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.

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?

Perhaps a design where both mating surfaces are plastic with metal for the rest of the body? A lot of vacuum insulated bottles have plastic bonded to metal in the cap, they just have to repeat that with the bottle itself

They come in handy when air drying heavy, damp shirts

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.

Same here. Gives me a new appreciation for in-app language settings, in case an app is too complicated or weirdly translated.

1. Separate rubber pieces from earbuds
2. Plug drain in sink and wash rubber pieces in soapy water, then let dry
3. Fold a sheet of tissue paper over and saturate with 70% isopropyl alcohol from a dropper bottle
4. Wipe earbuds thoroughly with the saturated tissue and let dry
5. Reassemble and repeat once every 1 to 2 weeks

Agreed, but company does not provide us devices. Everything I’ve said applies to my second phone running GrapheneOS, which I am using as my work phone. I’m trying to avoid setting up and running Play Services just for nice-to-have notifications when none of my other apps require it.

A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230

Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can’t be that crazy of a product. There’s already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.

I’m jealous of my friend’s workstation that has an easily accessible filter in front of the case fans

I fancied the opportunity, but there were no other speakers of the language at my school.