First, as an all-time favorite, most corkscrews. The classical waiter’s knife with corkscrew is about the best thing you can get (and you can get it much cheaper than Google’s first hit for “sommelier knife”!), but that does not keep suppliers from flooding the marketplace with useless alternatives that usually tear the cork apart, or leave cork rests in the wine. The one on the photograph is kept for educational purposes only.
Second, a recently-discovered stupidity, Samsonite’s Malaga travel bag. This bag comes with a small padlock (the same lock and key is used for all Samsonite products, it seems, but then again, this lock does not even try to look like it offers serious protection), a more robust combination lock, and a back zipper which can’t be locked, and gives easy access to the bag’s main compartment.
Third, the keyboard in my trusty Dell laptop. A critical part of the mechanism is a relatively thin piece of tin that must be bent in the right way — and, of course, is distorted over time, with all kinds of not so funny effects on my typing habits. The distortion effect is particularly strong with the shift and control keys, but can fortunately be fixed with a little bit of tinkering. The stupid assumption, though, that tin doesn’t exhibit unelastic distortions, seems to have been commonplace in Dell hardware design for quite some time. I still remember some “workstations” which provided comfortable access to the PCI bus, but required re-bending some critical tin parts after the third exchange of a faulty PCI card.
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