A polite sounding car horn which you would use to say “thank you”, “hello”, etc.
mmm
It would be nice if I could ask my fridge while I’m at the grocery store: “How much milk do I have left?”
A phone with a “don’t let the recipient know I called” option. If you called someone and got their voicemail, you’d have the option of just hanging up without a “missed call” alert appearing on their phone.
My first visit to St Martin I freaked out driving because everyone was honking at me. My gf explained and I gradually came to understand they were all friendly beeps.
Traffic generally runs smoothly in no small part due to the total cooperation of drivers on the island. For example; someone wants to back out of their parking spot after picking up lunch, traffic stops and “beeps”. That car backs into traffic and beeps a thanks.
Many years ago, back in the late 50s or early 60s, my folks were considering the purchase of a Renault Dauphine. I remember that the horn button stuck out the side of the steering column and rotated about 30 degrees to select city horn or country horn sounds.
City horn was a pleasant “beep beep” and the country horn was much louder a harsh in tone. I’m not aware of any cars with that ability today.
A bleep buster.
Code would be embedded in programs and your TV would decipher them like it does for closed captioning. You would be able to disable the bleeps shows use to cover up offensive language.
Nothing anyone says on TV is more offensive to me than those irritating bleeps.
A button on your TV (or other appliance) which activates a homing beep in the remote. Certain members of my household wander away distracted while holding the remote, then drop it in random locations. I literally found it in the freezer once. I would like to press a button on the relevant appliance, then follow the sound to wherever its remote was dropped.
A service that watches all television channels simultaneously and sends out digital signals to mark the beginning and end of commercials, to link to mute buttons and recorder pause buttons. Maybe you’d need a separate person to watch each channel, but the way we do it currently requires millions of people to watch the channel.
I’ve seen commercials for fridges that have (what I assume is) a webcam inside specifically for that reason. Pull up the camera from your phone while you’re at the store and see what’s in there.
My 2010 Chevy Volt had a softer pedestrian warning beep, designed because the car ran silently. I’m not sure I used it to warn pedestrians, but I did employ it now and then for a friendly hello.
A television where “Channel 1.1” is the connection to the USB input, “Channel 1.2” is the connection to the HMDL input, and so forth.
New York city used to have a law that required cars to have a softer “city beep”. I remember the owner’s manual for my parents’ 1969 sedan that included a picture of a special soft-loud switch on the instrument panel. I don’t know how that was handled though - as special option for people who expected to drive in New York City - like taxicabs?
I’m officially old because every answer I can think of to this question is to go back to something that we’ve done better in the past. Such as…
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Cars that have electro-mechanical controls, no touch screens, and are not designed around the entertainment system. I realize we’ve had computer components in cars for decades now, but I’m getting fed up with how they run the whole show. More bells and whistles = more stuff to break. Let’s get back to simpler cars, or go fully automated and take humans completely out of the loop. One or the other.
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Web sites that are not overwhelmed with ad space. I understand they are largely funded by ads, but there has to be a better way. Especially now, when it seems every site has some sort of pop-out that covers the whole screen until I find the little x. Nobody reads or responds to those. Just stop it.
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Devices that don’t break or stop running perfectly functional software when they are updated. I am fed up with “improvements” screwing up my devices (first thing I do with any new device is forbid auto updates).
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Build products that can be fixed, and don’t require proprietary tools or software to do it. There has been some positive movement on this lately. I’m hoping it gains momentum.
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Not really an invention, I guess… But I want to redesign how we do air travel. The way it is now is almost perfectly designed to be miserable. I fly often, and am just amazed at how awful an experience it is. Twenty years after 9/11 and we’re still taking off shoes. But we can’t even really discuss it, because to do so publicly would be a security risk. It’s insane. As with other things, the pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses. It’s no wonder people are behaving so badly on planes. Not to excuse them, of course, but we have done just about everything we can do to piss people off when they fly.
Some of the Roku streaming devices can do this. There’s a button on the base unit that will beep the remote. One reason most remotes don’t have this feature is that it requires radio communication between the remote and base units. And another is that most remotes don’t have any chips to receive signals anyway. Most remotes just use IR signals and are essentially like dumb flashlights. But I’m sure the biggest reason is that it would add a few cents to the price of the remote.
Newer Tivo’s do it as well.
[quote=“Joey_P, post:34, topic:958689, full:true”]
Dang. I just need better equipment. In my original (not yet posted) reply box, I had also included that I want a device for my water line/meter that monitors the flow and decides its been running for too long – and automatically shuts the water off. This seems like a godsend for those on vacation or if a freeze somehow splits a pipe in the winter. A bit of googling showed me the device already exists, so I deleted that paragraph.
Can it be separate from the cover? Because my granny had a solution to this, way back in the 50-60s. She had a slew of little gidgets that were basically little plastic disks, about the size of a man’s dress shirt button, molded atop a wire that was twisted into four or five loops of a helical spiral. Plus one or more lengths of dowels.
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Spread your cover over the couch, say. Could be a sheet or blanket or a length of appropriate cloth, whatever.
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Tuck some of the fabric down into the ‘seam’ where cushions butt up against the back, and slip the lengths of dowels down into the ‘pocket’ of fabric you just formed.
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Then go to town with the little gidgets, basically using them to ‘screw’ your fabric down to the couch. Grandma used a row of them along the top of edge of the back of the couch, plus lines on the outer underside of the rolled arms, and along front of the couch where the skirts joined the rest of the upholstery. Plus a random few to fix the folds around the ends of the arms into place.
It took maybe a half hour to get all the gidgets back into place, but you only had to redo it when you changed/washed the covering. The little ‘button’ part was molded of clear plastic, roughly looked like a little flat flower, and weren’t very noticeable at all AND they did a splendid job of keeping the cover solidly in place.
I wonder what happened to them? My mother didn’t inherit them, dammit.
A compressor/limiter (audio effect) built into a TV set. You set the threshold, and nothing can go above it, volume-wise. No more bursts of loud commercial breaks.
A house with a central core for utilities (mainly water). I’m sick of waiting three or four minutes for the water to heat up in the bathroom at the opposite end of the house from the water heater, not to mention the waste of water.
I cannot agree more heartily.
They’re installing a recirculating system in our house right now. I can let you know how it works
A recirculation system connects the farthest point of a plumbing system back to a water heater with a plumbing line that becomes a dedicated loop of hot water. Hot water is always circulating through the system, so it is available at every faucet immediately,