Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
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 learned long ago when something like this bothers me that it is irrational to get angry at objects, then I connected I am not angry at the object, I am angry at the dumb ass turd who designed it.
btw, I drill a hole in my oil filter before I remove it to drain it so it doesn't spill all over the front of my engine.
Maybe all engineers should have to sign their work. Like have their license number or something embossed on it. That way we can find them and inform them of their idiocy.
I will often drive a screwdriver into the bottom a filter, but this one is impossible to get to and even if I did, it would dribble on the exhaust pipe.
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
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.
You can buy good can openers and bad ones in any country.
I bought this can opener after watching a Technology Connections video, and I kinda love my can opener.
Came here to say can opener too. Not for the same reason as you mentioned just that more often than not a can opener is just plain shoddy. Slips, doesn’t fully cut, hard to grip, etc….
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.
Planned obsolescence. When the battery finally dies, you can't use it wired.
That was a design decision by Steve Jobs to keep people from using them as wired mice.
If this is true what a dumb reason. Basically decided to make a device that could be used 100% of the time unusable for some fraction of time just because it looks the way he wanted it too.
It's like that to push you to buy two of them.
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)
Garlic crushers. All of them suck.
I've found one that seems to suck less. It is at least sensibly designed, easy to clean, and hefty enough where I'm not going to break it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WHLDMNX
Buy jarlick. Join us in convenient garlic-in-a-jar nirvana.
Keep looking. Find one with a thick stainless steel construction. I have two that you could break a window with.
I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it's far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.
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.
Roll the bag. Flip the box upside down. Put it in going up. Hold it in place and flip the box back over. Gravity holds the bag closed. This is a bad idea if anyone else accesses the box and isn't on the same page as you.
Laptops with no intake dust filters.
Actually, no, any computer with fans that doesn't have a dust filter is a terrible design.
My laptop doesn't have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it's attached to. It's actually quite nice. I've never seen it hit 70 degrees. I've cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I'm watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.
And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It's just a little Acer. And it's not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.
Now, my wife's MacBook that she games on....yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.
A twelve year old computer in 2013 would have been utterly useless. Doesn't matter how good is was in 2001 it would die under even a modest 2013 workload. But a decent computer from 2013 is still useful today. Not for triple-A gaming, VR, or 8K video editing, but still a decent productivity and media machine. I just bought my first handheld gaming PC and I made sure it had eGPU support since that's the likely bottleneck in the future (i7 and 32GB RAM, so that should be good for a long while) and I fully intend to get a decade out of it. There's no real appetite to upgrade your machine regularly any more, and the manufacturers hate that.
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.
I've dropped brands for that shit
Got a local one that puffs up to like 3x height in the microwave though and that pulls off a lot of the adhesive.
The glue gets weaker when it's heated. They use the same film for oven meals as well. It comes off fine when you finished heating, but it's a pain in the arse when cold.
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?
Or just going outside and ejecting that puppy without touching anything except the other side of your nose. Farmer blow FTW.
Because it is not always possible... Also, take your time to clean the sink afterwards or you might get in trouble with you SO (I am speaking out of experience).
It's probably habit, but it just feels somehow wrong to blow my nose without a piece of paper snugly against my nostrils. Like trying to poop without being seated on a toilet bowl.
Just tell me that you turn the water on pre-hork instead of touching the fixtures with hork hands, and I'm totally fine with your suggestion.
Of course! You need the hork-lube to do it right
OMG I thought I might be the only one!
I do this too and it drives everyone nuts but it's so much better!
Only thing is sometimes I miss a snot rocket that goes astray.
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.
Even with a bidet that paper sucks. Drying off you ass with it leaves so much paper crumble everywhere that you'll need the bidet again...
Okay Team Bidet, how are they actually supposed work?
Just dont try to spray up your ass, its pretty hard but you dont wanna.
But now you only use three or four squares of TP to dry off instead of fingerpainting shit all up your asscrack until the point you've been conditioned to believe is clean enough.
One problem though, shitting at your workplace or anywhere else will be insufferable. My LPT is to take one of the better hand towels and wet it in a sink before hitting up a stall. Thank me later.
- Spray bum
- Pat dry with TP
The tricky part with phase 1 is managing water pressure. Too little is ineffective. Too much blasts shit everywhere.
