A bidet 💪 even a cheap one is nice.
Warning. Purchasing a bidet will ruin travel because you don’t feel clean the entire trip
I recently started carrying one of these in my travel kit. Absolutely recommended for just that reason.
As someone who speaks Spanish
culoclean
choking on my White Russian
Same here my friend! They nailed the name.
Came to say bidet. I have the poor man version … 25 at Amazon. I suffer Everytime I have to go back to only tp when not at home. I feel like a savage caveman without one. Smearing poop is just nasty and uncivilized to me. I have used the fancy ones in Japan but really did not like the warm water. I prefer the shocking cold glaciar feeling of butt refreshes. To anyone reading this…get a bidet, ANY KIND… Try cleaning up peanutbutter from your arm with just paper to experience what we talking about .
If it counts, definitely the Steam Deck. With that and emulators, it’s like having almost every game I’ve ever owned in one portable machine.
In a similar vein, I love my ps vita. Hacked, it’s an absolutely amazing console, and is able to boast the “actually fits in my pocket” award.
Such a cool console. Sony butchered it, but theres still so much fun to be had with it. We got a GTA san andreas port by the community ffs
Sony wishing they didn’t make the vita is a double edged sword, because it also means you can be a completely obvious hacker, and Sony doesn’t give a singular fuck. And they still ban people for hacking on ps3, so it isn’t just age.
Similar here: Anbernic RG280V. Fits in a pocket. Plays everything up through PSX. I use it all the time!
Yeah i have a modded psvita, scene is suprsingly active. You got ensō?
I have whatever I set up with when I hacked it tbh. I don’t really do much beyond transfer games onto it at this point
Have had mine for 10 years and it still going. The screen edges are a bit yellow but not a big deal.
I just got one so reading this makes me hopeful. Fallen out of love with gaming a bit in recent years
Check out “Dave the diver”. I’ve fallen out of love with gaming as well and I’ve been dropping a lot of hours into this game on my steam deck. Super unique and easy to pick up and put down. Feels fresh.
Will do sir
If you like platformers Bzzt just came out and would definitely run on the deck. For roguelikes I’d recommend Darkest Dungeon, Hades, or Rogue Legacy. For a straightforward RPG with 3D models but pixel art I’d recommend Octopath Traveller 2.
I also recommend Dave the Diver as well, fantastic game.
Also just ordered mine. Since I started working fulltime remote a year ago, I found myself not wanting to spend more time on my desk after work. That translated into me almost giving up gaming even though I used to love it. Moving to a place where I can have a second desk would cost me one Steam Deck per month so I just went with a Steam Deck lol
I got one recently too, and it’s already helping me with this. I hope you find joy in it :). I never buy myself anything so I was worried I’d regret it… but I really like it so far.
Omg same, but it’s been a rough year so this is my Christmas gift to myself I guess. Also glad to hear it’s helping you :)
It’s been great for getting to games I’m not sure I would have otherwise. Ori and the Blind Forest was the perfect game to play through on it!
I hope you have a better rest of the year and beyond. This year stank a bit for me too, but there’s been some good things as well.
Almost all my gaming is on my SD now. Love this thing.
I came here to type that, so I’ll just upvote yours instead. Such a versatile device, the Steam Deck!
I got a retroid pocket 3+ for emulators and it’s fuckin awesome. I feel like a steam deck may be in my near future lol
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Now that is a B1tchin’ cane.
I’ve been struggling with gout in my knee and ankle off and on. When it gets bad I’m almost immobile and I broke down and finally bought a cane to help me hobble around when it’s at its worst.
Mine also came from Ukraine and like you I wanted something with personality. I got an oak, ball top style stained cherry and I love it!
I got one made of holly, with a phoenix feather core. It’s very nice and supple.
did you pick it or did it pick you?
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Physical Therapy! Do the exercises/stretches. If you need to go back and ask a doctor for another round, do it. I get it though.
Sometimes KT tape can do wonders, but it really really depends. Personally, the best was with knees and arms. I wear a different kind of brace for my ankle, a Trilok, but there are apparently a whole bunch of similar ones now.
Other times you just suffer in silence…
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Dude do it. I dealt with chronic pain for way too long and just accepted it as hopeless. I had tried stretches and exercises on my own with no luck so I wrote physical therapy off as pointless.
Eventually I gave in and 6 weeks in to physical therapy my pain is like 80% gone. I started noticing improvements after a week.
Probably it doesn’t quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it’s much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.
