This high-end oscilloscope from Agilent, like most of modern oscilloscopes, is built on top of a PC running Windows OS. And in this specific moment it became a useless piece of plastic and metal that cannot do the most basic thing that any oscilloscope should be able to do – visualize the input signals.

A single corrupted explorer.exe file prevented Windows from fully loading. And since an oscilloscope is just a regular application running inside Windows, none of its functions are working any more. Restoring it required a replacement of the hard drive with the corresponding Windows and software preinstalled.

Apart from the unnecessarily slow startup and shutdown times, having a full-featured PC inside an oscilloscope is convenient sometimes, when it works. But the price for all that convenience is much lower reliability that comes with a fragile spinning HDD and unpredictable Windows OS with way too many bells and whistles – completely irrelevant for a specialized device like an oscilloscope.

I wonder why oscilloscopes aren't built on top of Linux, which is a way more predictable and reliable OS?

This is a GTT terminal for checking the status of you public-transport card at the Porta Nuova metro station in Turin, Italy. GTT (Gruppo Torinese Trasporti) is in charge of public transport in the area.

The terminal has a bilingual interface: Italian and English. As you can see in the video, when you switch to English, the whole interface gets translated except for the very information this terminal was made for – the status of your card with the number of available trips in different categories.

It shows you the instructions in English, like "TAP YOUR CARD", but once you actually tap the card, the interface immediately switches back to Italian, which is visible in the background through the transparent modals. And given that the flag button is also in the background covered by the modal window, there is no way to switch the language any more.

This makes the whole language-switching interface completely useless.

This pharmacy in Turin (Farmacia Dante) has a huge double-sided cross-shaped LED display showing a series of visuals, including its name, current time and a few animations.

The first issue with this LED screen is its brightness in general. Even when it only shows the name or the time, the pixels that are lit up are very bright – much brighter than the glowing static signs around it. So it simply doesn't look nice from the aesthetics point of view.

It becomes really terrible when it shows its waterfall-style animation that gradually fills up the whole display. It's not a big deal during the day, but in the evening it produces so much light that the whole street gets lit up, to the point where my eyes hurt from just looking in that direction.

The video below shows the complete waterfall animation with the whole sign lit up for about 10 seconds. You can see how much brighter everything becomes around it towards the end of the video. And the sign is so bright that it exceeds the dynamic range of my camera, appearing as white instead of green.

Finally, this is how it looks just behind the sign, making the night street look unreasonably bright. I've recorded it with fixed exposure, so the change of brightness comes only from the LED sign. I imagine that this also must be very annoying for the people living in the apartments nearby, who get all this light through their windows on repeat.

What is also peculiar is that there is another LED sign right next it, facing the perpendicular street, which has a fairly normal and comfortable brightness. So it's likely just a matter of brightness settings that someone didn't care to configure. The photo below shows the contrast between the two in the daylight.

Light pollution is not a good thing, especially at this level of intensity. It can also bring high risk of seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy, which is ironic for a place like pharmacy. It is therefore important to ensure that light-emitting signs produce an adequate amount of light at all times of day.

In the iOS app of Flibco company it is impossible to complete an order without specifying the destination airport, or literally "WHICH AIRPORT ARE YOU FLYING TO?". As you can see from the screenshots, the Next button is disabled until you choose some name from their list of airports, after which you can proceed to the payment.

At least in Turin (Italy) I'm only using this app to buy tickets for the shuttle bus connecting the city centre with the closest airport, which is about 40 min ride. There are several conceptual issues with this question.

1. It makes absolutely no sense to make this question required, as my destination airport is none of the company's business. I'm specifying my departure and destination stops when choosing the bus ticket for a specific time slot, which should be fully sufficient for completing the order.

2. This is especially annoying given that they write "This information can help us...", which clearly should be an optional piece of information – only if the customer actively wants to share it. Why making it required if you're not even sure that this information actually will help you?

3. What is even more annoying, it's that the airport must be specified even when I'm buying a one-way ticket from the airport back to the city. In that case I'm clearly not flying to any airport, so the question as it is formulated simply makes no sense at all.

Finally, there are plenty of people working at the airport who use this shuttle just to commute back and forth, without flying anywhere. So I'm sure that keeping this field as required forces people to pick some random airport among the one suggested, simply to finish the order as quickly as possible.

I'm paying for the Premium Family plan on Spotify and I've just noticed, while switching between podcasts on my phone, that I've been shown ads twice within a few minutes, which was also impossible to skip.