Do a test squirt into the bowl so you know what you've got to work with. Start with low pressure to get most of it, adjust angle of necessary, then hit it with everything.
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.
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've had these dual wall glass mugs at home for a few years. So civilised.
https://www.house.com.au/products/baccarat-barista-cafe-double-wall-thermal-glass-mug-2-pack
I bought a set of mugs like that recently. It's a shame because they are pretty nice looking, and comfortable to hold when empty. But when full of hot liquid, the handle just is totally inadequate.
They are from IKEA, so at least they didn't cost too much, but I am a little surprised because their stuff is generally pretty well thought out from an ergonomics and usability perspective--it's only really the sturdiness/durability I ever worry about.
The best mugs I have are still a pair of the stereotypical featureless cylinder type I got from a giveaway 10 or 15 years ago--they are utterly boring, but the handle fits 3 fingers for a perfectly stable grip!
If you only put distilled water in it it really doesn't seem like an issue
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:
- You don't soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- 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.
You better start showing Plague Daddy, Prince of Decay, God of Chaos Nurgle some goddamn respect
I've taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it's dry and grab another towel
It works so well I'm completely confused as to how/why there isn't a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem
Don't use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That's it.
i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It's a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there's replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).
the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.
You literally just use a sponge and some bleach spray and like a minute of your time. If you replenish it daily your normal water chlorine should keep most of the bad shit at bay.
Toilets seem to be getting smaller and I’m having trouble sitting on it without my penis touching the front.
Hey everyone get a load of this guy with his massive hog
Rounded toilets are the worst for this. Elongated is the way to go.
Given your instance, I'm guessing you're not from the US... but here there are two generally standard shapes for residential toilets--round and oblong. The round ones fit better in small bathrooms, but man when you are used to the oblong shape it feels like sitting on a child-size toilet or something.
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.
We did.
Boxed wine.
However, bottle design is pretty refined, and they are quite reusuable.
If this is a regular issue for you I'd recommend a decanter or at least a large carafe. It solves your problem, helps the wine to 'breathe' and looks fancypants as balls.
That's why you should just drink it straight from the bottle.
That’s why you should just drink it straight from the
bottlebox.FTFY
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.
We went to an auto parts store a while back to get some wipers and got a plain set but couldn’t get it on somehow. Asked the staff for help, they ended up going through 4 or 5 sets of different brands and price levels just to find us a wiper that could actually fit the car. The only one that fit was the most expensive option, too. They were so frustrated they didn’t even charge us the extra and just sent us on our way. Stupid wipers, great staff.
I don't believe in anything supernatural, but I'm pretty sure wiper blade attachment designs were somehow still born in the deepest fires of hell.
Not even just that, but modern vehicles make it a pain in the ass to just put your wipers up before a snow storm. Used to be you just lift them up and they're done. Now you have to get in the car, hold the wiper stalk up to the manual wipe mode and let them go up before you can get back out and lift them. I know it's for aerodynamics hiding them under the cowel but it's still a pain in the ass. My last 2 cars have had this feature.
I get this one but I also don’t mind. It’s mostly done for aerodynamics and fuel efficiency. Tucking the wipers gives a decent bit of drag reduction so it has a real purpose at least.
Then again on some luxury cars they do it just so you don’t see them and that’s boring but those losers probably don’t change their own wipers.
Now, my gripe is: Around here ehen it’s going to ice over in winter we’ll lift wipers off the glass so you can scrape the windshield afterward without hitting frozen down wipers. But some wiper designs you can’t lift the wiper off the glass and it’ll stay off. Those suck.
Wordless instructions make the world a more equitable place by making everyone equally frustrated
My last wiper change was a couple years ago and the first wiper took 20 minutes. The second was like 40 seconds but that first one made me mad.
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.
Or you could be my house, previously owned by a maniac, with counters in the kitchen at 3 different heights. I wish I could say that was the stupidest thing the previous owner did.
I have beef with counter tops too, especially where I'm at right now. I'm around 6 foot so and on top of that I live in a handicap accessible apartment (although i am not handicapped, i think they just gave it to me because it was the one that was available i guess), so they're lowered even more. Anytime I'm in the kitchen cooking or doing dishes i always leave with back pain
Weird take on counter tops.
Things designed for many people to use need to be the best height for most people. I feel confident that most countertops are the best height for most people.
I acknowledge that they are too low for a tall person, and that they're too high for a short person.
