The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[mcshroom]

Tick and Cross would be understood pretty widely I'd have thought. Green tick and Red cross if you want it to be colourful

[mrcharly-YHT]

There are times I hate being colour blind, not being able to tell if things are on or off or charged or not is a bit of a pain

A bit of gel can help with this, so you get bright/dim (or the presence or absence of a 3D effect if you hold the gel over one eye) to indicate state, but that's not always helpful without a reference.

I've been known to modify hardware to have proper separate charging/charged blinkenlights - it's trivial to snip one of the leads on a two-colour LED and solder another LED (perhaps of an actually different colour) across it, assuming you can get physical access (which you usually can't).  I'll happily pay a premium for chargers etc with numerical/bargraph LCD indicators rather than the hated colour-not-really-changing LEDs.

but having to try the handle on the mixed sex toilet cubicles can be very awkward 

Not an issue I have (I can usually discriminate red and green, unless it's too small to have colour), but it's bloody stupid of them to use red/green rather than red/white or, you know, text.   

It's the sort of thing people just don't think about.


(Ironically, I've got multi-coloured LEDs to indicate whether there's someone in the bathroom.  They flash in the level crossing wig-wag style when they're red.)

There must be smartphone apps that use a smartphone camera to do colour recognition?

When I had to hand my only pair of specs in for new lenses, I used my phone as a visual aid to get around (I'm shortsighted). It worked really well.

[barakta]

Our work toilets are hard to tell if occupied or not, not helped by it being dark as fuck in there with terrible lighting...

I think something obvious and big would be good for ALL toilets. While blind folk who look blind/carry a cane/have a dog get sympathy, many partially sighted folk simply don't look blind.

[Kim]

There must be smartphone apps that use a smartphone camera to do colour recognition?

I used to have a rather nice one (now unsupported) that did clever false-colour to enhance discrimination, which matters more than absolute colour in most real-life situations.

And then there are things like this: http://shop.rnib.org.uk/home-and-leisure/labelling/colour-detectors.html for helping blind people choose their socks.

But it's a truism that the iPhone^[1] (perhaps in combination with one of those watch things) is rapidly becoming the canonical piece of assistive technology for the visually impaired, as it's off the shelf hardware.


_{[1] Apple's speech interface is miles ahead of Android's.}

[Si S]

Tick and Cross would be understood pretty widely I'd have thought. Green tick and Red cross if you want it to be colourful

That's the ticket, embossed to make it tactile

[Si S]

There are times I hate being colour blind, not being able to tell if things are on or off or charged or not is a bit of a pain

A bit of gel can help with this, so you get bright/dim (or the presence or absence of a 3D effect if you hold the gel over one eye) to indicate state, but that's not always helpful without a reference.

Gel  I'm assuming this isn't hair gel. Not sure it'd help anyway I'm pretty bad, apparently we have a green carpet in the living room, it's blue to me. Mrs S has purple hair, I know this since that's what it says it on the on the box of dye, that's blue too.

Traffic lights? Nearly gave my licence back after running one on red at 50mph 

[matthew]

I suspect Kim is thinking of stage lighting gels. so use a coloured gel and look to see if the item gains contrast or not to aid in distinguishing colours. Obviously this requires some colour sensitivity and enough knowledge of your own sight to be able to interpret the effects.

[Kim]

Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant.

Even if your vision's completely monochromatic you could, for example, use a red gel to discriminate yellow from green, because green will go dark when viewed through the red filter.  This tends to work better for things like LEDs, which usually have a single wavelength.

Swatch books of gel samples can be obtained cheap or free from suppliers of stage stuff.  Might be worth playing around with.


My issue with traffic lights isn't that I can't tell what colour they are, it's that from a distance the green looks like a random mercury/tungsten lamp.  If it's dark, I won't always notice that there are green traffic lights until I'm fairly close (or the lights change).  Those reflective borders help, and should allow you to tell the lights apart by position.


And then sometimes, you get deliberate decoys:

(click to show/hide)

They've got the masks the wrong way round, so the green standing man means 'cross' and the red walking man means 'wait'.

I reported this to the council a couple of years ago.  They haven't fixed it.

[Si S]

Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant.

Even if your vision's completely monochromatic you could, for example, use a red gel to discriminate yellow from green, because green will go dark when viewed through the red filter.  This tends to work better for things like LEDs, which usually have a single wavelength.

Swatch books of gel samples can be obtained cheap or free from suppliers of stage stuff.  Might be worth playing around with.


