For example, I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it’s side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can’t see what you’re doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who’s idea was that?
No one asked for the spork
I dont think I’ve ever seen a spork with teeth that could actually pick up food like a fork, so it’s just a bad spoon.
Wine bottles. After thousands of years of drinking you would think humans would develop a bottle design that doesn’t dribble down the side after pouring.
That’s why you should just drink it straight from the bottle.
If this is a regular issue for you I’d recommend a decanter or at least a large carafe. It solves your problem, helps the wine to ‘breathe’ and looks fancypants as balls.
Reusable water bottles, especially their lids. They build up microorganisms faster than a petri dish and the more complex the bottles are, the worse it is.
Worst offender are the ones with integrated straws. Sure, they look nice and are a good idea, but cleaning them thoroughly is a nightmare. Also, I don’t know how people tolerate the ones with exposed straws or mouthpieces. Isn’t that incredibly unsanitary?
More generally, why doesn’t anyone except for Nalgene make reusable bottles without rubber gaskets? Gaskets get stinky, then you have to peel them out, scrub like mad, and then awkwardly stretch them back in. I’ve been looking for a metal water bottle without a gasket for ages. They literally just need to shove the Nalgene-type screw-on top into a metal body.
Bonus points if someone designs a gasket-less bottle that opens in the middle so I don’t have to fiddle with a bottle brush every time I wash it.
The issue you’re highlighting is due to the different between metal and plastic. I have an Orca bottle that has a plastic lid that screws on without any rubber gasket and I end up with shreds of plastic in the bottle.
Plastic rubbing on metal leads to the plastic degrading and metal on metal does not make a good seal, so I think a rubber gasket is your only option.
I stopped using my water bottle for a while til they made a new cap where the rubber gaskets have a pull tab for easy removal and cleaning.
Easy removal of the gasket solves the entire problem for me.
I love my simple metal Yeti bottles.
Water bottles for bikes suffer from this.
You gotta get them really dried out really regularly.
Like if you only have one that you use every day it’s just going to get gross no matter what.
It needs to be bone dry for a few days to kill everything.
If you have 2 and switch once a week, the one that’s out of rotation will dry out and any funk will just die off.
About ten years ago I found and ordered a glass bottle with a fitted silicone lid. It’s not tight enough that the bottle can be tipped upside down without the water slowly dripping out, but it’s great for keeping stuff out.
I always wanted to see a company make a glass bottle with silicone top that was completely leak-proof.
Yeah, why do people blow their noses into PAPER when you can just go to the bathroom sink and hork in your hands, and then wash up afterwards??? Why would people walk around with dried boogies on they face when they can wash?? Why? Why, Mister Anderson, why, why?
OMG I thought I might be the only one!
I do this too and it drives everyone nuts but it’s so much better!
Only thing is sometimes I miss a snot rocket that goes astray.
It’s probably habit, but it just feels somehow wrong to blow my nose without a piece of paper snugly against my nostrils. Like trying to poop without being seated on a toilet bowl.
Just tell me that you turn the water on pre-hork instead of touching the fixtures with hork hands, and I’m totally fine with your suggestion.
Of course! You need the hork-lube to do it right
Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I’m just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don’t enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I’d go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I’m a renter for now). It’s also a poor design because it’s going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don’t need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It’s an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it’s a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can’t replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don’t
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that’s designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn’t exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year’s)
- “Teflon” or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn’t poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
Laptops with no intake dust filters.
Actually, no, any computer with fans that doesn’t have a dust filter is a terrible design.
Keyboards are the obvious one.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast lead to the arms of a typewriter hitting each other.
And why is one of the most accessible large keys fucking Capslock?
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
I’m not even talking about the menu key, Windows key and Copilot key.The other one are bicycles. An aerodynamic riding position is uncomfortable for most people, so is the saddle, and when you break too hard, you fly head-first into whatever you were trying to avoid. Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way.
Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way
No thanks. Might be nice for some long trips but for my daily use, I need something a little bit more compact and easy to load up with stuff and a kid.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing
No it’s not. It’s designed to put commonly-used letters in between rarely-used letters. You are correct that this is because of typewriters getting mangled, but a typist can type just as fast on a QWERTY or AZERTY keyboard as on an alphabetical keyboard. It stops typewriters from getting mangled by making it less likely that any given pair of adjacent keys will be pressed in succession.
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
To facilitate touch typing. Since the cursor keys are physically separated from the typing keys, you are very unlikely to press a cursor key when you meant to press a letter, or vice versa. In the 1970s, keyboards used to have the cursor keys on the H, J, K, and L keys, which explains a lot about vi. In the 1980s, IBM introduced the inverted T layout, which made it easier to move the cursor around and to move about in games. This layout meant you didn’t need separate editing and input modes; you could move the cursor and type letters all in one mode.
Up until the early 2000s, games were designed with the intention that the player would use the cursor keys to move about. The use of WASD began as Denis “Thresh” Frong’s custom Quake layout, which allowed him to move and look independently. As this layout proved effective, other players adopted it, and then game devs designed their games around it.
The keyboard I’m currently using has a key in the F-row that’s tied to a lock screen. I accidentally hit it several times a day, and end up having to put in the passcode to unlock the computer every time.