I recently picked up a 13 year old dell inspiron to run my instance of home assistant and Plex. It was an upgrade from a shitty old Linux laptop that was literally falling apart. All I had to do was add ram (it only had 6gb and it wasn’t stable, so I maxed it out with 16gb) and I swapped the old slow HDD for a crucial SATA SSD and it’s been perfect. It probably pulls more wattage than necessary but it’s exactly what I need for now.
wow that’s amazing. so it’s connected to all other PCs in the house? did you have to buy a lot of new storage?
I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven’t run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.
The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
I’m not the guy you replied to.
I originally stored my music in Plex and used Plexamp. I have a large playlist downloaded from youtube which caused horrible performance issues in Plexamp. Navidrome is pretty much a read-only service. It can only read metadata from the files, not add any or manage them. For me this feels safer to expose to the internet since my docker container only has read-only access to all of my files. Even if someone broke into the service for some reason, they couldn’t do anything to my files.
I don’t know if jellyfin has similar performance issues with large playlists since I already had navidrome set up by then.
Thanks! I don’t have too much music on it yet, I guess, so not sure on the performance. I do like that read only approach, though. Currently I’m running just the regular jellyfin app on my Mac. What made you use it in docker? It sounds like in Linux it’s a safeguard to prevent dependency issues but I don’t think that’s really a factor on mac
Mostly ease of management. I have a server on which I run multiple applications. If I don’t need something anymore, I can just purge the container. The directories used by that container are clearly listed in my docker-compose file so I never have to wonder whether I purged everything that is now unnecessary.
It also makes it very easy to deploy a new service.
I bought a cheap low power minipc. Don’t know the numbers but having a 10yo desktop powered 27/7 can’t be that great for your power consumption.
The one I bought is an Intel Alder Lake N100 Quad Core up to 3.4GHZ, 16GB DDR5 512GB for €160.
A countertop water boiler. It turns out I go through just about 4L of tea a day and now I spend a lot less time boiling water. And when you refill it and it comes to temperature it plays Fur Elise
edit: typo
+rep for Zojirushi. My water boiler lid recently began chipping and pretty much disintigrating and on their website I saw they even have replacement parts for discontinued products. Very cool of them
Example: https://www.zojirushi.com/app/spare_parts/item/8-CDQ-P010
fur elise? fleur de lis is the ⚜
Yes, thank you
would a raspberry pi count? i’ve been self-hosting a nextcloud instance and my RSS feed for a while now and i’ve really been enjoying it
Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.
Ditto on the Arduino. I built a pickup winder for electric guitar, and it’s more than made up for its price in entertainment alone.
Heck yes. I never want to use the internet anywhere but my house because my husband installed a Pihole and it’s the best thing evaaaar.
A good pair of headphones and a decent amp and dac to power them. It’s like discovering music all over again.
My personal recs: Modhouse Argon Mk3, Hifiman Sundara, Sennheiser hd6xx
Steam Deck. Without question. I don’t think I would have been able to cope with the last year and a half of my life without it. This year has been very rough and I have been able to escape life while still spending time with my family. Top-tier psychological maintenance for me.
This one seems silly, but one really useful cheap thing I bought that I use much more than I thought I would is an electric kettle. (I should point out I’m in the US) I use it to make iced tea, my wife uses it for hot tea, and we both use it for boiling water for whatever cooking project needs it. We have a gas stove, and it takes about twice as long to heat up a liter of water as this kettle. It uses a normal US 120v outlet and I think it draws 1,000w. (Edit: I looked it up and it’s 1,100 watts)
Seconding an electric kettle, even a cheap one was a game changer over not having one at all. Crazy how 99.99% of people I know as an American don’t own one
Boiling water is only for pasta to Americans
Most Americans don’t drink tea. The only things that I know they are used for are tea and instant noodles.
Don’t let the pour over coffee crowd hear you. You’ll be done for. A proper gooseneck kettle is like top 3 priority.
I wonder if they’re more popular now. I took this in a Walmart in California. https://imgur.com/d5ae1Po Although about half of those are not electric!
plus one and I use it for a lot of non cooking where you want water of a specific temperature. Unclogging drains and filling the carpet cleaner comes to mind… Its like I want 135 degree water. Oh also nasal irrigation water. Its great for it to have a wide temperature setting.
I want 135 degree water.
Unfair! We in Europe can’t have that!
Why does America look like poor Poland villages. But even poor Poland Villages have electric kettles.
Why don’t Americans use electric kettles? https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c?si=t7nyeDTJIuVDfsQq
Most Americans have a coffee pot instead of an electric kettle. Coffee is a cultural staple in the US. Tea is not.
Dear god, I won’t even look at a kettle that’s less than 2200w.
