[HN Gopher] Everything with a battery should have an off switch
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Everything with a battery should have an off switch
Author : danso
Score : 739 points
Date : 2022-05-06 16:33 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| atoav wrote:
| Sometimes you don't want that actually. For example if the reason
| that device has an battery is a RTC (Realtime Clock) and it uses
| it to keep track of time.
|
| Or with things where battery life is a much smaller issue than
| forgetting to turn the thing on (e.g. smoke detectors).
|
| Or with things that draw unspeakably low amounts of current and
| where such switches would be hard to implement (e.g. digital
| wrist watches).
|
| Other than that: Yes please.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > Or with things where battery life is a much smaller issue
| than forgetting to turn the thing on (e.g. smoke detectors).
|
| What an odd example to pick.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Why? Turning off your smoke detectors to save battery seems
| like a profoundly bad idea
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Having an off switch on a life saving device like that
| sounds like a profoundly bad idea to me, so not sure why it
| would be brought up in this context. I personally would've
| used an example of something you might actually want to
| turn off, but it would just be a bad idea, not a
| potentially fatal idea, if you failed to turn back on.
| atoav wrote:
| I was listing things where I would _not_ want an off-
| switch along with the reasons. As you rightly mentioned
| yourself having an off-switch on a smoke detector is a
| very bad idea.
|
| The only place where smoke detectors are frequently
| switched off are remote huts that might be empty for the
| better part of a year. And there the best strategy is to
| unmount the whole thing, pull the battery out and place
| both things somewhere really obvious so the next guys
| notice immediately what needs to be done.
| [deleted]
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Apple Airpods Max: My biggest complaint about these is that they
| don't have a proper power switch that absolutely cuts the power.
| This is especially awful since the case they ship with is awful
| and I don't want to use (but it, or some other magnetic solution
| is required to put them in low power mode. I don't want low power
| mode, I want no power mode. Just put a damn switch on them!
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I'm thinking a lot about security aspects of this.
|
| If I turn off my iPhone, MacBook, or Google Pixel phone, are they
| really off?
|
| What are the security implications of "modern standby" on laptops
| where the CPU and WiFi are always on even after I fold the lid
| down?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| And Bluetooth ...
|
| Pretty annoying that my closed laptop, that's in another room,
| can drift in and out of being "found" by my bluetooth headset
| and stop music playing.
| staindk wrote:
| Sorry, the following rant is only tangentially related.
|
| New Windows sleep (""sleep"") states are bewildering.
|
| My S/O's new laptop only supports "S0" or "Modern
| Standby"[0]. It can sit there closed up in its deepest
| supported level of "sleep" and have its fans spinning and
| keyboard backlight lit while downloading updates or whatever
| else it deems important.
|
| Sure, introduce something like S0 and spend time improving
| it. Try to "perfect" it like how Apple has seemingly
| perfected its low energy use modes on its devices. It will
| probably take MSoft 10 more years. But don't also
| artificially restrict the use of other sleep states. On the
| new laptop it is supposedly a hardware restriction, but I'm
| guessing it's more just some firmware toggle (IIRC some
| laptops have had S1-3 re-enabled via firmware updates, but
| I'm not entirely sure now).
|
| Edit: it seems that MS has patched a bunch of regedit tweaks
| that used to allow re-enabling more sleep states[1], though
| it depends on exactly what laptop model you are on as well I
| suppose.
|
| [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/power/system-... [1]
| https://superuser.com/questions/1179987
| kevmo314 wrote:
| An off switch doesn't convince me more though. If the company
| really wants things always on, they could easily wire the
| hardware off switch to a software off switch and elevator-
| close-button it.
|
| In fact, even a non-nefarious company might do that so a sudden
| power loss doesn't cause data corruption.
| IYasha wrote:
| Me too, for more than a decade. I never trust anything that
| could not be physically unpowered. Long before IoT, IPMI and
| smart-stuff attacks became a thing. The more I learn about
| hw/sw implants the less I believe in device security. (
| sedatk wrote:
| > are they really off?
|
| When my iPhone's battery is depleted the screen goes blank. If
| I try to turn it on, an empty battery logo appears and it says
| "Find My enabled" underneath. So, I assume not.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| (Background: I work in product design/new product development,
| and conceivably might have designed this thing! If any of those
| were still designed in the Western world. Which they aren't. I
| _have_ designed some stuff like it, though!)
|
| Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition
| next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we
| need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing,
| because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn
| off.
|
| (It is especially fun to put something together for the Very
| First Time, then realize you can't turn it off... and you need to
| turn it off because it's the Very First Time this thing has ever
| existed at all, and it isn't quite right, and you need to fix
| something. But it can't be turned off, and this is somehow by
| design.)
|
| (Our design team will never listen. This is because they, one,
| don't listen to anyone ever; and two, never use the products they
| design. Oh, sure, there might be a user study or two. But they
| never actually have to _live with_ or _work with_ the damn
| things.)
|
| > They never seem to just use the bluetooth module as the sole
| microcontroller
|
| We actually do this! It works pretty well.
|
| > and also it's not like microcontrollers are expensive these
| days. with a blobbed-on IC of some 8-bit custom non-programmable
| thing, they're probably spending like 1-2 cents each
|
| Yeah I wish we could get those prices. But we don't do COB (chip-
| on-board) and we only use microcontrollers we can get and read
| datasheets for, so we pay at least 20x that price. Maybe that's
| why we don't have any clients?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > This is because they... never use the products they design.
| Oh, sure, there might be a user study or two. But they never
| actually have to live with or work with the damn things.
|
| Yeah, I do software and Ive found the same thing: if I'm
| building it, then I'm actually the first user of the software,
| and I have all sorts of feedback for the designers. Luckily
| I've worked with some great designers who were usually more
| than happy to adjust the designs though.
| Zak wrote:
| Make the battery removable, then you have an off-switch and a
| repairable device. For bonus points, use a battery in a
| standardized form factor so I can buy spares.
|
| I know, I know, the industry doesn't want me to keep my device
| working longer than the lifespan of a Li-ion cell.
| titzer wrote:
| ikr? They have these things now, they call them "AAA"
| batteries...holy heck, you can take them out, and they even
| make rechargeable ones. Like, if your thing doesn't work, you
| can just swap the batteries instead of waiting N hours for it
| to charge itself....what a concept.
| Steltek wrote:
| Rechargeable AAAs are crap though. Power density sucks.
| Voltage level sucks (and voltage regulators will suck the
| battery dry before your micro does). And the form factor
| sucks.
|
| I'd sooner have a 18650-family (e.g. 14240 or 14500) become
| standard than a bunch of AAAs.
| moonbug wrote:
| Battery hipsterism. Oh HN, you keep giving.
| Zak wrote:
| It was a valid point. There's a significant
| performance/weight reason most of the devices with non-
| removable batteries and built-in charging are using Li-
| ion instead of NiMH.
|
| Getting a bunch of consumers used to buying spare Li-ion
| cells and using external chargers might be a non-starter,
| but it's possible to have both onboard charging and
| removable cells so the upgrade path is there for those
| who want it.
| titzer wrote:
| I've had a series of Canon powershot cameras that have
| all used more-or-less the same Li-ion cell design[1] and
| I've been able to swap batteries with them. They're big
| enough that third parties have even offered replacement
| batteries.
|
| There is probably room for standardization of a compact,
| rectangular, rechargeable battery of roughly those
| dimensions. Is someone pushing for it?
|
| [1] https://www.apotelyt.com/camera-
| power/canon-g7-x-mark-iii-ba...
| Zak wrote:
| I don't think anyone is pushing for that, though
| sometimes a company will design a device around another
| company's battery design. There's quite a bit of small
| photo/video lighting that uses Sony NP series camera
| batteries. Those are just a pair of 18650s in series
| inside a plastic box.
|
| It seems to me the size of the G7X could have been
| designed around a 14500 cell instead.
| Zak wrote:
| > _Rechargeable AAAs are crap though._
|
| Not compared to alkalines, not since about 2005. Voltage
| regulation (i.e. a boost converter) plays well with NiMH
| rechargeables too, though not with alkalines.
|
| That's assuming one of them is an appropriate size and
| voltage for the application. If more than one starts to
| seem like a good idea, consider a larger cell, higher
| voltage chemistry, or both.
| titzer wrote:
| I use a lot of rechargeable AAAs and AAs. For AAA,
| 1100mAh are pretty good, which almost up to the ~1250mAh
| of an Energizer alkaline. For AA, there are 2800mAh
| rechargeables available, which is on par with an
| Energizer alkaline.
| buescher wrote:
| Panasonic Eneloops and similar modern low-self-discharge
| NiMH batteries are really nice. Their capacity is not
| quite as high as alkalines, but their internal resistance
| is an order of magnitude lower. At loads over 100mA,
| they're a far superior battery in both ability to deliver
| power and effective capacity. They have low self-
| discharge, so you can charge them after using them
| instead of discovering you need to charge them before
| using them. And I've never had one leak, but I assume
| they can.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Rechargeable AAAs are crap though. Power density sucks.
| Voltage level sucks (and voltage regulators will suck the
| battery dry before your micro does). And the form factor
| sucks.
|
| Not in my experience: our main TV is connected to a 2008
| computer running Linux Mint that we use for netflix and
| amz prime. I've been using it in this way since 2016. The
| remote is an off-the-shelf wireless pointer thingy with a
| few buttons on it (works like a Wii controller) that
| takes 2x AAA batteries.
|
| I've been recharging those 2x AAA batteries since 1996,
| and it still works fine enough that I don't feel
| compelled to replace them.
| baq wrote:
| the real problem is the design team doesn't give two shits
| about neither users nor developers of the product...
| developers aren't treated as customers by design teams and
| then everybody is confused why the thing doesn't work. (hint:
| maybe it's stupid hard to make it work if you are actively
| prevented to be able to work on it?)
| lavela wrote:
| the real problem is that you can't keep all those little
| features you'd wish for in your head, so while you are
| making a buying decision they don't factor in as much as
| the lower price achievable without those features.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps we need government labels like we have on food -
| little boxes for common things like "battery: removable"
| or "on/off".
| brewdad wrote:
| We'd need some regulation for the regulations. My son's
| laptop battery died last week. Today, it is considered
| non-removable. But, he did remove it, after removing
| about 20 screws, carefully prying open the case, removing
| a few more screws and layers of insulation inside.
| Eventually, he was able to remove it and test that the
| battery was the fault and order a new one.
|
| If we require labels, without the necessary strictly
| defined definitions, today's non-removable battery
| becomes tomorrow's "removable" battery. Because, hey, it
| is _possible_ to remove it. Good luck getting everything
| back together if you aren 't an engineer or extremely
| careful in how you disassembled things.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If a battery is "removable", that means replacing the
| battery is a normal, reasonable use of the device. Ergo,
| if the device breaks while the customer is replacing the
| battery, the manufacturer would need to replace it under
| warranty.
| Zak wrote:
| "Field replaceable" might be better way to describe it.
| If my flashlight runs out of power, I unscrew the
| tailcap, take out the 14500 cell, and put another one in
| it. I don't need tools and I can do it in the dark; it
| would be a major flaw for a flashlight if I could not.
| Silhouette wrote:
| I've advocated similar as a possible way of countering
| other consumer-hostile practices in the past but for
| something like batteries I think we're already past that
| point.
|
| E-waste is a huge but so far mostly overlooked problem.
| Built-in obsolescence is great for exploitative
| businesses and bad for basically everyone and everything
| else. Unnecessarily restricting hardware repair or
| replacement might be the largest contributory factor in
| this problem.
|
| Time to regulate.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I'd love this - simultaneously beneficial to consumers,
| improving the market (reducing information asymmetry),
| and not something that laissez-faire-market-types can
| complain about (because you're not _restricting_ what
| sellers can do, technically - you 're just forcing them
| to reveal more information about their product, and then
| it's _market forces_ that actually deal the killing
| blow).
|
| More ideas: "online account required for use", "collects
| location data", "phone call required to cancel
| subscription", "memory use: 350 MB" (just like calorie
| counts!), and so many others...
| Zak wrote:
| That varies a lot based on product type, price point, and
| target market.
|
| For something long-lived and expensive, I will pay extra
| and accept a less sleek design for standardized removable
| batteries. I research most purchases of durable goods. Of
| course, I may not be the most profitable customer since I
| don't plan to buy a new widget every six months.
| vjk800 wrote:
| This is the real problem. Otherwise the markets would
| have solved the crappy products problem a long time ago.
|
| When I use something at my home, I usually have a
| constant stream of minor annoyances that could easily be
| fixed by the manufacturer. However, when I'm shopping for
| a new product, I dont remember any of them.
| wildmanx wrote:
| The odd part is that for many people that's even the case
| if it's software _and_ they are programmers themselves
| _and_ it's open source. But they go complain instead of
| just fixing the minor annoyance.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing
| with our stupid design team
|
| So many red flags here.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > and we only use microcontrollers we can get and read
| datasheets for, so we pay at least 20x that price.
|
| Yeah, I see what you mean.
|
| And even if google translate can help, there are of course
| other problems
|
| 20x might be the actual cheaper option
| sverhagen wrote:
| Sure, but you have a manager who thinks... against better
| judgement... again... that they are gonna sell 20 million
| units of the thing, so their math suggests that you should...
| yep... prematurely optimize.
| iamben wrote:
| > This is because they, one, don't listen to anyone ever; and
| two, never use the products they design. Oh, sure, there might
| be a user study or two. But they never actually have to live
| with or work with the damn things.
|
| I wonder the percentage of consumer (and business - have you
| ever used a POS in a pub?!) electronics this applies to? It's
| gotta be high 90s. I've lost track of the number of times I've
| lamented "did _anyone_ actually use this? "
| [deleted]
| pm215 wrote:
| A friend of a friend retired from the tech industry to become
| a joint-investor in a small chain of pubs. He ended up
| writing his own Linux-based POS software for the pub tills,
| AIUI...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I've lost track of the number of times I've lamented "did
| _anyone_ actually use this? "
|
| We have a combination oven and microwave (yes...) that seems
| to have been designed with the primary purpose of enraging
| the owner.
|
| The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments. But
| you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by spinning
| a dial. Except that you can't do that while the oven is on.
|
| The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When it's
| finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then _continue to
| make the operating noise_. You can stop it from making the
| operating noise by opening the door.
|
| The microwave _can 't be replaced_, because it's _part of the
| oven_.
| caf wrote:
| If "the operating noise" is the cooling fan for the
| magnetron, it keeps going when the time is up to cool it
| down. Mine does the same, but actually says "COOL" on the
| screen when it does so.
| folmar wrote:
| My old microwave oven has a fan that is on only when the
| microwaves are on. If that was possible in 1985 it can be
| made the same way now.
| caf wrote:
| No doubt it was some combination of lower power,
| physically larger or simply more prone to failure. Do you
| suppose the designers go to the trouble of a cool-down
| timer just for the hell of it?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The problem with this is that it _prevents you from
| knowing_ when the microwave has finished.
| caf wrote:
| The cooling fan isn't supposed to be an audible
| "microwave is on" alert. That's not its design function.
|
| Perhaps the actual audible alert on yours should be
| louder.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > by spinning a dial
|
| When we moved into our current house, it had a microwave
| like that. When we replaced it, my primary requirements
| were 1. multiple fan speeds, and 2. a nice, simple touch
| pad for entering the time; preferably one where you didn't
| need to press a button before starting to enter the cooking
| time.
|
| The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a
| situation where it made using the device better, and in
| most situations it made it worse.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| My microwave oven uses a dial, and it works great. It
| uses increasing intervals between dial ticks (5 seconds
| for cooking times under 1 minute, 10 seconds for cooking
| times under 3 minutes or so, than 30 seconds, than 1
| minute, than 5 minutes; I don't know the cut-of points by
| heart). The intervals are chosen in a way that they're
| precise where they need to be, and large where they don't
| need to be precise. It's really easy and fast to set the
| time you need.
|
| It's a bit limited, in the sense that you can't set the
| time to e.g. 17:27. But who needs that?
|
| When my old mechanical kitchen timer died on me, I bought
| a digital one with a dial, in the hope that it work the
| same way as the one on my microwave oven. Boy was I
| wrong. It kinda increases the interval when you spin it
| faster, but in a completely unpredictable and impractical
| way.
|
| So I guess it's easy to make impractical dials, but it
| certainly is possible to make very well functioning dials
| as well.
| dpark wrote:
| > The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a
| situation where it made using the device better, and in
| most situations it made it worse.
|
| Digital dials can be nice in some cases.
|
| My parents had an oven with a dial for the temperature.
| Spin it either way to increase or decrease the
| temperature by extra 5 degrees. I loved it. It was so
| much better than the touchpad design. The range of actual
| temperatures in an oven is pretty small and I found this
| much more friendly than punching in the temperature,
| getting it wrong, cancelling, and punching it in again.
| It was a "finger tip" dial so it was quick to spin.
| Probably horrible for people with bad arthritis or other
| hand mobility issues, though.
|
| I wouldn't mind a microwave with a similar dial for time.
| Again, the actual range of times in typical use (for me)
| is not that high. The design described with a two tier
| system for adjusting time seems moronic though.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty
| small
|
| The range of temperatures you use is about 200 degrees?
| dpark wrote:
| Maybe 250. 300-550. I rarely go up to 550 and never below
| 300 that I can recall. With 5 degree increments, that's
| only 50 clicks, fewer if the system is speed sensitive.
| oauea wrote:
| High quality dials with adaptive increments are amazing
| and much faster & easier to use than a touch pad.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When
| it's finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then continue
| to make the operating noise. You can stop it from making
| the operating noise by opening the door.
|
| Check out Chesterton's Fence.
