New:
1. No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs by Lezlie Lowe
Reread:
1. Survivor in Death
New:
1. No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs by Lezlie Lowe
Reread:
1. Survivor in Death
Latest pandemic malfunction: my 18-year-old TV finally gave up the ghost.
I bought a new TV easily enough, but it's a bit too big for my existing TV stand. So I'm shopping for some kind of TV stand or table or cart or something to put it on.
Problem: the products that catch my eye keep being heavier than I can lift.
Under normal circumstances this isn't so much of a problem. Normally, we can have furniture delivered. Normally, it's not a huge imposition to ask someone to pop by and help me move or assemble something.
But during a global pandemic, this isn't an option. My building's pandemic rules prohibit delivery people from coming up to apartments, instead telling them to leave the deliveries at the concierge desk and residents will bring them up. My building's pandemic rules also prohibit visitors, and public health rules are also telling me not to have contact with other households. (Sometimes public health rules let single people bubble with another household, but there are zero people in my life whose risk factors permit visiting me and aren't already bubbled with another household.) So during the pandemic, I'm limited to what I can lift myself and assemble myself.
Online shopping sites could help me with this by letting me filter products by weight, so I only see those that are light enough for me to bring up to my apartment myself and assemble myself.
The websites already have this information - it tends to be listed right under dimensions.
The websites already let you filter by various variables, such as price and size. I can already tell the website "show me all the TVs under 35 inches", so why not "show me all the TV stands under 40 pounds"?
Building on this, they really should let you filter by any characteristic that is listed on the site. Country manufactured, inseam length, number of USB ports, anything. People have all kinds of oddly specific requirements, so, especially in this pandemic era where more shopping is being done online than ever before, why not let us pinpoint exactly what we need?
During the pandemic, I've been reading the epaper versions of the my newspapers rather than getting my usual home delivery, and I've noticed an annoyance: links to further information on the Toronto Star site are provided as a QR code, without a corresponding URL provided.
This is an annoyance by itself in the print version, because it only gives you the option of opening the link on a mobile device, even if you'd prefer to read on a computer.
But it's all the more annoying in the epaper version, because epaper readers are already reading on their preferred device for reading a newspaper electronically! If I'm reading on my computer like I usually do, I could, theoretically, grab my phone and scan the QR code. But what if I was already reading on my phone? Surely there are many households that don't have extra mobile devices just sitting around unused for every time you want to click a link!
If the Star would simply print URLs next to (or instead of) QR codes, everyone could access the links by the means most convenient to them, thereby maximizing the number of eyeballs on the Star's website. Using the QR code alone is inconvenient to many and impenetrable to some. There's no reason not to continue printing URLs, like they have since the advent of URLs.