As far as I’m concerned, that’s like adding hair to a wart. Now there are three ways to set the cooking time. Will that “Add :30” button work if there’s no time on the clock? What if I cook something and then taste it and decide it’s not hot enough and needs another 30 seconds; can I just shut the door and press “Add: 30”? And that still doesn’t help with anything that doesn’t end in :00 or :30.
Here’s what I want: put food in, close the door, press ‘2’, ‘4’, ‘5’, ‘Start’ and it cooks for 2:45. If that’s not enough, then the next time I cook that thing I’ll press ‘2’, ‘5’, ‘0’. I don’t want the machine trying to be helpful and guessing what I want. Just keep it simple.
My dream for a microwave is that it would have only two buttons on it. There would be the “Cook +1 minute” button, which when you press it, adds one minute to the timer and starts the microwave running (if it isn’t already running). Holding down this button would eventually make the time scale up exponentially (in case for some reason you need to cook something in the microwave that takes longer than 10 minutes or so and don’t want to press the button a lot).
The other button would be a -1 minute button. When you press that button, the timer would decrement by one minute (to a minimum of 0) and would stop the microwave if the timer was now at 0. This would also scale exponentially so that holding the button down for a bit would just 0 the timer.
Opening the door (to stop the microwave) and failing to start the microwave running again for 10 minutes would also zero the timer.
There is nothing I cook in a microwave where both
(a) cooking it a round number of minutes isn’t close enough and
(b) I can’t afford to just cook it for n-1 minutes, then babysit it for the last part of a minute.
are true.
If you wanted a really fancy version, there would be a dial for the power setting.
That’s no good. If it needs a half-minute, I don’t want to have to stand there on alert to turn it off at the right time. I’ll put something in, tell the oven how long to cook it, and it stops when it’s done. I might be tending something else on the stove, pouring myself a drink, whatever. It might take me thirty seconds or a minute to get to the microwave after it beeps.
I always like to ask people (especially if it’s an unfamiliar microwave): “What’s faster? Cooking for 3:30 seconds, or cooking for 3:33 seconds?” Now I’m sure that if you get an industrial engineer and a stopwatch, 3:30 is indeed slightly faster, but the point is, why bother hunting and pecking?
My Panasonic DVR has three recording/playback options - HDD, DVD, or SD card. I’ve never used the SD card, and I mostly use it for DVD watching. But because my TV is relatively old, it doesn’t have its own tuner, so I use the DVR’s tuner instead.
The DVR’s LED display only tells me what channel it’s set on in two situations: When I have a DVD in the player, and I’m on the HDD setting; or I am on the DVD setting with no disc in the drive. In all other cases it says “HDD Sleep”, the timecode of the DVD, or “SD”. All information I do not need when I am trying to watch TV. Also, no matter what setting it’s on, it will flash up a big blue box in the centre of the screen to tell me the HDD is asleep, which is 30 minutes after switching it on.
I can see how this information may be handy for some people in some situations, but I would like to switch it off and adjust these fixed options to suit my usage.
Many devices I have show the time as default. I don’t need to know the time on my cable box or DVD player since I have a perfectly good clock in the room. What I do need to know is what channel the cable box is set to, or the number of minutes into a DVD playback, both of which are covered up with the useless time display. The clock display should only be an option, not an unconfigurable default.
My guess would be that your car came from a company that doesn’t really care about the user enough to test it. This is one of the reasons Toyota (and, so I hear, Honda) are best sellers year after year.
Well, the OP says, “I just got a new car stereo. It has the capability to be used as a hands-free phone, by communicating via bluetooth to my cell phone.”
That implies aftermarket, not OEM.
So, let me applaud the Ford Sync system. Now that I don’t have it, boy, do I really miss it. On the other hand (and I’m not quite sure if it’s entirely related), I’ve heard that the FordMyTouch system isn’t as good as plain old Sync.
Oft times a problem with a bluetooth in a car is a problem with the car, but a problem with the phone.
New phones, with new untested software and upgrades to old phone’s software.
It was not uncommon to have a customer either buy a new phone or sometimes their old phone would just stop working with the in car Bluetooth.
Guess what? It wasn’t the car that changed, it was the phone.
While it is great that your phone works with your car, trust me Somewhere Toyota has a list of what features work with which phones, and there are probably a few phones out there that you car will hate with a passion.
