- Fitted sheet must have label on bottom right seam
- Salted butter wrapping text must be red. Unsalted blue.
Coffee shop tables should be 3 legged to prevent them from wobbling and me spilling my coffee when I lean onto the table even just a bit.
As someone who uses a Nintendo switch and an Xbox, the A and B buttons should be in the same place on all game controllers.
I can get behind this one.
Fucking yes. @ArbitraryMary@lemmy.world for world president.
While I agree with the first thing, I’m concerned what someone with the name Arbitrary might do with more power!
What if they ban chocolate chips on waffles?? I’d be doomed!
No bans of chocolate chips on anything will ever be issued. You have my word.
I fully endorse you now, without knowing anything else! Woo party with waffles with chocolate chips on them time!
It may seem slightly above inconsequential, but parking. Parking is a great example of arbitrary rules having longstanding effects. (Really neat video on parking regulations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8)
As for more inconsequential. Leafblowers Leafblowers immediately banned unless they are
- Less than 20db
- Zero emission
- ONLY USED AFTER 9AM WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
So 10 times quieter than a silent room?
They said regulate, it’s up to the industry to create a compliant product
They need to suck sound out of the environment
/s
Oh no… Guess we can’t have leaf lowers anymore… Shame…
Can we have leaf highers?
Yeah no kidding, this guy uses decibel scale but doesn’t understand decibel scale. I fucking hate leaf blowers but 55dB seems like a reasonable starting point to me. It won’t even barely reach your yard from a neighbor’s.
WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.
As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they’ve gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.
You forgot v) collaborates internationally for work, requiring them to be awake early to maximize overlapping hours in their workday.
But even I know not to do noisy shit outside until at least 10. Those few quiet hours in the morning where it seems I’m the only person alive are to drink coffee and cherish.
you also forgot people who work in factories that have to get up at 4:00 a.m. during the week and so they like to sleep in till 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.
I’m guilty of 8am yardwork, but mostly mowing in the hottest part of summer at the coolest part of the day. I’m also guilty of 8pm yardwork when it’s just the only time I can find to get it done. I only mow once every 2-4 weeks depending on how much my grass has grown, so I figure that balances it out somewhat
Small bladder, but I still refrain from impacting others.
Never live in the japanese countryside. Work starts between 5 and 6am every day (sunrise is before 4:30am at it’s earliest where I live). By 9am in August, it’s already getting ridiculously hot for working outside.
Relevant podcast episode:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-los-angeles-leaf-blower-wars/
My neighbor likes to do yardwork at 10pm
Luckily he has electric equipment so it doesn’t make as much noise
Except for the days he decides to do woodworking too
Relevant podcast episode:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-los-angeles-leaf-blower-wars/
Print the food expiration date above the label barcode. Black ink on white background.
Honestly ANY standard would be an improvement over the current reality.
Expiration date see:
the back of your own head
Seriously, I feel like one of those Rubik’s cube champions looking at my yoghurt from all possible dimensions trying to find out if it turned to cheese or not.
Laptop keyboard layouts. There is no reason they should be so different.
Specifically, those laptops that have full-sized left and right arrows, but half-sized up and down arrows - those earn 1 week of jail time for the CEO per unit sold.
While we’re at it, the power button must be in the same place on all laptops.
Adding a copilot button to a laptop, 10 years jail
no trial
I just want every keyboard to have a home and end button (I’m a coder, and my current keyboard doesn’t have them, and I have to set a binding in every. single. thing.)
Preach! I need all my keyboard shortcuts, dammit.
The Sims 2 had wonderful keyboard shortcuts for toggling walls and jumping between floors via Home and End and Page up and Page Down respectively and this was carried through to The Sims 4
Legend has it that there my be up to 2 other uses for these keys, too.
But surely not more than 2, that would be crazy.
Makes it so hard to use console command history
International standard paper sizes (A4 etc.) in the U.S.
Metric units aka SI units aka sanity
I assumed it was global… What do you use in the US?
A pretty-much arbitrary system based on a standard letter size of 8.5 in x 11 in, with multiples and fractions thereof. It lacks the critical √2 aspect ratio, so pages designed for one size have the wrong proportions when scaled up or down.
