What will happen when I'm too old to push? (buttons, that is) I'd like you to consider my underwear. As we move inexorably towards another Christmas – for American readers, I understand you prefer the euphemism "Holiday Season" for its more generous syllable-count – close relatives have begun asking what gifts I might like to receive on the big day. What I want, of course, is toys. …
Come on, what's your problem?
Too grumpy to appreciate the unique smell of Paris streets late at night and early in the morning?
Disclaimer: it is the only major capital (and major city in fact) I can think of where you have to watch your step while walking downtown in the "civilized part" of it so you do not step into a turd every 2-3 meters. Quite a few of them not dog turds either. And the overwhelming smell of piss everywhere - the metro, the streets, the parks, the whole place reeks of urine. Add to that a concentration of pick-pocketers which rivals St Petersburg in its glory days and voila - the most "beautiful" city on the planet.
Is this what their revolution allowed the Frenchies to do ?
Liberté, égalité, fraternité .
Which could roughly translate as the brothers ( and sisters ) are free to p*** and s*** anywhere because some pompous bunch of Royalists can't tell them what to do anymore :-D
I can top that sign.
At Versailles, where the busses go in, there's a small gatehouse, and behind it, there's a wooden door, let into a stone wall. On the door, is a yellow triangle with the international lightning bolt symbol for dangerous electric voltage.
Wedged into the space between the door and the jamb, was a torn piece of corrugated cardboard, with the following inscribed on it in heavy black ink:
Ne pas uriner -- risque du choq
I read French. None of the other folks on the bus laughed at all.
Do they no longer have the street pissoirs in France?
The above descriptions in France could fit most towns in England since local councils started axing public conveniences. A few years ago I visited Crystal Palace. The council "You are here" display marked three public conveniences. One had disappeared below a new supermarket. Another was a derelict shell. The third in a park was intact - but only open in the summer months.
LEDs are great. Cheap, reliable torches, power saving long-lasting lightbulbs, nice cheap status lights on kit so you know what the hell is going on (rather than them trying to save cash by having one lamp trying to report 15 different conditions by flashing/changing colour).
LEDs are a curse! I bought a little USB power supply the other day, that allows you to charge a couple of devices and still plug your alarm clock in. Very useful for the bedside table, rather than messing around with power strips. But oh no! It's got retina burning LEDs on the face, because nobody wants to charge their phone/tablet while sleeping, that absolutely never happens.
OK, maybe that device was designed for your desktop and not the bedroom. Explain my Teasmade then. Yes, I've hit middle age and continue to accelerate, I'm a hopeless 70s throwback, etc... It makes me a lovely cup of tea in the morning though. But I have to put a cardboard box over it on the bedside table, because the light that lights up to tell me the alarm is set is so bright that I don't require an alarm, as I'm unable to sleep. I can fucking read by it!
It's a very big button, they obviously felt only really, really old gits would use it. But they didn't need to fill the whole back of the button with one huge LED, they could have just used a little weedy one. Where do these morons thing this device is going to be placed?!?!
I've got three similar cases. One is a computer case with a painfully bright blue power LED. It's not too bad when it is continuous, but if I put the computer into sleep mode it blinks continuously. And it shares a connection with the power cable (not sure how they manage the sleep detection with that) so cannot be easily disconnected. It's bright enough that I can see the room flicking on and off in blue from another room.
Second case is a portable, battery-powered speaker. Same deal - it blinks on and off constantly which makes it useless for the bedroom. Turning it to face the wall obviously spoils the sound quality a little and duct tape to the front of a speaker is not my preference.
Finally a speaker beneath my TV set. Happily that one can be duct-taped over.
I really don't know what all these people were thinking.
I bought a TV for the bedroom. The missus and I like to watch the news in the morning in bed with a cup of coffee (Jeebers, we are SO OLD!!!!) TV duly installed on a bendy-arm-type-thing (Oh yes; why oh why oh why invent a SLIGHTLY different alternative to a VESA mount to put on your crappy cheap TV? Why not just go with the standard measurements? WHY?!?!) Anyway: Put the thing up, turned on. Oh the glory of lolling in bed, coffee and news. Brilliant. On standby, the TV has a super-bright blue FLASHING LED on the front. It's like having the emergency services sitting on standby in your bedroom. Never mind, I am a resourceful fella. Out comes the black insulating tape. Now the remote doesn't work. The sensor sits in the same spot as the blue flashing LED torch! Gah. Foiled again. I am reduced to get out of bed in the morning, and with creaking back and protesting knees, bend down and switch it on by the wall-socket. Oh the humanity!
