What are some minor things about technology that you wish someone would correct?
My nomination is: Why isn’t there a degree sign ( ° ) on the standard QWERTY keyboard? Probably not a big deal to most people, but to those of us who work in a technical field, it’s an annoying oversite. I have to type things like “80 °C” or “90° angle” on a regular basis, and I keep a Word document on my desktop that has only a ° in it, so I can copy & paste it as needed. Maybe they could replace the caret symbol ( ^ ). Who the heck ever uses that?
My chief complaint with modern technology is the tremendous time lag on digital controls. You push a button and you don’t even know if it registered for 4-5 seconds.
I have something like ten clocks in my house (counting phones, wall-mount clocks, and appliances) and two clocks in our vehicles… but none of them can agree what time it is, because they don’t talk to each other.
Tried that. It doesn’t work, because Alt just brings up the menu on whatever program I’m using.
This reminds me of something I’ve noticed. Modern digital TVs seem to take much longer to start up than older TVs used to. I know it’s because the electronics need time to boot up, but it’s a bit annoying to wait 5+ seconds, when you’re used to just hitting the button and having the TV flicker to life immediately.
Touchscreens are cool and infinitely versatile and all that, but there are certain times I miss actual buttons, like when skipping a song on the iPod while driving.
It’s the same with DVDs, DVD players, and video games. I hate that some DVDs force you to do so many things even after the tv and player have booted up. With my VCR all I did was put in the tape and it started playing. I might have to FF through the anti-piracy warning but after that it was all good. But now I have to wait through the warning because it won’t let you skip it. That’s just mean-spirited to me. “We’re going to make you sit through this every. single. time.” And once you’re through that, you have to wait for the menu to come up. This can be a pain for something like a Star Wars DVD which insists on having a whole little presentation before letting you choose. And on some DVDs, even after you’ve hit “Play Movie,” there’s an extra screen asking if you want it in wide-screen or pan and scan, or if you want the director commentary track on, or some other choice. And some DVDs are a real bitch with trailers, not letting you get past them in one choice (The Sixth Sense DVD really annoys me with this).
My Wii is annoying in the same way. If i want to play COD, it takes like 8 minutes and 10-12 screens to get to the game action.
None of these things are that big an issue. But hey, it’s a thread about minor stuff.
It’s the blue or green ones that bother me. Man, do they light up a room at night. I also cover them up. But I have to use a black cloth since I sometimes have to look to see which ones are on and tape is a bit of a pain to keep peeling and re-applying.
Which operating system? Are you holding down Alt and typing the numbers? And it has to be the numeric keypad numbers, not the top-of-keyboard ones.
Otherwise, on Ubuntu, it’s Ctrl+Shift+U, which gives a little underlined u as it waits for input, and then type the Unicode (00b0 gives you °, 2103 gives you ℃. Nobody should use ℉ ever)
I, too, find the red LEDs annoying, but their purpose is to let you know if you’ll get any joy out of pressing the power button. Green light means on, red light means off, but device is connected to power. No light means device has no power, so there’s no point in trying to turn it on until you plug it in.
Blue LEDs. They seem to be everywhere lately. I guess because they are cool and trendy and everyone got tired of red and green. But the blue ones are bright! Much more so then red or green. Sometimes it’s like sleeping with a night light on.
I don’t mind little dim red “standby” LEDs. The ones that bug me are the newer BRIGHT BLUE lights.
And it would be terrific if the manufacturers could arrive at a common “grammar” for commands. Walk up to a microwave oven, and do you press “potato” twice to cook two spuds, or do you press “potato” then the number 2 and Start?
it lets you distinguish between OFF and unplugged or broken.
if you expect the device to respond to a remote control or to a sensor or time value then you want to know it is ON and ready to function as expected when the event occurs.
Technical support. For most services, any tech support contacts are well hidden and take a diligent search to find. When you can find it, it seems to go through some sort of AI, which picks random phrases in your request (especially if you, as requested, are very detailed) and then pulls a canned response that is common but has no relevance to the issue at hand.
They also use discussion boards. In the past 15 years, I’ve only once found a useful answer from the discussion board for a company’s website. Usually the response is just a obvious solution that I’ve already tried – and often, I’ve even said I tried it. Or you never hear anything from anyone.
When I need help, I’ve already tried the obvious solution, but no one cares to give you help for anything other than obvious solutions.
A second peeve is software that doesn’t let you customize it, so it installs in a particular folder, even when you want it somewhere else.