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| Tell us why you think it's relevant.
| wildmanx wrote:
| Sure. Sibling comments to my comment explain that the
| continued "operating noise" is a cooling mechanism that's
| required by the microwave oven.
|
| So, it wouldn't be a good idea to just rip that part out
| of the design. Even if it may be annoying. Perhaps a
| better explanation is needed, like some models showing
| "cool" in the display. But it's per se not a design
| oversight.
|
| Chesterton's Fence is about not changing things before
| understanding what led to the current state of affairs. I
| think the principle easily extends to complaining as
| well.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, absolutely not. This is not a problem that other
| microwaves have. It seriously impairs the functioning of
| the microwave. Chesterton's Fence tells us that there is
| no cost to eliminating this ridiculously awful
| functionality, _because other microwaves already don 't
| do it_. An explanation doesn't help in any way. The
| solution is to stop misbehaving.
| go_prodev wrote:
| That must be frustrating, but was quite funny to read.
|
| I would happily invest in kitchen appliances that have a
| silent mode for apartments and shared living spaces.
|
| My microwave beeps at the end, and then beeps again 10
| minutes later once the food has been removed. My old
| toaster beeped 5 times when the toast popped, which is
| unnecessary when the popping action is loud on it's own.
| bombcar wrote:
| You might be able to remove the "buzzer" or speaker in
| the device.
| Foffle wrote:
| If it's a regular piezo buzzer, just stick a small rare
| earth magnet to it. Instant silence, and doesn't damage
| anything!
| bombcar wrote:
| This is brilliant - I bet there's not too many sizes of
| piezo buzzer so someone could make little kits to sell on
| amazon et al ...
| botdan wrote:
| Have you looked to see if your microwave has a volume
| control menu? After years of listening to my microwave
| blare across the house I saw a tweet that informed me
| that most microwaves have a menu setting somewhere to
| control the volume and sure enough, my Frigidaire
| microwave actually does. I had just never thought to
| look.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments.
| But you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by
| spinning a dial
|
| Mine is similar, also a combi. You spin the dial and it
| will go up in 10 second increments to a point, then in
| minutes, then in 5 minutes, then ten minutes, etc. Fine, I
| get it, it's like floating point. But it starts doing 5
| minutes at the 10 minute mark! So you can't do 11-14
| minutes. Which is actually about right for some things in
| an oven.
|
| You also can't add more than 10 minutes to a short time
| without stopping the oven (this, I assume, is intended to
| be a safety thing to avoid being able to accidentally add
| hours of cooking without positive user intent).
|
| And I do wish it would just stop the fan once it stops
| cooking, but I suppose the electronics next to the hot oven
| don't suddenly need less cooling just because the hot metal
| box doesn't have food in it.
|
| I do like it though because it's much more efficient for
| small things than a big oven and I don't have space for a
| toaster oven _and_ a microwave. And it has a _much_ better
| UI for setting a delay start than the 6-button interface of
| the big oven.
| [deleted]
| donmcronald wrote:
| > did anyone actually use this?
|
| Are you me? Lol. Sometimes I use software where I wonder "am
| I the only one that bought this and tried to use it?" I think
| part of the issue is that requirements get written by people
| who have no experience. They've never done the job the
| software will be used to augment and they don't know anything
| about software development. Then the requirements are used to
| outsource the actual design and development.
|
| Using POS as an example (in a country with tipping culture).
| Imagine if a requirements document for the payment system
| said "must include an option to tip", but the design and
| development was done in a country where tipping culture isn't
| a thing. You'd likely end up with the "tip" option hidden
| away in a hard to reach place while everyone who uses the
| software _knows_ it should be prominent and easy to use and
| could immediately tell you the design is poor.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Yeah I wish we could get those prices._
|
| You might enjoy [1] about a microcontroller that's ~3 cents, in
| quantity 10.
|
| Of course it's only one-time-programmable, and generally pretty
| basic. And that's a pre-supply-chain-crisis price - these days
| prices have risen to 9 cents [2]. Still very cheap though!
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhAGnsnO7w [2]
| https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Have you developed anything with that microcontroller, or
| tried to use that datasheet?
|
| An ATTiny10 or PIC16F is so much better documented, so much
| better supported, so much more featureful, and so much better
| in every way that the average small-volume product design
| house will never make up the 40-cent price difference per
| part. How many development hours or support hours can you
| bill before you're penny-wise and pound foolish?
| nottorp wrote:
| Even at a higher level than microcontrollers, i've worked
| with arm chips whose only documentation was random posts in
| chinese characters on sites i had never heard about before.
| They were cheap, but for the small volume devices i was
| working on dev time became significant.
| mmoskal wrote:
| Because the chips are so simple, I actually found the
| datasheets for Padauks to be sufficient. In particular, I
| don't think it's any more confusing than say STM32 or even
| NRF52 datasheets, mostly because the chips are so much
| easier and thus the datasheets are sooooo much shorter.
| Granted, I have not worked with 8-bit MCUs other than
| Padauks.
|
| Their compiler/macro-assembler also seems to be working
| just fine, once you get past the UI from early 2000s. The
| error messages that must have been auto-translated from
| Traditional Chinese, but you squint a little bit and get
| the idea.
| folmar wrote:
| There is an SDCC backend as well.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| hexo wrote:
| I would fire the whole team immediately if they really dont
| listen. Noone wants another e-waste.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I am pretty sure the market disagrees with you.
| hexo wrote:
| Environment disagrees with "market". "Market" takes whats
| available. Not producing ewaste means "market" cannot
| consume it. Simple.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Sure, but the point is that you can keep making these
| things and people will keep buying them, so "noone wants
| another e-waste" is clearly not true. Discussions about
| "the market", its effects on the environment, etc. are
| all important and worth having, but don't really have
| much bearing on whether or not "people want another
| e-waste".
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I mean, if you look at it that way then people really
| want corrupt politicians and exploitative businesses
| because they keep electing the former and paying the
| latter.
|
| I think people really don't want e-waste. They don't want
| oceans (and now bodies) full of plastic. The industries
| have just done a great job of convincing them nothing can
| be done about the problem.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > I think people really don't want e-waste. They don't
| want oceans (and now bodies) full of plastic. The
| industries have just done a great job of convincing them
| nothing can be done about the problem.
|
| I think it's a bit more complex than that; a lot of
| properties that distinguish a "solid product" from
| "e-waste" are not at all obvious when you buy it, and
| it's not _illegal_ and it is _cheaper_ , and people got
| to make rent too, so... yeah. I agree: in the abstract
| most people don't "want e-waste", but they also look at
| costs and other factors, and they do "want e-waste" once
| you factor that in.
|
| It probably shouldn't be strictly illegal too, but now
| you have a situation where:
|
| 1. Consumers blame industry and say that government
| should do something.
|
| 2. Industry says they're just producing what consumers
| want and that it's not illegal.
|
| 3. Government says they want consumers and industry to
| have free choice and call for different consumer actions
| and "self-regulation".
|
| So basically, everyone is pointing at everyone else, and
| nothing gets done. And the arguments from the various
| sides aren't necessarily bad or malicious either:
| regulation _does_ come with a cost, and cheap stuff
| _does_ have its use.
|
| Personally I think factoring in external environmental
| costs in to the product price would be good, but it's not
| so easy as it will make things more expensive, and
| already enough people are struggling to make ends meet
| (as the current high inflation rates show) so it all ties
| in to a lot of other issues as well.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Noone wants another e-waste.
|
| > I am pretty sure the market disagrees with you.
|
| Not applicable - efficient market hypothesis requires a
| host of conditions to be true, and all of the following are
| unmet: information symmetry, sufficient number of
| suppliers, lack of monopoly effects, and rational
| consumers.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > (Our design team will never listen. This is because they,
| one, don't listen to anyone ever; and two, never use the
| products they design. Oh, sure, there might be a user study or
| two. But they never actually have to live with or work with the
| damn things.)
|
| If you don't mind me asking .. if it's that bad, why do you
| still work there? Is there a shortage in suitable jobs? (Honest
| question..)
| noobermin wrote:
| I hope you don't mind this sentiment but you seem like one of
| the "good ones." A lot of designers seemingly do things like
| this for some insular reasons rather than for market reasons
| (better for consumers or it gives them an edge). Just another
| example how some developments in tech are top-down rather than
| bottom up from market demand.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Can you tell whether you work in a product design company, or
| an engineering company?
|
| Does that come from clients?
|
| I used the same 3-in-1 latch circuit for power on/off, pairing,
| and software power off for 12 years.
|
| A good enhancement mode NMOS FET can be as good as a physical
| switch at low voltages.
|
| If you really need nano-amp level leakage current AND very low
| drop, you can consider turning to beefy depletion mode devices,
| which gate the user will discharge with the button press. A
| nice benefit is that you can directly sense the button press
| with an MCU.
|
| I once even did a bluetooth mouse with this "hardware" switch,
| and a graceful shutdown: we sense voltage on the buck
| capacitor, and detect when the battery disconnect triggers.
|
| The few microfarads in the capacitor are enough to send the
| last update with the 0% battery level, and a disconnect
| command.
| code_duck wrote:
| One of the most annoying on-off interfaces I deal with for an
| electronic device is my insulin pump. When one intentionally
| turns off delivery or it runs out of insulin, it beeps loudly
| every few minutes. To turn it off, it has to be plugged in, and
| then the shallow, stiff button on the top held for 20-30 seconds.
| Turning it on is easier, but opaque - connecting it to power
| starts it up after a few seconds.
|
| I understand why a crucial medical device doesn't have an off
| switch that could be engaged accidentally, but I don't understand
| why they tie the function to being connected to a power source.
| jokoon wrote:
| Lithium batteries, even when they don't provide power, slowly
| lose power.
|
| They can also "degrade" when they're not in designated voltage
| range. This is one reason why most batteries are soldered,
| because they need to be regulated at all times.
|
| So no, you cannot "turn off" a battery. A battery should either
| provide power, or be plugged to a charger.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Sure, the battery degrades once its voltage drops to low or
| rises too high. But it also degrades from charge/discharge
| cycles. And without the ability to turn the device off the
| battery loses power even more quickly, either causing more
| charge/discharge cycles or bringing the battery quicker into
| the unhealthy zone.
| balsam wrote:
| According to the table in the following Article, lithium batts
| have the lowest self discharge rate. When you dont have
| credentials to present please present citations.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discharge
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Degrading outside a voltage range and soldered batteries
| means they're talking about the lithium _ion_ or lipo parts
| of this chart.
|
| I've seen several "present credentials" demands here lately.
| I find it a bit odd.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| There's also the safety issue. In the event of an internal
| short, the battery can actually catch fire. Would be nice to
| have a hardware power button that physically disconnects the
| battery from that load.
| carpenecopinum wrote:
| It's cool that they managed to make the device work for them.
|
| But on the other hand, I think it should not be the job of the
| consumer to "fix" shitty design choices. If we accept devices
| that are borderline defective by design instead of sending them
| back to where they came from, what we'll end up with are more
| devices that are similarly broken for the sake saving a few
| cents.
|
| The only way we can truly fix bad design choices is by making
| them unprofitable for the manufacturers.
| windex wrote:
| We need more hardware buttons and dials. Things like power, mic
| etc need a hardware switch
| baby wrote:
| Recently my trimmer turned on by itself and then stayed on. I
| couldn't turn it off. Had to put it inside a bocal until it
| drained itself of battery so that we could bare the noise.
| cristifalcas wrote:
| beowulfey wrote:
| To be fair, I feel the same way about this comment.
|
| I guess there will always be parts of the internet that each of
| us finds annoying.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| icelancer wrote:
| Reset the counter.
|
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1135439789090574338
| donatj wrote:
| Beltalowda wrote:
| "Fix" what? That the medium or style they choses to express
| themselves doesn't work well for you? Well, tough; that's
| your problem, not his. They're not your bitch. The
| entitlement...
| donatj wrote:
| > That the medium or style he choses to express himself
| doesn't work well for you
|
| It doesn't work well for thousands of people, which is
| why there are always complaints.
|
| You can say the exact same things about his post asking
| them to fix the controller. Oh "the entitlement" and
| "that's his problem, not the controller manufacturers".
| We're asking him to fix his posts. He's asking them to
| fix the controller.
|
| When something is suboptimal, you're well within your
| rights to complain about it. Posting long rants as
| Twitter threads is suboptimal for the consumers of said
| threads, just as a controller you can't turn off is
| suboptimal for the consumer of the controller.
|
| Same same and fair game.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _He 's asking them to fix the controller._"
|
| No he isn't, he's fixing it himself.
|
| > " _When something is suboptimal, you 're well within
| your rights to complain about it._"
|
| You can complain about it on your own Twitter. Here, it's
| explicitly against the HN guidelines: " _Please don 't
| complain about tangential annoyances--things like article
| or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| delecti wrote:
| I'd rather read a twitter thread than a medium or
| substack post. It's not suboptimal for _all_ of the
| consumers of their tweets.
| icelancer wrote:
| Foone doesn't submit his threads here and he doesn't
| charge for them.
|
| You're not an intended consumer.
| IE6 wrote:
| generally speaking coming out hot with a "whatever you're
| doing is wrong and you need to do it the way I want you
| to do it" is always a hard sell - regardless of how valid
| your original argument may be
| _Microft wrote:
| > _Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of
| getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE
| TIME there 's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man,
| this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when
| you can make one blog post?"_
|
| > _CAUSE I CAN 'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.
|
| I have ADHD. I have bad ADHD that is being treated, and the
| treatment is NOT WORKING TERRIBLY WELL. I cannot focus on
| writing blog posts. it will not happen._,
|
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547904532242437
| donatj wrote:
| You can append to a blog post as you go the same way you
| can append to a Twitter feed. It's functionally the same,
| the medium just isn't a threaded hierarchy. There's no
| reason it has to be posted fully formed as he declares.
|
| My own blog posts often have 10+ revisions after I've
| posted them.
| icelancer wrote:
| Or, more simply, you can just consume the product as
| produced, or not.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| But you came across this and you wouldn't have come across it
| if he just put it on his own website. Network effects and game
| theory...
| louky wrote:
| People post their own and others' websites here _very_
| regularly!
| CRConrad wrote:
| We came across this by seeing it here on HN. Lots of people's
| own websites get posted here on HN, so we might well have
| come across it anyway.
| icelancer wrote:
| Considering that foone's "website" (or blog) is entirely
| giant Twitter threads...
| emptyfile wrote:
| Actually the moment I see that a link leads to Twitter or
| Instagram I don't click it.
| kamranjon wrote:
| It's strange I have no issue reading posts like these but every
| time they come up someone complains about the format of twitter
| and I still have no idea what makes it so difficult for people
| and I definitely did not grow up with it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Because it's actively user-hostile. It's not that we can't
| figure it out, it's that it takes extra effort and creates a
| problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. If things
| like ThreadReaderApp or Nitter can present the content in a
| more accessible & pleasant form, Twitter should be able to do
| so as well.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Sure they can but it will hurt their ad tracking
| Jcowell wrote:
| I see this and would argue it's not user hostile. Rather
| twitter's target users are those who sign up and log in to
| view and consume content so they can target. It's not a
| hostility towards user but rather a non-catering to its
| non-users. For the majority of content , tweets and threads
| are not an issue. They easily consume it and if they don't
| want to deal with the format they utilize tools that
| utilize Twitter's API.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Nowadays it cuts off threads and refuses to let you read to
| the end unless you're logged in.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes this is soooo annoying. Luckily thread reader app
| doesn't do this (yet)
| [deleted]
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I just tried and I could read that whole thread without
| being logged in. Maybe twitter lets you read the whole
| thing if you've _ever_ logged in with that browser?
|
| I guess if this _is_ actually a problem, anyone who 's
| bothered by it, who doesn't have a twitter login could look
| into rewriting twitter.com links to nitter.net instead.
| mod wrote:
| If you scroll a little too far at the end, it'll lock you
| out and prompt you to login. Basically as soon as the
| first "recommended" tweet is displayed mid-screen.
|
| The way I scroll as I read, I often have to go back and
| reload the page just to read the last tweet in a thread.
| rplnt wrote:
| Well first of all you need to be familiar with the format. Or
| better said, with the abuse of the format. Because while it
| might look like replies, you need to figure out it was used
| to post an article and not actually additions/corrections
| what would be a common use for someone replying to
| themselves. But it's still hard to figure where it ends as
| the replies from the author seamlessly blend into other
| users' replies. It doesn't help this particular author
| doesn't number those tweets (which in itself is ridiculous)
| or even use punctuation or capitals. It just seems like
| random rant, not something we're supposed to be be reading
| when someone shares a tweet.
|
| And then there's the noise. Why do I need to skip icons,
| names, numbers, padding, dividers after every sentence? And
| while our brains are relatively good at it, I still need to
| process it as it gives clues into where the "article" ends.
|
| Twitter is the worst format to post articles. At least it was
| until someone came up with the idea to post them as videos
| with computer voiceover.
|
| (I'm using the word article here, but I'm still not convinced
| it isn't just a random rant)
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| It's fine to prefer different approach to content publishing,
| but there are lots of solutions to this problem - use them
| instead of complaining about the ways that other people choose
| to publish their content.
|
| See https://threadreaderapp.com/user/Foone
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Even with thread reader this looks still really ranty and
| choppy. All the isolated sentences, the all-caps parts etc.
|
| But it's ok, not everyone likes every type of content.
|
| It sounds like a pain having ADHD though.
| jmull wrote:
| I kind of appreciate the signal: When someone chooses to blog
| on twitter you know it's facile at best, and more likely simply
| stupid (as in this case).
| pards wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1522599896066396161.html
| Hamuko wrote:
| Another hot take: every device where Bluetooth isn't the sole
| method of interacting with the device (think AirPods), you should
| be able to turn off Bluetooth.
|
| You haven't seen hell before you've seen a speaker with Bluetooth
| that you can't turn off and you can't stop your neighbours from
| accessing. Or more specifically, heard hell.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Hear, hear! After being woken up at 6am a few too many times
| because of a bluetooth speaker like this, I swore off all
| bluetooth speakers.
| can16358p wrote:
| While I get the motivation, I'd rather have my Apple devices
| which have some economic value to be findable using Find My,
| which can't function with a physical "hard" off switch.
|
| I'd rather have Bluetooth use infinitesimal amount of my
| iPhone/Macbook battery than them being lost/stolen which could be
| potentially tracked when off with "soft off".
|
| But besides some use cases like this, I agree with the post.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I 'd rather have my Apple devices which have some economic
| value to be findable using Find My, which can't function with a
| physical "hard" off switch._
|
| Why not? I mean obviously they wouldn't be findable if they
| were off, but that's a feature. Apple could add a physical
| switch _and leave everything else the same_. Your devices would
| function as they do now in "On" mode, but you'd also be able
| to turn the off properly. Isn't that better?
| can16358p wrote:
| That would literally kill the whole point of being able to
| find it if it's stolen.
|
| I know there are other ways to do it (a sophisticated theif
| might just put it in a Faraday Cage), but Find My would just
| work in its current form otherwise, and putting a physical
| switch that physically switches it off kills the whole
| purpose.
| neoberg wrote:
| So when it's stolen a thief can just switch it off?
| nvarsj wrote:
| Super bright LEDs is one of my biggest pet peeves on electronics.
| And 99% of them seem to be blue. This one is red, but pulsing -
| oh god.
