This is actually not a bad thing - a toaster designed this way will have a longer life-span.
When you push down on the handle an insulated “pokey thing” (sorry to be so technical) pushes some foil springy things into place to close the circuit that provides power to the elements, timer, and an electromagnet that holds the rack down. Pushing up to break the contact is a crude way to pop it up, and can lead to faster corrosion of the contacts and an earlier death of the toaster.
A cancel switch costs little and prevents those contacts from arcing too much.
Litle, portable hand-held DVD player/monitors that have most of their controls on an even smaller wireless remote - which can’t be used from more than a foot or so away.
There’s a big spiffy new shopping center in town. A couple big stores, a big new movie theater, etc. There’s also a two-story parking structure, primarily for the movie theater.
There is not one single sign indicating where the ramp to the second level is. Literally: it’s entirely unmarked. In order to get to the ramp, you first need to realize there is a ramp and it’s not just a covered parking area (which I actually thought at first). Then you must drive into what’s essentially an alley behind the structure, past another alley full of dumpsters, and know that the next turn is in fact the entirely-unmarked ramp. On the upside, there’s always plenty of spots up there for those who know how to get there.
My digital camera, however, is even smaller than my phone and isn’t required to make a sound. Oh well.
This one I found before I made a purchase, luckily:
Sanyo makes a digital camera/video camera, the Xacti with an interesting design: it’s shaped like the hand-grip of a gun or power tool, with the lens on the front end, a flip-out LCD screen on the side, and the shutter button on the top where your thumb is. It’s very compact and comfortable to hold. The problem is that it’s built for people with significantly smaller hands than me. If my fingers are comfortably around the hand grip, the shutter button is below the knuckle of my thumb, so it’s almost impossible to shoot. If I position my thumb comfortably next to the shutter, I have to hold the grip by the ends of my fingers, so it’s impossible to hold steady.
Yeah, but the thing is, people would probably recognize it’s a camera, whereas having a phone in your hand doesn’t mean you are necessarily making a call.
I’m not saying I agree with the stupid laws, but just trying to shed some light on them.
My PC keyboard has buttons on it to turn the PC off. Despite their protestations of innocence, my cats have obviously figured out what the key does as nearly every time they step on the keyboard they hit the key on the first try. Thus, not only do I have the joy of trying to get a cat off the keyboard, but watchng my PC shut down as well. :rolleyes:
Open the Power Options in the Control Panel and go to the Advanced tab… at the bottom there will be dropdowns that say
When I press the power button on my computer:
and
When I press the sleep button on my computer:
Change them to do whatever you want – on mine, the power button will hibernate and the sleep button will stand by. You’ll probably want to change them to “Do nothing”.
My cellphone has both a still-picture and a video capture function. When taking a still picture, it makes a camera noice, as others have described upthread. This noise cannot be disabled. I thought this was silly, until one day I was in the changeroom at the gym and it occurred to me that with the noise one could not take pictures sneakily in such places.
However, the video-recording function has no such noise.
More bad design: the drains along the roads in Mississauga (and many other places).
Their grates stick out into the travelled portion of the road. This may be good for snow-clearing reasons, but it means that all the vehicles in the curb lane must drive over every grate. Not only does this resuilt in a bump every few hundred metres as the wheels of the bus hit them as it travels along the road to work, but the wheels’ pounding on the grates means the grates’ support breaks down quickly and they have to be fixed or replaced sooner than necessary. And I’m talking about hundreds of grates.
This reminds me of my oven. You have to set the temperature, then press start. If you don’t, it’ll screech at you, then the little computer will read “push start!” It should just start on it’s own after you stop pressing the increase button.
All this talk of remotes has reminded me of a couple of bad design flaws.
I own a VCR that has a feature I have seen on no other VCR. When you’re cueing up a tape you hit “Display” so you can see when you’ve arrived at its start. But on this particular VCR, the display disappears after about five minutes of tape has rolled. In order to see where the tape is at, you have to keep re-pushing the “display” button in five minutes increments until the tape gets where it needs to be, or guess. If you’re guessing, it’s very easy to forget you’re cueing the tape and go way past it. It’s annoying to keep re-pushing the display button. Whatever it is, it’s a pain in the ass compared with just keeping an eye on a tape cue display that doesn’t keep going away.
A truly stupid bit of design.
I’ve also got a TV with a singularly annoying mute feature. When you change the volume on the set, there’s a display of bars across the bottom inch or so of the set that changes color to indicate volume increases or decreases. A few seconds after you stop adjusting the volume, the display disappears. Very good. But when you hit mute, the bar display appears and does not go away, more or less obscuring what’s going on at the bottom inch or so of the screen. You can have mute with screen obscured, or sound on with screen visible, but not mute with screen visible. The only way to get the effect is to go through the tiresome process of lowering the sound volume to its lowest, which means you will have to go through the tiresome of raising it to normal levels later.
A really, really stupid design.
The thing is, these are not old sets, they were both bought in the last five years when most TV sets and VCRs already had these features properly designed.
Here’s a good one: The Cadillac CTS-V has a digital ‘g’ meter situated inside the speedometer. It’s just a small digital numeric value, about the size of the odometer. It measures the lateral ‘g’ forces you are pulling when you go around a curve fast.
The only time this thing has a reading other than ‘0.0’ on it is if you’re in the middle of a curve, going fast enough to be pulling outside G forces. Apparently, the engineers at GM think that this is a good time to take your eyes off the road and fixate on some tiny numbers. This is not just bad design, it’s deadly design. The mere act of trying to use this gauge dramatically increases the likelihood of crashing your car.
In contrast, the Z06 Corvette also has a lateral ‘g’ meter, but this one is projected into your line of sight on a head-up display, and it has a bar graph that you can track with your peripheral vision while staying focused on the road. It’s still a gimmick, but at least it’s designed right.
I can do better: I used to have a VCR that displayed the counter only when playing. Whenever you fast-forwarded or rewinded, it helpfully displayed “F FWD” or “RWND.”
You had to stop occassionally to gage how fast you’d gone. Utterly useless.
I quite like my condo, but the previous occupant made some very odd choices in fixtures and such. Like carpeting the bathroom. The place where you’d like to, you know, occasionally mop. After your little nephews visit, say.
Anyway, the shower/tubs she installed? Most annoying thing in the condo. The enclosure ends immediately above the shower nozzle, where is painted drywall. So, unless you’re 4-ft. tall, water spray bounces off your head and soaks the wall.
Furthermore, the thing has a molded-in shelf at waist-height. Which seems useful, but isn’t wide enough to hold shampoo bottles without them tumbling onto your feet as your eyes are full of suds. And it’s juuuust barely wide enough for a standard bar of soap to fit. Except that it is utterly flat, without ridges or a lip or anything. So, when you set your slippery bar of soap down on it, two seconds later it zings! off in a random direction. Just as your eyes are full of suds. Utterly useless.
Oh my GOD, yes! I loathe that we still use this unsupported piece of crap at work. Worse yet, every damn database in our system was set up differently.
True, but the problem here wasn’t that people were pretending to use their phones when they were actually filming, it was that during the famous Tokyo rush hours, the trains are too packed for anyone to see anything that’s going on below their shoulders, so the sound was to alert people that someone was taking a picture. The law just happened to be proposed at a time when phones with cameras were far more compact and widespread than regular digital cameras, otherwise it probably would have been applied to them as well.
Ohhhh yes. Just to spell it out, I tried these, and let’s say that nobody seemed to notice that in the natural course of things, these flimsy plastic tissues will develop kitty-induced perforations, reducing their structural integrity and preventing them from successfully containing several pounds of urine-soaked clay.