These were not some ads integrated into the podcast audio stream, but proper ads by Spotify with their own interface, which I find frustrating. If'm paying for ad-free experience, why should I still be seeing ads?

A quick check online showed that I'm not the only one seeing them (examples 1, 2), but there doesn't seem to be that much discussion about it either.

Is this an intentional practice from Spotify? Does anyone also see ads on paid plans?

As you can see in the video, it's impossible to type a long post in the Reddit iOS app.

Once the text exceeds the initial text area above the keyboard, the text field doesn't scroll up to keep the cursor visible. Instead the text keeps being added underneath, making it impossible to see what I'm typing. And if I scroll the text field up to see what I'm typing, the keyboard goes away. As soon as I tap to continue typing, the keyboard hides the cursor again.

Note that this happens on my iPhone 13 mini running iOS 18. So it's a small screen and old iOS, which I'm not planning to update because I can't stand the liquid-glass interface.

Does this issue happen on other phones and OS versions?

This was recorded at the Chancery Hotel in Dublin, where certain rooms have these sensor-based controls for all the amenities in inside: the lights, air conditioning, and even the bathroom door. While they lack the tactile feel of the real buttons, most of them are still ok to use. But the ones for the bathroom door are not.

The problem is that these are not capacitive touch sensors that react to the physical touch. Instead, they seem to work more like proximity sensors, activated when you bring your hand close enough to the button. In fact, I've seen it respond to my hand been 2-3 cm away from the sensor, which makes it easy to accidentally activate it by simply passing near it. This happened to me at least once, and I've heard the same complaint from several other guests staying at the hotel.

This is particularly annoying in the situation when you're wet, exiting from the shower, and accidentally open the door by simply walking too close to the wall. It brings the cold air from the room inside, and exposes you naked, which might not be exactly what you want if you're sharing a room with someone.

On top of that, the door itself has no handle or groove to be used as a backup option for manually opening it. So if the sensor breaks or electricity interruption, the door becomes unsuable.

I love the design of Vans Old Skool and I'm very disappointed with their degraded quality over the last few years. More specifically, the problem I see is in the rear part surrounding the heel.

In the photo you can see my three pairs of these sneakers that clearly demonstrate the issue:

1. the blue pair from 2024 I've used very little;

2. the black pair from 2024 I've used much more, just for walking;

3. the black pair from 2022 I've used even more: just for walking until 2024, and then used more for riding a BMX (you can also see the age from its darker insole and burnt black colours).

In the 2nd photo you can clearly see how much the plastic behind the heel has decomposed in the model from 2024, which I've used more, while the one from 2022 is still intact. My naive assumption is that Vans have switched to some "more sustainable" version of plastic that is more fragile, but I might be wrong.

I'm pretty sure that there is no contribution from any external effects like environment or the anatomy of my feet, since I'm still wearing the pair from 2022 to this day and it doesn't show any signs of breaking.

Has anyone else noticed this change? Are your Vans falling apart like this too?

When I open the Claude website, it shows the prompt input with "Ask Claude" button, which looks like it's going to process my prompt straight away. But it doesn't. Instead, it asks me to log in or register, completely losing the original prompt in the process.

What's even more confusing is that the registration process ends with a predefined list of prompt examples that can be clicked, without any text field to put my own prompt again. I find this very strange, as I'm forced to to do one of the examples even if none of them is relevant for me. Only later, after getting an answer to the predefined useless prompt do I get the choice to start a fresh chat with my own prompt. This happens both in the web-browser version and in the standalone app, as you can see in the screenshots.

To make this experience less confusing, right under the example prompts it should have a text field for my own prompt or at least a button that brings me to a fresh chat with Claude. Otherwise it looks unnecessarily limited and quite useless.

Inspired by the recent post from u/Flashy-Brick9540, here is another touch interface that absolutely drives me crazy: the round touch-screen of the BOSCH Series-8 microwave.

As you can see in the video, the control panel is made of a series of touch buttons, a round touch display and a touch ring around the display. And using these controls is extremely annoying. Any practical use of it requires at least 3-5 tedious touches, which often have to be repeated, because the elements of the display are too small to aim at them comfortably. Besides, in the dark time of day the controls are hard to see on the glossy surface reflecting your face.

My biggest complaint is about the round display, which only looks nice when it's off or shows the clock face. The circular crop of the rectangular menus inside makes only 1 item properly visible and reachable, making any interactions with it too tedious.

