Um? You’re grabbing the plates and bowls and glasses with those same fingers, and placing them on areas where the food will go…doing it with the silverware is not noticeably less unsanitary. If you’re that worried about it, wash your hands before you empty the dishwasher.
I grab my plates by the rim. And my cups by the outside.
Why does a TV need software updates?
Originally Posted by Der Trihs
How freaking bizarre is that! I was thinking of his Teapot for Masochists earlier this morning.
I’ve also got his Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions Of Automobiles around here somewhere. IIRC, there’s a description of badly thought out transit fare machines that sounds just like the BART ticket vendors here.
Microwave ovens are another thing that need some standardization of the “grammar” by which we use them. To cook something for two and a half minutes, do you press 2-3-0 Start or CookTime 2-3-0 Start?
You can get a device called a TV Powerdown - you train it to respond to your TV remote and when you turn off the TV, the device switches it off completely by cutting the power. They work pretty well.
Ooh, I’ve got another one.
One of the lifts at my workplace - the control buttons are placed in a single, evenly-spaced row at waist level along one of the sides.
The buttons consist of:
Door Open
LG
G
1
2
3
4
5
Alarm
They’re made of stainless steel, like the rest of the interior and their legends are in the form of embossed, lightly raised markings - almost unreadable without stooping and squinting.
Most people working on the 5th floor have at some point accidentally pressed the Alarm button (because it’s at the end of the row)
Many people wanting to go down from any floor to the lower ground will find themselves pressing the door open button and wondering why the lift won’t depart.
Actually, I have a liquid measuring cup like this too. It’s the smallest of a set of glass bowl-measuring cup hybrids (glass, bowl-shaped, but measuring lines, pour spouts, and half-assed handles/tabs) but the 1-cup measure is, yeah, right at the top. I pretty much just use it for less-than-a-cup measurements, because I’ve got a couple of standard measuring cups too.
Don’t be embarrassed–measuring cups are perfectly OK for measuring liquids. In fact, the advantage is you can tell you have an exact cup without setting it down and bending over. The disadvantage being what you mentioned.
Is the pot welded to the stove top or something?
Another DVD player bitch: my one is so… slow… to do anything, whether you press a button on the remote or the actual unit. Which wouldn’t be too disastrous, if it actually gave some indication that it was plotting something in the 6 or 7 seconds it takes to ponder its task.
Instead, it does absolutely nothing, so you suspect that it has frozen up (which does happen quite often) and start mashing the buttons repeatedly. At which point it will unfreeze itself and respond to every button press you made while it was frozen - all in quick succession! So after wondering if anything was going to happen at all, you go to cycling through every menu on the whole system for a microsecond at a time. 
Hmm. I hadn’t considered that, and it makes some sense. In my own, personal life I have two chief problems with this.
Firstly, there are so many devices with these, LEDs or not, that I (and others, though admittedly it’s entirely personal preference) find them distracting. I can perform this at-a-distance diagnostic, from my bed, of six different things, seven or eight if you include “my computer” and “my computer’s fans” as separate. For those of us who do not like this, as was pointed out up-thread, there is electrician’s tape.
Secondly, although I can see the nominal usefulness, many of these things are not really user-serviceable. Even if I can tell by the combination of “bright blue light on case, nothing on screen” that my LCD monitor is powered on but nonfunctional, I can’t really fix that. At least, not easily. So it’s mostly just lighting for the sake of lighting, for many people. This is different sometimes–for instance, that kind of diagnostic is nice for cable modems. For the signal amplifier? Not so much.
My frugal (read: cheap) boss bought me a Compaq laptop. The damn touchpad is off center on the keyboard so my text is constantly flipping all over the place because my palm keeps hitting the blasted touchpad. Grrrrrrrrrr.
Firefox 3.0’s “Awesome Bar” (:rolleyes:) has a history list as well, with a couple of strange design choices. (I’m certainly not qualified to call them ‘bad’ even if they do irritate the hell out of me.)
First, as soon as you type one character FF immediately goes off looking through your entire history (default is 90 days!) while it ignores any more characters you type. While it is possible to clean up the database, or reduce its size by shortening the length of your history, it seems much more reasonable to let you type until you pause for a moment before searching.
Second, the history is indexed on everything, not just on meaningful words. For example, when I want to go to xkcd, I type ‘x’ and FF shows me a list including URLs of pictures whose descriptions include the size (e.g. ‘640x480’). Now that’s useful!
Our last house had a dishwasher which would beep multiple times when it had finished. Now, when do people usually put dishwashers on? That’s right, just before going to bed.
Nothing like being woken up an hour after going to bed to be told by an appliance that my dishes were clean.
Speaking of appliances beeping in the night, I used to have a roommate who’s microwave would beep forever after the timer was done until the door was opened. And I do mean forever. Once every 30 seconds (maybe a minute) it would beep until it lost power, the door was opened, or you hit a button.
Useful in some instances I can see, but not when my roommate had a habit of getting drunk, heating up food, then passing out on the couch and forgetting about it, leading the constant beeping to wake me up in the middle of the night. :mad:
Not at the moment - I’m having trouble adjusting to the new stove, but I haven’t actually melted any pots yet. 
(I knew someone would go there - yes, I usually remember to move the pot or bowl to where I’m measuring. The operative word here is “usually.” Even when I’m measuring right at the pot or bowl, though, it’s still very sloppy.)
The handle on the microwave of our microwave/stove combo appliance breaks off when you boil things on the stove too often. When we called to complain they said we werent supposed to use it every day.
I actually had to go in and shut this feature off. (Look it up. It’s not that hard.) They claim it was fixed in 3.5, but it wasn’t. In 3.0, there was actually a built in waiting period! They “fixed” it by shutting it off!
There’s just no good reason for any part of the browser to be able to max out the CPU (which is why you can’t continue typing. Ever notice you can’t click on anything else, either?). I’d’ve changed browsers if I could find one that did Live Bookmarks and with 1/2 as good an adblocker.
BTW: I wish I’d found that cleanup command before I wiped out my history to fix it. This addon will at least make it automatic
I own a(n admittedly cheap) speaker set which is controlled by remote. And by that I mean that the only way to control it is by remote. There are no controls at all on the central unit. There is a power switch, but you still need to press power on the remote to turn the thing on.
The dinky little remote, of course, is slowly dying (i.e. despite battery replacement), which will render the entire unit useless.
I don’t really know – I assume it’s so that it can remain current with the exciting, dynamic world of digital broadcasting.
On Wednesday, every receiver of terrestrial broadcast digital TV (“Freeview”) in the UK had to be re-tuned, because the powers-that-be have reshuffled the frequencies (so more people can receive Channel 5, and to allow for future HD broadcasts). Some of the older Freeview set-top boxes can’t cope with the change, and no longer work.
I imagine the ability to update it’s software makes my TV somewhat future-proof.
No, but it can be pretty heavy. My mother used to have one where you could cook two whole turkeys, she gave it away to a friend who was opening a restaurant.