That sounds like a massive pain in the backside.
No, it promotes Freedom™.
Sports teams that change cities must also change names.
No more “Utah Jazz”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Jazz
Similarly, cable channels that veer from their original content must also change their names. Mtv hasn’t been Music Television in decades.
Sounds like you want trademark reform.
There are basically no requirements for maintaining trademarks. If a company owns a name they can use that name and branding forever, no matter how false it becomes, no matter how much the business or product changes, they can keep the name. This shouldn’t be the case.
If an ice cream company is named after their two founders, the company shouldn’t be able to keep using their names after they’re no longer involved. But under current laws they can.
A glass company can build its reputation on making heatproof glass, then change the glass so its no longer heatproof, while still selling it under the same name. This is unjust.
Companies should be forced to rebrand upon major changes. Current trade mark laws are fundamentally misleading.
“Local” sports teams should be comprised only of locals. No buying and trading from other regions.
Basketball:
"Soon it was commonplace for entire teams to change cities in search of greater profits. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don’t allow music.The Raiders moved from Oakland to LA back to Oakland, no-one seemed to notice."
TV remotes, computer speakers, car radios, etc must have two sets of volume up / volume down controls. One for upper volume limit, and one for the lower.
Now I can hear what the characters are whispering to eachother, without waking up the entire apartment complex when there’s a gunshot on screen.
Or hear the quiet parts of music when I’m driving without blowing my eardrums out when the contrasting high energy part kicks in.
That’s called a compressor and you could run your stereo through one or use a mobile app to do the processing on your phone.
All of my my windows machines that are hooked up to screens have Loudness Equalization enabled, which works a dream!
My Linux boxes have another software I can’t remember the name of, which do the same thing but does require more tuning.
I couldn’t watch anything without it.
If you have a surround setup, try boosting only the center speaker. Dialog is usually played through that.
Someone else mentioned a compressor. If your tv/hifi has a night mode, it’s doing that exact thing.
This is not as straightforward as you might think. If there’s an actual quiet part it would amplify the background noise.
Do I not amplify the background noise when I turn it up myself? I think they’re looking more for a “variable volume” option rather than any actual audio engineering
You wouldn’t turn up the volume when you know the scene is meant to be quiet. Or at least, you wouldn’t turn it up so high you can hear the background noise at the level you want to hear dialogue.
It frustrates me to no end that you can customize audio levels for vocals, music, sound effects, etc in video games, but you can’t individually customize anything volume-wise on a TV.
If you play videos through VLC player, you can adjust the dynamic range, which sounds like what you are looking for.
If you run Linux, you can even do it at the system level.
every date MUST be in RFC 3339 format. e.g. 2024-09-08, with optionally the time: 21:41:24+02:00
and hell no not ISO 8601 cause then people would use stuff like 2024W154
Thank you! Also nobody wants to buy a copy of an ISO standard
Would you allow long dates?
For example, Jan. 11, 2022, or 7 September 2010.
no, for cross-language interoperability. ok I just noticed that this breaks other calendar systems but well
Broadcasting audio from a personal device in public should be a misdemeanor.
It can be in some places.
Having a conversation with a voice assistant in public should be a minor felony.
To branch off from this, can i be the regulator for anyone using speaker phone in public/shops for 1v1 conversations by holding the phone next to their face to talk and walking around.
I don’t know, my emotions?
- Pwm flicker should be regulated on all LED devices, from smartphones to household bulbs and car turn signals.
- Price displayed is exactly what you pay. With tax, no credit card or smartphone surcharge or “cash discount”
- Tip screen on POS cash registers is displayed before you swipe/tap your card, not afterward.
Dishwashers and dish sets have complimenting standards. E.g.
Dishwasher rack is set A.
Dishes (plates, bowls, tupperware, etc.) Would advertise as “fitting rack sizes A,B, & D!”
Check out this person with their “matching dishes”! Well, aren’t you fancy?
