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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I love my simple metal Yeti bottles.
Me
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 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.
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 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
That’s pretty much a swamp cooler
Lol yup, got the idea from a Technology Connections video on how one of the common humidifier designs are literally just large swamp coolers
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.
Ok so my father makes his own wine, at home from kits/concentrate. He makes a lot of wine and drinks a lot of wine (and gives a lot of wine away as gifts)
One day he called me, and he was so excited. Like if he wasn’t a 61 year old man I would have guessed he was going to announce his pregnancy.
“You won’t believe it! The wine place is selling bags now!!! So I can put my wine in bags and put those in boxes!!! Omg why didn’t I think of this?! Think of all the time saved with corks and recorking!”
It was a happy day for him, certainly.
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.
Garlic crushers. All of them suck.
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.
I should get used to that with my grater. I either press with huge amounts or just do the old smash and rapid micro slice.
Buy jarlick. Join us in convenient garlic-in-a-jar nirvana.
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.
In the UK it’s mandatory, ostensibly to prevent deliberate overdoses. You can’t buy a big bottle of acetaminophen.
In part because they call it paracetamol.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen packaging as described in the UK. Normally they’re packaged in individual blisters that can be pushed through the foil covering in a single step. I’m not sure about this ‘peeling’ action that’s described.
Also, for what’s it’s worth, medication in the UK is publicly known by it’s International Nonproprietary Name rather than brands, so for the most part people will ask for ‘paracetamol’ rather than Deludomex™ or whatever. ‘Acetaminophen’ is a new one to me, though.
I always run into the common problems with my plumbus, no further explanations needed it think.
As a Roman Legionary. I have multiple plumbata, but one plumbus gives me troubles. I i feel like I can relate
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)
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. I’m 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.
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
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.
They come in handy when air drying heavy, damp shirts
those hooks are perfect for hanging two t shirts on, or a zippered/buttoned clothing, or even skirts
No one asked for the spork
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.
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.
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.
Planned obsolescence. When the battery finally dies, you can’t use it wired.
It’s like that to push you to buy two of them.
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.
I don’t know what “other countries” you’re talking about, but where I’m from, a “can opener” looks like this:
(I’ve been using one just like this for my entire adult life, and guess what - it’s ok!)
You can buy good can openers and bad ones in any country.
I can’t find anything that matches your description of US can openers on DDG, do you happen to have a pic? Can’t picture it
Second one in the video on the page I linked in my comment.
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….
I bought this can opener after watching a Technology Connections video, and I kinda love my can opener.
Thats seems similar to what I’m talking about. Like the second one in the video on the page I linked.
Same. I should really learn to use a simpler one, but I love this model and it still seems rock-solid to me after years of use. The best part is not ending up with sharp, dangerous edges on the lid!
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?
- 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.
I get that’s the principle, but how long are you supposed to spray for? How much pressure? Is there a trick to it? In my own limited experience, it doesn’t actually do much more than dampen the poo.
You know you’re supposed to use the bidet after you’re done pooping, right?
Yeah, but how long do you have to dampen your crack in order to feel the equivalent clean of two dry wipes?
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.
A water bottle with a sport cap is a sufficient travel bidet.
