It’s hard to top the inkjet printers I’ve owned. I still can’t believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.
If you’ve owned more than 2, those are on you! 🤣
But yea, consumer printers suck.
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn’t needed a new toner cartridge.
I bought my parents a laser printer after years of them being incredibly frustrated by inkjets. I got them the same model as me, as well as a spare toner cartridge.
I’m still on my original toner cartridge, and I’ve had it for probably six years or so.
My parents are in their late 40’s and early 50’s. I think I might have accidentally gotten them a lifetime supply of printing.
Considering the volume businesses need weekly vs a peivate household I wonder why the very same cartridge lasts for >5 years
I got my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it’s the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it’s a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn’t die.
And they’re making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time… Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
I should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don’t want to commit seppuku after using it.
smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)
or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn’t muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.
but least they worked together in failure.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
I can’t speak for ring but I know as long as my Google nest is connected to WiFi it will update software automatically.
OUYA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya ?
Wow. Okay, I misread it before, but still tell me more. What’s your story ?
Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there’s no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play… or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
Pretty much the worse “console” ever made. Any video on it will tell you all you need to know. I wouldn’t buy it for a penny today if someone offered.
I was willing to put up with a lot of sacrifices for a $100 smartwatch but I was not expecting the level of trash I received. Unappealing and cheap looking silver colored case, typos in menus, and navigating the painfully underperformant UI made me immediately regret my purchase. There were many other issues I’ve since pushed out of my memory. I packed it up for a return within 24 hours.
The ONLY positive was supposedly the battery lasted weeks but I didn’t want to use the damn thing for more than 5 minutes.
“Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black”
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I’m not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I’ve owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won’t help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they’re connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Good to know, thanks!
Thank you for explaining that far better than I could!
I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was “rated” for 800 sq ft.
Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.
Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!
Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.
I said “Nothing. Make a better product”
I wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn’t produce ice because it couldn’t pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
From my understanding, a lot of the products on amazon are resellers that buy stuff from alibaba and then resell it at a markup so it would not surprise me if that was the case.
They all looked the same when i was last on there searching for one.
100%.
I’m constantly seeing the same items with different branding all at a similar price point - it’s all AliExpress garbage. And if the AliExpress version suits your needs you’re better off ordering from AE directly as it’s significantly cheaper. AE shipping speeds have improved over the years too, I’ve gotten items within 1 week several times now
The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
GameStop
That explains it.
Funny thing is, out of all the disc “cleaners” we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
Oh shit, I remember those. They “cleaned” by using an abrasive spray to “polish” the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn’t make sense really.
The Cuecat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Came at a time when there weren’t barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn’t exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.
The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn’t be associated with it.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona’s ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in “fraudulent Chinese ballots”.
He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
It also looks vaguely like a dildo, which is cool.
Ha, I had one and it’s what first came to mind too. Pretty useless.
Windows OS
Ya, when my windows 10 stops working I’m just going to hook up my steam deck to my monitors and kb+m and use that for everything.
Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.
Right now? I’d say first alert smoke alarms. The batch we bought all has failed in an “alarm always, and don’t stop” kind of way. They are only two years old, and I’m frustrated.
First Alert, ask questions later
Failing to an alarm on state is preferred to an alarm off state. So at least no fire can sneak up on you. I think they sell ones now that are 10-year sealed battery with a 10-year warranty.
My building has these and 2 of them failed in the first year. Can’t replace the battery so had to replace the whole thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Scrubbing-Bubbles-Automatic-Cleaner-Starter/dp/B001QJAHIY/
Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.
It worked about as badly as you’d expect. I don’t know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they’re a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.
I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.
$176 for an automatic shower cleaner lmaooooooo
A self mowing lawnmower, it moved so randomly and was so specific for its operation parameters that I ended up just going back to manually mowing.
If your yard was just a perfectly level, medium sun, no rain, obstacle free, rectangle you wouldn’t have any problems.
You need that RTK EPOS tech bruh
Either an hp ink jet printer.
Or my apple watch. The apple watch step counter is just plain broken. I can say hey siri a dozen times it may or may not respond.
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
I remember that thing… My grandpa had one. It was … Interesting.
Metal detectors, just in general. My BF has one and the metal detectors just don’t like me for some reason, I could never achieve success with it, like everything was a needle in a haystack. He was always “the detector” and me “the photographer” and I guess stuff just doesn’t transfer over well.