You're pretty much just saying you want things to be designed for you and that everyone else should adapt to you, rather than you having to make concessions for others like everybody does.
I am tallish for a woman, at least where I live, but not for a person. Countertops are too low for the average height person, they are still built at the 36" height that was in my old house, built in the 1920s. We are taller on average now, and both men and women use the kitchen now.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen a plunger of any kind kept in someone's toilet.
Is this an American thing?
Every toilet should have these next to them. They are cheap and useful, so there's no excuse to not have one. Especially if you plan on having guests over! :p
I have one of those...in my bathroom and I really don't care for it. It turns itself inside out when you use it.
Do you have a multi use one? Some can invert the flanges into itself to become sink plungers.
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?
I agree with you, but I'm not sure how great it would actually be.
I don't know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn't this a feature of soviet era communism?
As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.
Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that's as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?
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 always thought this was super on purpose. Is it not intentional design for “child protection?”
I think it's for anti-tampering purposes. Imagine the consequences if some bad actor tainted those pills with something or replaced the pills with another.
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.
I stopped using my water bottle for a while til they made a new cap where the rubber gaskets have a pull tab for easy removal and cleaning.
Easy removal of the gasket solves the entire problem for me.
Water bottles for bikes suffer from this.
You gotta get them really dried out really regularly.
Like if you only have one that you use every day it's just going to get gross no matter what.
It needs to be bone dry for a few days to kill everything.
If you have 2 and switch once a week, the one that's out of rotation will dry out and any funk will just die off.
The issue you're highlighting is due to the different between metal and plastic. I have an Orca bottle that has a plastic lid that screws on without any rubber gasket and I end up with shreds of plastic in the bottle.
Plastic rubbing on metal leads to the plastic degrading and metal on metal does not make a good seal, so I think a rubber gasket is your only option.
Perhaps a design where both mating surfaces are plastic with metal for the rest of the body? A lot of vacuum insulated bottles have plastic bonded to metal in the cap, they just have to repeat that with the bottle itself
About ten years ago I found and ordered a glass bottle with a fitted silicone lid. It's not tight enough that the bottle can be tipped upside down without the water slowly dripping out, but it's great for keeping stuff out.
I always wanted to see a company make a glass bottle with silicone top that was completely leak-proof.
I love my simple metal Yeti bottles.
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!
When your dick hits the bowl and you wonder what STD you just picked up.
STDs would be fairly difficult to get, most stuff requires blood or semen to transfer, or sustained skin on skin contact. STDs die pretty quickly once they leave the heat and wetness of the human body.
UTIs would be probably more likely, haha.
Just a little related PSA- you can get tested for STDs for cheap at wellness centers, university clinics, and planned parenthood clinics. The vast majority of STDs are curable, and even the more tenacious ones can be prevented via oral pills or shots like PrEP, whose pills give extremely high resistance to HIV, and whose vaccine has made people immune in trials (needed twice a year to maintain immunity).
At the end of the day, you want to catch STDs quickly, because they can do damage to your organs. Medicines can cure them. And if you are with a new partner, get tested, or wear condoms (or both!)
I am a vagina owner from birth, I never imagined the toilet bowl shape would pose an issue to penis owners. From reading your comment I'm still unsure of which toilet bowls you're talking about, I would appreciate if you (or anyone, really) could point to images of both so I, and potentially others, can compare. TIA
I hate those.
Sit where it is comfortable and you touch the front, fucken gross, or sit back far enough and stain the bowl.
TIL!
In my parent home there's a octagonal toilet badly shaped so is uncomfortable to sit parallel(the same way you sit in a oval one) because the seat is too long and is uncomfortable to sit crossing the seat because is too narrow, you need to sit diagonally but because is octagonal your dick hits the bowl. Extremely annoying design.
Kitchen sinks. Instead of doing the dishes they just let them accumulate!
Shower curtains
light bulbs that die too often.
those pots and sauce pans that use a screw to connect the handle. the screw head generally places inside the pot and will get to all your food.
chopping boards. plastic chopping boards enhance your meals with microplastic. composite wood enhances your food with bacteria lodged in-between wood pieces. bamboo -- too thin and ends up similar to composite.
Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
Can I ask where everyone is from? I'm in the UK, which uses 230v, and even cheap-ass LED bulbs last forever. But a lot of the bulbs are rated for both 230v and 115v so I'm wondering if those same bulbs are being sold in the US. If that's the case, they'll need to pull double the current to manage the same output which is far more stressful on the electronics than higher voltage with lower current.
It's usually because of cheap electrolytic capacitors. Letting a $10+ item die because they were too cheap to pay $0.25 instead of $0.15 for a properly rated component.
I use the Phillips Hue bulbs and spots and I’m yet to have one die on me. Some of the bulbs has been in use for more than 10 years. However, I see my fair share of other LED spots that dies too soon.
thanks capitalism
It's usually the electronic drivers. They overoverheat and degrade. Most burned LED bulbs still have working LEDs and just need to replace some component of the driver board.
When I replaced a set the other day I learned that some of them are not rated for enclosures
Wood boards don't harbor bacteria assuming you wash them. The wood dries out and the bacteria die with it. They need moist surfaces with some food supply to grow.
yup, there's no problem with wood. there's only risk when it starts to wear.
I think there are glass cutting boards wouldn't that work for you
They ruin knives
They dull knives
i use a solid wood one, but this suggestion works as well!
Chairs and tables. Why do I have to squeeze my thighs between the chair and the dinner table and then bend down awkwardly when I eat to not splatter all over? Why are chairs so high and tables so low? Just put the table higher so the food is closer to my mouth and why do we even need chairs anyway?
Milk cartons suck now. In the 90s, we could fold and push to open. Why do we need scissors to open them now? Oh and half of them now have a plastic lid in the middle so you can't even pour out the last drops anymore.
Chairs and tables will always feel right for some and bad for others. My legs are long so if there are table supports I need to back away from it and I end up sitting too far from the table. Then casual restaurants all seem to be using those horrible metal chairs that feel like they are made for prisons that have these constricting backs. We need chairs to sit.
I always hated those glued and folded top milk cartons. Every other one would be a struggle to get the seam to open and sometimes I ended up taking a knife to hack it open.
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.
A lot of toilet paper holders are secured to the wall with drywall hangers. An L-shaped one-piece one is basically asking to be torqued right out of the wall.
I'd tend to chalk that up to user error, if you're putting enough force on your toilet paper holder to pull it off the wall you're doing something besides just pulling toilet paper off of it or maybe you installed it with the world's shittiest drywall anchors
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid
Some places you can’t (for whatever reason) install a proper ventilator. Then these with carbon filter will remove some things. But yes, they are far inferior to the full blow vents.
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.
Amen. The one non-negotiable item when we eventually renovate our kitchen is a vent fan so powerful you should be afraid to bring your small dog into the kitchen when it's on.
We had one of those downdraft ones and it was similarly useless, worse than useless even though it technically vented outside because it got so disgusting, the vent grate right in the middle of the stove so things fell in, and heat doesn't go down, it didn't pull anything when it ran.
The two piece toilet does make installation a bit easier since it's less weight. I wonder if there are any sort of workplace safety weight limit considerations that come into play. E.g., maybe the 2 piece can be done with 1 person, but a one piece could need 2.
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.
Water has both adhesive and cohesive properties, and this bullshit is one of the results. I hate it so much. Basically the bit of wwater in contact with the surface of the spout likes to stick to that spot; and the above that likes to stick to the water stuck to the surface and so on, making it kinda roll along angled surfaces even when it seems like gravity should be yanking it right off.
And they absolutely could shape the spout in a way that stops this - they just choose not to.
Never heard of the oil coating trick @DontRedditMyLemmy mentioned, but it makes sense - oil is hydrophobic, so that could eliminate the adhesion part of the equation; and without that moving the stream initially, its cohesion won't be an issue either.
Or do what they do in chemistry which is to take a rod (or in the kitchen anything like a dinner knife or handle) and place it against the spout and let the liquid then run down the rod.
I have to chime in here, as it's a subject close to my heart. The old Pyrex measuring cups don't do this. I went out of my way to buy some on eBay. I can't imagine why they redesigned like this, but there's a lot of things I can't imagine.
It's because they moved away from borosilicate.
To be fair, most are. At the end of the day, today's economy makes it far more profitable to choose either extremely cheap or extremely expensive, making good, lasting, but not perfect products is just not what consumers seem to want. People eother want something cheap that works okay, or something really well made that justifies the price.