In fact ours gets so much use I just ordered one that I can shout at across the room to switch on
This is where the 120 volt power makes it a little worse for us Americans. 2200w would be 18 amps, easily taking most of the power on a breaker.
If kettles ever got more popular in the US maybe they could put 240v outlets in kitchens for kettles, but that would be a huge change.
At 110V that’s a 20A kettle. So you aren’t getting that high of wattage kettle in the US. Most standard US residential breakers are only 20A (some are only 15A) and they aren’t designed to continuously run near the max amperage so the biggest we can run on a “normal” circuit is probably around a 1760W kettle but it would also have to be the only thing running on that circuit at the time.
Last time I needed new headphones for going out, I bought a Shockz bone conducting headphone.
While the specific one I bought was the wrong choice (the Run I got is slick but needs a proprietary charging cable instead of the USB-C the Move uses, and they sound 100% the same), overall the concept is really good. I enjoy hearing people around me, for someone who more listens to podcasts and radio shows not music the quality is perfect, and I can wear these on my bicycle without having to worry I won’t hear something.
Also, since they don’t sit in the ear not enclose it it’s easy to semi-forget them there as they’re so comfortable, no stuffed feeling or sweaty ears. I sometimes just use them at home instead of shifting a podcast onto the sonos speakers. Just easier.
Yes. I love mine. I originally got some bone-conduction headphones to use at my job because I work in a high noise environment and they still work while you’re wearing earplugs, but I use them pretty much constantly now. It’s really nice to have my music or podcasts and still be able to hear when someone asks me a question, or to be able to hear traffic coming if I’m out walking or jogging.
I’ve had a couple pairs of them now and weirdly bone-conduction headphones seem to be the one electronic device that under promises on its battery life. I don’t know if maybe I just got lucky, but the cheap no name set I got off Amazon promised 5 hours, but even after a year still regularly lasts 8 or 9. My Shokz Open Run Pros promise 10 hours, and I routinely get 15 or 16 hours. So that’s nice.
Out of curiosity: did you ever test noise cancelling headsets in that high noise environment? I’d think that in-ear and over-ear nc headphones should work quite well too.
No, because active noise cancellation doesn’t offer any hearing protection. It doesn’t make the noise go away, it works by sending out an extra soundwave which is a mirror inversion of noise to be cancelled, sends out peaks where there were troughs and troughs where there were peaks, and they cancel each other out as far as your brain is concerned. But to work the destructive soundwave has to be as loud as the sound it’s cancelling, and now you have two sound waves blasting away, still moving air and putting pressure on your eardrums, and it’s that pressure causes the damage to your hearing.
Proper PPE has a passive barrier that physically blocks the bulk of the vibration from reaching your eardrums in the first place. Active noise cancellation does kind of the opposite of that.
I’ve heard of these for a while and general question for you and anyone else who’s looked. What are the red flags? Nothing comes without risks and years of research has shown the hearing damage from traditional headphones. There has to be a rub with these. What are the negative rumblings of using these style of headphones. They have to be there. We just don’t have the decades of research yet.
If I now say that your premise is wrong (headphones don’t cause hearing loss, loud noises do, independent of the source), does that automatically answer your question? 😛
Now to dig a bit deeper into that, there is a lot of research into MIHL from using PLDs, and the key thing is always people turning up the volume higher than they normally would, usually due to the context of where they are. That is, we use our little headphones in noisy environments, and to drown out the noise we turn them up too much and start damaging our ears over time.
In that regard, bone conduction headsets are worse. They are intentionally fully open, and don’t in the slightest bit try to reduce ambient noise. That is, if anything you’d be tempted to crank them up even higher.
I will however say that the models I’ve used all came with an interesting “safety” in this regard that stems from the way they work: At a certain and not that loud noise level, they start vibrating physicially off the skin during playback, in turn plateauing the achievable volume. I suspect however that this level is already beyond healthy.
So, in other words:
If you’re concerned about hearing loss, keep the volume in sane reaches. If you also need to ignore outside noise while listening, this means getting enclosing and/or noise-cancelling headphones, not open ones like bone conducting. However, if keeping the volume low, say during listening at home, bone conduction is no different from other forms of receiving audio, both still stimulate the hearing canal hairs.Yeah, I love my ANC earbuds. In pass-through mode, I can hear ambient sounds almost better than I can without them, especially on a bike where I can tune them to blank wind noise but allow voices and bells. And you’re right about not needing high volume to hear music well. They have great sound quality, and the ANC is indispensible on airplanes.
