Headlights that don’t blind oncoming vehicles
Seriously… I hate my own damn headlights! People flash their high beams at me as if I have mine on, but they’re just the stock headlights… I’ve been seriously considering going to a mechanic to have dimmer lights installed lol
Your headlight level adjuster might be stuck or broken. Have your mechanic check that it works.
If people regularly flash their lights at you over it, you probably should.
A lot of vehicles have a beam dip adjuster in the cab. Mine pops out when I press the center of the light control selector.
Officially, they are to correct for a heavy load in the back. Unofficially, if you tweak them, you can flip between longer range, and polite as required.
If you watch your lights, there should be a fairly sharp cut-off at the top of their coverage. If that line ever hits a window or mirror, it will look like you are flashing them. If it’s too high, either fix it yourself (generally quite easy) or get it fixed.
Aim them yourself. You’ll spent more time finding a good spot to aim them then actually doing it.
If they’re LEDs or HIDs they’re probably just a screw you turn to aim them. If they dont then it’s basically the same thing, but in a less convenient spot. Look up the proper aiming procedure for your car, or just wing it by finding a car in a parking lot.
I know the feeling. I had a rental car once for two weeks and I was more than once road-raged because of the lights. Everyone thought I was high-beaming it, but nope.
My cars low to the ground and only has halogen lamps, so if I’m ever flashing high beams at an SUV with overly bright lights, it’s only so I can continue to see the road. LEDs are insane and the governments too busy facilitating record defense contractor earnings to do anything about it.
If you’re in Canada, they’re developing standards and they’re asking for feedback. There’s a survey to fill out on the Transport Canada site.
They won’t do shit unless the US does it first. Government loves to consult and ignore.
That’s what sealed-beam headlights used to be before composite housings which are proprietary to a given vehicle were legalized.
In fact, sealed-beams are still widely used in commercial vehicles because of their standardization to a point where they can be picked up anywhere and they’re just gonna work.
On my car I have matrix headlights. I think every car should have them it’s honestly awesome technology and it’s a lot safer than normal lights. Hard to explain how they work just go look up a video and see for yourself
Hard to explain how they work
Not well at all when it comes to avoid blinding bicyclists, that’s for sure.
Just another tech developed by the car industry pretending there are only cars in the road.No; personally i find those annoying as hell when a car with those is behind me. Having partial high beams on either side from behind, that also come on and of with oncoming traffic, is really distracting. Never mind the “less good” implementations, that blind you through your side mirrors.
Just don’t make headlights stupid bright.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode, where they design the “perfect” family vehicle - and it costs too much for a middle class family to afford.
Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find and affordable car with manual transmission, locks and windows.
i’m not normally in support of taking control away from owners, but automating headlights seems like a big one. make radar and/or lidar, along with LED headlights, a requirement on new vehicles and have them automatically reduce brightness when a vehicle approaches. my old mazda would at least automatically turn the high beams off if a vehicle was a certain distance away from me.
The headlights themselves should be mounted at a standard height. Taller vehicle? Mount the lights lower on body.
No second headlights on trucks either
OMG, light pollution in general has become my current “white whale,” and the gods awful headlights on these ridiculous cars makes the most of it!
We should be able to see the stars at night, I don’t think we have to sacrifice a dark night for the sake of “safety,” maybe use a different color of street lamps, or get the lights on the walkway with just enough to find your way around
Please, I don’t want to lose the Night!
Nuts, bolts, and screw heads.
I know we need various sizes for various tasks, but I shouldn’t have to dig through 50 different screwdrivers or ratchet heads and still not have one that’ll work.
I replace crappy ones when I remove them.
I’ll tolerate Phillips, but slotted gets replaced with torx. Phillips get replaced if they get damaged.
Torx are pretty great
Everything should be torx
There are reasons why you can’t have Torx in some situations. For example, sanitary machine designs. Preference is a flanged hex head. If flush mount is required, then slotted is best (even though they do suck for every other reason)
Why would slotted be better than, say, Phillips for flat mount? Most of the flat heads on the equipment at work is either a Phillips or hex
For sanitary applications, slotted is better because you can clean out the slot easier than the cutout for a Phillips head.
