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Comment by CogitoCogito | Hacker News Reader

> Kitchen scales, bit more use, at least once a day but again 2 button cells a year

I had a kitchen scale that would eat through its battery pretty quickly (within a month) even when not being used. I figured it could be an interesting project to open it up and try to figure out where the stray power draw was happening, but the obviously correct solution was just to leave the battery cover off and pop it in and out for regular use.

Anyway my current kitchen scale was given to me as a present and has a mini-usb input to charge an internal battery. I personally found it to be a bit overkill, but at least I wouldn't need to get a new battery all the time. Then I realized that it can't be used when plugged in and charging. As in even if it is fully charged, it will not work when plugged in a charging. I can't believe that design idiocy. The engineers/managers/everyone involved in the production of this product should be ashamed.

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I dropped my kitchen scale and it broke, so I had to go shopping for a new one. Which was kind of fine since that scale wasn’t great. But finding a good scale turns out to be pretty hard!

In the end I found some review that compares different scales and as a reference they used an entry-level lab scale. So I figured, hey, why don’t I just buy the benchmark scale? It costs about the same anyway.

So now I have an ugly German lab scale that actually has an off button and runs on a 9v battery. Here’s hoping I never have to buy another.

This is the secret for lots of these things; if you step slightly above “home use” you can often find industrial/commercial products that will work just fine - though do be aware of the limitations in some.

Or you could go with fully mechanical balance scales.

I know what you mean, but I prefer to picture them trying to fit a massive equal arm balance and stack of reference dumbbells in their bathroom.

I have Sony WH-1000X M3 noise cancelling fancy pancy wireless headphones and they can't charge and be used at the same time either! It is lunacy. Is there some cracy cheap charging chip that has this drawback? The headphones were very expansive still ...

Maybe that's a security feature, as you probably don't want the lithium battery to explode near your head.

I have the same headphones and that is not the only quirk thats driving me nuts. It doesn't remember the last noise canceling setting i used. I almost always use them at home so i don't need NC but every time I turn them on its in NC Mode and I have to press the button twice.

Maybe you have it set to autodetect the current setting. You can set presets for sitting/walking/in transit, and it dynamically switches between them.

While I don't disagree the battery in them lasts forever. Charge them while you sleep.

The electronics industry is sleeping on the job, because they have not defined standard sizes for consumer grade lithium batteries (that means with an inbuilt protection circuit). All headphones, etc. should be using standard batteries.

I have just replaced a battery on my laptop, it completely failed after 2.5 years of use - they are a consumable, not a durable good. All headphones, gaming mice, etc. are headed straight for the landfill when their battery fails, it is impractical to replace that inbuilt lipo cell as it has custom size and shape, etc.

I buy devices with replaceable batteries whereever possible.

They should have taken the apple approach and put the charging port on the bottom so you couldn't even lay it flat on its bottom with the charger plugged in.

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