|
| For SMD leds it's pretty easy to destroy them directly by using a
| hot enough iron - they're heat sensitive and die easily. Just
| touch it with your iron and boom, annoying light gone.
| beckman466 wrote:
| wtf? how else are our Silicon Valley overlords supposed to check
| in on us, how else do they prematurely wear down our gadgets so
| we have to pay expensive money for their tech team to un-glue and
| then re-glue a battery inside, or to replace the gadget entirely
| (with various components still functional, but turned into
| e-waste due to their fundamental black-box proprietary nature?
| asddubs wrote:
| you can snip off smd LEDs pretty easily if you have a set of
| flush cutters. I really like the knipex ones, they're high
| quality, truly flush, and very durable
|
| (this is just a random picture of them)
|
| https://cdn.bueromarkt-ag.de/product/1eb892022d09365e7dd2c7b...
|
| PS: foone knows what a chip on board is, right? I'm assuming they
| just used weird phrasing, but the fact that they called it a
| "blobbed over IC" kind of threw me off
| inglor_cz wrote:
| So true. I just found out in the hard way, by letting the battery
| in a home safebox expire. I cannot find the physical key and the
| electronic lock does not work without power. I will have to call
| some specialists to break in.
| userbinator wrote:
| You could probably pick it. There are, not surprisingly, plenty
| of videos on YouTube about this.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I might give it a chance.
| Timpy wrote:
| I'm sure you had an array of considerations when buying an
| electronic safebox, but this is the bottom line as to why I
| would never buy one.
|
| As a programmer my day job is "this isn't working the way it's
| supposed to, lets figure out why and fix it." I can't fathom
| ever wanting to deal with that stuff when I get off work. A
| lock and key have been working just fine since the Roman times,
| it's relatively easy to conceptualize how it works, the things
| you can troubleshoot on it is a relatively short list, the UX
| surface area is small and predictable (it's just a lock and a
| key). I could go on for a long time. If something got along
| just fine before bluetooth and wifi existed then I never want
| to own a version that requires bluetooth or wifi.
| zepolen wrote:
| Why did you pick a job you wouldn't do in your free time,
| doesn't that get tedious?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| A lock and a key has other failure modes. I broke a key in a
| lock more than once in my life. I also once accidentally
| fouled up a lock with some kind of dirt/fluff that it stopped
| working with the key.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| First look up the manual to make sure the battery isn't
| replaceable from the outside. My fire safe has an electronic
| lock, but you can replace the battery by twisting off the face
| of the lock (which isn't obvious from looking at it)
| TomGullen wrote:
| Wristwatch?
| pmlnr wrote:
| Everything with a battery should have an easy way to remove the
| battery.
|
| Correction: MUST have a way.
| rahimiali wrote:
| Basically, Foone ends up disassembling a device that has no off
| switch, and leaves it disemboweled on his desk as a warning for
| other devices.
| johnsonap wrote:
| Foone's pronouns are they/them
| S0und wrote:
| You've posted this "fun fact"? 4 times already. Are you this
| bored?
| johnsonap wrote:
| Just something I care a lot about.
| aulin wrote:
| how is one supposed to know this from the twitter thread in
| this post? I even tried to actively look them up and couldn't
| find any info about it.
| jwilk wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Foone
|
| > _Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird
| Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (they/them)_
| johnsonap wrote:
| it's in their twitter bio
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > I went out and bought this as it was the cheapest bluetooth
| controller I could get on a same-day notice and boy I'm not happy
| with the quality results
|
| Man buys cheapest product, is surprised by its lack of quality.
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| off means off!
| pveierland wrote:
| Related to the topic, besides the energy argument and the ability
| to cycle system state, I'd argue the huge importance of being
| able to power things off for personal freedom, especially for
| things with connectivity. We still have the power to shut off
| devices and largely the ability to block their connectivity (e.g.
| routing TV ads through a network filter).
|
| With 5G and future connectivity, it feels as there will be push
| towards not being able to block the network access of individual
| devices, such that a TV or fridge will just speak to its server
| directly via some XG/IoT network which the user does control,
| without any user ability to block this communication.
|
| After losing control over connectivity, it seems as power
| switches will be the next thing we'll start to lose control over,
| for engineering and ergonomic reasons, but also for control
| reasons. Such a shift may be further pushed by more ubiquitous
| and long-range wireless charging, if it gets to the point where
| devices such as our phones can be sufficiently charged simply by
| being inside buildings.
|
| Just thought I'd throw in my $0.02 vote for the ability to power
| off things.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| Great. Now I need to buy a faraday cage to fit my refrigerator.
| swader999 wrote:
| Think bigger. Do the whole house. There's paint you can get
| for this.
| rocqua wrote:
| Does that actually work for 5G? I believe that, in urban
| areas, you can even get cell reception from inside a
| microwave because a phone needs very little signal.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > because a phone needs very little signal
|
| Isn't it because the microwave is shielded against a very
| specific frequency, that is much lower than the 5G one?
| So that the 5G frequency penetrates the shielding without
| much trouble?
|
| (I'm really not sure, that's my initial guess, but the
| questions are not rhetorical.)
| rocqua wrote:
| Microwaves are at 2.4Ghz. Normal 5G ranges from 800Mhz
| till about 5Ghz. That is about the same ballpark, and
| Faraday cages are not incredibly frequency sensitive
| devices.
| swader999 wrote:
| I can still get cell reception in my bedroom that has
| three coats of the paint with proper copper grounding
| running through it all. But it barely registers on my
| meter now whereas before it was 100x. I'm sensitive to
| emf and do sleep noticeably better now. I still turn my
| phone and wifi off at night. I'm about 400 metres from a
| cell tower. Rural so no 5g yet I think. Yeah I have the
| window film and metal window screens and metal fabric
| curtains too. Wasn't a trivial project.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Can you explicate more about emf sensitivity! Just asking
| because I have never heard such thing. And, yea caging
| entire house is probably arduous and costs fortune.
| swader999 wrote:
| Its just anecdotal, I definitely sleep better the further
| I'm away from cell phones, cell towers and pulsed wifi
| routers. I've got a meter and I've used emf shielding
| clothes prior to addressing my bedroom. Its pretty hard
| to do decent studies on it since its so prevalent. Prone
| to quackery and people making quick bucks on it too.
| brewdad wrote:
| It rains 9 months a year here. Much of the US gets quite
| cold or hot for a significant part of the year. I really
| don't want to step outside to use my phone. WFH means I
| need to leave it on my porch in order to receive work
| calls, I guess.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Go old school - get a landline and one of those analogue
| rotary dial phones. The most secure phone there is.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And coated windows. Sounds like the way forward.
|
| Does a smart fridge still work if you rip the modem and
| Wlan boards out?
| falcolas wrote:
| Having worked in a former alphabet agency building that
| did have a faraday cage built into it, don't worry too
| much about the windows. They weren't a big enough hole to
| allow connections even in the middle of the city. Even
| standing at one with your cell phone was iffy.
| djhn wrote:
| But that's exactly what an alphabet agency employee would
| say!
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Great part about TVs is you can just... unplug them.
| everforward wrote:
| > With 5G and future connectivity, it feels as there will be
| push towards not being able to block the network access of
| individual devices, such that a TV or fridge will just speak to
| its server directly via some XG/IoT network which the user does
| control, without any user ability to block this communication.
|
| Amazon Sidewalk [1] is pretty much already there (assuming
| uptake is high enough, and I believe it's opt-out, so it
| probably is). From what I recall, the bandwidth is low, but
| that didn't seem to be a technical requirement but a political
| one to prevent leeching so much bandwidth the user notices.
|
| I think you're right, though. Usage is going to proliferate
| until laws reign it in, or someone develops an "electromagnetic
| radiation firewall" that allows fine-grained control over
| physical signals. The only other option I can think of is a
| soldering iron, but that's not terribly feasible. I'll take a
| soldering iron to a $40 part, but I'm not going to risk frying
| a nice new refrigerator or other expensive appliance.
|
| 1. https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-
| Sidewalk/b?ie=UTF8&node=213281...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _With 5G and future connectivity, it feels as there will be
| push towards not being able to block the network access of
| individual devices, such that a TV or fridge will just speak to
| its server directly via some XG /IoT network which the user
| does control, without any user ability to block this
| communication_
|
| How does one ensure that a product is built this way, to avoid
| it?
|
| I understood that a number of current 5G capable devices - e.g.
| telephones - can be disconnected the usual way (a button in the
| (quick)settings that toggles the connection).
| davchana wrote:
| True. My car came with ATT sim installed. It uses that to
| remote start via App, and to tell me the location, miles,
| other data in app. Also, to show me directions on its display
| screen. There is no way for a user to switch off that data
| connection (not that I want it, its free of cost, and it
| helped me few times).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I hope it can be disabled by the manufacturer upon request,
| like the E-Call system (microphone+GPS+radio device that
| should trigger an emergency call in case of actioned
| airbags).
| davchana wrote:
| No where in the manual I found how to disable it.
| Although there is a toggle option to NOT to call 911 in
| event of collision.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It is something that some workers in some department at
| the manufacturer's should know. Like for the E-Call: it
| is in the European law that it may be disabled (by the
| manufacturer and not by the car owner), but your
| interfaces to the manufacturer will easily not know.
| pveierland wrote:
| Yes, for a telephone currently it is simple, both as it is
| necessary for the user to be able to disable the 5G
| functionality, for legacy and usability reasons.
|
| However for a device such as a TV, once it is sold with a
| network plan arranged by the manufacturer, there doesn't
| remain much of a point to allow the user to normally control
| whether this connection is active. For a while, an option
| would remain to disable or configure such an option, but over
| time it seems likely that the user would no longer be able to
| control this directly.
|
| It gets even easier for devices such as a smart lightbulb or
| a smart toaster - devices for which there wouldn't be any
| direct user interface. Once these communicate via wireless
| wider-area networks, the trend seems to be clear.
| bluesquared wrote:
| In a somewhat similar manner, my CPAP has a 4G modem that's a
| huge double-edged sword (for Americans only, you can see where
| this is going...).
|
| On one hand, it is nice to have an app that shows my stats, and
| my doctor can also remotely access how my therapy is going.
|
| On the other hand, it also phones home to the manufacturer & my
| insurance. When I don't hit my usage target for a specific time
| period, insurance stops paying for it and I have to personally
| pay out of pocket. So now you add the stress of not only
| complying with sleeping with an uncomfortable apparatus on your
| face but also if you don't keep it on enough (I take it off
| unconsciously in my sleep) you start paying thru the nose for
| it. Vicious cycle...
| te_chris wrote:
| Jesus Christ that's dystopian.
| ars wrote:
| Not really. The device belongs to the insurance company and
| they're only willing to pay for it if it's actually being
| used. They are quite expensive machines, and they don't
| want people having them in their house, and not actually
| using them (CPAP has a very low patient compliance rate).
|
| And that's why they have tracking built-in. You're
| perfectly able to buy the machine yourself without
| insurance and then you don't have to turn on the modem.
|
| And also after you've used it for a while they give it to
| you and then you can turn off the modem.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think the modem worked its way in there because some
| employers mandate compliance and that's how they check.
| (Think safety-critical jobs like driving a train; if
| you're diagnosed with sleep apnea and don't use the
| prescribed mitigation, you can't drive the train. Too
| many people feeling "fine", falling asleep, and running
| their train around a 30mph curve at 80mph.) Insurance
| companies obviously love the excuse to not pay, but
| that's probably not the primary purpose for telemetry.
|
| You can buy your CPAP outright for around ~$1500. This is
| a problem for many people, but probably not HN readers.
| The telemetry basically facilitates an interest-free loan
| that lets you pay for the machine over a couple years.
| More favorable financing than a credit card, so people
| aren't getting super screwed here.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| IMO it's a misuse of the technology. Controlled remote
| access was a good idea for doctors to see how therapy was
| working and adjust when necessary. I'd argue that newer
| APAP machines are so good at self-adjusting that it's
| less clear that remote access is necessary. And using it
| for insurance purposes should never have been permitted
| to begin with. Price it into the premium and skip the
| dystopian monitoring part.
|
| Personally, I just bought my machine outright. Yeah, it
| was close to a thousand bucks. But it's been going strong
| for years, so I'm happy with the investment. It has never
| been allowed to connect back to resmed.
| ars wrote:
| I agree APAP is so good you no longer need a Dr.
| involved. People should be allowed to purchase an APAP
| machine if they want it, with no prescription.
|
| However I disagree about insurance - they are paying for
| it, so they can chose how they want to monitor usage. If
| you don't like it, then pay for it yourself, exactly like
| you did.
|
| Also, the older machines don't have remote access, they
| have a little card you have to bring periodically to the
| Dr. so they can confirm to insurance you are actually
| using it. Remote access was meant to make it less
| annoying for patients, and cheaper too since you don't
| have to go to the Dr. so often.
|
| Pricing it into the premium is a terrible idea - it would
| raise premiums for everyone, for very little gain.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Pricing it into the premium is a terrible idea - it
| would raise premiums for everyone, for very little gain.
|
| Enough to matter? Let's put this in context. A typical
| CPAP machine will go for years before needing to be
| replaced, and can be purchased retail for about $800.
| Compared to routine medical expenses, that's nothing.
| Heck, the reduction in costs for monitoring compliance
| would probably lead to -lower- premiums, not higher.
| wildmanx wrote:
| CPAP: Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. A device to push
| air into your lungs usually during sleep to treat or give
| support with different conditions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_positive_airway_pre.
| ..
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Cars already do this kind of comms; Teslas are in permanent
| communication with head office, and I think the Volkswagen ID3
| electric will be as well. Charging by harvesting ambient
| signals is a thing without needing ubiquitous dedicated
| charging stations, for very low power uses:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=electronics+charging+from+ambient+...
|
| It won't be many years until the bluebottle fly which came in
| the window, round the room and off into your house, is
| indistinguishable from a camera drone from the census bureau,
| your insurance company, your nosey neighbour. And then many
| more years until Vernor Vinge's "smart dust".
|
| Check out the size of the cameras on the Tobii 3 eye-tracking
| glasses, for example:
| https://www.tobiipro.com/imagevault/publishedmedia/71ru67v90...
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| I have a corollary: that these on and off switches should not
| require "an app".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> (Our design team will never listen. This is because they, one,
| don't listen to anyone ever; and two, never use the products they
| design. Oh, sure, there might be a user study or two. But they
| never actually have to live with or work with the damn things.)
|
| This is so obvious from everyday life that someone really ought
| to write a paper about it and have it published in Nature.
| Because it will certainly be published. It will probably become
| the most cited paper of all times, just because of all the pent-
| up pissed-offery that everyone carries in them, going around in a
| world where nothing. ever. fucking. works! dammit.
|
| Pfh. Sorry for the vent. This is what impractical design does to
| people.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625.
| vsareto wrote:
| I get that you're pissed, but there's plenty of technology that
| you seemingly forget about (being pissed off makes you a bit
| irrational) that works _most_ of the time. Saying nothing ever
| fucking works is just a dumb take
| bombcar wrote:
| It's nice sometimes to have a deep dive into technology that
| does work, and works so well you barely even notice it.
|
| When it's failing is when it comes to the forefront. Crappy
| touchscreens seem to be a major component in lots of them,
| had an experience with an elevator "system" with a
| touchscreen that was mildly annoying.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It's interesting that you and the sibling comment both
| mention elevators :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Nothing that was redesigned on the last few decades
| works.
|
| From cars and elevators to software. Anything that
| interaction designers touched is broken.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Yes. Change for changes sake. It's hard to improve on
| something that already works fine.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Btw, here is the litany of broken systems that led to my
| outburst above.
|
| I'm two months (at least) without data on my phone. I didn't
| need to use it and I'm a lazy ass so I didn't try to fix it.
| When I call them, a kind youg man on the other end of the
| chat says he's reset my service and within a couple of hours
| I'll definitely have data.
|
| In a couple of hours I have no data, but now I also have no
| service: "emergency calls only". Result!
|
| Of course I can't log into my account to see what's up,
| because it's trying to send me a TFA code. It can't send it
| to my mobile, since it's dead, but it sends it to my landline
| which is in the UK. I'm in Greece now.
|
| I try to get help by clicking on a link in the page where I
| fail to login. I'm taken to a page with an "AI assistant"
| called TOBi. The page has the assistant's icon, smiling at me
| encouragingly and a wheel that's spinning, spinning,
| spinning... and spinning.
|
| I think I pass out from all the spinning and all the
| screaming and pulling at my pigtails. I finally realise I can
| actuall call a number to ask for help. Fortunately my friend
| still has service.
|
| I have to blow a few raspberries down the line to convince
| the (other) chatbot that it can't understand my speech, but
| I'm finally connected to a human being.
|
| The kind young woman on the other end of the line tells me
| she has reset my service and I will _definitely_ have my
| service back in 24 to 48 hours.
|
| Three days later I definitely don't have service. I try to
| log in to my university email to pick up some work I need to
| do, but it asks me for a TFA code. That it sends to my
| mobile.
|
| I call Vodafone for a third time. This time, I'm put through
| to a technician. He asks me to take my sim out of my phone
| and read the S/N off it "to make sure it's the right sim".
|
| Hang on. To do _what_?
|
| I put the sim back in the phone and I have service. Ah. So
| that's what he wanted me to do. He could have said so.
|
| And I should have thought of it.
|
| So, nothing works. Not even my goddamn brain works anymore.
| If that was a dumb take, that's because I'm dumb and useless
| and so is everyone else, it seems. Except for the guy who
| doesn't know how to tell you "did you try taking it out and
| putting it back in again?".
|
| Because that's the only thing that works anymore.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I could make and receive iphone calls, I could hear the
| other party, but nobody could hear me. This went on for a
| couple days, I was ready to go get a new phone.
|
| Then, silly me, I remembered the good old DOS days. I did a
| cold reboot of the phone, and voila! people could hear me.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| What I don't get is that my phone doesn't have a windows
| OS. It has an Android OS. Like yours, it should not need
| a reset. Let alone three. So what's up with all those
| resets?
| WalterBright wrote:
| What's up? Software bugs.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Alright, I exaggerate. But when there's so many things that
| just don't work, and so few things that just work, then I
| think I'm justified to say "nothing".
|
| Kind of like Yogi Bera says "nobody goes there anymore, it's
| too crowded".
| andreareina wrote:
| It's a book actually: The Design of Everyday Things
| kyaghmour wrote:
| That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes
| everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst
| part is that comments like these make it come off as the go-
| to reference to actually solving these problems.