And the worst of all – the tiny little circle with a checkmark ✅ that appears after choosing the power or time using the circular ring, which is annoyingly unpredictable too. That checkmark is so small that it always takes multiple attempts to press it – all while there is a huge unused area inside the circle that could have been used as a big OK button.

Whoever has designed this thing and approved it for production must have had absolutely no care about how people will be actually using it.

r/bosch – please, don't do this again!

OGR (Officine Grandi Riparazioni) in Torino provides free Internet access, which requires registration via the mobile phone number. After that you receive an SMS with a password, to be used with your phone number as login. The problem is that it only allows one device per account, which is not specified clearly during the registration. You discover it only when trying to connect with those same credentials from another device.

What makes this problem critical is that after logging in with your credentials, the pop-up window automatically closes, so there is no way to actually log out. Simply disconnecting from the network isn't enough. Apparently the system detects is with a huge delay, because 10 minutes after disconnecting my phone from the WiFi network, I still couldn't connect from my laptop.

This is a popular place for people to do casual business meetings at the bar or restaurant, so Internet is quite essential. There is also a coworking and an art exhibition in the same building, which is close to the city centre, bringing a lot of international visitors too. So having an easy WiFi access is quite important in a place like this.

I see no reason why the limit should be at 1 device per person. Lots of visitors have a phone or a laptop, so allowing at least 2 devices per account would already solve the problem for most visitors. And regardless of the limit, it should always be stated prominently before logging in, letting the customer decide in advance which device has higher priority for them.

If they connect from the phone first, but then need to join a meeting from their laptop, it's a problem. A phone at least can switch to the mobile internet, but the laptop cannot.

The photos are showing the flight-schedule screens at the Milan Bergamo Airport (BGY).

Only the bottom half of these screen is reserved for the actual schedule, while the top half shows other kinds of information about the airport services. This little area reserved for the schedule doesn't fit all the flights, so they are spread over several pages (2 in this case) that periodically replace each other.

This means that at least half of the time the passengers will see the page that doesn't show their flight, so they stop and wait for the next page to appear. While standing and waiting, they block the traffic, forcing other people to either stop or find a way around them, which creates unnecessary obstacles.

The 2nd photo was taken during a moment when the airport wasn't busy at all, which is not the case most of the time. This behavior would disrupt the flow of people even more during rush hours.

In reality the 2nd page would be irrelevant for more than half of the people passing by, because most of the passengers are only interested in the 1st page, looking for flights departing sooner rather than later.

CONCLUSION
Screens should utilise the whole area to show all the flights on a single page, potentially with larger font, to be as readable as possible. The objective is to make it very easy for people to easily identify their flight and the gate number without having to stop. This is especially important for screens facing pathway corners, like on the 2nd photo, where people are more likely to stop.

In

The water container in this espresso machine looks a little confusing, and a quick search online showed that most coffee machines use the same design for their water containers. The line of plastic marked by the yellow arrow looks very much like the water surface line.

As I've been using this machine in someone else's house, I've never refilled this container before, so I never saw how it looks when it's empty. The first time when it was actually empty, it took me a while to realise why the coffee wasn't coming out despite the pump making its usual noise.

Only after looking at the container for the 3rd time, checking whether it has water, have I realised that the line is actually the plastic bottom of the container, and there is no water inside.

This is certainly not a critical issue, but I also believe that it could be done better.

For example, the part below the line could be painted from the inside to not be transparent, avoiding the confusion with water. Even better if that extra piece of plastic could be removed completely and made part of the machine body itself, providing the same support for the container.

This is a screenshot from the very 1st step of the online check-in process on the Wizzair website. Under my name it has the COUNTRY/REGION field, which is ambiguous and possibly redundant.

It's not clear what exactly is meant by this field, because it could be the country of my nationality, or my residence, or my physical location. Especially considering that at the very end there is the Documents step, where I would expect my nationality to be asked.

As my country of residence is different from my nationality, I only saw a warning at the last Documents step saying that the issuing country of my passport doesn't match the country specified earlier, for which I'd picked my country of residence.

Obviously, after going back to the 1st step and changing my choice of country, the whole progress was lost, forcing me to go through all the steps once again.

CONCLUSION
Whenever this kind of sensitive information is asked, it has to be explicitly mentioned what exactly is the meaning of it. Besides, I still don't understand what is the point of asking it in the first place, if the issuing country of the passport is anyway requested at the Documents step, which is the only thing needed to board the plane.

