Culture
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Background: English has a wide variety of rarely-used short words that are extremely useful in various word games (e.g. Scrabble, Words With Friends, Bananagrams), and not in very many other situations. Specifically, there are (in the 1993 FreeBSD dictionary that comes with Mac OS X), a total of: 139 two-letter words 1294 three-letter words 4994…
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Background: Laptop privacy screens (or “monitor filters”) reduce the viewing angle of a laptop screen in order to prevent evildoers from snooping on sensitive information on your laptop (Figure 1). The issue: Unfortunately, these privacy screens have a few downsides: They are inelegant to attach. Often, the attachment points block a small amount of screen…
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Background: Closed captioning (e.g. [Wind howling] or [Ominous footsteps] in a movie) supplements traditional subtitles with information beyond just dialogue. For a movie, this information is usually sufficient: a viewer doesn’t usually need to know exactly how loud the wind was howling, or which direction the footsteps are coming from. The issue: Unfortunately, in video…
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When using a computer, phone, or tablet, it is occasionally the case that a user must type in numbers. Typing numbers on a computer with a 12-digit physical numeric keypad is fast and easy (Figure 1). Unfortunately, laptops frequently no longer have these hardware keypads, and smartphones and tablets never did. The issue: The “soft”…
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Background: In many movies and books, a financial amount is discussed at some point. For example, a character may remark that a heist “could be worth 100,000 florins” or “the estate had fallen on hard times, and now generated only 576 denarii annually.” The issue: Is the amount discussed above a lot of money? Or…
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Make microwaving even easier with a synchronized-turntable solution that prevents you from ever having to reach all the way into the back of the microwave to get your reheated beverage! The true chef’s choice.
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Follow the cruel and unyielding demands of your phone in order to stay fit on a custom jogging route! Bonus feature: allows the user to participate in the “sharing economy.”
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Background: As civilization reaches an apex of decadence not seen since the days of Caligula, new and exotic labor-saving schemes have arisen. Specifically, you may soon be able to order food directly to your refrigerator, thus saving you from having to be present for delivery. Deluxe! The issue: While the process of delivering food directly…
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The issue: Modern computers (and TVs) have large, high-resolution screens. But sometimes people have nostalgia for the past—perhaps yearning for Cold War-era computing, when the harsh glow of a 9-inch CRT monitor represented the pinnacle of technology (Figure 1). Proposal: Modern monitors should have an option to emulate the behavior of various old display types.…
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Background: Almost everything in the world is designed for people of average adult size. As a result, most everyday objects (furniture, stairs, door handles, etc.) are a totally inconvenient size for children or the extremely short. This is somewhat surprising, since everyone spent many years facing these problems as a small child. But it was…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 