|
| The reasons it's the worst design guidance out there is that
| it teaches: 1) that engineers should NOT be
| entrusted/involved with user design. 2) to conceptualize
| users as blissful idiots. 3) that obscuring errors in a
| system is actually a good thing.
|
| All of these are things that I see the lasting effects of in
| products I use in every day. Don't get me wrong, I bought
| this with the best of intentions. It was the highest rated
| design book on Amazon on the topic. Reading through was an
| extremely painful exercise in essentially coming to realize
| that everything I see broken in the engineering teams I work
| with and products I use is actually codified in words.
|
| Take this excerpt as an example -- p. 65: "Eliminate all
| error messages from electronic and computer systems. Instead,
| provide help and insight."
|
| Are you f'ing kidding me? You cannot seriously think this is
| right. For the longest of time I wondered why I hated using
| Apple products. It turns out Norman was schooled at Apple and
| they absolutely practice this teaching. I bought an early-day
| iPod touch circa 2007 and proceeded on to loading all my
| music on it. A few upgrades later, some albums disappeared
| without any error. I searched and searched and searched,
| trying to describe my problem in a number of different ways
| on Google to see what I could find. And all I could find were
| semi-answers. But you know what? If it had actually displayed
| "error 0xFHJAD1234" when failing during the upgrade, I
| could've actually google that. And I'll spare you the story
| of what I had to do when the family Mac's HDD failed ...
|
| So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail,
| designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're
| doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate
| person around them that could assist them if they could in
| fact identify the problem.
|
| Worse, this philosophy probably hints at a level of
| intellectual ignorance/arrogance that is quite fascinating.
| You see, in my line of work I have to be able to walk
| engineers I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way
| up to cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have
| a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works.
| Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how
| any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not
| the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers.
| To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible
| problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful
| exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant
| or both. But since you've eliminated engineers from the
| design loop (see #1 above), no one will tell you you're full
| of it.
|
| So yeah, no. Do read Norman's book. But look at it as
| everything you should NOT be doing.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible
| problem in a computerized system and then provide a
| graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant
| or arrogant or both.
|
| I don't think you read the book. I read the book in
| 2000/2001. The emphasis was on helping the user.
|
| Not a single line in that entire book, IIRC, advocates
| silently failing. I have no idea how you came up with that
| interpretation, when almost every single example in that
| book highlights "silent failure" as something to avoid.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I had a funny discussion with Don Norman about pie menus
| and SimCity, in which I blamed the nuclear meltdown on the
| linear pull-down "Disaster" menu, and blamed round pie
| menus for putting out fires quickly but ultimately leading
| to urban sprawl:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0
|
| Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New
| Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop
|
| Talks by Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's
| "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop. Organized and
| introduced by Ted Selker. Talks and demonstrations by Don
| Hopkins and Don Norman.
|
| Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-
| up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very
| easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add
| to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the
| voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant
| solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to
| now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or
| bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the
| first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He
| said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his
| way."
|
| Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round
| menus put the fires out."
|
| Norman: "What caused the meltdown?"
|
| Hopkins: "It was the linear menus."
|
| Norman: "The linear menus?"
|
| Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the
| meltdown."
|
| Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was
| having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?"
|
| (laughter)
|
| Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they
| make it really easy to build a city really fast without
| thinking about it."
|
| (laughter)
|
| Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern
| Virginia!"
|
| Normal: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you
| think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the
| various complexities of controlling a city."
| httpsterio wrote:
| This is such a weird take.
|
| First off, Norman wasn't schooled at Apple, he basically
| created the HCI guidelines with Nielsen. Apple's design
| guidelines have long been based o years what Norman worked
| on so you have it the other way around.
|
| In no part of the book does it say that engineers shouldn't
| be part of the design process. What the book advocates is
| that if engineers are entrusted with design, they should at
| least understand the users and design their products based
| on their needs and for the users. Anyone can be a designer,
| anyone can apply design thinking. No one is excluded.
|
| And your comment about error codes, I would always say that
| an error message is more useful than an error code. You say
| that you would Google the code, wouldn't it be more useful
| if you could just read the actual error code and figure out
| what went wrong without habing to look it up first
| somewhere else?
|
| What Norman advocates for is to help the users help
| themselves, show the state of the application and don't
| hide things behind error codes.
|
| Again, silently failing is definitely not recommended by
| the book or anyone really so if thats been your experience
| with Apple, it's not because they follow the teachings of
| Norman's book, it's because they _don't_ follow it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... He clearly says that engineers have ideas that are
| antagonistic to interaction design. There is an implied
| message that they can learn not to, but one message is
| explicit, the other is implicit.
|
| And it gets much worse in "The Inmates are Running the
| Asylum", that says engineers shouldn't do design right in
| the title, on the most sensationalist way possible.
|
| Later he toned down that message a lot. Nothing from his
| group will say that anymore, and you will get a clear
| message that making your engineers think about design is
| better than nobody thinking about it. It still carries a
| message that you should leave design to experts, but you
| won't find anything there saying that engineers can't be
| UX experts anymore.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Regardless of what the book says, anyone too close to the
| product during its development will have difficulty
| designing it appropriately for the user.
|
| If you know how the product works then you already have a
| mental model of interacting with it. That mental model is
| NOT the same as the user will have, and thus an engineer
| will think that something is obvious even though it is
| not obvious to the user.
|
| The same goes with anyone else who is close to it during
| the development.
|
| You need outside users to make it clear how people new to
| a product can understand and interact with it.
|
| Unless you're an engineer who can forget everything they
| know about their own product, you shouldn't try to design
| everything yourself with no outside feedback.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's correct, and the designer is too close to the
| product too.
|
| That is the correct message, and the one every article
| about design should push. Neither the engineers nor the
| designers can design a product in a vacuum.
|
| Those are both old books that do not deny this message,
| but focus on less relevant subjects, and have less than
| clear advice. We shouldn't recommend those books for
| people without previous knowledge on UX design, because
| they will be harmful.
|
| Besides, given that Nielsen was himself a very important
| voice on the creation of the modern user-focused design,
| there is very likely a newer book from him to recommend
| instead (I stopped reading his books and started reading
| his papers at the time of the change, so I don't know
| one).
| kyaghmour wrote:
| See the "Acknowledgements" section of his book -- pp.
| 299-304. Yes, Norman had written "The Psychology of
| Everyday Things" prior to joining apple. But in his
| acknowledgements to this particular book (i.e. "The
| Design of Everyday Things" p. 301) he very heavily
| credits his experience at Apple: "I have learned a lot in
| the years that have passed since the first edition of
| this book ... The most important experience was at Apple
| ... I learned about industrial design first from Bob
| Brunner, then from Jonathan (Joni) Ive. ... Steve
| Wozniak, by a peculiar quirk, was an Apple employee with
| me as his boss, ..."
|
| So while Norman wasn't a neophyte when joining Apple, he
| clearly credits his experience at Apple for having
| heavily influenced the specific book we are discussing.
|
| Norman certainly doesn't recommend silent failure
| verbatim. But what I'm saying is that this is the net
| effect of his recommendations.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I've read both editions, they're not really that
| different.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's an endless debate in programming languages about
| how to handle errors in software. Error codes, exceptions,
| optional types, NaNs.
|
| One solution I try is to redesign the cause of the error
| out of the system. For example, compilers often have
| maximum quantities of language constructs that are
| supported, like the maximum length of a string literal.
| Then, when the length is exceeded, an error message is
| concocted and generated, then error recovery has to be
| done, then the compiler has to not generate an object file,
| etc.
|
| I don't know what other compilers do, but one day I
| realized that it was _less work_ in the compiler to not
| have a limit, but to keep enlarging the string literal
| buffer. There was only one limit left on all these things,
| that was globally running out of memory. Globally running
| out of memory is a fatal error for compilers, and so error
| recovery isn 't necessary. Just print a message and exit.
|
| This works great. Large numbers of errors just go away,
| like "line length too long", "string literal too long",
| "too many cases in switch statement", "too many symbols",
| etc.
|
| There are, of course, still some limits, like the object
| file formats often have hard limits, and of course you
| don't want to overflow the program stack.
| kemayo wrote:
| > So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY
| fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what
| they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-
| literate person around them that could assist them if they
| could in fact identify the problem.
|
| It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from
| the book, but rather that Apple _didn 't_ follow it. They
| did hide away the error messages, but they didn't provide
| help and insight.
|
| If they had done so, you'd have (presumably) been told in
| the software that there was a problem with certain albums,
| and been walked through a flow that would fix said problem.
| Or maybe a link to a support page that'd do the same. This,
| if it was done, would have been much better than showing
| "error 0xFHJAD1234".
|
| Thus I think it's fairly good advice, as long as you read
| the "instead" as a critical instruction. You should
| eliminate opaque error messages _so long as_ you can
| provide help and insight for those cases you have removed.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| I don't mean to nitpick, but please refer to my comment
| regarding the inability of being able to inventory
| everything that can possibly go wrong in a computerized
| system. That's especially true given that if you take any
| successful engineering project, you'll see that its
| useful lifetime usually spans several individual
| engineering careers. Take something like Windows, or even
| Android for example. The people who were involved in its
| early days usually end up moving on to other projects.
| It's in fact not uncommon to change teams or companies
| every 3-5 years. There generally is no way for newcomers
| to understand everything about the system they're
| inheriting and they'll typically be encouraged not to
| break legacy stuff.
|
| So not only are systems increasingly complex, but those
| maintaining them at any given point in time likely don't
| understand them nearly enough to accomplish what you
| suggest: understand all potential outcomes and provide
| useful error recovery. Therefore, the "provide help and
| guidance" advice provided by Norman effectively becomes
| "silent failure" for those cases not anticipated by the
| current-day release team. And since anticipating all
| outcomes is by definition impossible, Norman's advice is
| awful.
| alistairSH wrote:
| For the example you gave, as a user, what would you do
| with "Error: 0xFHJAD1234"?
|
| The best you could do is report it to Apple (or whoever).
| But, the error alone doesn't achieve anything. You would
| have been better off with "Something broke, click here to
| send log to Apple." (which is roughly what the book
| recommends - replace the error with something
| actionable).
| kyaghmour wrote:
| I have copied-and-pasted the strangest of kernel errors,
| compiler errors, god-knows-what-obscure-tool errors, etc.
| over the past 20+ years into search engines and have
| almost always been delighted and amazed at how somehow
| someone somewhere at some point in time had not only
| encountered the same thing but actually wrote a
| description of possible root causes and potential
| solutions that often unstuck me right away. The success
| of a site like stackoverflow is exactly this.
|
| It turns out that if you actually do take the time to
| report the error, no matter how obscure it is, someone in
| a dark corner of the internet will spend enough time on
| it that they'll even see fit to document it for others to
| help their own selves out. And given that, per my initial
| post, nobody is smart enough to understand how the
| computer system/software they're creating is going to
| work under all circumstances, providing error verbosity
| is sometimes the most empowering thing you can give to
| your users.
| carapace wrote:
| I call it "Somebody Else Has Had This Problem". It's a
| heuristic that became useful starting about twenty years
| ago, eh? Before the internet you had to have (and write)
| fairly complete manuals for software, now you put the
| error message into a search engine and, hopefully,
| amortize the suffering.
|
| However, I suspect this has also made it easier to write
| and (kinda sorta) maintain larger and more complex
| systems. Like the phenomenon where you widen a road to
| ease traffic congestion and it works for a while but then
| encourages more traffic. The reduced cost of creating and
| maintaining complexity may have encouraged it overall.
|
| - - - -
|
| As an aside, can I quote you, like, on my blog?
|
| > in my line of work I have to be able to walk engineers
| I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way up to
| cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have a
| fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture
| works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have
| no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact,
| no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the
| best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow
| inventory every possible problem in a computerized system
| and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info
| is either ignorant or arrogant or both.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| That's an interesting take. Thanks for sharing. Sure, I
| can definitely see the "google this error" effect as
| having permitted a higher degree of complexity. Or, maybe
| to be more accurate, lowered the barrier to entry to
| create more complex systems. There are probably pros/cons
| to this. It takes less sophistication to build something
| very complex, thereby democratizing the ability of
| building sophisticated systems/services, but it also
| means there are many more complex systems out than there
| is a community of people who have a more-or-less "good"
| understanding of what they do and, possibly, whose
| overall behaviour is likely only partially understood by
| their own designers. Cue in all sorts of security
| implications, etc. Food for thought.
|
| I don't mind the quoting, but, just in terms of mental
| hygiene, I generally dislike posting unequivocal opinions
| on the internet ... because it's often come back to bite
| me ;) I'm especially skeptical of my own writing when I
| use labels such as "ignorant" or "arrogant". So long as
| you understand that I don't take myself very seriously, I
| mostly stand by that quote you mention.
| tremon wrote:
| You are making the same error as the book: assume that
| every user is non-knowledgeable, helpless and stupid, and
| that no user has access to a trusted expert to help them
| (whether for free or for a fee). And by designing for
| that error, it will become true. And knowledgeable,
| capable and smart people will resent you for it.
| c22 wrote:
| And then what? Is Apple going to receive the error log
| and dispatch a technician to your house to fix it?
|
| In my experience sending crash data to software companies
| has _never_ resulted in my satisfaction, nor has using
| some 'wizard' to diagnose an error. As alluded to above
| these systems are just not smart enough to actually know
| what's wrong. If the original programmers could create a
| fully automated flow to repair all error conditions then
| why bother notifying the user at all?
| rchaud wrote:
| Apple doesn't have to lift a finger beyond showing an
| error message with some kind of identifier. The user
| isn't expecting an onsite visit anyway. They can go to
| the local Apple store and explain the issue to an
| employee there, instead of wasting time trying to
| reproduce the error.
|
| If they're not tech-savvy (and you would never talk to
| Apple store employees besides at the checkout counter if
| you were), they likely won't be able to reproduce the
| error anyway. They'd fumble around trying to explain what
| went wrong, and the employee would run through multiple
| scenarios trying to reproduce it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Interestingly, sending crash data to open source projects
| often results in timely fixes.
|
| Sending them to large software companies does not have
| the same outcome. But then, that's certainly not a flaw
| with the format.
| throw10920 wrote:
| No, the best that you can do is _paste it into Google_.
|
| Giving a user an error ID gives them a partially-if-not-
| completely unique _identifier_ that they can then use to
| find other people struggling with the same error and
| possible solutions.
|
| This is _infinitely_ better than having _no_ error
| message and having to try to type different permutations
| of your symptoms into Google in order to try to win
| search engine bingo.
|
| Sure, if Apple quickly and responsively fixed issues,
| then you wouldn't need the error code. But, they don't!
| The problem is that "hide the error message and replace
| with actionable advice" only works in the idealistic case
| where the vendor will quickly fix the issue and/or the
| advice consistently fixes the problem. But, they don't,
| and it doesn't - the advice doesn't work unless
| implemented _flawlessly_ - it 's not robust.
|
| The _robust_ approach that will actually survive contact
| with the real world is "include an error message and ID
| code - even if you have to hide it behind a "more
| details" button".
| chipsa wrote:
| Or worse, the fix suggestion being wrong: "Please try
| again later", when the root cause is a misconfiguration,
| so it'll never work until the configuration is corrected.
| kemayo wrote:
| > And since anticipating all outcomes is by definition
| impossible, Norman's advice is awful.
|
| Yes, that's why I said that I read the advice as saying
| it should only be followed when you _can_ provide help
| and insight. You don 't have to do it in an all-or-
| nothing way.
|
| You can have common problems with a helpful flow that
| tells the user how to fix them. You can have less-common
| problems which just show an error code. Removing the
| error _without_ providing help is the problem here, and
| is the thing that I feel goes against the book 's advice.
| dpatru wrote:
| > It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice
| from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it.
| They did hide away the error messages, but they didn't
| provide help and insight.
|
| > If they had done so, you'd have (presumably) been told
| in the software that there was a problem with certain
| albums, and been walked through a flow that would fix
| said problem. Or maybe a link to a support page that'd do
| the same. This, if it was done, would have been much
| better than showing "error 0xFHJAD1234".
|
| The parent post addresses this: there are so many ways
| for for the system to fail that it's not feasible to
| "inventory every possible problem in a computerized
| system and then provide a graceful exit". So where an
| error is not gracefully handled, the system should allow
| for a human to see the error and solve the problem,
| rather than throw away the error.
|
| >> Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly
| good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet,
| I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how
| any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does.
| Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip
| designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every
| possible problem in a computerized system and then
| provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is
| either ignorant or arrogant or both. But since you've
| eliminated engineers from the design loop (see #1 above),
| no one will tell you you're full of it.
| kemayo wrote:
| > The parent post addresses this: there are so many ways
| for for the system to fail that it's not feasible to
| "inventory every possible problem in a computerized
| system and then provide a graceful exit". So where an
| error is not gracefully handled, the system should allow
| for a human to see the error and solve the problem,
| rather than throw away the error.
|
| Yes, that's what I said as well. It's why I said the
| problem was that Apple _didn 't_ follow the book's
| advice, insofar as they removed error messages without
| providing help for them... and so it's unfair for the
| grandparent-comment to blame the book when its rule
| wasn't followed.
| ars wrote:
| It's definitely fair to blame the book when the book
| gives advice that is impossible to follow.
|
| If it's not possible to always give help and advice,
| sometimes you have to give an error message and unless
| the book mentions that then it is definitely fair to
| blame the book.
| kemayo wrote:
| Eh, I read the book as presenting a maximalist vision: in
| a perfect world, all error messages would instead be help
| that lets you resolve your issue.
|
| Since it says to hide error messages and instead provide
| help, anyone who hides error messages and _doesn 't_
| provide help can't really be said to be following the
| book's advice. It feels wrong to me to blame the book for
| not, in every bit of advice it offers, saying "don't
| half-ass this incorrectly". That seems inherent to me.
| ars wrote:
| It's not a very useful book if it doesn't provide advice
| that works in the real world. I have not read the book -
| does it give advice on what to do if it's not possible to
| give help? Or does it just assume that it's always
| possible to be perfect?
| Finnucane wrote:
| In Ye Olde Dayes, Macs would in fact give you messages
| like "error 39!" when something went wrong. Only, in
| those days, there was almost no way to figure out what
| that meant.
| infogulch wrote:
| If you have to say "Oh it's good advice but you have to
| _interpret_ it right, " when the advice has an obvious
| misinterpretation pothole that clearly wrecks many
| prominent applications of it, maybe that reflects poorly
| on the original advice and indicates that it shouldn't be
| offered without the necessary critical context.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| It's perfectly reasonable to point out the second half of
| the sentence. "It says to provide help and insight" isn't
| law school levels of interpretation.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Why not just include an error code _and_ help and
| insight?
|
| That way, when the help and insight inevitably fails to
| solve the problem at some point, the user can still dump
| the error code into Google to see if other people have
| run into/solved the problem.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That book, IMNSHO, should be required reading for anyone that
| designs anything to be used by anyone.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Their managers should read it too, lots of bad products
| come from inflexible business requirements
| smilespray wrote:
| Last week, I bought ten copies of the book for everyone in
| our team -- regardless of role.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Better ship a copy with every product sold so the
| customer can properly appreciate what you've done
| gswdh wrote:
| Surely, they only need one each?
| dontcare007 wrote:
| And get rid of the bright external, useless leds! My room looks
| like a planetarium at night, since every device has to have a
| status light...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If it beeps, blinks, moves, or makes noise, it needs a _kill_
| switch!
| eternityforest wrote:
| Soft switches are fine if the power is really, really, low. For
| real.
|
| Like, if the battery is rechargeable, 5-25uA is pretty much zero
| drain.
|
| If it's disposable, you get about 1-5uA before it's A
| Problem(Because the only good use for a disposable is on stuff
| that only gets changed once in multiple years).
|
| In a lot of cases the switch is the least reliable part, and it
| makes case design harder, and maybe compromises waterproofing.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Beware of alkaline cell leakage, though. They fare much better
| if they are isolated when not used for long periods. But you
| could use a low self discharge rechargeable cell like NiMH
| instead of alkaline, of course.
| thealistra wrote:
| People say everything (and everything should have user
| replaceable batteries).
|
| I would not like a pacemaker with an off switch you can trigger
| by accident or have it have user replaceable batteries - seems
| dangerous to your health
| deanCommie wrote:
| I watch my Roku SmartTV about 3 times a week for about an hour or
| two (most of the rest is on my PC)
|
| During that time, I maybe tap the buttons a dozen times as i scan
| around to the app and the thing i want to watch.
|
| I have to replace the 2 AAA batteries inside that thing easily
| every 3 months. WHY.
| navbaker wrote:
| Number one on the list of "gifts your family can give you to make
| you hate them": the BeatBo[0] child's toy. It rolls around, has
| no on/off or volume control, and is motion/vibration activated,
| so it will indeed start blaring music and rolling around if you
| take actions like "walk across the floor".
