That's actually pretty funny. I imagine you were very pissed off when you first discovered that one.
I had a similarly flawed one. I had an alarm clock which had a MSF radio sync thing built in. But every time it resync'ed with the MSF time signal it'd make the same sound as the alarm for 2-3 seconds. You couldn't turn it off. This was invariably at 3AM or some horrible time. I eventually opened it up and cut the MSF antenna out and slept better knowing the clock was always slightly wrong.
On that note, about 20 years ago, there suddenly was an abundance of small cheap alarm clocks with DCF77 receivers available. Got one of these and totally overslept every couple months. I eventually got a second alarm and set it a few minutes before the other one, and sure enough eventually there was a day where the second one (so my original one) didn't ring its alarm. I didn't look at the clock so was not able to see what was going on, but at least knew it wasn't me.
years later when I long didn't use that clock as an alarm anymore, I had it in a spot where it wouldn't properly receive the DCF signal and I noticed that it would quickly lag behind after just a few days. So my theory at that point was that sometimes the clock just managed to fall behind enough in its old spot and then resync just when the alarm would've gone off, and there was no logic to account for this. ie the clock would compare the time to the set alarm exactly once a minute, but when the clock would receive a new time signal of 7:01:00 when its local time was 6:59:59 or earlier, I'd oversleep.
How could anyone think such a "feature" was a good idea? I try to be charitable but that's got to be the result of either absurd incompetence or intentional maliciousness.
There is a VDSL modem/router/wifi/Powerline combo device by the Deutsche Telekom called "Speedport neo". It's actually totally functional andwl pretty cheap, at least a few years ago it was almost a steal on some websites.
The super awesome feature it had was that it contained a speaker that would play the Telekom jingle every time the connection was established. This cannot be disabled and would happen at night too. So if you had a flakey connection, or used it on some other provider that still had the forced disconnect every 24 hours, it would drive you nuts pretty quickly. So I assume a lot of people took too the obvious fix to this...
> or used it on some other provider that still had the forced disconnect every 24 hours
German providers disconnecting customers every night is a ridiculous feature in itself. It is condescending towards customers who require to use their internet connection at night, for example because they work at night. It could lead to always-on features being broken, backups not working, and I've had countless of times where I was gaming with a German who gets DC'ed which does not work at all in competitive gaming.
In The Netherlands, yes sometimes the connection is broken at night. Sometimes, for a longer period of time. But this is because of software or hardware maintenance, and then doing such during the night makes sense as it provides the least downtime. I get that. But there is no discernible reason German providers need to disconnect every 24 hours.
> German providers disconnecting customers every night is a ridiculous feature in itself.
It wasn't actually strictly at night, but just exactly 24h after the connection was established. But the problem was that even if you reconnected manually at a convenient time, every now and then you'd have a connection issue at a random time, and then it would keep happening at that exact time until you manually changed it again.
I'm not aware of an authoritative source for why this was the case, but most likely there must've been a technical reason like accounting, and then they just kept it around. Mind you, this only affected DSL, which at first was (apart from small regional exceptions) offered by the Telekom exclusively, and later on when resellers appeard, they had no influence on this behavior as it happened on a level where they had no access to. After a while you got consumer routers which let you choose an exact time where it would force a reconnect, so you'd at least be sure when it happened.
Ironically, when the Telekom introduced VoIP, they finally got rid of the dreaded daily disconnect, but some of the resellers kept it, like the one I'm on (cause it's cheap and otherwise rock solid). I just set it to 6 in the morning and scheduled all my backup scripts with this in mind.
While I'd have given an arm and a leg in the days of edonkey2000 for a static IP, nowadays I see the changing address as a privacy feature.
The only explanation I heard was that they wanted to prevent people using consumer DSL for such nefarious purposes as running publicly available servers (nevermind the rather restricted uplink speed machine this hard at any scale anyway), so this was their way of forcing you to get a new IP address every 24h. Of course, services such as dyndns quickly jumped in to fix that problem.
My Dad had a Samsung phone with a "fully charged, unplug me" message and tone that couldn't be turned off. To make matters worse, if he ignored it and went back to sleep it would reach the threshold and pathologically start charging again ~2-3 hours later. He said "it whimpers all through the night" and could only charge it when he was awake to save his sanity.