And many devices are too bright for some of us who prefer to sleep in total darkness.
Especially when the migraine-fairy has decided to make it's regular visitation..
I have a 4-gang powerboard under my side of the bed. There is always something plugged into the mains-lead end - if only to hold the bit of cardboard[1] in place over the red light that indicates that it's connected..
Being extremely myopic as well I have a bedside clock with ~7CM high digits (otherwise I have to lean over to read the time). It does, however, come with a dimmer switch and is a nice soothing red.
[1] Yes, yes, I know I should do something more permanent but that presupposes a supply of circular tuits which I currently don't have..
LEDs are a curse! ... It's got retina burning LEDs on the face, because nobody wants to charge their phone/tablet while sleeping, that absolutely never happens.
Electrical tape with a pin-pricked hole in it.
Or http://lightdims.com/
My alarm clock LEDs were bright enough to read by....
"Example: The red LED at pedestrian crossings next to the button they press is often brighter than a vehicles rear lights!"
Probably justified as being bright enough to see in bright, direct sunlight by someone with very poor vision but not totally blind, which seem reasonable to me.
Being in french, it almost looks poetic.
I wonder if they are aware it resembles the framed and mounted dictates of that horrible woman from Order of the Pheonix - Theresa May - that was it?
Getting older, you loose interest in the passions of your youth or you become more jaded as you've seen it all before several times and the myriad disappointments, merely gritty little niggles at the time become large hills of disinterest and finally the mountains of I can't be bothered anymore, just give a good book and a nice fire.
Then there's Douglas Adams 3 rules on reaction to tech (there might be an undiscovered fourth).
All my radios have a red LED to help me find the power button when they are switched off. However when listening to the radio in bed in the dark it is a fumble to find that same button. Why did they not merely have the LED change colour.
A Sony DAB radio has several other design features that are apparently poor.
The button to change bands is flush with the panel - alongside other identical flush buttons to select Tape or CD mode. To a finger tip the whole area feels like contiguous flat panel.
It shows useful information for a DAB station. It is questionable whether one wants to know the frequency of a DAB signal - and it omits the diagnostic error rate that some other radios have. The track that a music station is playing essential if you want to avoid "name that tune" insomnia. However to select it you have to use a remote control to sequence through the three display variables. If you change preset stations or come back from standby - it resets the display.
And who said there are no original ideas anymore nowadays. Reading the comments, the solution for the French, or perhaps the international, urine issue is obvious. I'd like to propose this logical train of thought:
--- Gentlemen pee where they shouldn't.
--- Gentlemen find it difficult to ignore blinking LEDs
--- Gentlemen find it difficult to ignore bright LEDs.
--- Gentlemen know different LED colours are status related.
--- Indicator lights on tellies are help aim the remote.
--- Gentlemen have difficulties aiming while peeing.
Hence I suggest placing bright LEDs which might help them aim, and change colour if they "hit the right spot".
Sorry..?
Erm...
Yes - right - Ne pas uriner -- risque du choq
Toltec's valid point notwithstanding (though most decent TVs will detect there's no signal coming in over HDMI and go into standby mode), most of the above is down to the designers either prioritising form over function, or simply not giving enough thought to how the user interacts with the device. IMO.
" if your sky/virgin/bt box shuts down because you have not pressed a button for a couple of hours "
Or in the case of the spanky new IQHD box from Foxtel, the new power saving feature means that, if you haven't touched a button for the last 30 minutes, you can't be watching, so it switches to sleep mode. Great for watching really short movies.
My TV has a red status light because it literally takes longer to boot than my laptop, so I need to have something to tell me I've actually turned it on. And since we're talking about being old - CRT TVs could have video & audio running from cold in a fraction of a second.
"
CRT TVs could have video & audio running from cold in a fraction of a second.
"
No they cannot. The CRT requires a fair amount of time before its cathode is hot enough to emit enough electrons to light the phosphor, and usually at least as long again before the stream is at full intensity and properly focussed.
Admittedly that's not nearly as long as a modern TV set takes to boot its CPU so it probably seems instantaneous in comparison.
Thermionic valves are so much faster than silicon ...
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