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Bright-Beats-Tumble-
| Beat...
| memco wrote:
| An off switch is always handy. I have a monitor without a power
| button and so I can't shut it off without disconnecting it. It
| also makes it harder to troubleshoot when there's no signal: is
| it the power or data that's at fault? I'm not sure because
| there's no buttons at all so I just have to keep connecting and
| disconnecting cables until it works which is more difficult to
| discern because I'm looking at the back where the cables go
| rather than where the output is displayed.
| weberer wrote:
| Just plug it in to a power strip that has a switch.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > anyway the real problem is that I own a soldering iron and a
| willingness to void warranties.
|
| Yea, fair
| Kalium wrote:
| > Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as
| ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team
| about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are
| designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you
| cannot turn off.
|
| I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and
| design teams design primarily in an effort to impress _other
| designers_. They don 't have to use the things. They often don't
| even really care if the things work at all. They care that other
| designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.
|
| This does not generally result in what we the customers or users
| would regard as good design. The phenomenon reminds me of
| software engineers I've worked with who were more interested in
| building something with event sourcing and stream processing and
| functional languages rather than solving the problem more
| readily.
| gotaquestion wrote:
| It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects
| were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least,
| the client design requirements were).
|
| There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a
| billion units, and some company like this game controller
| design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think
| the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| Chris Bangle, who was the chief designer at BMW for the E65
| generation of 7 series and E46 generation of 3 series, said
| that he was designing to the other designers. Which is why he
| ignored the feedback that the E65 was ugly. The term "Bangle
| Butt" was applied to the E65. His successor took the radical
| position that this thing called "beauty" was important. I don't
| have sources at hand but it was discussed in print and web
| publications of the consumer side of the auto industry.
| joshAg wrote:
| Sometimes they're not entirely wrong though. The E46 design
| is now decently well-regarded by many car enthusiasts.
| Granted, I'm probably not the best person to ask about BMW
| aesthetics since I think the best looking one they've made is
| the clownshoe and thought the hood bulge was exceptionally
| lazy.
| hatware wrote:
| >The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65
|
| It was applied to a lot more than that. Even the F11 6er
| still had it.
|
| What is interesting, though, is how much flame surfacing
| started to flood car designs after Bangle's BMWs had been out
| for a few years. I'm not arguing that the E65 looked good,
| but he certainly made an impact on all of car design,
| seemingly overnight.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625.
| anonymousab wrote:
| This used to be how I assumed that awful UX keeps coming about,
| repeating the same mistakes and then making new ones by
| removing existing conveniences for no clear reason. But surely,
| I thought, I must be assuming the worst of an assuredly more
| rational situation.
|
| I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista
| through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior
| negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks
| who think they know better than anyone who uses their product;
| people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they
| ostensibly work on, in any given day.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Does anyone remember Office 2013 with the UPPER CASE MENUS?
|
| They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM
| TOO.
|
| That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed
| Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked
| like errors.
|
| Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so
| FILE and File look like two different things. It was a
| constant irritant.
|
| The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new
| design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of
| complaints about the uppercase menus.
|
| The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback.
| We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more
| energy in this part of the interface."
|
| More energy. I am not making this up.
|
| They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases
| of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed
| Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the
| beginning.
|
| (Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not
| for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)
| justin_oaks wrote:
| > We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want
| more energy in this part of the interface.
|
| Translation: Here is vague explanation that distracts from
| the fact that I made this choice emotionally rather than
| rationally.
|
| I see this time and time again. People are simply reacting
| emotionally. If they try to explain why they behaved a
| certain way, they offer an explanation with something that
| sounds rational but isn't actually the reason.
|
| In this case, the designer probably was hurt that people
| didn't like their work and stubbornly resisted it.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _" We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want
| more energy in this part of the interface."_
|
| It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort
| of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the
| engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw
| ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst
| engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design
| abilities of all engineers. But form _needs_ to be balanced
| with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify
| everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a
| disaster. There needs to be balance.
|
| Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces
| designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and
| guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating
| interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't
| satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just
| look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with
| the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an
| engineer designing an interface would use a button widget
| and the button would _look like a button_. Today designers
| make everything look sleek and special to leave their
| artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can
| even click.
| Animats wrote:
| _Design needs to be given back over to the engineers
| again._
|
| No, no, then you get the open source approach:
|
| _In case the desktop shortcut for your application is
| not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory
| you have and option to create the Desktop launcher
| manually. In this example we will create and Desktop
| application shortcut for Skype application. Obtain the
| following information for any given application you wish
| to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:_
| Path Application Icon:
| /snap/skype/101/meta/gui/skypeforlinux.png
| Application name: Skype Path to executable
| binary: /snap/bin/skype
|
| _To obtain a full path to executable binary of any
| program use the which command eg.:_ $
| which skype /snap/bin/skype
|
| _In regards to the application icon, the choice is yours.
| You can either head over to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/
| directory and search for any relevant icon to use, or
| simply download new icon from the web. Now that we have
| all the necessary information, create a new file
| Skype.desktop within ~/Desktop directory using your
| favourite text editor and paste the following lines as
| part of the file's content. Change the code where
| necessary to fit your application specific details._
| robonerd wrote:
| Yeah yeah, typical. _" it's easy and popular to point to
| the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the
| design abilities of all engineers."_
|
| The general dysfunction of open source design is much
| broader than UI design and has little to do with
| engineers in general being incapable of good UI design.
| You might as well linux bluetooth woes to claim that
| engineers shouldn't be allowed to write device drivers.
| Whether it's designing a GUI, an API, or any other
| system, there will be some engineers who are good at it
| an others who suck. To get good design _of any sort_ out
| of engineers you need an organizational structure that
| promotes talent and weeds out the hacks. The open source
| scene broadly lacks such structure and struggles to do
| this.
|
| What you're talking about is a deficiency with community
| driven model of development, not a general deficiency of
| all engineers. Put 20 random chefs into a kitchen with no
| organizational structure imposed on them and your
| restaurant will be a disaster. But using that to claim
| chefs can't run a restaurant is absurd.
| rzzzt wrote:
| A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-
| al...
| robonerd wrote:
| > _1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction
| of other Microsoft user experiences_
|
| In other words, _we jumped off this bridge because all
| our friends did to._ Consistency... with other Microsoft
| products. What a joke. What about consistency with
| virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd
| parties and Microsoft 's own history? Citing consistency
| to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm
| is truly insulting.
| donmcronald wrote:
| It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know
| better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused
| to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on,
| in any given day.
|
| The default white title bars that blend seamlessly into any
| white content behind them is a perfect example of this and so
| many people don't even realize they can change it.
|
| Windows usability has declined since Windows 7 which had a
| lot of things that seemed like the designers were trying to
| improve their own lives while using the software. My favorite
| was the thick borders that were easy to grab for resizing,
| etc., even on high DPI displays. Compare it to Linux UIs
| where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k
| monitor to resize a window.
|
| Thankfully Win 10 still has large targets for grabbing window
| edges even though the border is only 1px.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a
| single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window._
|
| On Linux you hold the super/windows key and click/drag
| anywhere on the window to move it, or right-click/drag
| anywhere on the window to resize it. It's _much_ easier
| than using thick borders. Discoverability is admittedly not
| great, but this feature easily coexists with window
| borders. Microsoft could keep the thick borders by default
| and also implement this.
| efitz wrote:
| Translation:
|
| "Don't do it the way everyone else does it or the way
| you've always done it; our designer decided to make that
| hard for <inscrutable reasons not related to delighting
| existing users> and instead we offer this hard-to-
| discover non-idiomatic workaround.
|
| "You will grow to love the workaround because it doesn't
| hurt nearly as much, kind of like stopping after you've
| been hitting yourself in the head with a hammer."
| robonerd wrote:
| I guess you (deliberately) missed the part where the two
| features coexist perfectly fine. There is no _" "Don't do
| it the way everyone else does it"_, you pulled that out
| of your ass. All the Linux DEs worth mentioning have
| draggable window borders that are familiar to any Windows
| or MacOS user. The default width of those borders varies,
| but thick borders by default are common.
| rstat1 wrote:
| I think you've just described the "design" philosophy of
| GNOME.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers
| and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other
| designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't
| even really care if the things work at all. They care that
| other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.
|
| I've been a designer for about a long time. I've done many dumb
| things, but never that. I have definitely had the irrational
| thought that "users will think I'm a bad designer if we ship
| this product", but that's usually because it was a bad product
| that shouldn't have been shipped.
|
| I've never gotten the sense that my peers do this either. I
| have definitely gotten the sense that some designers want their
| designs to impress Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically.
|
| Everybody wants to impress their peers to some degree, but to
| be clear, that usually translates into just doing a really good
| job. I've never had another designer show me something and say
| "Nobody else will appreciate this, but I thought you'd like
| it".
| psygn89 wrote:
| Agreed. I find dumb design usually comes from two pools:
| inexperienced designers and cost cutting measures. What's a
| switch to a company but another point of failure that they
| can't as readily blame the user on?
| arinlen wrote:
| > I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers
| and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other
| designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't
| even really care if the things work at all. They care that
| other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.
|
| To put things in perspective, this is how we get stuff like the
| Eiffel tower.
| mega_dingus wrote:
| The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary display for the
| World's Fair. It was very much intentionally designed to
| impress other designers; that was kind of the point
| arinlen wrote:
| > _The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary display for
| the World 's Fair. It was very much intentionally designed
| to impress other designers; that was kind of the point_
|
| I'm not sure I got the point across. The whole point is
| that focusing on design is how we get outstanding, high-
| quality results. It makes the product more appealing and
| can even make it transcend it's status. High quality design
| creates value with negligible impact on cost.
|
| The Eiffel Tower exemplifies that. It was designed as a
| temporary exhibition but it's impact transcends that of a
| mere temporary structure. It became the landmark of a
| European capital, and the symbol of one of the richest,
| most successful and culturally dominant nations on earth,
| and in the process generates fortunes in revenue due to
| tourism.
|
| Another good example is the Sagrada Familia cathedral in
| Barcelona, or pretty much each of Gaudi's work. Even the
| Gaudi's Park Guell, which failed as a real estate project,
| is a resounding landmark and tourist attraction.
| gumby wrote:
| Which I never saw the point of, even (especially?) during my
| periods of living in Paris.
| mongol wrote:
| It is probably among top 5 most recognizable buildings in
| the world. I see a point in that.
| zippergz wrote:
| Do you also not see the point of art?
| gumby wrote:
| Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical
| show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think
| it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore.
|
| I think most people disagree with me so I don't think
| it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _But now I think it 's just a humdrum industrial
| eyesore._
|
| That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually
| it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many
| cities rushing to build their own.
| wk_end wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and
| _de...
| robonerd wrote:
| I know, I've seen a few of those. Most of them are tiny
| replicas built ironically for the novelty factor. Besides
| the ones built for tourist traps, most are justified as
| radio towers. But as radio towers the design is laughably
| obsolete. Compare with guyed masts, which virtually every
| developed town and city around the world has numerous
| examples of.
| superlopuh wrote:
| Turned out to be useful in WWI
| macksd wrote:
| Which is beautiful, but is absolutely not something I would
| ever choose to pay for.
| yawz wrote:
| Sacre bleu!
| Animats wrote:
| Learn to talk to designers. Have a copy of _Tog on Interface_
| around. Know about Fitts ' Law. Know who Susan Kare is.[1] Know
| what Bang and Olufsen audio gear looks like. (They took the
| black-on-black look to the extreme. Designers really like that
| look. You can't find the controls.)
|
| Go on to learn what Bauhaus architecture looks like, how that
| led to modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, then Mies Van Der Rohe,
| then brutalism, and finally Frank Gehry in ridiculous mode.[2]
| Understand why this didn't result in liveable cities.
|
| Then you can talk to designers.
|
| [1] kare.com
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...
| zanellato19 wrote:
| Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this,
| tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress
| the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most
| impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like
| this one
| yawz wrote:
| I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14
| years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was
| more interested in impressing each other than solving real
| problems.
| Joeri wrote:
| I have to say that scala was the most fun in programming
| I've had. You can make beautifully elegant code, that is oh
| so clever. It is easy to get seduced into thinking about
| elegant code instead of good solutions.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, every profession does that to some degree. But most
| professionals are impressed by things that make the results
| of their work better, even if at completely unreasonable
| costs.
|
| Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by
| things that make the results of their work worse. That leads
| to completely different problems.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Literally every industry has industry circle jerks like that.
|
| You always get _some_ people who build asinine crap in order so
| show off their "mastery" of their craft. It's just that
| product design and web development have more money sloshing
| around to provide for that kind of indulgence than residential
| plumbing and semi trailer manufacturing do.
| lynx09 wrote:
| What about pacemakers? If that is the exception, then not
| everything with a battery needs an off switch.
| timothyduong wrote:
| I had this same thought.
|
| Also quartz wrist watches.
|
| Turn that quartz watch into an automatic that you wear
| seldomly. (Aka you need to readjust the time each time you wear
| it!)
| Nanite wrote:
| Examples lying around in my house:
|
| Bathroom scale: lovely it powers up when you tap it, but eats up
| 2 button cells a year for a few dozen uses a year
|
| Kitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2
| button cells a year
|
| electronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just
| sitting in my toolbox
|
| Strangely enough none of our kids toys with batteries seem to
| suffer from this problem
|
| How much extra cost does a hard on/off switch add to the bill of
| materials?
| parenthesis wrote:
| What's wrong with mechanical bathroom and kitchen scales?