I feel like 99% of products I interact with get me frustrated with their simple-to-fix design flaws.
But as for your question: fucking toothpaste containers! Could you make a more frustrating and intentionally bad design?? Why is it that if I cut them open I can get like another few days to a week of brushing? Why not put tooth paste in a jar with a little spoon? Or an opening that is small so that the amount that is left after squeezing your best, is truly insignificant? Why. Must. I. Suffer?
I think if they just designed the tubes conically, with no rigid end besides the male part of the cap, you'd have barely any waste.
You can get tooth powder in jars.
Wow, did not know about that!
Why not put tooth paste in a jar with a little spoon?
Yah, I want a nice crusty jar of toothpaste with a nasty spoon and then I need a spatula to dig out the last bits vs just squeezing a tube. Just push on the tube with you thumb into the back of the opening and the last bits come out.
Why would it be crusty? Just close the lid, and a wide and short jar is much better than a tube.
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.
You could try the Dvorak layout? It's optimized for fast typing. The most commonly used letters are on the home row. I've always wanted to try it
I used it for years but when I got a replace t computer just never bothered changing keys around and stopped. It was neat and I typed reasonably faster but at the time many programs wouldn’t handle the mapping and I’d have to remap controls in every game and was just kind of annoying.
The single best part was the loom on people’s faces when they used it. They’d go to type, it wouldn’t do what they expect and then they’d look at the keys and then to me like I was an alien. So good.
Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way
No thanks. Might be nice for some long trips but for my daily use, I need something a little bit more compact and easy to load up with stuff and a kid.
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.
The keyboard I'm currently using has a key in the F-row that's tied to a lock screen. I accidentally hit it several times a day, and end up having to put in the passcode to unlock the computer every time.
I wish I could disable that stupid key. I'm tempted to pop it right out. But I use a shared computer, so I'm limited in options here.
The only thing more poorly designed than a regular keyboard is a keyboard where they try to cram extra functions into the same number of keys with a FN key. Every brand does it differently, no consistency even within the same brand sometimes.
I always run into the common problems with my plumbus, no further explanations needed i think.
As a Roman Legionary. I have multiple plumbata, but one plumbus gives me troubles. I i feel like I can relate
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.
Yeah it's a difference when it's a cleaver, something meant to apply raw force, and hence needs a certain weight to be usable.
But a knife?!
Anyone got good knife recommendations I'm in the market right now??
General purpose for meats and veggie cutting.
I'm currently using a victorinox fibrox. It's great but loses edge rather quickly requiring honing each meal and sometimes during cutting of ingredients.
Zwillings Four star is great!
Does victorinox offer sharpening services? Some knife manufacturers have programs where you can either send your knife in or take it in to a store and have it professionally sharpened.
If your blade is losing its edge quickly, it probably needs to have a new edge put on it with an actual sharpening, v rather than just the touch up it gets from a honing rod.
Thicker helps with balance in the hand. Cheap knives usually are too light in the handle or the blade is so thin it flexes. A sharp knife is what helps cut and you shouldn't work with dull knives.
There's a balance that needs to be maintained. A general purpose knife like a chef's knife needs some thickness to it, otherwise it can't effectively chop through tougher things. It's also not a knife you are supposed to hold the full weight of when cutting most things. Thin knives are awful for things like cutting a cabbage in half or cutting chicken bones.
Yeah good point I recently got a serrated utility knife and while it’s decently sharp, the profile is annoyingly wedge shaped so while cutting something soft like an orange is fine, anything hard like an apple will split before you can get a clean cut. Seems like it should have a more even, thinner side profile imo. Otherwise decent knife tho three stars.
I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.
Condoms should roll on either direction.
Protip: Buy the XXXXXL size, throw it over your junk, then shrink-wrap it with a heat gun.
Just don't use ordinary shrink tubing, it doesn't seal properly in the front and may tighten too hard for comfort
Spray on condom
Ahh, like 4 day undies.
Normal
Backwards
Inside out normal
Inside out backwards
Fred, is that you?
NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
🚫
Thankfully, there are some designs that improve on this! Here’s what’s in my kitchen:
The brand is OXO, for anyone curious.
I have that and they still are still a pain (I said something else here and it got censored! LOL) to get in or out of a crowded tool jar. Then I always bump that end switch and they pop open in the jar.
Most of my tongs have a metal square that slides down the length to keep them closed, is that not normal?