The number of hotdogs in a hotdog pack and the number of hotdog buns in a hotdog bun pack cannot be coprime
The number of hotdogs in a hotdog pack and the number of hotdog buns in a hotdog bun pack cannot be coprime
(Although 8 and 12 aren’t coprime, and he tears open three bags of buns, meaning if he had just bought three packs of hot dogs and two bags of buns he’d be fine.)
Unless you get the (superior) Hebrew National dogs that come in packs of 7.
Unless you get the (superior) Hebrew National dogs that come in packs of 7.
In which case, to get an even number of buns, he’d have to buy 12 packs of 7 hot dogs and 7 packs of 12 buns, for a total of 84 hot dogs and buns. (Or remove 5 buns from each 12 bun bag.)
Edit: Which means Joey Chestnut could eat his new record of 83 of those dogs in ten minutes and have another left over for Steve Martin!
“Coprime” is the operative qualifier of the original comment. You can’t do what Steve Martin did with coprime amounts of buns and dogs because they can never evenly go into one another. You’ll always have leftovers.
“Coprime” is the operative qualifier of the original comment.
I did say that 8 and 12 weren’t coprime.
You can’t do what Steve Martin did with coprime amounts of buns and dogs because they can never evenly go into one another. You’ll always have leftovers.
That isn’t true. You can do EXACTLY what he did. If he had packs of 8 hot dogs and 9 buns, removing one bun from each pack would have the same effect. And 8 and 9 are coprime.
And you can also do what I said he could’ve done, that is, get an even number of hot dogs and buns by purchasing different amounts of packages. If someone purchased 9 packs of 8 hot dogs and 8 packs of 9 buns, they would even out.
You can ensure any two coprime integers go into another number evenly by simply making them factors of the other number (in this case, 72).
Edit: fixed a typo
Packaging for supermarket products should have what the product is big and the branding small. Not the other way around.
Oh. Sound mixing on movies/tv shows should be such that voice lines are always perfectly audible even on shitty speakers. Make actors e n u n c i a t e like they did in the 30s. Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for, turning all of media into mumblecore chief among those things.
I think all food packaging should be standardized and reusable, with a deposit system similar to reusable glass drink bottles (at least in Germany).
For instance: All the cereals should use the same returnable ‘cereal box’
Movies (and even most video games) make me so angry with that kind of stuff. You want an artificially tailored experience that only works with a zillion-dollar sound system? Fine, you can make it an optional soundtrack that only kicks in with those systems. But the default audio mix needs to be intelligible even on my phone’s speakers.
Video games are annoying because often you can’t hear anything over the explosions music during the opening cutscenes, but at least you CAN fix it in the settings. Movies, yeesh, you have to rely on your TV’s crap postprocessing.
At least game cutscenes tend to be less mumbly. Even IF the volume of things is all over the place.
TV and Movies? Fuck me, it’s like actors all forgot how to talk and instead just mumble every line.
The technology for this has existed for 20+ years and is actually fairly common. It’s often referred to as dynamic range compression. I think the chief complaint here is that it needs to be more accessible. Pre-applying it would mess up too many use cases.
Audio compression is much older than 20 years! Though you’re probably right about it becoming available on consumer A/V devices more recently.
And you’re definitely correct that “pre-applying” compression and generally overdoing it will fuck up the sound for too many people.
The dynamic ranges that are possible (and arguably desirable) to achieve in a movie theater are much greater than what one could (or would even want to) achieve from some crappy TV speakers or cheap ear buds.
From what I understand, mastering for film is going to aim for the greatest dynamic range possible, because it’s always theoretically possible to narrow the range after the fact but not really vice-versa.
I think the direction to go with OP’s suggested regulation would be to require all consumer TV sets and home theater boxes to have a built-in compressor that can be accessed and adjusted by the user. This would probably entail allowing the user to blow their speakers if they set it incorrectly, but in careful hands, it could solve OP’s problem.
That said, my limited experience in this world is exclusive to mixing and mastering music and not film, so grain of salt and all that.
I thought it would be simple: just make the mono/stereo/etc mixes easier to understand, and leave the advanced stuff to people with a million speakers.
I guess that’s too simple?
I would bet there is one mix created in surround sound (7.1 or Dolby Atmos or whatever), and then the end-user hardware does the down-mixing part, i.e. from Atmos with ~20 speakers to a pair of airpods.