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I tried to get such a kitchen scale and couldn't find one
| that wasn't either highly imprecise or ridiculously expensive
| (like three digit euros)
|
| If you have a vintage one that is reasonably exact, they're
| great.
| ilammy wrote:
| You cooking meth there or something? It's a kitchen scale,
| I doubt you'd need _that_ much of precision from it.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Ever tried baking with some of your ingredients 20-30%
| off? Doesn't work well for lots of recipes. What's even
| worse is when the error isn't a linear x%, but changes
| with increasing weight.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I use the kitchen scales (and a smaller set of digital
| scales) for measuring out things like resin where you do
| need a reasonable degree of precision, especially when
| you're measuring out small amounts e.g. 5g of A and 6g of
| B.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| yep, also been doing that, mixing epoxy requires good
| accuracy.
|
| that being said, UK police considers kitchen scales as
| evidence that you were dealing drugs
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Both bathroom and kitchens scales are large enough they can run
| on AA / AAA batteries and casually go a decade (or more)
| without replacement.
|
| Tangentially: I used to have a 3 button timer, it was a little
| LCD countdown display and 3 buttons. One button set hours, one
| minutes, and one starts / stops the countdown timer. I found
| this timer when I was a kid, used, and the 1 AAA battery it had
| lasted into adulthood, literally decades. I have since bought
| almost the exact same device - 3 buttons, one display - a few
| different times and the newer ones only last a year on the same
| battery.
|
| What's going on here? Presumably someone designed a new 3
| button timer, since they can't just steal an existing
| schematic, and I guess just nobody cares to make it good? Why
| don't all 3 button timers last multiple decades on a AAA
| battery?
|
| I've seen the same thing with other small electronics, like the
| dozen or so stopwatches I've owned in my life. A few of them go
| strong for decades, others have their LCD display start fading
| in a year.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| > Both bathroom and kitchens scales are large enough they can
| run on AA / AAA batteries and casually go a decade (or more)
| without replacement.
|
| For bathroom scales, sometimes the design doesn't permit
| batteries larger than button cells, since the entire scale is
| a piece of tempered glass with four 1/4" tall feet and a
| lighted LCD display that shines through the glass. I like
| this particular design because it's thin enough to fit under
| a door as it swings. Batteries in my scale last over a year
| with near-daily use, and mine has a very bright display.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| My relatives have a similar type of bathroom scale.
|
| When the button cell ran out, I popped in another one we
| had lying around.
|
| One month later, the button cell was dead, after using the
| scale a handful of times. Obviously something was draining
| the button cell battery when the scale wasn't in use.
|
| I could try and debug the scale, but given that even ten
| minutes of investigation would be more than the amount of
| time I spent using the scale in one year, I just decided to
| remove the button cell when the scale wasn't being used.
|
| Two years later, that button cell still works in the
| scale...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| i have read that the build quality of batteries has dropped.
| schroeding wrote:
| I have a digital LCD clock, a giveaway by NTT from a trade
| fair, that still works with the same single Maxell AA
| battery since 1998. The battery quality must have been
| amazing at the time, or the clock uses almost no power. I
| honestly don't know how that's possible. :D
| titzer wrote:
| I remember getting a digital watch in a box of cereal in
| ~1990 or so. That thing lasted 10+ years on just the
| battery inside it.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Ine the same way designers discussed above try and big
| dick their designs, clocks when through some EE big
| dicking on trying to minimize battery usage. Same thing
| with LCDs.
|
| They got them to really low power usage. Some of the ones
| today would basically last your whole life on a single
| button cell.
| narag wrote:
| I have this ultracheap made-in-China big kitchen clock,
| with a single AA that I've replaced twice in eight years. I
| don't buy expensive batteries, more like in line with the
| clock.
|
| It has second hand (the kind that doesn't tick but appears
| to move uniformly) so there is some extra mechanical work.
| progbits wrote:
| I think the quality is hit and miss, even with premium
| batteries. I had enough devices damaged or entirely
| ruined by a leaked battery so now I remove them from
| anything not actively used.
|
| If anyone knows a reliable model for AA/AAA cells that
| will absolutely not leak when left unused in a device for
| year+ I would love to hear it.
| wpearse wrote:
| We switched to buying USB-rechargeable AA/AAA lithium ion
| batteries. The brand we buy is Pale Blue, but there are
| many other brands.
|
| These batteries have a regular form factor, with an added
| micro USB (and USB C on some larger battery sizes) port
| for recharging. They work really well for us and charge
| quickly (and conveniently -- everything has a USB socket
| nowadays).
|
| The price may seem expensive, but after 10 or so charge
| cycles they should have paid for themselves. I expect
| these batteries will be good for many hundreds of charge
| cycles.
| fnimick wrote:
| I wouldn't recommend this personally, having had bad
| experiences with poor charge circuitry in integrated
| chargers like these (in my case it was in a 18650
| battery). Get a good charger (e.g. eneloop), and then you
| can get generic rechargeable batteries incredibly
| inexpensively for it, without risking poor charge
| management causing overheating or battery failure.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Why use those instead of 'normal' rechargeables? Invest
| in a battery charger once and each battery will be
| cheaper.
|
| The only USB chargeable ones I use are 9-volt batteries,
| those are awkward and I dont want to replace my charger
| BugWatch wrote:
| Get IKEA's LADDA rechargeable NiMH, they are a rebrand of
| Eneloops, the some of the highest quality NiMH batteries
| available, and are made in Japan; all tests on YouTube
| and elsewhere consistently put them at the top of the
| line.
|
| They have very low self-dishcharge rate (and even come
| precharged in packaging) and with recharge cycles ranging
| from 500 (for the highest capacity 2450 mAh AA ones) to
| up to 1000 (for 750 mAh AA/1900 mAh AAA ones). Also, they
| do not leak.
| buescher wrote:
| Energizer lithium. It's what I put in nice things I use
| infrequently.
| grosswait wrote:
| I've had much better experience with energizer not
| leaking while Duracell is terrible. Searching the net for
| other experiences, I found some prepper forums discussing
| this and apparently Duracell tries to extract so much
| capacity from the cell they sacrifice wall and end
| thickness causing them to leak.
|
| I don't think anyone can say they absolutely won't leak,
| but search these types of forums/subreddits and you find
| other recommendations as well.
| mod wrote:
| I buy a lot of those little timers for my business. They get
| pretty heavy use, maybe running timers for about 6 hours per
| day. They don't last anywhere near decades for us.
|
| Anyway, my insight is simply that some of them turn off the
| LCD after a while of non-use, and some of them keep it on
| indefinitely. Maybe that explains the difference between your
| two experiences.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The timer I had never turned off the LCD. I found it in
| early elementary school and the same battery was still
| going strong when I got married in my late 20s. So it
| lasted 15+ years on a single AAA battery.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I had the same exp. One I bought in the mid 90s. That
| original battery that came with it lasted nearly 10 years.
| Then another 5 with the new battery. I retired it when the
| plastic casing came apart. The LCD never turned off. That
| thing was a tank.
|
| The newer ones I am lucky to get a year out of the battery.
| Even using the on/off switch.
| tzs wrote:
| I've noticed something similar with remote controls.
| Receivers, CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray players, TVs,
| cable boxes...almost every one I've ever bought came with
| batteries that lasted for many years. Sometimes longer
| than the device the remote controlled.
|
| Then, when the remote needs new batteries and I put in
| the batteries sold in US stores they would last a year or
| two.
|
| The batteries that came with these devices were brands
| I'd never heard of and never seen at any store in the US.
| Usually they had lots of Japanese-looking writing on them
| and little English except for the brand name.
| buescher wrote:
| I've noticed this too. A couple things:
|
| 1) The OEM battery was probably fresher than the one that
| wound its way through retail distribution and then sat in
| a drawer at your house for longer than you realize
|
| 2) By the time you have to replace a battery, your
| remote's PCB has had time to adsorb water and
| contaminants from the air, get soda spilled on it, etc
| and is going to have higher leakage. It will then always
| draw more current in standby.
| Cd00d wrote:
| Batteries are sold with an expiration date on the package,
| and I don't think that's usually _decades_ out.
|
| In the 80s I remember seeing expiry dates on AA packs of 99,
| and my child-brain thought they didn't expire so they put a
| meaningless number there instead - I couldn't process the
| idea of the year 1999.
| whynotkeithberg wrote:
| Sounds like nearly decades to me if buying in 80's and have
| an expiration of 99... Just because a childlike brain of
| hours can't understand that sort of time doesn't mean it's
| not literally decades.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I have a oven thermometer that has two active parts which are
| linked via some sort of wireless system.
|
| One part is the one you plug the actual thermal probes into,
| and that then transmits data to a separate display. You can
| turn that one off.
|
| Then there is the separate display that lights up and beeps and
| what have you: this one _doesn 't_ turn off, presumably so you
| can admire it say "--" whenever you're not actively measuring
| the temperature of something...
| lultimouomo wrote:
| > electronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just
| sitting in my toolbox
|
| Had the same problem; got a good Vernier caliper, never looked
| back. Some things just don't need batteries!
| mod wrote:
| I did the same! And now every time I go to use the thing I
| have to look up how to read it again.
|
| I don't do highly accurate work very often, obviously.
|
| I don't like buying non-rechargeable batteries, though, so
| cell batteries are out.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I agree. They're not _difficult_ to read but they 're
| definitely more of a pain than replacing a battery once a
| year.
|
| A dial caliper is better than a vernier caliper anyway.
| Still more of a pain to read than a digital one.
| pards wrote:
| I bought an RF pet tracker last year that comes with
| rechargeable CR 2032 batteries and a charger [0]. The
| rechargeable batteries factored highly in my decision-
| making process.
|
| [0]: https://www.girafus.com/en/products/charger-batteries/
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Also one sold by the Pi-hut:
| https://thepihut.com/products/lithium-ion-coin-cell-
| charger
|
| After someone nicked my electronic calipers, I also got
| mechanical ones - they are perfectly adequate for all
| home use so far.
|
| I used to use electric ones for 3D prints and designs,
| and haven't tries that since - might not be able to get
| the same perfect results with mechanical ones.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It comes down to the electronic design: specifically, low
| current draw when "asleep". Obviously it's possible to make
| electronics that costume a tiny amount of power (think quartz
| watch that lasts for years with a very small button cell). It's
| just poor workmanship by the designers or penny-pinching.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > Kitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2
| button cells a year
|
| I had a kitchen scale that would eat through its battery pretty
| quickly (within a month) even when not being used. I figured it
| could be an interesting project to open it up and try to figure
| out where the stray power draw was happening, but the obviously
| correct solution was just to leave the battery cover off and
| pop it in and out for regular use.
|
| Anyway my current kitchen scale was given to me as a present
| and has a mini-usb input to charge an internal battery. I
| personally found it to be a bit overkill, but at least I
| wouldn't need to get a new battery all the time. Then I
| realized that it can't be used when plugged in and charging. As
| in even if it is fully charged, it will not work when plugged
| in a charging. I can't believe that design idiocy. The
| engineers/managers/everyone involved in the production of this
| product should be ashamed.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I have Sony WH-1000X M3 noise cancelling fancy pancy wireless
| headphones and they can't charge and be used at the same time
| either! It is lunacy. Is there some cracy cheap charging chip
| that has this drawback? The headphones were very expansive
| still ...
| driverdan wrote:
| While I don't disagree the battery in them lasts forever.
| Charge them while you sleep.
| aphroz wrote:
| Maybe that's a security feature, as you probably don't want
| the lithium battery to explode near your head.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The electronics industry is sleeping on the job, because
| they have not defined standard sizes for consumer grade
| lithium batteries (that means with an inbuilt protection
| circuit). All headphones, etc. should be using standard
| batteries.
|
| I have just replaced a battery on my laptop, it completely
| failed after 2.5 years of use - they are a consumable, not
| a durable good. All headphones, gaming mice, etc. are
| headed straight for the landfill when their battery fails,
| it is impractical to replace that inbuilt lipo cell as it
| has custom size and shape, etc.
|
| I buy devices with replaceable batteries whereever
| possible.
| lhoff wrote:
| I have the same headphones and that is not the only quirk
| thats driving me nuts. It doesn't remember the last noise
| canceling setting i used. I almost always use them at home
| so i don't need NC but every time I turn them on its in NC
| Mode and I have to press the button twice.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Maybe you have it set to autodetect the current setting.
| You can set presets for sitting/walking/in transit, and
| it dynamically switches between them.
| rebuilder wrote:
| I dropped my kitchen scale and it broke, so I had to go
| shopping for a new one. Which was kind of fine since that
| scale wasn't great. But finding a good scale turns out to be
| pretty hard!
|
| In the end I found some review that compares different scales
| and as a reference they used an entry-level lab scale. So I
| figured, hey, why don't I just buy the benchmark scale? It
| costs about the same anyway.
|
| So now I have an ugly German lab scale that actually has an
| off button and runs on a 9v battery. Here's hoping I never
| have to buy another.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the secret for lots of these things; if you step
| slightly above "home use" you can often find
| industrial/commercial products that will work just fine -
| though do be aware of the limitations in some.
|
| Or you could go with fully mechanical balance scales.
| thfuran wrote:
| I know what you mean, but I prefer to picture them trying
| to fit a massive equal arm balance and stack of reference
| dumbbells in their bathroom.
| chippiewill wrote:
| They should have taken the apple approach and put the
| charging port on the bottom so you couldn't even lay it flat
| on its bottom with the charger plugged in.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Strangely enough none of our kids toys with batteries seem to
| suffer from this problem
|
| we have some toys around where the way to turn it off would be
| to unscrew the battery compartment and take out the battery.
| The toy cuckoo clock that the kid broke that now goes cuckoo at
| odd times was fun, but hmm, nobody can seem to find it in the
| house anymore, wonder what happened to it.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Regarding Kitchen Scale:
|
| I recently bought this [1]. It works with friction - you turn
| the nob once or twice and you're good to go for a couple weigh
| ins. It feels rather cheap - so let's see if it really lasts. I
| love the idea though. I wish we had more energy harvesting
| gadgets like this.
|
| [1]; https://caso-design.de/en/p/caso-kitchen-energy-design-
| kitch...
| stinos wrote:
| Have had a similar model for like 5 years now. No regrets
| yet. The small effort it takes to power it up by far
| outweighs all of the disadvantages of a battery.
|
| Before that I installed a switch in the scale we had to
| erradicate battery drain.
| bombcar wrote:
| Since scales inherently involve putting weight on them it
| should be possible to use that weight to push down a plunger
| generating enough electricity to run for the weigh-in.
|
| A spring would then reset it for the next time.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If there's a plunger resisting the scale going down to
| harvest energy, that would prevent all the force from being
| on the load cell, giving you incorrect readings.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Not if the plunger rests on the load cell. Then plunger
| just captures the work done as it is compressed, it
| doesn't reduce the force that passes through it (once at
| equilibrium.)
| ars wrote:
| You can put the switch in between the plate and the force
| sensor.
|
| Then all the force is on the sensor and is also a switch.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| Couldn't you subtract the resistance of the plunger and
| display the adjusted value?
| bbarn wrote:
| I love the idea, but the non-flat top, and the display on the
| flat top kill it (and admittedly, most cheap kitchen scales)
| for me. If I can't put a big bowl on it and still see the
| readout it's useless to me.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I haven't used one so not going to pick one to link, but a
| quick search finds scales that claim to run on ambient
| light.
|
| Based on a 30 year old calculator I have, I would expect
| them to work fine.
| Arrath wrote:
| When I was a child my parents had a purely mechanical scale,
| with a dial to adjust the zero.
|
| Yet another case of why fix what isn't broken. Only, I expect
| that an IC or two and an lcd to run a digital scale are
| cheaper at volume than some amount of mechanical clockwork,
| once the cost of batteries is pushed off on to the consumer.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| A quick glance at Amazon seems to confirm your intuition.
| The cheapest mechanical scale I can find is $32 but there
| are lots of electronic ones for ~$15.
| Jolter wrote:
| We used to have one like that, too, and I don't remember it
| being capable of single-gram accuracy like my cheap IKEA
| scales are.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The kids toys are probably all manufactured by VTech which has
| solved this problem once across all of their products
| Accacin wrote:
| I had some digital bathroom scales, and I weigh myself pretty
| much every morning. The battery lasted a month, and those
| button cells are pretty expensive.
|
| I decided to take it to be recycled and just bought a
| mechanical one. It was a little annoying at first as it's not
| as precise, but for my purposes that works fine.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| All of those are ones I would argue the best design is to eat a
| few batteries a year. Calipers need to hold memory
| specifically.
|
| But more generally most of those are using alkaleak batteries
| and you really wanna be changing those out on at least a yearly
| basis. So it actually makes since to let them have a small
| always on drain. (Some might be using a 2032 lithium but I can
| almost guarantee at least the calipers are a 357/lr44 alkaline
| battery.)
| Retr0id wrote:
| Memory of what?
| regularfry wrote:
| The zero set-point, usually.
| mod wrote:
| Probably which position the zero is at, and maybe which
| measurement system you're using.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > Calipers need to hold memory specifically.
|
| You don't need power to retain a tiny bit of settings data.
|
| I believe the real reason is because most of them have the
| "helpful feature" of turning on when you move it. Without
| something monitoring the sensor, no way to know to turn on
| automatically.
| NavinF wrote:
| No, most calipers can only do relative measurements. It's
| constantly counting how many 0.01mm the head has moved so
| it doesn't lose track of where 0mm is located. Turning on
| the LCD when the volatile counter changes value is a free
| feature since the mcu is always on.
|
| Of course better calipers do absolute measurements, but
| they're too expensive to scribe lines with and therefore
| useless for hobbyists.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| When started to live in my own appartemen and was the first
| time sick, I bought a thermometer to measure fever. The second
| time when I was sick a couple of years later the battery was
| flat. So I bought an oldschool thermometer without battery to
| measure fever. I use still the same 20 years later. Of course
| it does take a bit longer to know your body temperature, but
| when you are sick, you are not in a hurry anyway.
| lapsis_beeftech wrote:
| Get Vernier calipers! The scale is easy to learn and use and
| measurements will be at least as precise as electronic
| calipers. With no batteries required the tool has much less of
| an environmental impact and you never need to worry about
| whether the calipers will work or not.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| There are also calipers with a dial.
|
| https://www.otelo.fr/waroot/images/products/600/40130350_A.g.
| ..
| blacksmythe wrote:
| I have a very cheap plastic one with a dial, which works
| amazing well for the cost (<$10). I don't remember where I
| bought it, but it looks like this one:
| https://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-900003
| mlatu wrote:
| it doesnt even have to be a mitutoyo to get you down to
| 0.01mm precision, i got mine for about 40euros. Using
| equipment i had access to at work i checked that rating and
| indeed: the tool i got is good for measuring at that scale,
| and you really dont need any electronics.
|
| Usually you can pay the vendor to calibrate the tool for a
| couple bucks more.
|
| of course digital ones are much, much easier to read, but
| you only really feel that convenience when having to
| measure hundreds of items quickly to sort them into a tray
| or something...
|
| And in the end, usually a Nonius type caliper is good
| enough anyways, and skilled users can read those to up to
| 0.02mm... and thats already pretty good and most of the
| time: good enough
|
| and in case you do need to know the length of something
| down to a micron, there are other tools for that with less
| sources for measuring errors
|
| so yeah: mechanical calipers rock and: you dont have to
| always get the brand things to get what you need
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Get Vernier calipers! The scale is easy to learn
|
| Yep.
|
| > and use
|
| Nope, not once you get old and tiny things are increasingly
| difficult to read with or without assistance.
| lapsis_beeftech wrote:
| Fair enough, usability will obviously be poor if the scale
| is difficult to read. My eyesight is terrible but at least
| it is still all myopia so I can compensate by putting the
| calipers extremely close to my eyes. Looks awkward and
| people call me Mr. Magoo but it works!
| pvillano wrote:
| there are also 3D printed mods that add a switch
| jrockway wrote:
| It's just the cheap no-name calipers that eat batteries.
| Genuine Mitutoyo (and probably similar brands) treat their
| batteries very kindly.
|
| I have used vernier calipers but the time savings of not
| having to scrutinize the vernier scale every time you take a
| measurement is quite worthwhile. Just buy a good set.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > electronic caliper: Same, eats up 1 button cell a year, just
| sitting in my toolbox
|
| ooo a chance to plug one of my favorite youtubers; I believe
| it's this video [0] that compares cheap with expensive / brand
| digital calipers; the TL;DR is that the expensive ones use much
| less when off, or, the cheap ones use 4x as much. They both
| keep using power when off though, so that when you move the
| calipers while off it will still measure the distance.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnDype-j3hk
| nrp wrote:
| This seems to be common in battery powered test equipment. I
| have a decade old Fluke multimeter and five year old Mitutoyo
| calipers that both seem to be powered by magic. Neither has
| needed battery replacement despite regular use.
| criddell wrote:
| Things that sit for much of the year I tend to remove the
| batteries when possible because I assume the batteries will
| leak.
|
| It might not be true, but it feels like battery quality has
| gone downhill recently (especially AA and AAA). I had very few
| leaks from the late 90's to about 2015. Since then, a lot more.
