I used to have a Sony cordless phone/answering machine. The base had a handy compartment which held a spare battery for the cordless handset and kept it charged. The base set, like all of the answering machines I have ever owned, had a rather onerous procedure for setting the time and date. You would have thought that since the base set had this nifty spare battery sitting inside it doing nothing but being charged, it could have done double-duty as backup power of the time/date programming as well. Alas, no.
When are stoves going to come with appropriate sensors, and a loud voice that says “Hey! I know you’re very busy but your food is about to burn!”
I’d say a buzzer that lets you know this, but I already despise all the dingy, buzzy, annoying sounds of the current appliances.
I had never even thought of the possibility of a mute button for the microwave before, but now that I have, I want one desperately. Why is this not a feature?!
I want a car sun visor that is mounted on a moveable, flexible arm. They all seem to have only two positions (front and side). The sun however, is much more clever and manages to spend a lot of time in positions I cannot easily block with the visor (especially in the winter).
I just sent a nasty-gram to Toyota over this. As clever as they are, this shouldn’t be hard to implement.
How do they do it for cordless phones?
Cordless Phones are already RF receivers, and the shortened battery life isn’t as much of an issue because you usually leave them in a charger/they are rechargeable. So I would think that if anyone would ever do something like this for a remote it would be the expensive logitech harmonies - rechargeable + a charging base gives you a place to put the page button and the ability to look for RF signals without killing non-rechargeable batteries
Various devices: I dream for battery compartment doors that don’t fall off. Surely we can have better battery compartment doors that stay closed or retain the darn door if it’s popped open.
I imagine this will be a standard appliance in kitchens once the technology becomes affordable.
I bought a Roku a few months ago. Mostly, I love it, but it has no off switch. Nope, none. No physical button and no on-screen clicky button. All you can do is let it sit long enough to go to sleep on it’s own.
Wireless Routers - Give me a physical switch on the back that will turn off the wireless capability. I have one that usually is used as a wired router, but occasionally we use the wireless capability. But for the 90% of the time when I’m not using wireless, I’m still blasting a signal through the ether. Just give me the darn switch already.
I wonder if this will work on our microwaves…
-D/a
Personally, I can’t see the point. The fan that runs while the microwave is on is louder than the control pad beeper.
Not sure if it’s feasible to deepsix that fan…
I bought myself a Tom Tom GPS device for Christmas and it’s saved me a few times. But I noticed that I don’t really pay enough attention to driving when I’m looking at the viewscreen. What I’d really like is to have the entire windshield be the GPS device, with the viewscreen being sheer enough to see out of with no obstructions. Is something like that feasible?
My sister has it turned off on hers. No idea how she did it, but it can be done.
The dome light in my Corolla is far more complicated than it needs to be - I need on, off, and dimmer (dimmer is optional) - I never know exactly what setting I have my dome light on in this car. Sometimes it is off when the doors are open, sometimes it’s on - it’s just too complicated.
A very few microwave ovens have that capability. Most don’t.
Beeping is more annoying when you’re trying to sleep than the steady white noise of a fan.
This is interesting. My dryer, as do most dryers produced in the 2000s, has a feature that allows it to determine when the clothes are dry and then shut itself off. You can turn it back on after that, but the default is to simply turn itself off. It’d be nice if you could set how “done” you’d like something cooked to be, and have the stove shut itself off too. Even if it was really simplistic, and only turned itself off after an unreasonable amount of time was likely to ensure you were about to burn the shit out of something, that’d be useful.
Speaking of dryers, my (old) dryer has an buzzer that goes off when the cycle is complete that CANNOT be made not to sound without taking the dryer apart. Consequently, we can’t run it past bedtime because it wakes up the occupants of the bedroom just over the laundry room.
I bought a dryer a few years ago like that and HATE it!
My new place came with an old dryer (1980s?) that has simple controls, makes no damn buzzes or beeps when done, and best of all, it does a great job drying!
Well, my current oven and my previous oven do this, as long as you’re cooking something you don’t mind sticking a temperature probe into.