Asklemmy

Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

As for me, I'm just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don't enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:

• An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I'd go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I'm a renter for now). It's also a poor design because it's going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
• Packaging on almost all processed food. I don't need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It's an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it's a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
• Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.

I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:

• Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
• Generally everything that has a battery which I can't replace
• Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don't
• Fuck clothes without pockets!
• Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that's designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn't exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year's)
• "Teflon" or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn't poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron

I have a truck where the oil drain plug is directly over the axle. I have to strap an offset funnel under the drain to get it to not splash all over the fuck, and of course, it's not easy to get that stay put so inevitably I have oil everywhere. Same truck has the oil filter tucked up where I need a special oil filter wrench with a ratchet and extensions to remove it, and when you pull the filter out, you have to tip it so it spills the oil inside everywhere.

I had an idea a long time ago of a website where you can crowdfund a private investigator to find engineers that do shit like this, and a crew to go over to their house and beat them halfway to death.

I have this drive if you look at the image you can see that the rear panel has a little semi circular nib of plastic at the bottom. It serves no purpose, but what it does do is make it nearly impossible to plug the DC connector in. You can't quite tell from the image but it's perfectly placed so that you can't fit the requisite number of fingers needed to securely hold the plug and push it in to the cavity where the inputs of the panel are located. It actively encourages the otherwise pretty unlikely scenario of making only partial or near contact with the connector and not quite properly plugging it in. A dangerous possibility from a safety perspective but also a great way to lose a bunch of data by having it lose power or short out during operation. It's one of the most exquisitely designed inconveniences hell's engineering department could have possibly developed.

Laptops with no intake dust filters.

Actually, no, any computer with fans that doesn't have a dust filter is a terrible design.

There are many, but my current bugbear is the wireless Apple mouse. It has a built in rechargeable battery and and a tiny little port for you to plug the recharging cable in. The port is mounted on the bottom of the mouse rendering it useless while it's being charged. I guess it's to make it look nicer but it's so stupid.

Any time there's a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

Any mug that has a really hemispherical, smooth handle. You put a hot beverage in there, and the weight is enough to make your fingers slide down the handle, and then you burn yourself on the main body of the mug unless you really squeeze.

Any faucet that just barely sticks out over the sink, so you have to touch the back of the sink to wash your hands (british sinks are even worse, though).

I'm going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.

I'm on Team Bidet now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did... but the stuff should not exist.

I'm guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they're not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn't happened yet.

Garlic crushers. All of them suck.

When I was a kid cereal didn't have no zippas! We rolled up the one end of the bag and watched it partially unfurl when we let go, and we were satisfied with that.

cups, glasses, bowls, anything that doesn't have a spout and makes a mess every time you transfer liquids

Every time I spill something I'm reminded how much better lab glassware is (beakers etc)

Some toilets have a perfectly round bowl so they don't stick out as far and take up less bathroom floor space - and they work fine, but only in bathrooms that anticipate the vast majority of its occupants to be equipped with a vagina. For those of us rocking a penis, those fucking toilets are horrible - sitting on that damn thing requires you to contort your junk around like some sausage-Houdini as you're sitting, so that you can guide it through the remaining 2 square inches of open space not occupied by your legs or ass. Then when you're actually seated, you still have to sit there and awkwardly hold the thing so it stays pointed straight down.

Fuck up any part of that, and the tip of your dick hits the seat or the inside of the bowl.

...and they must be like $3 cheaper than an oval toilet or something, cuz 99% of US apartments seem to be equipped with the round, vagina-only toilets.

Oval bowls are the way. No matter what's in your pants, it gets the job done without the significantly increased biohazard risk.

I guess in fairness, the problem isn't with their design, it's with the people who purchase the toilets treating them as sex-neutral when no the fuck they aren't!

Humidifiers.

It's just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.

Trouble is, they're all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.

And before I get the "you gotta clean it with vinegar every week" comment, two points:

1. You don't soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
2. Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.

US can openers. In other countries, they cut the sides of the can not the top, so the lid has no chance of falling in while dulling the edges. It also allows them to be much smaller and easier to use.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/videos/how-to-use-a-can-opener

Toilets seem to be getting smaller and I’m having trouble sitting on it without my penis touching the front.

Wine bottles. After thousands of years of drinking you would think humans would develop a bottle design that doesn't dribble down the side after pouring.

Yeah, why do people blow their noses into PAPER when you can just go to the bathroom sink and hork in your hands, and then wash up afterwards??? Why would people walk around with dried boogies on they face when they can wash?? Why? Why, Mister Anderson, why, why?

I can't seem to pour out of my pyrex measuring glass without the water dribbling all down the front of the spout making a mess. You think they could have shaped the spout to prevent that better and it infuriates me every time.

For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.

After pouring the detergent into the appropriate receptacle, toss the cap in with your laundry to be washed like everything else. No mess.