| [deleted]
| nickff wrote:
| > _" How much extra cost does a hard on /off switch add to the
| bill of materials?"_
|
| BoM cost is not the whole story; a physical switch can greatly
| complicate an assembly, and may require hand-soldered wires. In
| addition to those cost-related factors, external switches are
| usually quite ugly, and getting them right can be very
| challenging, so it's much easier to just omit them.
| newsclues wrote:
| And on off switches can result in a call to support ($) or
| negative reviews when idiots can't turn it on.
| SilasX wrote:
| In contrast to users who look for one but don't find it,
| who don't call support?
| ggm wrote:
| I think this is special pleading. At the volume we're
| discussing a surface mount flow solder on off device is not
| going to kill the BoM, and could be designed not to be ugly.
|
| It's no different to any other bad design. It could be
| better.
|
| All phones and computers can be completely powered down.
| They're hardly ugly switches.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > I think this is special pleading.
|
| This is an emotional, low-quality response to what is a
| measured comment actually providing nuance to the
| discussion.
|
| The parent poster is very clearly _not_ saying that leaving
| off the power switch leads to a better experience for the
| consumer - they 're just giving legit reasons that a
| design/marketing team might use to justify doing so. Please
| don't try to cheapen the knowledge that they provided like
| this.
| m_eiman wrote:
| > All phones and computers can be completely powered down.
| They're hardly ugly switches.
|
| iPhones (and I assume most Androids as well) can't be
| completely powered off. Neither can Macbooks. In fact, I'd
| guess that most modern digital things with non-replaceable
| batteries can't be powered off.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a specific Dell laptop reset procedure that
| requires you to open the case and disconnect the battery
| so you can then press and hold the power button to get it
| to discharge all residual power. It's a pain.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I had to do this a couple of times with a Lenovo that
| sometimes locked up completely when it went to suspend -
| battery was highly inaccessible so it was a 30 minute
| tense process each time - firmware update eventually
| solved the problem. Not sure what the solution for this
| is - something like one of those paper clip reset holes?
| abofh wrote:
| Ermm, most phones and computers cannot be completely
| powered down. Either by nit-picking (CMOS clocks) or soft-
| switches (ACPI, soft button power-on), there's always some
| voltage in the system unless your PSU comes with an actual
| hard power switch (and even then, again, CMOS).
|
| They consume a lot _less_ power, but leave an 'off' phone
| in a drawer for a month starting at 100%, it will not be
| 100% when you 'turn it on'.
| unwind wrote:
| I understand and agree, but the use-case is a bit skewed
| since that's not even true for a bare "naked" battery or
| cell.
|
| They all self-discharge [1], some chemistries more than
| others of course but phone batteries certainly do.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discharge
| Retric wrote:
| Self discharge is easily an order of magnitude slower
| than the power draw of these devices while seemingly off.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| In low-power mode even those microcontrollers are using
| just nA (yes that's nano-Amps). Vs 100's of mA in
| operation. So the battery life goes from hours to what
| should be decades.
|
| I'm thinking the battery goes dead because of leakage
| currents through the rest of the circuits, which were
| probably not designed to the nA standard.
|
| A solid-state Off switch would also need a good silicon
| device to cut current consumption at the battery. Which
| also costs something.
| kuu wrote:
| Seriously? Is 2022 and we didn't solve the switch button? I'm
| sorry but I just don't believe you.
| foldr wrote:
| It's weird but true. Adding physical switches to a device
| can be one of the most complex design elements. It
| complicates both the layout of the PCB and the design of
| the case. Finding a suitable switch is also a real pain, as
| parametric searches for switches don't work particularly
| well.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| We did, but maybe not cheaply enough. If they can save a
| few cents by passing on the cost to you (in the form of
| more battery usage) they will do so as long as the market
| (or regulatory environment) doesn't mind.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The caliper and kitchen scale already have buttons.
|
| (they would both be shitty without a zero/tare button)
| bombcar wrote:
| Many of these "auto zero" which is why you have to do the
| scale dance - tap it with your foot to turn it on, wait for
| it to say zero, then step on.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, my explicit mention of kitchen scales and calipers
| was intentional, they both become much more useful if the
| user can choose to zero the readout at any time.
|
| This is less true for a bathroom scale.
| thfuran wrote:
| Went not just stand on it while it tares and ignore the
| negative when you step off?
| majewsky wrote:
| All the digital bathroom scales that I've encountered
| refuse to display negative measurements.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| My $20 "Pittsburgh" calipers from Harbor Freight (don't
| judge) are still on their original batteries, after 6
| years. They have a power button, and a separate zero
| button.
| felixhandte wrote:
| They don't actually turn off though. It just turns the
| display off. They need to continuously sense position
| since digital calipers measure movement increments rather
| than absolute position. That's why if you take the
| battery out and put it back in it will prompt you to re-
| zero the calipers.
|
| Amusing video explanation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnDype-j3hk
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's not uncommon for them to be designed to require
| zeroing at each power on.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Could you check the voltage on those cells next time you swap?
|
| I've found that seemingly similar devices have very different
| notions of what constitutes a discharged battery.
|
| I have a remote controlled humidifier and RGB LED - controllers
| for which use one and two infrared LEDs respectively. Both are
| powered by CR2025 button cells, which when new have an open
| circuit voltage of 3.3V and 2.7V once depleted.
|
| The two-LED device considers a 3V cell "dead", while the one-
| LED will happily work at this voltage.
| nickff wrote:
| Voltage doesn't tell you much about the state of charge of a
| battery (especially with no load being applied), and there
| may not be much energy left at a battery 'floating' at 3V.
| The cutoff may have more to do with saving money on the power
| circuitry than what the designer thought was a 'dead
| battery'.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Bathroom scales, kitchen scales and calipers all have versions
| that work without electricity and aren't much less convenient
| (if not more convenient since no waiting for electronics to
| boot up slower than they should or clunky menus)
| Loughla wrote:
| I disagree. Measurements are funny things depending on the
| level of detail you need; analog versions of measurements are
| very clunky when you need precision. (now this is a bit much
| for bathroom scales and kitchen scales, but it was the
| calipers that interested me). When I need under .01
| precision, my analog calipers just do not do the job as well
| as my electronic calipers. I can read them, but the last
| couple of thousandths are always sort of a guess. If I'm
| working on a project with tolerances of .01 or less, that's
| just not an option.
|
| I guess a fun middle ground - I have a set of mechanical
| calipers with a readout in actual numbers on the side like
| electronics would, but all mechanical, like clockwork or
| whatever it is in there, going to .001. They're infuriating
| to use, because the numbers are so small on the side, and at
| that level of detail, stupidly sensitive.
|
| edited the decimals because it's early and my brain shut off.
| rypskar wrote:
| Is your caliper really that accurate and calibrated? In my
| experience you need a calibrated micrometer for that level
| of accuracy, especially to get a consistent measurements
| between several persons
| jrockway wrote:
| Yes, reputable digital calipers are fine for thousandths
| of an inch. A micrometer is good for further precision
| and when you what more consistent measurements of softer
| materials. For example, if I measure my set of - gage
| pins, the caliper agrees exactly with the spec (a .210
| pin reads 0.2095), and it's pretty hard to torque down
| too tightly on hardened steel. But if they were nylon and
| not steel, you'd probably get better repeatability with a
| micrometer. (And it's worth noting that the pins
| generally aren't actually half a thou smaller, a
| micrometer reads 0.20990. If 4 ten-thousandths of an inch
| are important to your project, yeah, you need a
| micrometer.)
| rypskar wrote:
| ah, thousands of an inch, I'm not American and was
| thinking thousands of a mm
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes it is. It and my mics are calibrated to at least the
| thousandth. The shop has a 6" mic set on the ten-
| thousandth. But nobody uses that one because that's a
| level of detail that is just amazingly frustrating to
| chase.
|
| >between several persons
|
| This is just wrong. Rule one of precision equipment - do
| not touch my precision equipment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Since I've brought a digital caliper that allowed
| reading sizes with actual 0.01mm precision instead of
| "guessing it's around X", I've noticed I have no object
| around that won't compress by something larger than that
| amount when I apply reasonable amounts of force into the
| caliper.
|
| I'm also sure it's not calibrated to this level, but that
| doesn't hurt relative measurements.
| trasz wrote:
| That's why calipers ought to have those tiny "rolls" that
| you can turn to move them, instead of pushing, this way
| you can't "overtension".
| bombcar wrote:
| The nice thing about analog is they don't confuse you about
| precision - a digital caliper could be only precise down to
| .01 and yet show .0001 increments.
|
| For many things like a bathroom scale precision isn't
| really needed anyway.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I try to never buy something that uses batteries and has a
| version that doesn't. My bathroom scale is a spring one. I do
| notice it isn't as accurate. The ones with weights are best,
| but those are quite expensive and take up a lot of room. For
| the kitchen I use electric for the extra precision while
| saving space.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Bathroom scales are one of the few devices where it's
| worthwhile to invest into a smart device with Bluetooth or
| Wifi
|
| Regular tracking of your weight over years does provide
| valuable information about your health and no normal person
| regularly enter it into Excell
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Someone at my work has a really nice electronic calipers that
| is solar powered (think like a calculator... low enough power
| requirement that ambient light is more than enough) and thus
| will effectively never need battery change.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That is really clever, should really be used more often.
|
| When it comes to kitchen scales, most Kenwood food processors
| double as very accurate and premium kitchen scales with
| backlight, as as they are plug-in they don;t need battery -
| great option if you have the counter space - you just place a
| platform where the chopping bowl goes.
|
| After someone nicked my electronic calipers, I got mechanical
| ones - they are perfectly adequate for all home use so far.
|
| I used to use electric ones for 3D prints and designs, and
| haven't tries that since - might not be able to get the same
| perfect results with mechanical ones.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| My caliper eats at least 1 battery per month and it's those
| awful R44 alkaline ones that start leaking when they're empty
| :(
| hitovst wrote:
| This doesn't cover all the unwanted surveillance tools we pay
| to have spy on us.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I try to avoid coil cells in all my devices - all batteries in
| my house are rechargeable.
|
| That being said, there are rechargeable button cells and there
| is a button cell charger!
|
| https://thepihut.com/products/lithium-ion-coin-cell-charger
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Between clicking on/off at least once a day, and changing
| batteries once a year, I'm picking changing the batteries. I'd
| also guess most people would just leave it on. They may have
| already tried that.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I wish the Dymo label printer (for those labels printed on
| tape) had an off switch.
|
| Every time I want to use it, the 6 batteries are flat.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Just remove one battery and it's off?
|
| To be honest, I also have a Dymo label printer (very old
| model), and it does have a physical on/off switch, but even
| with the switch off it still consumes batteries like in 6
| months.
| tristor wrote:
| I gave up, bought the optional power adapter and just plug
| it in when I need to use it.
| mod wrote:
| I have one and didn't even know it could run on batteries.
| I've always used a power cord.
| reticulated wrote:
| Our kitchen scales have a single on button and auto power-off
| after a minute or so. I discovered completely by accident that
| holding the power button down for 3-4 seconds powers it off.
| Nowhere in any of the manuals was this mentioned (I went back
| and checked)
| rightbyte wrote:
| Maybe a rouge engineer added it for the benefit of mankind?
| diegof79 wrote:
| Example in front of me: the MacBook Pro.
|
| At some point when Apple introduced the touchbar someone decided
| that you don't need to truly turn it off... and it automatically
| turns on when you press a key. Meaning that you can't cleanup the
| keyboard without draining the battery first. (I tried looking for
| undocumented configs to turn this off... for years -well more or
| less since 2017)
| priteau wrote:
| There are utilities to help with this problem:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/06/04/keyboardcleanto...
| diegof79 wrote:
| I used KeyboardCleanTool but it didn't worked for me. What it
| does is to put an app window that captures keyboard events,
| but you can still press certain keys (like a lock screen
| shortcut in the touch bar) to by-pass it. Many times what I
| did is to open vi in the terminal... and it does the same
| without the extra app.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| I would say there are a few reasonable exceptions to the rule.
| For example I wouldn't want smoke detectors or carbon monoxide
| detectors to have off switches.
| PMunch wrote:
| Of course there are always exceptions. Smoke detectors usually
| have replaceable batteries though, which kind of work like an
| off switch. Pacemakers however should definitely not have an
| off switch, and a replaceable battery would be tricky. You'd
| have to do the switch like that BMO character.
| tzs wrote:
| > Smoke detectors usually have replaceable batteries though,
| which kind of work like an off switch.
|
| That is changing. Several states, including California and
| New York, no longer allow replaceable battery smoke alarms.
| They require long life sealed batteries. Other states are in
| the midst of doing so.
|
| They are doing this because smoke detectors have a limited
| lifetime. You are supposed to replace them 10 years after
| manufacture. However, they don't suddenly stop working at 10
| years...they just get less and less effective over time.
|
| Many people don't realize they are supposed to replace them,
| or know it but forget. I didn't know, for instance, until
| mine was ~17 years old. It still went off when I'd sear a
| steak if I forgot to close the door between the kitchen and
| the room it was in so there was no obvious thing to tell me
| that it was likely losing effectiveness.
|
| By going to units with a sealed battery meant to last the
| lifetime of the unit they hope to make it more likely that
| people will remember to replace them. When it is time the
| units will beep like the replaceable battery units do when
| the battery is getting low.
|
| I would guess there are also people with the replaceable
| battery units who when it starts signaling low battery take
| out the battery planning to pick up a new one next time they
| are shopping, forget, and take a long time to remember if
| ever. Sealed units will help there, too.
|
| BTW, when buying smoke alarms it is probably best to avoid
| Kidde (also avoid them for fire extinguishers). They are
| prominently featured at Home Depot and Walmart, and can be a
| little hard to avoid if you don't take a bit of care. Here's
| why to avoid them, from the Wirecutter.com article on basic
| smoke detectors:
|
| > With placement on the shelves of Home Depot, Kidde is the
| most prominent competitor to First Alert, but its overall
| track record is, in a word, disturbing. In 2018, the company
| recalled more than 450,000 dual-sensor smoke alarms; in 2016,
| it recalled 3.6 million smoke/CO alarms, and in 2014, it
| recalled 1.2 million smoke/CO alarms. In addition, since
| 2005, Kidde has enacted three separate fire extinguisher
| recalls of 470,000 units (2005), 4.6 million units (2015),
| and 40 million units (2017). Worst of all, in early 2021, a
| federal judge ordered Kidde to pay a $12 million civil
| penalty "in connection with allegations that the company
| failed to timely inform the Consumer Product Safety
| Commission (CPSC) about problems with fire extinguishers
| manufactured by the company." For these reasons, we can't, in
| good conscience, recommend any Kidde products to our readers.
|
| > Although First Alert is not immune to recalls (it recalled
| nearly 150,000 smoke alarms in 2006 and roughly 600,000 fire
| extinguishers in 2000), none of them are recent or on the
| scale of what Kidde has had to do.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That is why smoke alarms take the chunky square lithium battery
| that costs more than the smoke alarm.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Smoke alarms typically take standard 9V batteries you can buy
| at the drug store, no? At least non-hardwired ones do.
| kornhole wrote:
| I like to walk into cell phone stores and ask if they have any
| phones with an off switch. These are of course rare and only sold
| by niche companies like Pine and Purism. Everything else just
| looks like it is off while it is still transmitting in low energy
| mode.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Wait... If I power off (not sleep) a typical phone, it still
| transmits?
|
| I know there's the baseband processor that does its own thing,
| but I would've thought the userland "off" state shuts that off,
| along with everything else except for whatever watches the
| power button and battery charging.
| Saris wrote:
| It's a ridiculously easy thing to test, and I've never heard
| of a phone transmitting while powered off or in airplane mode
| so far.
|
| The FCC for one would throw a fit if airplane mode or power
| off still actively transmitted.
| causi wrote:
| If he read the manual he'd know the off-switch for Switch
| controller is clicking the pair button one time.
| rigmarole wrote:
| I don't have this device, but reading the manual there is no
| mention of any off-switch or off procedure. There is only
| syncing, charging, programming back buttons, adjusting the
| lights, changing light modes. And as for the lights, there are
| only 4 modes, none of which is "off".