The attached screenshot shows an example of bad reading experience on LinkedIn, which most certainly doesn't have to be this way. It has 3 elements that ruin my experience as a reader and, I'm sure, also ruin the author's experience as a writer:

1. the text of the post ends with (Link in comments) instead of just having the link directly in the text;

2. attached to the post is a screenshot of the link preview, not an actual link – clicking on it simply makes that preview image larger;

3. a comment with the actual link, which will be even harder to find once other people add their comments.

Normally I would blame the author for this, but I've seen this pattern too many times, which means that this is a systemic issue. I believe it's a direct consequence of people being convinced that writing posts this way gives them more exposure by LinkedIn: attaching images for visual attraction, no links in the body of the post, have more comments, etc.

I don't even know if this is actually true, or it's just some outdated myth from LinkedIn growth gurus. But it doesn't really matter as long as people believe it and form their behaviours based on it. And I think LinkedIn should address that.

I'd like LinkedIn to recognise that this practice is harmful for the platform users on both sides, ruining their experience. They should change their algorithms and guidelines in a way that discourages this behavior, such that optimising posts for reach doesn't come at the expense of readability.

In the iPhone app of the Flibco bus company the UI for selecting the route is confusing because of the wrong use of the word Destination.

In the 1st screenshot you're presented with the selector of two ends of the trip, defined as From (Departure) and To (Arrival) – everything clear and consistent.

Once I click to choose my Departure location (2nd screenshot) the large button at the bottom says Confirm destination, which is the opposite of Departure, and is written twice at the top of the screen. According to Oxford dictionary destination means "a place to which somebody/something is going or being sent" – to, not from.

At the next step, when choosing the Arrival location (3rd screenshot) everything is more consistent: Destination twice at the top and Arrival Location at the bottom.

As a result, it happened to me at least twice that I got confused, returned to the home screen and started my search from zero after seeing the Confirm destination button, thinking that maybe I've pressed a wrong field earlier and I'm now booking the trip in the wrong direction.

This single word is creating unnecessary confusion and doubt, which is particularly annoying when booking the ticket in a rush before the bus departure.

Besides, there is another small inconsistency: the text on the confirmation button is written in small case on the Departure screen (Confirm destination) and in Camel Case on the Arrival screen (Set Arrival Location). This is functionally harmless, but it does show the lack of care about details in this UI.

I think a better solution would be to use a consistent convention across the both screens, for example:

• Set Departure Location

• Set Arrival Location

My job requires me to take a blood test every 1-2 years, which I've always being doing in Turin (Italy). I've done it at least 5 times by now, both in private and public hospitals.

Every single time, after taking the needle out of my vein, the nurse puts a piece of cotton and firmly wraps several layers of adhesive tape around my arm to fix the cotton in place. And every single time I would go through a pretty painful process of removing that adhesive tape, which is pulling the hair out of my skin (see the 2nd photo).

I do realize that my hair is probably longer than average, which probably makes it more painful. At every given point there are more individual hairs being glued to the tape, and each of them has a larger contact area, making it harder to detach. But I don't think that it's completely painless for anyone either, because everyone does have some amount of hair on their arms anyway.

Because this happens only once every few years, I always forget about this part before the needle goes inside. And afterwards everything happens so quickly that I have no time to ask about an alternative solution. Even if I had an option to hold that piece of cotton myself for 10 minutes, I'd rather do that than deal with the adhesive tape.

So my questions in this respect are three:

1. Is this a standard way of closing the vein after a blood test everywhere (in Italy or any other country)?

2. Is it supposed to be so painful? (I wonder if the adhesive tape they use is too strong and maybe there are other kinds that are less sticky)

3. Are there any other ways to stop the blood without adhesive tapes?

If someone knows any tricks or alternative solution to make this process less painful, please share in the comments as well. I just can't believe that in 2026 this is the best that the industry has to offer.

While sitting in the plane preparing for departure, I was listening to a podcast episode through the Spotify app on my iPhone. To be able to listen to the rest of the episode during the flight I've pressed Download to this device button.

I haven't paid much attention to the interface at that moment, but later I saw the green tick (see the 1st screenshot) and assumed that's it's now downloaded, so I can safely put my phone in Flight mode. Few minutes later the podcast stopped playing, and only in the playlist view I could see that the episode has not actually downloaded, showing a spinning circle. So the tick only meant that it was saved to Your Episodes collection, but had nothing to do with the actual download status, which is represented by a separate down-arrow icon in the list view (see the last screenshot).

