The "increment by 30 seconds and then start" microwave button is one of the all-time great human inventions

Hm, maybe I exaggerate a little, but I do really love it.

You know how microwaves have about a hundred stupid buttons that are labelled stuff like "Potato" and "Popcorn", and how you can ignore the whole lot and just press the one that increments the time in multiples of 30 seconds and then starts cooking? (Well, maybe you also want to learn to control the power level if you're feeling fancy.) I love this interaction pattern and wish it applied to more things.

My digital kitchen timer is particularly stupid. It has seconds, but it increments them by 1 second each time, because of course I always want to cook something for exactly 7 seconds, that's a very normal thing to want to do. So it's prohibitively hard to time anything for 30 seconds, or 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and so I never do it even when it would be useful.

Also, while I'm at it, why is it so hard to find a timer that beeps for a while and then shuts up? Why do I always have to rush over to turn the stupid thing off? I can see that being useful for something where you might burn the house down, but at least half of the time I'm using it to time brewing tea. If my tea gets a bit stewed I will probably live.

And does it really have to beep that lazy 1000 Hz beep that all beepy things beep at, can't we have something a bit nicer?

Maybe I should rename this post to "I hate my kitchen timer, but searching for a replacement is so hassly and error-prone that I feel stuck with it". But let's focus on the good I want to see in the world.

I've only covered the "increment by 30 seconds" part above. The "... and then start" bit isn't so important, I'd forgive the lack of it in a kitchen timer, but it's a very nice convenience feature that I really appreciate in microwaves.

That's it, that's the post. I moved to London for work six months ago and totally broke my routines for writing outside work. I'm getting back into it now, but please bear with me while I get the engine running again with some short, stupid, or incoherent notebook posts.