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| to be pedantic, is that an actual off switch? one that
| disconnects the battery? or a software defined low power mode?
| johnsonap wrote:
| Foone's pronouns are they/them
| Forge36 wrote:
| Who reads the manual? I suspect the HN crowd tends to read them
| more often, even so, I suspect many of us avoid that until
| "necessary" (IE: I've been stuck on a problem I care about for
| too long)
| drakythe wrote:
| As indicated in the thread via his own words and pictures this
| is an off-brand switch controller, not a Nintendo official one.
| They don't have the same requirements for even features as the
| official Nintendo Pro or Joycon controllers.
| causi wrote:
| As the owner of a whole passel of shitty third party Switch
| controllers I have yet to encounter one where the pair button
| didn't turn it off.
| noobermin wrote:
| May be this one didn't? Have a little sense of good faith
| for foone (of all people)?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Or OP just forgot to RTFM and is ranting because they
| don't know how to use what they bought? Wouldn't be the
| first time...
|
| At the very least it's terrible UX design though.
| johnsonap wrote:
| Foone's pronouns are they/them
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Especially kids' toys! We have a mostly wonderful toy firetruck
| that we don't bring along anywhere because it might start singing
| at any moment.
| arkaic wrote:
| How about when my desktop won't stay asleep, because, I don't
| know, some update is scheduled to run, or some unknown number of
| errant processes that have a schedule exists somewhere. And yes,
| I turn off my mouse each time so table vibrations or gusts of
| wind are ruled out.
| _Microft wrote:
| Assuming that you use Windows, run the Event Viewer as admin.
| In the Event Viewer go to "Windows Logs"->"System" and look for
| events from source "Kernel Power". Find a wake-up event and
| read the report. It will tell you what caused this event. Happy
| debugging!
| arkaic wrote:
| Thanks! I'll try this out
| _Microft wrote:
| Feel free to reply here later, I'd be happy to hear whether
| that helped with figuring out your problem!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I installed a battery cutoff switch on my car. One of the best
| investments in upgrading a car.
|
| My Kindles all die fairly quickly even when off.
|
| A lot of my electronics is plugged in via bus strips with off
| switches.
| tempestn wrote:
| Don't you find it annoying losing all the settings in your car?
| Radio stations, etc.? If you're leaving your car for a long
| time without driving it, I would suggest adding a pigtail to
| make it easy to plug in a battery tender instead.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not really. I lose the presets, but I play music from a USB
| stick anyway. It's far, far less trouble than coming back
| from a trip and finding your car dead in the airport parking
| lot. Many times I've also discovered a dead battery in the
| morning because the door wasn't closed all the way and the
| interior light was on. Ugh.
|
| Having a separate "tender battery" for car-is-off power needs
| is a fine idea. Another idea is for a battery voltage monitor
| that will cut off the battery if the voltage starts to drop.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Or, just make devices not so power hungry.
|
| I got this fancy tire gauge+filler. It uses a couple coin
| batteries. They live around 6 months with it "off". I use it a
| couple times a year, so basically every time I go to use it it is
| dead. Removing the batteries requires disassembly. A year or so
| ago I soldered in a couple AA batteries in place of the coin
| batteries, it's been good so far, but I'm waiting to see.
|
| On the other hand, I have a Mitutoyo caliper, which also uses a
| couple coin batteries. I sometimes forget to turn it off when I
| put it back in the case, and so far, over 6+ months, it hasn't
| run the batteries out.
|
| So it _CAN_ be done. Both devices are basicaally the same: LCD
| display and they measure a sensor.
|
| Back when I was in HS, I had a Casio calculator watch, but it ate
| through batteries (3-6 months IIRC). The bracket for the strap
| broke, so I just taped it up in my locker. Soldered it to a D
| battery, and never had to replace it again. :-)
| teej wrote:
| User control has a big benefit here. I want certain devices to
| sacrifice battery power in exchange for fast wireless re-
| connections over bluetooth. My headphones for example - I don't
| want to wait, use the bluetooth antenna all you want.
|
| But I don't want that 100% of the time. With a power switch, I
| get my ideal user experience (fast reconnects) and I have
| control when to apply that user experience (on/off switch).
| seizethecheese wrote:
| It's totally possibly to engineer devices that last a lot
| longer.
|
| I'm currently working on a new device that will monitor my
| weight for 3 years without recharging. (It reads continuously,
| it's a scale for Bottomless.)
| dtgriscom wrote:
| You should never make absolute pronouncements.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Pretty funny this is top post, this morning I was woken up by a
| demented smoke detector that needed to be reset
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Is the battery removable? Best tip (if not) is to put it inside
| an ice chest, and put that in your car or refrigerator, then
| try to go back to sleep once the adrenaline rush subsides.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Unfortunately I was unable to reach it so I just stayed awake
| and eventually maintenance came for a visit and they replaced
| the battery and reset it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It'd be very, very nice if devices with re-flashable memory had a
| physical write-enable switch on it. No, not a software switch.
| With physical write-enable, no more malware getting installed on
| them.
| hnbad wrote:
| Obligatory addendum every time foone is posted here: foone goes
| by they/them pronouns and foone hates HN and all it stands for so
| please don't bother them with twitter replies just because you
| saw this thread on here. If you think about following them on
| twitter because of a cool tech thread, please be aware that
| they're not a tech novelty account and don't complain when they
| tweet about politics.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Why should we care whether Foone's mad at HN? Posting to a
| medium you don't own and expecting to be able to control who
| responds and how never really works out. If you want control
| over who sees your content and how they can respond, you have
| to use a medium you control, and I don't see why Foone is
| special in that regard.
| hnbad wrote:
| The reason I said what foone wants and doesn't want is
| precisely that they can not control what others do. Yes, you
| can disregard all that, follow them on twitter and angrily
| chastise them for not sticking to cool tech projects and tell
| them to use a proper blogging platform, but I was providing
| this information based on the expectation that most people
| reading it would not want to be intentionally rude.
|
| If the only thing stopping you from being rude would be the
| police literally dragging you away from your computer, yes,
| by all means, try to prove a point by being intentionally
| rude just because they can't stop you.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| My point is that when Foone posts are shared here, someone
| always follows up with The Official Rules for Interacting
| With Foone. Others neither expect nor get such treatment.
| What's different about Foone?
| userbinator wrote:
| Even typical Twitter users can have opinions we agree with at
| least some of the time.
| dmurray wrote:
| You forgot, foone isn't going to change from streams of Twitter
| posts to long form blogging.
| hnbad wrote:
| Well, this thread was less focussed than the last ones that
| got posted here so this seemed less likely to prompt the
| usual "Twitter threads are unreadable, why doesn't foone just
| write a proper article" replies, but yes. Foone has stated in
| the past that Twitter threads are the right medium for their
| ADHD-fueled bursts of writing and that blogs aren't.
| npteljes wrote:
| My most ridiculous experience was when an MP3 player froze back
| in the day. We had no way to switch off, or pull the battery out,
| so we waited 2 weeks, until the battery was dead. Then it worked
| fine after a recharge.
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| my son's hoverboard had a similar malfunction. literally the
| handbook said there is no reset, and we just need to let it
| drain the battery. it took DAYS for the LED lights to drain the
| battery......
| tempestn wrote:
| I love the dystopian futuristic vibe of this comment. I
| imagine your son stuck hovering 15 feet off the ground...
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Just scanning my desk which has a laptop, mac mini, monitor,
| phone, nintendo switch, a bunch of ipods ... the only things I
| can spot that have a power _switch_ are 4 of the 5 ipods.
| easrng wrote:
| What iPod has a power switch??? On mine at least (3rd gen Nano)
| the closest you can get to off is asleep with the hold switch
| on.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| It's been a while since I used my iPod Video/Classic, but I
| think I remember being able to turn them off by holding the
| Play button on the dial for three to five seconds. Maybe that
| was just the hard reset; I don't remember.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| You're right -- a few of them are hold, not power. Even the
| OG shuffle, which definitely _looks_ like it 's a power
| switch, appears not to be -- when I switch it "off" during
| playback, there's a suspicious delay before the music stops.
| key_to_dcmbr wrote:
| ahahahah how ridiculous is this idea. Just want to see author
| having off buttons on all their remotes: TV, AC, ect. Enjoy
| manually turning them off and having redundant button=)
| francisofascii wrote:
| The remote to my gas fireplace runs dead every few weeks. The
| remote uses radio, so I assume it is constantly communicating
| with the fireplace. I don't use it everyday, so I keep the back
| off to dislodge the battery when not in use, and reconnect the
| battery to turn the thing on. I would love a simple on/off
| switch.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Many "classic" remotes are actually designed with the keypad
| _itself_ being the power switch, they don 't consume any power
| while not being used.
|
| "Smart" remotes are a different picture. _audibly sighs and
| walks off the stage_
| davidgrenier wrote:
| Seems like a legit business in the making. Removing useless LEDs
| from products.
| corderop wrote:
| When I first read the title I thought about security reasons. I
| think this problem is more related on how the products are
| designed. Why does a controller need to be always looking to
| connections? For wearables, this could be ok, but not for a
| gadget that I'm going to leave in a drawer once I finish playing.
| otikik wrote:
| Everything that plugs into a power socket should have a switch as
| well.
| trasz wrote:
| In UK every power socket itself has a built in power switch.
| noobermin wrote:
| Everything powered through electricity should have a on/off
| switch.
| mihaigalos wrote:
| The trouble with a mechanical off switch is that you cannot
| easily / periodically turn it on, so it depends on your usecase.
|
| AVR Picopower has been around for about 10y now. These devices
| dramatically drop power consumption to the point where batteries
| should last a very long time, definitely >1y, more like 3-5y.
|
| The fact that modern devices drain a lot of juice is either
| sloppy SW design or sloppy HW design, since I believe the cost
| for microcontrollers is very similar.
| baybal2 wrote:
| You can have pushbutton on/off controlled by an MCU, and having
| near zero leakage.
|
| Just lookup circuits.
| PMunch wrote:
| That's the point though, in this case off means off. There is
| no reason his controller should have to periodically turn on,
| when you want to use it you turn it on.
| johnsonap wrote:
| Foone's pronouns are they/them
| watwut wrote:
| > The trouble with a mechanical off switch is that you cannot
| easily / periodically turn it on, so it depends on your
| usecase.
|
| That is not trouble, that is the whole point.
| steelframe wrote:
| Just this last weekend, I was woken up at 4:00 in the morning on
| Saturday by a cheap toy drone remote controller that was
| incessantly beeping because its batteries were running low. So
| I'm feeling particularly strong about this subject at the moment,
| and I'd add required off switches for anything with a camera or
| microphone while we're at it, battery-powered or not.
| justinator wrote:
| _> Driving a car is the ultimate expression of freedom._
|
| I see someone drank the Kool-Aid.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Drinking Kool-Aid is the ultimate expression of freedom.
|
| This statement was brought to you by Kraft Heinz.
| justinator wrote:
| I'm glad people are connecting with this comment (it's mine),
| but it's actually not about the article! My apologies, there
| was another, pro-car article that this should be attached to,
| but now I cannot find on hn. Carry on!
| teekert wrote:
| ...And, one should be able to turn of every led even when powered
| on... At Ikea I almost bought a nice brushed steel extractor
| hood, except it had this obnoxiously bright blue led on the
| front. Why? I know when that thing is on without it drawing my
| attention constantly.
|
| Same with my Lenovo X13 gen 2, there is a bright white led next
| to the power button... just why...???
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I don't know about the X13, but a lot of ThinkPads you can
| control the LEDs with some settings;
| /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::power/brightness on Linux (also some
| other knobs/LEDs in there).
|
| Thus far this has worked on every ThinkPad I've had; but again,
| I don't know if it will work on your X13 (or how to do it from
| Windows or other systems), but something to look at if you
| haven't already.
| karussell wrote:
| It would be great to disable it as it is really annoying but
| it does not seem to work. The file is readonly and it isn't
| recommended to change this: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinu
| x/comments/rnvgyc/how_to_di...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Looking at the Linux source "tpacpi::power" is in the
| "TPACPI_SAFE_LEDS" list; the setting mentioned in that
| thread only protects things like "tpacpi::dock_active",
| "tpacpi::dock_status1", etc.
|
| I checked, and my kernel doesn't have that option, and I
| can change it just fine ("echo 0
| >/sys/class/leds/tpacpi::power/brightness", as root of
| course).
| layer8 wrote:
| Agreed, i put https://www.lightdims.com/ or electrical tape on
| those. That doesn't really work with transparent cases though.
| teekert wrote:
| Ha! Nice to see someone actually was annoyed enough to make a
| product out of this annoyance :)
| nottorp wrote:
| > except it had this obnoxiously bright blue led on the front.
|
| I keep a roll of black electrical tape in my office :)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I like how modern routers have a button on the front to just
| turn off any LEDs, that's a great improvement I think.
|
| Anyway I've got a speaker in my bedroom with an LED that won't
| turn off, and a USB-C hub that has a tiny blue LED that
| requires me to disconnect the whole thing first. Really
| annoying.
| mellavora wrote:
| because it draws attention in the showroom, increasing sales.
|
| I've found if you use a dremmel with a fine bit, you can
| usually turn off the LED.
|
| otherwise put something over it.
|
| but yes, my solutions should not be necessary
| falsenapkin wrote:
| I have a TV with a flood light on the bottom when it's off and
| the IR receiver is also behind the translucent plastic for the
| light. It's in my bedroom and is bright enough to keep me up,
| so I have electrical tape over it which I then have to remove
| to use the TV because it doesn't have buttons.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > They never seem to just use the bluetooth module as the sole
| microcontroller
|
| There's more reasons than just being able to plug a different BT
| controller (which is great in times of supply chain problems)
|
| You're also usually stuck with a different toolchain than you're
| used to, so you will have to learn all the quirks. And they may
| not have enough pins or not the right type..
|
| But I get the point. It's kinda funny to read the "w000t my C64
| now has Bluetooth". When the BT controller is actually much more
| powerful than the C64 :P
| bbarnett wrote:
| _But I get the point. It 's kinda funny to read the "w000t my
| C64 now has Bluetooth". When the BT controller is actually much
| more powerful than the C64 :P_
|
| Lies! You take that back!!
| unlog wrote:
| I was thinking today if I can attach a switch on/off to my laptop
| battery to not wear it when I'm almost all the time on the
| desktop plugged in..
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I thought it was better to keep it 100% charged anyway?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| True for some older battery types, but not with Li-ion
| batteries; long story short, keeping the charge between
| ~30-80% is best for longevity.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You'll be pleased to know nearly all laptops now do this
| automatically.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Some laptops will throttle if they don't have access to the
| battery power.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| This is doubly so with kids toys. At least let me turn it off
| when piling them all in the toy-box without having them pressing
| a button on eachothers, making noises and draining the
| batteries..
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| People should show respect on not link to foone here.
| [deleted]
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| If one doesn't want to get linked to on the internet, one
| shouldn't post things to the internet. It is as simple as that.
| sph wrote:
| ReptileMan wrote:
| What do you mean?
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| foone doesn't like hackernews so I guess OP meant to show
| "respect" to foone and not link their stuff here.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| foone gets harassed when their tweets get linked here.
| bogantech wrote:
| Is that actually true though?
|
| If one of their threads is interesting enough to show up
| on HN isn't it also likely to have been retweeted, shared
| around elsewhere too?
|
| They certainly pop up in my feed constantly due to RT's
| from other popular tech people on twitter
| croes wrote:
| Let me quote from one of foone's tweets:
|
| "I HATE GETTING POSTED ON HACKER NEWS"
| carvking wrote:
| My backup iphone starts randomly - even just sitting alone in the
| corner unplugged.
|
| I regularly have to recharge it.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Cars.
|
| Cars are ubiquitous. They are everywhere. We all relate to them
| without thinking. Cars run on batteries. Even IC runs various
| systems using battery power when parked. But do cars have an off
| switch? To turn them truly off, such as when storing for a long
| period, the procedure is take a wrench and physically disconnect
| the 12v battery. So I disagree with the author. At least some
| battery-powered products are doing perfectly well without off
| switches.
|
| Other IC vehicles, notably aircraft, do have true off switches
| that fully shut electrical power at the source. So it isn't
| anything inherent to IC technology. Consumers have spoken: some
| things do not need off switches.
| titzer wrote:
| My car's entertainment system is stuck in a crash loop 24/7. It
| is slowly draining the battery, to the point where I worry my
| car won't start if it has been off for more than a week or two.
|
| And I don't agree that "consumers have spoken". Consumers don't
| design cars; their feedback loop is long, lossy, and easily
| ignored. Profitability drives car design, not what consumers
| want.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I have a Ford that sometimes has a similar problem: a
| freeze/crash in the entertainment system makes it partially
| unresponsive (so it can be stuck playing whatever it was
| playing at whatever volume it was at) and it will just eat
| the battery in no time. The solution is to pull the fuse to
| restart the thing.
|
| There's a big Microsoft logo badge right on the center
| console letting me know who to thank for that.
| donatj wrote:
| Evening with batteries should have user replaceable batteries.
| Ideally double A's. I am a huge fan of rechargable double A's.
|
| It's the main reason my Xbox sees so much more use than my
| PlayStation. My PlayStation controller is seemingly always dead
| when I go to use it, but I can just pop some new rechargeable
| batteries in the Xbox.
| phaistra wrote:
| > Evening with batteries should have user replaceable batteries
|
| There should be a law for this. Even for cellphones. When
| corporations market themselves as environmentally conscious,
| but don't allow the replacement of common wear items in their
| gadgets and products, then that's how you know they are full of
| shit.
| f311a wrote:
| I can't even turn off my Suunto watch from the operating system.
| They are always on while they have enough battery.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| This was always a gripe of mine, although I assume it's for our
| own good... I wouldn't want to accidentally turn my watch off
| mid dive.
| Aissen wrote:
| HOT TAKE: maybe not. Just make it default off. Official switch
| pro controller does not have this issue because it's always off,
| unless you press buttons, then it connects. Corollary: you cannot
| store it in a place where buttons might be pressed, or it will
| indeed drain the battery like in the post.
|
| (Edit: if you disagree, please tell me why. With proper design,
| it's possible for every button on this type of controller to act
| effectively as an on button, and I even cited a working, shipping
| example.)
| Jiro wrote:
| If it's able to connect by pressing a button that is not a
| physical on switch, it's not off.
| Aissen wrote:
| You can have an electronic circuit that is open, unless you
| press a button, then it's powered on and keeps power until a
| timeout/event. I know, it requires some more complex concepts
| than a bidirectional physical switch, but it's doable.
|
| The twitter thread complains about controllers which empty
| their battery between uses because they keep trying to
| connect; but it's not something that's mandatory: an at-rest
| device can stay at rest without user interaction. I've used
| hardware on which the battery was still usable after years
| without use; it does requires very careful design, though.
| solatic wrote:
| Counter-example: quartz wristwatches don't have off switches. And
| that's completely fine with me.
| [deleted]
| rcktmrtn wrote:
| Counter-example, or exception that proves the rule?
| jrootabega wrote:
| Interesting philosophical idea. I would argue that the position
| of the OP is really that things should have an off switch for
| when they're not being used. A watch is expected to be correct
| every time it's worn or looked at. It's never not being used.
| brational wrote:
| i was just thinking how it always annoyed me that my garmin
| smartwatch doesnt have an off switch but that's good context.
| though quartz doesnt have gps sensors..
| rnernento wrote:
| Forget about "with a battery" - everything should have an off
| switch. Rebooting hardware like the Amazon Fire TV is so
| annoying, and it's not like it doesn't like up or crash...
| lesgobrandon wrote:
| dschuetz wrote:
| Especially those which supposedly are turned off, but still use
| battery power for low-power Bluetooth for device discovery. So
| many times I was driven mad by this very shitty and very
| expensive device, because a deep-drained battery is no joke!
| numlock86 wrote:
| I like the topic but the tweet ... oh boy, the tweet was really a
| waste of time.
|
| > buys the cheapest controller one could find
|
| > "Oh my god it's all cheap components/design!"
|
| > buys a transparent one
|
| > "Oh my god I can see the charger indication on literally the
| entire surface area which triggers my ADHD!"
| jowsie wrote:
| > I can't believe the modern equivalent of InterAct/MadCatz
| would let me down
|
| This line is sarcastic, the whole thing is somewhat tounge in
| cheek.
| lynguist wrote:
| Isn't the takeaway message from this: just don't buy the cheapest
| and worst product? It will always give you a bad experience.
|
| When filtering for products the cheapest one and most expensive
| one should not even be considered.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Or y'know, buy crap products to rant about them and increase
| your social media engagement
| yeah666 wrote:
| I generally agree with the premise, but yeah, the dude
| namedropped Madcatz so you'd think he'd know that 3rd party
| controllers have never been worth it.
| brianpan wrote:
| All foone does is take things apart. He knows.
| johnsonap wrote:
| Foone's pronouns are they/them.
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