Oh man, absolutely! I hate those.
FYI they can often (not always) be disabled. Sometimes they have an “OPTIONS” button. Sometimes you hold down the 0 button or the 1 button for 30 seconds. It’s worth searching for instructions to mute your particular model — about 70% of the microwaves I’ve used have had a secret way to disable them.
I suppose worse would be coming back a week later and finding that the last thing you heated in the microwave and forgot about had started to grow tentacles.
That wouldn’t be “worse”, it’d be “magical”! Where can I get me some of these microwaves? Can I change the kinds and colors of the resulting tentacles based on the kind of food I leave in?
Can’t you skip making the actual effort to log out and just close the app as soon as you’re done with it? Closing the app probably logs you out automatically since you just have to use Face ID to open the app again.
Probably. At the very least it should log me out after a period of inactivity. But the app still shouldn’t do that when you explicitly log out.
You bet it does-- my house has a stove that has a timer that I use for measuring the steeping time for my tea, for one thing, and when it times out, it gives a loud “beeeeeeeep!” for about 2 or 3 seconds; the problem is, if you don’t turn it off by pressing the “timer on/off” button, it will continue to do that, as if you didn’t know or didn’t care the time had expired.
I bought a new microwave recently and would have chosen a different model if I’d had access to the user’s manual beforehand. There are two ways to set the cooking time. With “express” you just press start and it will add 30 seconds to the timer. A few seconds after you stop pressing it will start automatically. So for 90 seconds at full power that is 3 presses.
But say I wanted 80 seconds instead of 90. Press one button once to set the power, then a different button 8 times to set 80 seconds, then start to get it going. To do 5 minutes at 80% power would require 33 button presses.
Does it not have a numeric keypad?
A mild one: The minimalist colorless design so in vogue with streaming providers now.
On my Apple TV, inside many apps, the buttons and cards and other interface elements are all barely-highlighted black and white and shades of gray now and I can never tell which button is currently focused. I end up accidentally clicking on the wrong button or recommendation (which is probably the point) all the time.
I never thought “dark patterns” would be taken so literally, replacing useful highlights with enshittified and and undifferentiated greyscale everywhere…
shakes fist at cloud
My work has a commercial microwave in its lunchroom for employee use (bigger and all metal) and it also has one of those simplified keypads intended for commercial not residential use (it’s got numbers 1-6, 1 is 30 seconds, 2 is 1 minute and so-on).
Despite all this for some reason it still has a “child-safe mode” that immediately locks all the buttons so it doesn’t turn on unless you know the reset method. I only know this because some joker at work will occasionally turn the child-safe mode on randomly which means now I gotta Google how to do the reset code every single time.
What commercial piece of equipment has a child-safe mode?!
That’s even worse than the microwave. The microwave, at least, knows that you haven’t tended to the thing that the beeping was for until you opened the door. But a timer could mean anything, and for all the stove knows, you have done the thing you set the timer for.
My microwave also has a child-safe mode. It’s called “it’s a microwave, not a stove”.
Don’t you mean “… at The Cloud?”
My microwave has no number buttons, and instead uses a rotating knob to select the cook time. I quite like it. You just keep turning the knob until you reach a number you like. To me it’s easier than punching number buttons.
It has a very non-intuitive sequence of button presses to turn off beeps. Beeps are re-enabled when it loses power, so every time there’s a power failure or the unit gets unplugged, I have to look up in the manual how to disable beeps. I wish it remembered the setting across a power cycle, but I guess there are pros and cons to doing that.
For those kind of things I use my label maker to make a reminder and stick it somewhere unobtrusive yet accessible.
Alternatively, for things that won’t work for (like “what is the master reset code on the car radio?”), I just create a Google Keep note. Then it’s as near as my phone.
My years old, €50 microwave has two dials, one for the minutes going from one to 60, one for the wattage. After you set them, you close the door and it runs, and there’s one more button to open the door (mechanically). After the timer dial runs up, it makes a ping sound (also mechanical), the microwave stops and my meal is done. One push to the button to open the door. That’s all there is to it.
I’ve been lucky to work with a colour-blind guy (red/green) and a fully blind guy (lovely dog) so I am acutely aware of colour and useability in general… and I am a web software developer.
I share your fist shake.
Nope. You can see an image here.
Here is one that is really frustrating me. Later versions of Android 15, and Android 16 have an app called “terminal” which is really a virtual machine that runs Linux. It has a full version of Debian for ARM in it, and it can be modified and used to do anything you’d do on a Linux system.
As the name “terminal” suggests, it is just a command line interface, so it is convenient to attach a keyboard to the phone when interacting with it.
An extremely common thing to do on command lines is to press the up arrow key, to bring back previously run commands. This is broken in a most frustrating way on Android 16.
Pressing the up arrow on a physical keyboard not only brings back the previous command, but also moves the focus from the command line to the “X” that is used to close the whole terminal.
So if you want to run a command, then run it again the normal thing to do is press “Up” then “Enter”. On Android 16 this insta-kills the whole virtual machine.
Good god, this would drive me mad. Like angry enough to restart learning XCode.
Does it run a standard bash shell? I always do set -o vi so I can use ESC-k-k-k… to scroll through previous commands. It’s quicker for me since I always need to look at the keyboard to find the arrow keys.