Torx Plus*
Best of luck with that mate. Do you know how many different cross-shaped drives there are already?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives
And if you really want to get upset about confused standards you should read the section of the Talk page about why JIS B 1012 was removed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_screw_drives
They ARE distinct from standard Phillips, and posidrive. If one tries to use Phillips on them you’ll likely strip the head.
[…]
As discussed, the previous paragraph was wrong and (as of now) uncited, so it was removed. No information is better than wrong information.
Meanwhile, there’s Robertson, the superior 4 pointed driver over Phillips.
Those are already standardized though…
There are 14 competing standards. We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.
Congratulations now we have 15 standards.
I think that was the joke yes
I’ll just be happy when we phase out imperial and other weird thread types. Metric standardisation is a godsend over what came before.
The heads are a lost cause. They serve too many different purposes, with differing, competing, requirements.
Or the crappy BMW design.
Yes. Everything Robertson.
I just want existing standards to be public and accessible, not locked behind
400600 € ISO. That defeats the whole point of standards.Feet, yards, inches should be replaced by the metric system.
Metric ftw!
There are 2 types of countries in this world: 1. Those that use the metric system and 2. Those that put a man on the moon ;)
Funny thing is, NASA uses metric.
But their independent contractors use imperial and convert back and forth. This is how the Mars Climate Orbitor was botched.
Interesting flex. Apollo Guidance Computer was working with Metric SI units internally.
Calculations were carried out using the metric system, but display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts were accustomed to.
and how did that Mars landing go?
When you can divide a meter evenly by 2, 3, 4, 6 we will talk. Until then take your crappy base 10 measurements and stefu!
It can be done just like for feet and inches, look:
- a half meter: ½m
- a third of a meter: ⅓m
- a fourth of a meter: ¼m
- a sixth of a meter: ⅙m
Yet I only need an integer when using the imperial system, and I don’t have to repeat 3 into infinity.
⅓m is 1.093504 feet or 13.12205 inch. I don’t see how it’s more convenient.
Work in a machine shop for a week and get back to us
The entire planet’s machine shops do fine.
1x1x1 metre cube holds 1000L of water, and weighs 1000kg.
Uh? Done. What happens now?
What machines do u run in what country?
But then you’ve got a space that’s 5’ 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be…uh… 5’ 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?
In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you’d need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it’s 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)
I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I’ve finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.
I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can’t easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we’re doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.
You only repeat 3 to the number of significant digits necessary.
Isn’t that grade 4 math?
If you only need integers, why are the measurements of your home hardware and tech specified in 1/8ths and 1/16ths of an inch? Stick to whole inches or shut up.
50cm
33.3 cm
25cm
16.7cm
So you imagine that USians somehow can divide inches with infinite precision?
Easy.
Can you quickly calculate how many gallons of water receptacle with dimensions of 5 inch x 3 feet x 1 yard can hold? Extra points if you can also calculate how many pounds it weight when filled.
An open phone standard, and no, I do not mean the ‘Open Handset Alliance’ that doesn’t even live up to its name, I mean like an ATX-equivalent standard for mobile devices.
An open-source ISA already exists in RISC-V, maybe that hypothetical ATX-for-mobile-devices standard could standardize around that for starters, as for an OS, it could standardize around non-Android Linux and maybe even some BSD mobile OSes instead of Google pulling some MS-in-the-'90s crap for Android like they’re doing right now.
You need an equivalent of ACPI in the x86 space to catch on in ARM/RISC-V if you want a general purpose OS to be viable on phones
There’s sort-of kind-of SystemReady in ARM but it’s a far cry from the standardization of ACPI on x86 desktops
same for some laptops out there.
no reason a framework type thing couldn’t be a thing for all laptops.
Europe:
Power plugs
Train gauge and electricity
Online payment without credit cardsWorld wide:
Driving on the right
Driving on the left you mean. It’s better since most people are right-handed.
Yeah, so use your left hand to steer and right hand for everything else.
Prioritise everything else over where the car goes? Madness.
Weaves wildly onto the pavement full of school kids but accurately adjusted the aircon
That effect is vastly overblown and doesn’t really matter.
Sure, if we only started driving today, we should pick the best side from all perspectives, but changing that now will just be extremely expensive for a very limited gain.
The same goes for switching any island nation from left to right.
Using your dominant hand for gear shift makes more sense than the alternative. Disagree?