Those are gravity operated. Point the thongs grippers downward to open, point them to the ceiling to close.
Was a while before I found out. I like them better now.
Our president
No one asked for the spork
I love sporks. If you find the right model they are the ultimate eating utensil.
I dont think I've ever seen a spork with teeth that could actually pick up food like a fork, so it's just a bad spoon.
I have, just weight based. Heavier item harder to pick up, needs longer teeth. If for some reason you are eating chips with a Spork instead of a fork, not a big difference really.
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.
Twist them round half a turn (after loosening) one of the two plastic straps will break off and you have more maneuvering space to screw the cap back on. Twist and tear again to get the entire cap off and fasten the old fashioned way (more hassle).
My expierence is that most (european) bottles this helps.
I feel like plastic packaging in general has become much harder to rip open at the seam.
Anyone else notice this, or am I just much weaker now?Some of them are outright ridiculous. Like one of the protein cookie brands I like, 80% of the time I have to hulk out and end up ripping the packaging to shreds. We also see it on chip packages and cereal bags at times too. It's crazy.
The glue on boxes is almost certainly that strong so that anyone trying to open the box to tamper with it will also rip it, making their attempt obvious. It drives me nuts too, but aparently that's the sort of world we live in now.
There were a lot of very public cases of people trying to or threatening to add poison to cereals, after all. Something like 30+ years ago of course, but it might have influenced this.
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.
Twist them round half a turn (after loosening) one of the two plastic straps will break off and you have more maneuvering space to screw the cap back on. Twist and tear again to get the entire cap off and fasten the old fashioned way.
My expierence is that most (european) bottles this helps.
Not to be annoying but I actually carry a nice steel thermos with me and pour anything I might drink into the thermos.
It only feels like a hassle the first time. You get a steel thermos with a steel straw and now you're really cooking with gas.
Doesn't work for my tonic i have with gin, as I don't want to be drinking gin the majority of the time. Well, I do want to, I just can't.
I always separate the cap completely, it makes a little easier to close the bottle.
Yeah it definitely took some getting used to. Very annoying. I usually always keep the cap with the bottle anyways, so it's not helping me. But I suppose some people would just yeet those caps everywhere
My oven’s vents point directly up my face. So when you stand in front of the stovetop while baking something, you’re directly exposed to the fumes of burning gas.
Uhhhh what?
My gas oven has vents like this. So when it’s actively burning gas to get it up to temp, that’s where the exhaust comes out.
burning gas
Found another problem with your oven, get one from this turn of the century! :P
I'll mention you can get detergent sheets and they work fine. No more messing with powders or liquids for me.
Don’t know what you’re using but the tests of the ones available to me all shows very weak washing performance, some on par with washing only with water.
Explanation is, in short, that there is not enough washing detergent in the sheets.
I suspect that can be true, as the sheets are one-size-fits-all rather than measuring based on the size. Usually I run laundry before it's too full to reduce increased noise in the closet near my office. If I ever notice it's not getting clean when more full I'll just throw 2 sheets in given how cheap they are
I really like these too, I bought like a multi years supply of them and they fit in a pocket I hang on my laundry door and haven't fucked with liquid detergent or bottles since 2022
Sheets? For the washing machine? Wouldn't those require a plastic shell or base like the laundry pods do?
Nah, they have the texture of fruit leather and completely dissolve in water. A few brands make them like Seventh Generation, Earth Breeze and Ecos
I also like powdered detergent. I get mine from the package free store and then add in those scent boosts pellets for our scent only. Work so much better than liquid detergent
Most clothes, oddly gendered and sexist and it's fucking weird having different clothes for people who identify differently, like clothes are clothes. Make them for everyone. It's fucking wild.
Freesewing.org tries to do that, but just ends up awkwardly referring to "people with/without breasts" instead.
I'm sorry to say this, but I don't need the extra space for H-cups my ex needed. 😅 All depends on your specific body, but there are good reasons for all kinds of specific clothing shapes existing from extremely slim-fitting muscular shorts and super-spindly trousers all the way to saggy super-long shirts most people use for sleeping, Y-shaped t-shirts for big cup sizes and plus-sizes on suits.