I had a different situation, I sleep with roaring fans near my head and had to turn the phone alarm way up to hear it reliably. Then it would wake the neighbor at 430am whether it woke me or not. I purchased a separate 24hr timer and set the fans to go off at 4:25am, leaving a quiet room. And a quieter alarm always wakes me. Though I am now conditioned to hear when the fans shut off and get out of bed, and hardly ever fail to turn the alarm off in time.
My bluetooth ear clips have the following behavior when they want to give a low battery warning:
1. They shut down whatever audio is currently playing.
2. They take a dramatic pause.
3. They announce "BATTERY LOW. PLEASE CHARGE NOW."
4. They take one more dramatic pause.
5. Normal functioning resumes and you attempt to pick up on the thread of whatever the person you were talking to was saying for the past several seconds. This doesn't work well.
This announcement is, quite obviously, much worse than doing nothing at all. The worst case scenario, if a warning is just not given, is that my sound cuts out and I miss whatever someone was saying. But that is precisely the effect that the ear clips intentionally generate on an accelerated schedule!
There is no reason not to just add the warning into the existing audio stream. It should be an unobtrusive beep pattern or similar. That would take less than one second while not actively causing the same problem it's hoping it might potentially prevent.
(Speaking of awful bluetooth behavior that has no conceivable reason to exist, I lose all my normal computer audio whenever I'm using voice chat. Why? Well, voice chat takes input from my microphone, which switches the bluetooth device into "headset" mode. Headset mode converts stereo audio to mono and it is the only audio output you're allowed to use while you're providing audio input, or might potentially provide audio input.
Any applications that don't take audio input continue to try to play their audio to a bluetooth headphones device, which no longer exists, so they all lose the ability to make sounds.
Why is there more than one mode for the device to be in? Why would I want to lose functionality as a side effect of talking to my family? What's so difficult about playing different audio signals to each ear at the same time that the microphone could potentially become active? Non-bluetooth devices handle this and it's not even considered a notable feature. "The microphone doesn't shut down the headphones while you're using it." Why would it?)
> This announcement is, quite obviously, much worse than doing nothing at all. The worst case scenario, if a warning is just not given, is that my sound cuts out and I miss whatever someone was saying. But that is precisely the effect that the ear clips intentionally generate on an accelerated schedule!
There is a very good reason to announce it with fanfare: completely depleted batteries can get permanently damaged.
It also allows the user to plan better around the downtime. I'm actually able to continue with zero downtime on me in-ears because I detach one of them and power it up while the other one gets depleted further.
With my over-ears I'm unable to do that but they last many hours more. Which is logical as they're more bulky, have a larger battery, and don't have a case containing a battery.
> Speaking of awful bluetooth behavior that has no conceivable reason to exist, I lose all my normal computer audio whenever I'm using voice chat. Why? Well, voice chat takes input from my microphone, which switches the bluetooth device into "headset" mode. Headset mode converts stereo audio to mono and it is the only audio output you're allowed to use while you're providing audio input, or might potentially provide audio input.
True, this is silly, this also happens when you phone. But I actually don't want high quality sound when someone speaks. I've had people's background noise during gaming; not my preference. The irony is that with ANC, there's mics active all the time as noise cancelling depends on that.
But that's still a bug, obviously not intended behavior. I think i would rather have unobtrusive battery notifications than worry about the possibility of a specific type of unintended behavior that can be easily and routinely prevented by the manufactured. There's all kinds of excessive and annoying safety behaviors we could be putting into our devices but most of us get by on at least a minimum of trust.
Plenty of people use audio to fall asleep - be it relaxing music, white noise, nature sounds, podcasts, talk radio, boring speeches, or whateverelse. Not everyone likes the same sleeping audio as others sleeping in the same room.
The application such as Spotify could have a timer. The headphones apparently don't, nor do they have an auto go off when battery is depleted, or a way to more silently announce battery is low.
You really do not want to deplete batteries on devices where they're difficult to replace. Whether that is true for your sleep mask, I HAVE NO IDEA. A better way to deal with it is have them disable themselves after a timer. Maybe you can enforce that from the other side (I assume that is your smartphone?). Like, you can do some device automation with e.g. MacroDroid.
I had a similarly flawed one. I had an alarm clock which had a MSF radio sync thing built in. But every time it resync'ed with the MSF time signal it'd make the same sound as the alarm for 2-3 seconds. You couldn't turn it off. This was invariably at 3AM or some horrible time. I eventually opened it up and cut the MSF antenna out and slept better knowing the clock was always slightly wrong.