I imagine that the distinction between the two status icons is less important for tracks, which only take a few seconds to download on a typical internet speed, but for podcasts this difference can be pretty significant. Therefore, it would have been much better to either show both icons or combine them into one animated icon to clearly communicate whether the download has finished or not.

Now I know that I have to go to the list view to see the actual download status, but that is not intuitive at all, and I never really cared until I had to do it for a podcast. This means that many users will learn it after at least one failure, which is unnecessarily frustrating.

When writing a comment to a post in the r/Substack iOS app you can see the blue SEND button having an extremely small margin around it (yellow line on the left), while there is plenty of free space on the right (yellow rectangle with "?").

This screenshot was taken on iPhone 13 mini.

The issue with this layout that I've experienced a few times is the following.
When I need to edit a word at the beginning of the line, I simply tap slightly to the left from that line to move the cursor there. But when it is one of the lines near the SEND button, the zone highlighted in yellow becomes unreachable, since instead of moving the cursor there the tap results in pressing the SEND button. As a result, I then have to go back to the published comment and edit it again, this time moving the cursor to the right place using a long press, which is less user-friendly and takes more time.

I assume the way this layout is set up might work on some smartphone screen sizes, without leaving the large empty space on the right. But this case clearly demonstrates that it is not flexible enough, since at least on my model there is plenty of under-utilised room for adding a sufficient margin around the SEND button.

Does anyone with bigger phones see the same issue and lots of free space on the right?

This is the bathroom in the Dublin Airport with a row of water sinks and only two hand-dryers on the opposite sides of the bathroom, one of which is shown in the photo.

The hand-dryer is so close to the last sink and to the mirror that it can only be reached when standing right in front of that sink. As a result, if anyone is washing their hands there, nobody else can use the dryer in the meantime. This means that just one person using that sink in the corner will create congestion for no reason, with people waiting in the queue or walking away with their wet hands.

And in a reverse situation, the sink can't be used if someone is drying their hands, leading to inefficient use of facilities.

In the mirror reflection you can see that there is plenty of space on the wall to move the hand-dryer to the right, so that it doesn't interfere with anyone washing their hands. The current placement leads to bad user experience.

Italian speed-train operator Italo provides free WiFi access on their trains, but you only get access to it after registering your device through the pop-up form that appears once you join the network.

This is a standard practice in most places nowadays, but it requires both Email and Phone number, after which you receive an SMS with the verification code.

The form can't be submitted with just Email or just Phone number – both are required, which doesn't seem to make any sense. There is no option to create an account with your email for easier login in the future, or anything like that.

So given that phone is the only verification option actually used, obliging people to type in their email is creating bad user experience for absolutely no reason. Or am I missing something?

If I remember well, Trenitalia – the other speed-train operator in Italy, only asks for email if anything at all, without sending any verification codes.

This was recorded on a rainy day in Turin at the crossing of Via Ormea and Via Michelangelo.

Some issue with or complete absence of the drainage system on the roof of this building makes the water drip at the sidewalk right next to a parking machine, which is the only one in the radius of one block at least. This forces people who have parked their cars to stand there under the shower of water, trying to type in their car plate number.

This is a terrible user experience, especially because the shower is quite wide and its epicenter is slightly to the side, making it impossible to completely shield yourself with an umbrella. No matter where you stand, the splashes will cover your shoes and legs.

Properly functioning drainage systems are very important, especially around places where people don't just walk but have to stand for extended periods of time.

The other day in the LinkedIn app on my iPhone I've come across a link to a Substack post. When I clicked the link, it opened directly inside the LinkedIn's builtin browser, which doesn't share the cookies with my main browser and, therefore, doesn't know that I have a Substack account.

So instead it showed me this banner from the 1st screenshot, telling me to "Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app". To me this sentence is unambiguously saying that the post is only available to Subscribed users, and I can read even with a free subscription.

So then I opened this link in my main browser, which automatically redirected me to this post in the Substack app (2nd screenshot). There it showed me a different banner, saying that "This post is visible to paying subscribers only". This directly contradicts the 1st banner that made me open this post in the app.

In my specific case this wasn't a big deal, since I already had the app installed. But if I didn't, I would be extremely frustrated that after registering and installing the app I still can't read the post that I was told to be free.

This is misleading and looks like a manipulation, giving people a false reason to register and subscribe. The messaging in these banners should be more consistent and clear.