Our dog, who is generally very mellow, did not like the high pitched beeping.
The rest of the story is that I dropped the damn thing from 20 feet up and it broke upon impact. Now I have to find a replacement. Just went to Lowes, they don’t carry this brand.
After burning myself one to many times, I started keeping one of these on the handle of my cast iron skillet: hot handle covers
I keep it on there unless the pan is going into a hot oven, since I’m pretty good about using potholders there.
I didn’t know about those. Looks like it would have been a workaround for the grill I tossed. I actually threw it away because it had rusted—I’d oiled it, but it was some kind of crappy alloy—and I wasn’t going to even try cleaning it because of the ridged bottom. Good to know, though, so thanks for posting that!
The posh shopping centre near where I live has always had those high-power Dyson hand dryers mounted on the wall.
A while ago, they switched to all-in-one combination tap&dryers with automatic sensors to turn the water on if your hands were under the central pillar, and the air dryer when your hands were under the “wings”. Only of course the chances were that you’d get your hands nearly dry and then accidentally set off the water again.
This last week, they’ve gone back to separate taps over the basin and dryers on the wall
A few years ago I got a new garage door and opener. It was a fancy high-end opener which has a built-in battery so it can operate during a power failure. A few months later my house had a power failure. I was sitting in my living room and noticed a beeping sound. Finally tracked it down to the opener. The opener beeps EVERY 10 SECONDS while it’s not receiving power. What the everloving fuck is the point of that? Yes, I know my power is out. There’s nothing I can do about it, so shut the hell up. There is, as far as I could tell, no way to shut off the beeping from the control panel. I had to get up on a ladder and manually pull out the battery connectors to shut it up.
Now, that’s funny!
This is when I would apply the Tonka Truck Method. See, I bought this set of Tonka Trucks from Costco. The trucks make truck noises when played with, some of them with a button, some by rolling the truck. Note that rolling the truck means rotating the tires past a certain point, which could happen while the truck is in it’s box and you gently nudge it, like when you’re hiding it for Xmas, or trying to wrap it or walking past it on the floor. Said truck noises which seemed modest in the cavernous space of a busy Costco are really loud in an enclosed home.
The Tonka Truck Method is to disassemble the item (making your own custom screwdriver if needed to get past Tonka’s vigorous security protocols) and destroying the offensive speaker before putting it back together for an unsuspecting toddler.
We have Windows 11 Professional on all of our computers. The pro OS is designed for enterprise environments, which means a network, which means devices communicating with and depending on one another. So, what is the Windows default setting?
“Turn Off Network Discovery”
Duh, of course, networked devices would never want to communicate with one another, right? 
And in the better design category, some toys actually have a switch for sound: Off, Medium, Loud. It’s set to Loud, of course, by default so that it projects in the store. But you get it home and can set it to be reasonable. (Sometimes the switch is internal, near the batteries.)
I also would open up toys and but tape over the speakers. Greatly muffled sounds, but still hearable.
At work, we have a multi-national corporate vendor that has an on-line store for pricing, availability, placing orders and order status. They have a search bar for orders. They also have an open orders link. These work fine except if that order is over 6 months old, the search bar can’t find it and it does not show up in open orders. You have to click advanced search and then enter a beginning and ending date range to find the old open order. You can only search one old open order at a time. This corporation is still experiencing major supply chain problems and the extra work needed to search for old open order greatly adds to the frustration with this vendor. Year plus lead times and having to jump through extra hoops to check on their constantly changing ship dates is getting really old.
We had GPS try to send us across a runway at Sky Harbor Airport
I recently replaced a battery in my truck. It was designed so that removing it requires removal of another part. In addition, only the positive terminal is visible since half the battery is hidden under that part, so you can’t see if the cable is properly connected. It is not a very good design.
When Apple Maps first came out apparently that was a problem when people tried to use it to navigate to the airport in Fairbanks, I think it was. I don’t think it was explicitly directing people to cross the runway, but it was directing everyone to the general aviation side of the airport rather than the passenger terminal. And then some people would see the terminal on the other side of the runway, and attempt to cross the runway to get there.
This most recent Christmas I was placed in charge of surreptitiously unboxing several noisy presents, disabling their noises, and reassembling the packages before wrapping. Some temporarily, and some permanently.
I learned that the only thing worse than a 21st Century brightly colored blinking noisemaking “music”-playing semi-smart toy for a toddler is a half dozen toddlers with several such toys. Each. All at once. It was quite the gay cheerful cacophony and that was after I’d sabotaged half of it.
That’s not for the house-wide power failure scenario.
It’s for the “circuit breaker in the garage has tripped and the homeowner has no idea their garage door will be disabled soon when the battery runs out. Better alert them while we still can.” scenario.
Of course what any beeping alarm needs is an 'I heard you, now shut up until [whatever] happens again!" button. But that would increase costs by a penny or two per unit. Can’t have that.
Wow. I’m sure that someone thought that there was some problem that that design solved. I just can’t imagine who, or what the supposed problem was. Or that it actually solved it.
The “problem” it solves is things like airport bathrooms with 12 sinks and room for 2 air dryers on the wall near the door where there’s already the natural chokepoint of people entering and leaving dragging luggage.
By putting a complete handwashing and drying station at each sink they avoid backlogs at the dryers, avoid people going out into the building with dripping hands that create a tripping hazard, and avoid people using expensive TP as substitute paper towels. At least that’s the hope.
The reality I’ve seen is rather more mundane. The darn things are stupid expensive, most people can’t figure out how to use them because the dryer being there at the sink is just too unexpected and their little minds go “TILT!”, and the sensors are to non-discriminating, giving you the wash and dry at the same time effect.
I do not think these things will take over the world.
Oh, speaking of hand washing, one thing I hate about those motion activate soap dispensers is that they always seem to put them too close to the tap. So while I’m rinsing my hands I’ll keep accidentally waving them in front of the soap dispenser, and it’ll keep squirting blobs of soap into the sink.
The other thing you may want to do with new toys for a small child is to remove all of the cable ties and twist ties securing the toy to the package. Lots of fun when the kid is jumping up and down with excitement over the new toy but can’t play with it until a grown-up frees it from the packaging.
Rest areas on I-70 in Missouri a few years back had these all-in-one sinks installed a few years back, and they were a disaster. I think you started by putting your hands all the way to the back, which dispensed the soap, then you moved your hands to the middle to rinse, then all the way forward to trigger the dryer. IIRC neither the water nor the dryer ran long enough, and you couldn’t trigger anything individually, you basically had to start the whole cycle over again. It was like whoever designed these things didn’t bother to do any actual user testing.
A couple of weeks ago I took the train out of Kansas City, and they had the combo fixtures in the restrooms in Union Station, but a much better design. Faucet prominently front and center, soap on the left and dryer on the right, slightly further back and everything was far enough apart that you didn’t inadvertently trigger something.