I wish I could disable that stupid key. I’m tempted to pop it right out. But I use a shared computer, so I’m limited in options here.
The only thing more poorly designed than a regular keyboard is a keyboard where they try to cram extra functions into the same number of keys with a FN key. Every brand does it differently, no consistency even within the same brand sometimes.
Humidifiers.
It’s just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they’re all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the “you gotta clean it with vinegar every week” comment, two points:
- You don’t soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
You better start showing Plague Daddy, Prince of Decay, God of Chaos Nurgle some goddamn respect
Don’t use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That’s it.
I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel
It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem
That’s pretty much a swamp cooler
Lol yup, got the idea from a Technology Connections video on how one of the common humidifier designs are literally just large swamp coolers
You literally just use a sponge and some bleach spray and like a minute of your time. If you replenish it daily your normal water chlorine should keep most of the bad shit at bay.
In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There’s probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there’s varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there’s at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don’t they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?
I agree with you, but I’m not sure how great it would actually be.
I don’t know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn’t this a feature of soviet era communism?
As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.
Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that’s as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?
I’m not going to engage in a silly argument about the merits of communism as opposed to capitalism.
Then why bring it up and say someone will correct you if you’re wrong?
Old mate didn’t provide any fascinating insights into the manufacturing practices of soviet era communism, they just trotted out some meme-level anti-capitalist vibe-based hyperbole.
Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.
The glue gets weaker when it’s heated. They use the same film for oven meals as well. It comes off fine when you finished heating, but it’s a pain in the arse when cold.
I’ve dropped brands for that shit
Got a local one that puffs up to like 3x height in the microwave though and that pulls off a lot of the adhesive.
Any mug that has a really hemispherical, smooth handle. You put a hot beverage in there, and the weight is enough to make your fingers slide down the handle, and then you burn yourself on the main body of the mug unless you really squeeze.
Any faucet that just barely sticks out over the sink, so you have to touch the back of the sink to wash your hands (british sinks are even worse, though).
If you only put distilled water in it it really doesn’t seem like an issue
I bought a set of mugs like that recently. It’s a shame because they are pretty nice looking, and comfortable to hold when empty. But when full of hot liquid, the handle just is totally inadequate.
They are from IKEA, so at least they didn’t cost too much, but I am a little surprised because their stuff is generally pretty well thought out from an ergonomics and usability perspective–it’s only really the sturdiness/durability I ever worry about.
The best mugs I have are still a pair of the stereotypical featureless cylinder type I got from a giveaway 10 or 15 years ago–they are utterly boring, but the handle fits 3 fingers for a perfectly stable grip!
I’ve had these dual wall glass mugs at home for a few years. So civilised.
https://www.house.com.au/products/baccarat-barista-cafe-double-wall-thermal-glass-mug-2-pack
permanently installed lamps with a socketed power supply that sticks like 10cm out of the wall.
Why would a permanent lamp be socketed at all? If it’s permanent wire that shit properly.
I’ll mention you can get detergent sheets and they work fine. No more messing with powders of liquids for me.
I also like powdered detergent. I get mine from the package free store and then add in those scent boosts pellets for our scent only. Work so much better than liquid detergent
I really like these too, I bought like a multi years supply of them and they fit in a pocket I hang on my laundry door and haven’t fucked with liquid detergent or bottles since 2022
Sheets? For the washing machine? Wouldn’t those require a plastic shell or base like the laundry pods do?
light bulbs that die too often.
those pots and sauce pans that use a screw to connect the handle. the screw head generally places inside the pot and will get to all your food.
chopping boards. plastic chopping boards enhance your meals with microplastic. composite wood enhances your food with bacteria lodged in-between wood pieces. bamboo – too thin and ends up similar to composite.
Wood boards don’t harbor bacteria assuming you wash them. The wood dries out and the bacteria die with it. They need moist surfaces with some food supply to grow.
yup, there’s no problem with wood. there’s only risk when it starts to wear.
Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
It’s usually because of cheap electrolytic capacitors. Letting a $10+ item die because they were too cheap to pay $0.25 instead of $0.15 for a properly rated component.
When I replaced a set the other day I learned that some of them are not rated for enclosures
I use the Phillips Hue bulbs and spots and I’m yet to have one die on me. Some of the bulbs has been in use for more than 10 years. However, I see my fair share of other LED spots that dies too soon.
thanks capitalism
It’s usually the electronic drivers. They overoverheat and degrade. Most burned LED bulbs still have working LEDs and just need to replace some component of the driver board.
I think there are glass cutting boards wouldn’t that work for you
They dull knives
i use a solid wood one, but this suggestion works as well!
They ruin knives
A lot of OTC meds that are in boxes have annoying packaging where you have to peel off the little paper before you can push the pill through the wrapping. The paper doesn’t always like to peel off properly and it makes it harder to get the pill out of the packaging.
In the UK it’s mandatory, ostensibly to prevent deliberate overdoses. You can’t buy a big bottle of acetaminophen.
In part because they call it paracetamol.
I always thought this was super on purpose. Is it not intentional design for “child protection?”
I think it’s for anti-tampering purposes. Imagine the consequences if some bad actor tainted those pills with something or replaced the pills with another.