In the music world, we usually make stereo mixes. Even though the software that I use has a button to downmix the stereo output to mono, I only print stereo files.
It’s defintely good practice to listen to the mix in mono for technical reasons and also because you just never know who’s going to be listening on what device—the ultimate goal being to make it sound as good as possible in as many listening environments as possible. Ironically, switching the output to mono is a great way to check for balance between instruments (including the vocals) in a stereo mix.
At any rate, I think the problem of dynamics control—and for that matter, equalization—for fine-tuning the listening experience at home is going to vary wildly from place to place and setup to setup. Therefore the hypothetical regulations should help consumers help themselves by requiring compression and eq controls on consumer devices!
Side tip: if your tv or home theater box has an equalizer, try cutting around 200-250hz and bring the overall volume up a tad to reduce the muddiness of vocals/dialogue. You could also try boosting around 2khz, but as a sound engineer primarily dealing with live performances, I tend to cut more often than I boost.
My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.
But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.
I wish they just provided separate tracks that you could control. One track for dialogue, one track for music, one track for sound effects, and maybe one track for less important voices. Then let us adjust the volume of each. That would help so much. And they basically HAVE to do it at some point in the process anyway if they want multilingual dubbing to work.
Speaking of dubbing: recently I’ve taken to watching more content dubbed in French strictly because it’s almost always intelligible, contrary to the aRtIsT aCcUrAtE volumes of the original. Pretty sad that I have to do that though.
My TV is insulting like that. It technically has an EQ, but it makes no perceivable difference no matter what I do in it.
What the hell!
But assuming it worked, wouldn’t doing that strictly with sound frequencies cause issues? Like, okay, most voices are louder because I boosted their frequency, but now that one dude with a super low voice is quieter, plus any music in the show is distorted. Or something like that.
Not necessarily. Regardless of vocal range, around 400hz-2000hz makes up the body of what you hear in human speech, or the notes for instryments carrying a melody. Below that, say, 160-315hz is going to be the “warmth” and “fullness” of the sound, while 2.5khz-8khz is going to be the enunciation and clarity (think ch-sounds, ess-es, tee-s, etc).
Sure, if you start really going hard on an EQ, you could absolutely throw everything out of balance — if you cut out 12db at 250hz, all the warmth will be gone and everything will sound thin. If you scoop a bunch of 400hz-1.6khz, it will sound like a walkie-talkie, and if you make a large boost around 3khz-8khz, then everything will probably sound harsh and scratchy.
This is where, the listening environment becomes important to consider. Do you live near a busy highway or do you have a loud air conditioner? You don’t need to answer these questions in public, but those kinds of ambient sounds can compete with the enunciation frequencies, or add to the buildup of “mud” in the lower part of the spectrum.
The size, shape, material properties etc. of your room and furniture also play a role here. For example, a bunch of bare walls and hard surfaces will cause a lot of the high frequencies to bounce around, potentially causing a buildup of harshness. This is why recording studios and your high school band hall probably have those oddly-shaped, cloth-covered wall “decorations” that serve to neutralize the cavernous sound you’d get in a large, bare room.
Overall, compensating for the environment is where you should probably aim your EQ. That is, even if source material varies wildly, it’s probably best to try to EQ to the room you’re in rather than each, individual program.
The way to do it is to find a song you know by heart, that you know how it sounds in the best way possible (there are a few that, to me, sound great in my car and on my favorite pair of headphones, so I use those), and play that through your TV. Then, fiddle with the EQ until it’s as close to the ideal sound in your head as you can get it.
Streaming sites should have options like some video games where you can choose what type of speakers you are listening through. Because I do have nice 5.1 speakers, but I don’t always want to use them. Because they are loud as fuck lol.
They’re speakers, they’re supposed to be loud.
I started using subtitles years ago, and now I can barely hear without them.
Fortunately, we don’t have that problem here in Canada.
we get 12 hotdogs in a pack and 12 buns in a pack.
Which one
They’re referring to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Name_(brand)
Obligatory FUCK GALEN WESTON