My issue with traffic lights isn't that I can't tell what colour they are, it's that from a distance the green looks like a random mercury/tungsten lamp.  If it's dark, I won't always notice that there are green traffic lights until I'm fairly close (or the lights change).  Those reflective borders help, and should allow you to tell the lights apart by position.


And then sometimes, you get deliberate decoys:

(click to show/hide)

They've got the masks the wrong way round, so the green standing man means 'cross' and the red walking man means 'wait'.

I reported this to the council a couple of years ago.  They haven't fixed it.

Cheers Kim, I'll find a source and play.

Yes the red I jumped had no borders on it. They're essential if I don't want to get beeped at every light for slowing  Not that I care.

[ian]

Swimming pool. I understand you've changed your timetable (for GCSE assessments apparently, god knows what exam they take in the pool). I appreciate that you've put up a sign in reception to warn me of the fact. It's not entirely useful for those who aren't in your reception, especially as you only made the change yesterday afternoon. The online pool timetable is thataway ->

Even worse was trying to make the local free-sheet paper last twenty-five minutes.

[T42]

When the weather is fine
Be sure it's the time
For messing about at the bloody accountant's all afternoon to get out the company's annual balance sheet for the fiscal ferrets.

Balls.

[T42]

Oh well, that went faster than I expected. 

Seems that the bloody inefficient Social Security failed to deduct my contributions from the company's account last year so they'll be dunning us for the lot at one fell swoop. Stupid 7w@zorz.

[hellymedic]

I got two little grumbles:
David's PAYG Oyster card did not work today. I worked yesterday and there's plenty of credit on it.
David's iPad has no data. There's a 30 day rolling DD (which has been running for YEARS) set up but the April DD has not been actioned. Nobody at O2 seems to know why.

[SteveC]

Is there a special place in hell reserved for people who produce 13A plugs with the cables coming out of the top, rather than the bottom? I now have three power supplies taking up six of the eight sockets on the multi-way on my desk.

[bumper]

Is there a special place in hell reserved for people who produce 13A plugs with the cables coming out of the top, rather than the bottom? I now have three power supplies taking up six of the eight sockets on the multi-way on my desk.

I hope there is. Hopefully the people who design plugs that are too wide to fit in between or on the end of a multi plug extension will join them!

[Mrs Pingu]

Like the people who installed the sockets under the floor under my desk at work - with the bits where the cables point out facing each other, making it difficult to use all four.

[Kim]

Is there a special place in hell reserved for people who produce 13A plugs with the cables coming out of the top, rather than the bottom? I now have three power supplies taking up six of the eight sockets on the multi-way on my desk.

I hope there is. Hopefully the people who design plugs that are too wide to fit in between or on the end of a multi plug extension will join them!

That's sometimes done deliberately to ensure that wall-warts have adequate air circulation.  Because they've never heard of a kettle/radio/cloverleaf lead.   

Actually, the C5/C6 connector can go directly to the same circle of hell.  It is, as far as I can tell, pointlessly incompatible.    Just use the C13/C14 FFS.

[Torslanda]

That feeling you get when you screw the crank extractor all the way in but it still drags all the thread out instad of pulling the crank off the axle . . .

[spesh]

That feeling you get when you screw the crank extractor all the way in but it still drags all the thread out instad of pulling the crank off the axle . . .

Is that the Meaning of Liff entry for Wendover?

[Torslanda]

No but it's doubled the cost of the job and caused bruised hands . . .

[mrcharly-YHT]

Virgin trains - blue text on a red background on your ticket machines? Really? What marketing moron picked that?

[Wombat]

There was I, thinking how kind it was, for the railcard folk to email me to let me know I could simply renew my senior railcard online.  How thoughtful, I'll do that right now, especially as its cheaper than buying it at the station for just a year.

SEVENTY FUCKING QUID!  Er, it seems to have gone up in price a bit, doesn't it?

[hellymedic]

Is that one year or three?
I renewed my Disabled Adult Railcard earlier in the year for three years, which was cheaper but still quite costly.

[jsabine]

That's a three year price. One year is still £30.

[Wombat]

What do you mean STILL £30?  4 years ago it was £20, and when I renewed for three years online the following year, it was a saving on 3x £20.  I know all aspects of rail travel have gone up in price, but that's one hell of an increase.

The first year I had to buy it at a station, as back then, you couldn't even APPLY till you were 60, thus meaning that if you wanted to travel on your 60th birthday (as surely many do, wanting a 60th birthday treat day out) you had to buy the railcard at the station on the day.  Now, they've changed it so you can apply before you are 60, as long as the start date is on or after your 60th birthday.

I need mine on my 60th birthday, as I had a meeting to attend in York.