I just replaced my windshield wipers last night and it was a nightmare. The wipers I got are supposed to be universal, which means the little plastic bit that connects to the wiper arms has a bunch of little sub parts that you're supposed to remove based on what wiper arm connection your car uses. Well, considering I'm not well versed in modern wiper arm connection standards, and I'm also stubborn and don't think you should need to dig out your car manual just to change your fucking wipers, coupled with the fact that the instructions that came with the wipers are just 6 wordless diagrams vaguely showing you what bits to remove based on which esoteric wiper style your car uses, I struggled with those sons of bitches for like 20 minutes in below freezing weather.
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Wordless instructions make the world a more equitable place by making everyone equally frustrated
Countertops should be just a couple of inches higher, they are calibrated for a 1930s housewife but most of us aren't 5'2" and it's easier to stand on a stool if it's too high than to stoop because it's too low.
OP I hate those low ziploc bag openings too, they are so stupid.
Reusable water bottles, especially their lids. They build up microorganisms faster than a petri dish and the more complex the bottles are, the worse it is.
Worst offender are the ones with integrated straws. Sure, they look nice and are a good idea, but cleaning them thoroughly is a nightmare. Also, I don't know how people tolerate the ones with exposed straws or mouthpieces. Isn't that incredibly unsanitary?
More generally, why doesn't anyone except for Nalgene make reusable bottles without rubber gaskets? Gaskets get stinky, then you have to peel them out, scrub like mad, and then awkwardly stretch them back in. I've been looking for a metal water bottle without a gasket for ages. They literally just need to shove the Nalgene-type screw-on top into a metal body.
Bonus points if someone designs a gasket-less bottle that opens in the middle so I don't have to fiddle with a bottle brush every time I wash it.
A lot of OTC meds that are in boxes have annoying packaging where you have to peel off the little paper before you can push the pill through the wrapping. The paper doesn't always like to peel off properly and it makes it harder to get the pill out of the packaging.
I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
Everyone seems to have a cup plunger made for sinks next to their toilet instead of a toilet plunger near their toilet.
A toilet plunger has flanges:
I have seen this plunger close to zero times when visiting people and using their bathroom.
For the topic of the thread I'll throw in "toilets that are so bad at flushing that you need to keep a plunger next to them"
The only time I've owned a plunger was in a house with a broken clay sewer pipe that was about to kick the bucket.
Overtime, our kitchen knives. Knives need to be thin, as thinner knives cut through ingredients more easily. Today's knives are designed instead to be marketed. Something incredibly thick, and sturdy, to make it feel "premium", when all its doing is tiring you out, since using a heavy knife gets exhausting, especially when its so thick it wedges in ingredients.
Vintage European knives are slim, and almost petite, because they knew how to make a good knife, in the same manner japanese knives are ground extremely thin, sometimes thinner than a postcard.
I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.
NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
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Thankfully, there are some designs that improve on this! Hereβs whatβs in my kitchen:
The brand is OXO, for anyone curious.
Keyboards are the obvious one.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast lead to the arms of a typewriter hitting each other.
And why is one of the most accessible large keys fucking Capslock?
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
I'm not even talking about the menu key, Windows key and Copilot key.
The other one are bicycles. An aerodynamic riding position is uncomfortable for most people, so is the saddle, and when you break too hard, you fly head-first into whatever you were trying to avoid. Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing
No it's not. It's designed to put commonly-used letters in between rarely-used letters. You are correct that this is because of typewriters getting mangled, but a typist can type just as fast on a QWERTY or AZERTY keyboard as on an alphabetical keyboard. It stops typewriters from getting mangled by making it less likely that any given pair of adjacent keys will be pressed in succession.
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
To facilitate touch typing. Since the cursor keys are physically separated from the typing keys, you are very unlikely to press a cursor key when you meant to press a letter, or vice versa. In the 1970s, keyboards used to have the cursor keys on the H, J, K, and L keys, which explains a lot about vi. In the 1980s, IBM introduced the inverted T layout, which made it easier to move the cursor around and to move about in games. This layout meant you didn't need separate editing and input modes; you could move the cursor and type letters all in one mode.
Up until the early 2000s, games were designed with the intention that the player would use the cursor keys to move about. The use of WASD began as Denis "Thresh" Frong's custom Quake layout, which allowed him to move and look independently. As this layout proved effective, other players adopted it, and then game devs designed their games around it.
In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There's probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there's varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there's at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don't they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?
The new caps they're putting on plastic bottles are awful. Make it very hard to put back on properly and we've have a few incidents with them looking on but they actually cross threaded and leaked. I just rip them off now.
Also, why is the glue on cereal boxes so damn strong now? I end up tearing the box more often than not these days and that never used to be the case.
Those ridiculous new caps on plastic bottles are awful. They only lead to wastage as it's difficult for most people to reseal them properly and anything carbonated gets wasted. Tagging the lid to the bottle is not a world-saving solution for recycling.
My ovenβs vents point directly up my face. So when you stand in front of the stovetop while baking something, youβre directly exposed to the fumes of burning gas.