But that’s less of a factor that just being more attentive (and primed to react) to action on your right hand side if right handed. It’s ‘sticky’ for me at least: I can switch to driving on the left relatively easily, but the reverse takes more effort, even though I have spent more time driving on the right in my lifetime.
No one has manuals anymore.
Even if you’re in an automatic, and shifting between P, R and D. I’d much rather do that with my dominant hand. Wouldn’t you?
I really want everyone to use the metric system. Imperial is just awful to use for most design and machine purposes.
Interesting, as somebody who on a somewhat regular basis runs a lathe and occasionally a Bridgeport at work I could not imagine using metric. Mostly because our old machines are all standard, but also because a thousandth of an inch (industry standard unit for measuring clearances) is .0254 mm so now clearances begin to involve more math. Call it lazy but I’m not converting everything on my machines lol. We build engines and some parts and everything we do has to be in SAE.
Every single one of my machines is set up to run metric so I don’t have to constantly convert 64’s and 8’s and thou’s fractional units between denominators, which is exactly why I’d rather type .0254mm than 1/1000. I absolutely cannot stand using different fractional denominators or that a foot is divided by 12, but everything else isn’t. You’ve probably used it for years and are used to it, but approaching it with a rational mind seems like unnecessary work and risk of miscalculation.
Every number I use can easily be interchanged for another unit.
The QWERTY keyboard has entered the chat.
“We’ve always done it this way…”
All it comes down to is set up honestly. Our old clearing lathe is all in standard, so trying to machine anything with metric units means a bunch of conversions, each one an opportunity for error. Easier just to do it in standard when the machine over double my age is already set up for it! Plus the thread cutting portion i would have no idea how to convert. I’ll keep doing it in standard until my boss wants to covert 🤷
Women’s clothing sizes
It’s creeping into men’s sizes, too.
Depending on the maker, I’m a Large, Extra Large, 2XL, or sometimes 3XL.
And I can fit into some mediums.
And I can fit into some mediums.
I don’t want to hear about your psychic sex life, bud
:-)
There was a post recently.
[paraphrase] Guys who make jokes about their big dicks are usually assholes, but guys who joke about how small they are are usually cool and fun.
Reply = I have a medium dick. It can contact the dead.
Men’s clothes sizes are just as likely to be ill-fitted, it’s just that men aren’t held to the same standard of fashion. A lot of men don’t mind wearing something a size too big or cinching their pants up with a belt. Nobody bats an eye.
All online forms.
I fill out a lot of forms and it’s ridiculous. Sometimes I’ll be at the bottom of the page, and I’ll get a message saying that I can’t continue until I fill out a ‘must answer’ question. Sometimes the programmer was clever enough to make it so I’m directed to the question, but more often than not I have to scroll through the entire form to find where I made my mistake.
And, when I have gotten to the end, it would be nice if there was a chance to review everything.
I’m not even going to start with the forms that make you use the calendar tool that takes longer than just entering the date.
Forms itself should be a thing of the past. They mimic paper based patterns which makes no sense for lost use cases in 2026.
What we need is standardized APIs through which you can share specific personal info if you wish to do so. E.g. SOLID implements this.
If additional info is needed a basic conversation with an agent could take the place of a form in due time (for those who wish to use this).
Civil rights
Printer cartridges and razor blades
I haven’t printed anything at home in years. Just easier to go to the shop/library and pay them.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-safety-razors.html
Old fashioned double side safety razors. No gimmicks, less waste, and cheap.
That was the name of my third album.
Sounds like the name of a colab album between Weird Al and HIM
powertools’ batteries.
The “reject all cookies” button
Go to your browser settings and click “reject 3rd party cookies”. This will block all cookies, except for the domain you are visiting. But it might break some things and have to readjust for some domains.
Otherwise use ublock and noscript, prevents your browser from loading things you never wanted.
The cookies being rejected should’ve been the standard. Instead they gave us shitty popups that didn’t solve anything.
Job ads.
To hell with all the bullshitting.Title. Basic duties. Salary. Upload resume.
Windshield wiper arms. Everything should be J-hook.
The j-hook is fine. What is NOT fine is how difficult it can be to remove the damn wiper blades after they’ve been outside for awhile and things get dried up. There’s got to be a better way
See, if everything was j hook, blades wouldn’t have their own array of adapters, some of which get stuck even on j hooks.
If you have trouble, just break the plastic off. You’re replacing it anyway.
