InfoD-Cafe: Recharging batteries: lack of a common visual vocabulary

[Conrad Taylor]

Rob added to the tales of woe:

>Other areas of everyday life where a grammar is required:
>- digital clocks. Moving to summer time is great feat of memory, 
>manual dexterity, deduction and luck, and my oven clock is only 
>correct six months of the year.

I have a friend who until very recently had me come over
when the clocks changed, to reprogram her central heating.

However, my bedroom clock is one step cleverer.  Correcting
itself by a radio signal, it changes automatically; and my
Macs do a similar thing over the Internet thanks to some
server somewhere (gives a new meaning to the phrase "time
serving").

Solution: give your oven an IP address.

>- car radios: every car seems to have a different set of 
>abbreviations: PTY, AST, TP, TA, etc. But only rarely On and Off.
>
>In fact any radio is more complicated than the ones we used to have. 
>Not able to receive steam radio in the basement kitchen of our new 
>home, I've just ordered an internet radio. I'll need to tune it, so 
>I think I won't make any plans for the weekend.

I have a DAB radio, which cleverly tunes itself.  Programming
the buttons to bring up one's favourite stations is however
something else. At least those programs are stored in non-
volatile memory.  I bought the same friend mentioned above
a DAB radio for Christmas.  Alas, if it is deprived of a power
source (mains, battery) for more than ten minutes, the stored
favourites evaporate.

I guess she's figured out how to deal with the central heating
now, but I'll get called over to reprogram the radio when the
batteries I installed run out of juice.

Conrad

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