I will try to get around to blogging more high-brow things soon, but first a pet peeve: the little rubber feet on electronic devices that fall off. Case in point: a DYMO® LetraTag® label printer sitting right in front of me on my desk, barely 24 days out of the box (or rather, the blister-pack.) Came with two little rubber feet glued to the bottom of the battery compartment cover. One is gone. These little rubber feet are well-intentioned. It is hard to manufacture cases that will sit stably and without scratching on a variety of surfaces, and adding a few bumps made of a slightly springy artificial rubber material fixes the problem. In fact, I have sometimes had to add them back to devices that had lost them, such as one portable hard drive that wouldn't stop making annoying noises, which got a substitute made of a little lump of rubber eraser held on by a patch of duct tape. But why do they always have to fall off in the first place? It is perfectly well possible to make these things properly. Because the material is flexible, you can mold them into little rivet-shaped things that snap into the casing. Or you can use the kind that are held on by a screw. Or whatever. Now you might say that I silly to complain about the quality of cheap things, which are cheap precisely because low quality is cheaper to manufacture, and I should just shell out for quality or alternatively shut up. But that won't fly: the problem exists even with expensive and, otherwise, high-quality devices. The hard drive I mentioned had its case designed by none other than F.A. Porsche, which must have cost a pretty penny.
End of rant.
End of rant.
