i guess the creators thought that the up button would be used very infrequently

Posted by: Joltin Joe at June 17, 2005 01:44 PM

Yay, I was first. by the way, could you answer my question in yesterday's comments?

Posted by: nickd at June 17, 2005 01:46 PM

Never mind.

Posted by: nickd at June 17, 2005 01:46 PM

That hardware looks familiar. I'm certain that the buttons are the way they are because they've reused the hardware used for some other kind of cheap portable directory thingy, but I can't place what device it is.

The "3x" button strikes me as another symptom of the same problem -- the designers had an extra button and had to assign it to *something*.

Posted by: rich at June 17, 2005 02:32 PM

The instructions on the left mention a squared green key labeled SELECT, which is nowhere to find on the device. It appears that the SELECT function is assigned also to the RIGHT key, which happens to be a red circle.....also, on the bottom, there's another red button, smaller than the rest, thet doesn't seem to have any function at all.

Posted by: SAM at June 17, 2005 02:48 PM

You can use "save" to save information on up to 25 wines. Presumably, this means something like a bookmark or favorites list, since all of the wine details are built into the device already. But the instructions don't tell you how to see the list of saved wines!

Posted by: mph at June 17, 2005 03:10 PM

_@_v - (hic) looks like (hic) the designer had a few too many (hic) whilst 'working' (hic) on this one...

Posted by: she-snailie_@_v at June 17, 2005 03:30 PM

Waaah!!! The up button is different.

Waaah waaaah waaah.

Sorry I thought it was the whine master.

/got nothing, it's broken.

Posted by: Joshua Wood at June 17, 2005 04:26 PM

Bad puns are broken.

¬_¬

Posted by: Jello B. at June 17, 2005 04:33 PM

Jello B, that is a great emoticon, how do you do the ¬ character?

Posted by: Joshua Wood at June 17, 2005 04:52 PM

I found it hilarious that the instructions point out that the 'On/Off' button switches the device on and off. Without that step I woulda been clueless!

Posted by: falafel at June 17, 2005 06:12 PM

Hold down Alt and press 0172 on the number pad, then release Alt. The result: ¬

Posted by: Micah at June 17, 2005 06:39 PM

Option-Cmd-L if you don't have an Alt key...

Posted by: mac user at June 17, 2005 09:03 PM

They use the same form factor (and same random button assignment to the same oddball key layout) in other products as well:

http://tinyurl.com/df5ap

Multiple broken products from the same company! Nothing like keeping it all in the family.

Posted by: Hoki at June 18, 2005 01:49 PM

¬ ¬

very interesting. why does that combo give you the weird eye character? like a PIN number. Do other PINs give you different characters? Ja, the Whine Master is stupid, and the controls are broken.

Posted by: Bob at June 18, 2005 03:34 PM

hey bob the numbers are decimal representations of the ascii code that corresponds to each character. You can do a whole bunch of symbols such as: ☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○ and so on... take a look @ this page:

http://www.worldnames.net/unicode/alt-codes-for-symbols.htm

Posted by: Adrian at June 20, 2005 12:03 AM

Evidentaly Joshua's question was rhetorical as he used the symbol in the question.

Posted by: Sean P at June 20, 2005 01:30 PM

Thanks Adrian for the link. No more digging through the keyboard with "Wingdings" turned on.

Posted by: Chuck at June 20, 2005 05:05 PM

¬ ¬

he copied and pasted.

¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬

Posted by: Bob at June 20, 2005 08:10 PM

hmmm.... speaking of weird symbols, does anybody know why printers sometimes spew out pages of gibberish? it's usually just like these ASCII symbols ☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○, with a scattering of Times New Roman.

Posted by: Bob at June 20, 2005 08:17 PM

Copy and paste hadn't occured to me.

RE printers : It usually happens when the format gets screwed up in transmission to the printer or the computer thinks it is sending to a difrent printer.

For some reason (which I don't know) just about every printer has it's own language. In my opinion this is something else that is broken.

The weird symbols and extra pages are what the printer "thinks" the computer is asking for.

I would be curious to know if anyone knows the exact reason there are *always* so many pages.

Posted by: Sean P at June 20, 2005 08:38 PM

Stupid printers. That is broken.

Posted by: Bob at June 21, 2005 08:39 AM

Sean P is on the right track for the printer thing. Many printers are capable of handling plain-text data streams (legacy support, I guess), which are printed with the printer's default onboard font (which ought to be a monospaced font, but often is not).

You get the gibberish when something causes the printer to think the incoming printer-language data stream is actually plain text. You get so many pages because there is an ASCII code which represents "form feed" (page break) whose bytecode apparently appears frequently in printer language.

When this happens with a PostScript data stream, it's not so interesting because a lot of PostScript is human-readable. It's more fun when it happens with PCL or some other printer native language. Then you get the lines of overprinted text and funky symbols and hundreds of pages with three lines of characters.

Posted by: NobodyII at June 23, 2005 09:14 AM

Thanks, Nobody.

Posted by: Bob at June 26, 2005 10:27 PM