:
In the closet of the master bedroom in my apartment, there is an electrical timer built into the wall, with a three-way switch for ON/OFF/TIMER and a timing dial. I only recently discovered that this controls the exhaust fan in the bathroom, just in case you want to override the switch that’s you know… in the bathroom, and instead have the fan turn on and off at pre-determined times and schedule your showering and pooping accordingly.
Re: the dashboard dimmer. My Saturn had a feature where you could brighten the dash lights over and above the high setting. I thought this was odd until I was in bright sunlight one day, which washed out the digital display; flick the switch and it was bright and clear again.
I use Pause/Break fairly often. It is useful for halting scrolling output in DOS windows. Yes, many people still need to use DOS screens even within Windows.