🤷
People have different body shapes, you know? And sure, you could say "Buy why isn't every design available in every shape then?!", to which I'd say that I guess in an ideal world it would be but as a company you got to draw a line somewhere because manufacturing, logistics and storage costs are a thing. But if you look at say redbubble, they'll sell you virtually any design on 50-80 different articles of clothing independent of which one it is.
There's some... weird things though, granted. Like how you can tell "made for women"-trousers because a) the button is on the left and b) the pockets are ridiculously tiny.
Yeah I hate having button downs that tuck only one inch into my waist (I'm a man)
Why the hell do i have to know which way to put the batteries in at this point ?
A bridge rectifier circuit for each battery slot would solve the issue and, at the low currents of things like remote controls, would be pretty tiny and introduce inconsequential power overhead bbbuuuuuuuuu-uuuuuu-uuuuutttt it would cost money, precious pennies per device. And it would be tricky to market it, educate users, and so on. Such things are too good for this world.
Batteries have a plus and a minus, the spring is generally the flatter end which is generally negative, they’re designed that way to be stackable, although we could probably come up with a slightly more intuitive design.
Front-load washers should have a brake for the drum that prevents it from rotating while digging out clothes. Last thing I want is twisted/sprained wrist while peeling towels off the walls of the drum.
How hard are you pulling out towels that there's a risk of getting caught up in it ?
@bpt11 Soda and beer cans. There's always a little bit left.
Reusable bags that have handles longer than the bag itself, literally worse than the plastic bag version which can be handled properly
This is so you can put them up on your sholder. Well some that arnt jank.
Yeah, I'd say the opposite; I hate the ones with short, little handles.
Hangers with those hooks on the sides that I guess are meant to slip the collar of the shirts into? They don't really serve as a good use plus they seem to get tangled with other hangers at times and hang securely anyways. I've seen better hangers at work where there is a strip of some rubber compound on the top sides of each hanger, they hold things much better and I feel that's the more better of the design for a hanger.
I have no idea if you're a man or a woman, but I'm guessing based on your comment, you're a man? You're talking about those hooks/ indents like halfway between the hook and the end of the hanger? I think those are a lot more useful on women's clothes, which tend to have much wider necks which means they just slip right off hangers. The hooks help wide neck blouses and jackets stay on the hangers, and they're especially useful for tank top or spaghetti strap type tops and dresses.
You can get the foam covers to add to your hangers.
Look for "foam hanger covers." We ordered Foamies brand at the dry cleaners, but there wasn't anything special about that brand, just that we got a lot of them. They just stretch over top of the hanger. We used them for the slinky fabrics that would slide off, and I'd something was really slippery, you could stick straight pins into them.
They come in handy when air drying heavy, damp shirts
Me
I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap.
You just gave me a stupid idea. First measure out the exact volume of detergent you need for one load - eyeballing it I'd guess 20mL (I'm notoriously terrible at eyeballing volume, so, grain of salt) - then get a 20mL syringe and some IV tubing (it's got one-way valves, so when you connect a syringe to it and draw up, it pulls from on side of the line; then when you depress the syringe back down, it goes out the other side). Tie something heavy to the intake side of the line and throw it in the bucket of detergent. Run the other side of the line to just above the detergent receptacle if your machine has one; or near the door for you to just aim it.
Load clothes; pull syringe, push syringe, close the door, run the machine. No detergent dripping all over the place!
...detergent is probably too viscous as-is to go through IV tubing at an acceptable rate, so you'd probably have to dilute it with water first to thin it out, then adjust the amount you pull accordingly.
The pumps they sell for coffee syrup dispensers maybe.
Also they sell non-medical syringes for general use.
Ooh, that would for sure handle viscosity better than IV tubing. Good call!
permanently installed lamps with a socketed power supply that sticks like 10cm out of the wall.
Why would a permanent lamp be socketed at all? If it's permanent wire that shit properly.
Indeed! In my example, I have this IKEA LED Strip above my kitchen working area, and the power supply is integrated with the plug. There are multiple choices for power supply, but to my knowledge all of them are socketed.
The cap is a scam, it used to be the size of a soda bottles; now it's a literal cup.
you don't need to measure laundry liquid anyway,
just put the absolute minimum amount you can pour from the bottle directly in the machine and do 2 or 3 loads.
Or if you must use the cap, just drop the cap with the detergent in with the laundry. It will clean itself.
Try to find some that are made properly.
Space consideration is a bit more obvious with the seat though