The downside is cost; GP’s bone-conducting headset is $90, and the other pair they mention is $60. A good pair of ANC earbuds starts around $200, and some of the better pairs are upwards of $300.
Worth the money, IMO, but if $60 is all you can afford, GP’s might be the better bet than super sketchy-quality cheap ANC earbuds.
What’s the frequency response like on those? Can you hear low-end bass in a way that sounds good?
Y’all this sound crazy, but the Bug A Salt is fucking awesome.
It’s worth it if you can get a black Friday deal or something under 30$ because it’s just a little salt when you shoot it and there’s no guts on your wall, no dirty fly swatter, no chasing, no jumping, no reaching, and you feel like a sniper hitman.
Its not a toy. That shit hurts when you get hit lol
Do you not just have salt everywhere?
How much salt do you think it shoots lol fr tho it’s just a little for each shot
For flying bugs just use a mist spray bottle with water. Spray the bug with water first so it can’t fly away. Then squish it. It’s cheaper, the water evaporates, and for people with bad aim it’s a lot easier to hit.
That’s fair, but no fun and still bug guts.
Have my eye on this for years. But it costs more then €60 in Europe if you add shipping. That is just insane.
If you use temu there is a knock off for 7$ us on there
Robot vacuum. Autistic and ADHD and could never keep on top of keeping my floor clean. But I can now!
Been looking at these for a while but I can’t seem to decide on one, any suggestions?
I’ve had a look, not purchased, but watched a lot of review videos and I’d recommend you to do the same as no one here is going to have really tried all the different models available.
Unfortunately, the price does seem to correlate with the quality and performance and the most expensive auto vacuums cost in the £300 region. They also will never be as powerful as a traditional upright, can’t do stairs and of course you still have to empty them and take them up and down the stairs to do the different floors of your house. But yh, the price is the biggest reason I’ve not gotten one myself.
yh
Dereference this?
It means “yeah”
Roborock S8+ with the dock is awesome. It’s a straight upgrade from the last gen flagship Roomba.
Way better mapping and battery life.
I had Neatos for years. They worked great until they didn’t; I always had to do a lot of troubleshooting. Now I have a Wyze vacuum, which I think is a rebrand of a larger Chinese brand. It doesn’t clean as well as the Neatos, but it’s had no problems so far, and it was much cheaper.
There’s plenty of reviews out there if you want to get into it, and it does seem like some of the more expensive ones out there have some really nice features. But if you’ve been on the fence for a while my advice is to pick a well reviewed affordable one and go for it.
Once you have something cleaning your floors you’ll have more time to research which one is the ultimate vacuum.
I have a Roomba j7+ and I love it. I also have a Braava Jet M6, so mopping is taken care of too. The mopping is slow, but it’s quiet and it’s not like I have to wait for it.
Get a Valetudo supported one. There’s no need to share your room layout with random strangers. I’d get one of newer ones from Dreame.
These free up so much time. Love mine too. I cook a lot and mess around a lot in the open kitchen/living room area and had to sweep the floor daily…not anymore.
Cordless vacuum was a costly one but certainly made that chore a lot more easy and kinda fun. I planned to store it in a closet but I’d take it out every few days so eventually I started leaving it on the floor, it’s not in the way there either.
On a similar note, robot vacuum. It cleans quite nicely, is surprisingly reliable, and as a bonus you keep the floor less cluttered to make sure it doesn’t run into stuff it shouldn’t.
This year, my partner and I traded our large “traditional” vacuum for a robot + cordless stick vacuum.
Honestly, a great decision. Robot vacuum runs once a weekday, house has never been cleaner. Anything it doesn’t get, we can quickly grab the cordless for.
Bone conducting ear phones, I have tiny narrow ear canals and can’t get any type of ear bud to go in my ears, the bone conductors are a revelation for listening to audio books, radio and music when I’m out and about
Got a brand to recommend? Sounds awesome.
Shokz is a brand that makes them. I haven’t had a pair but a student of mine had them and liked them.
Shokz are awesome. I also have finicky and small ear holes that don’t like earbuds that much, along with piercings that can get annoyed depending on the style. Shockz solves all that plus I can hear my surroundings. Pro tip for camping…wear the shockz WITH earplugs and play white noise or sleep music. It was the only way I slept during a bass music festival with after parties going until dawn.
My wife was a bone conduction earphone candidate for multiple reasons and I convinced her to try some. Her first pair from Shokz died relatively quickly, but they sent her a replacement without much hassle. She likes them a lot. Every now and then I steal them for a bit. I call it the “voice of god” because when you play something through them it’s like telepathy. You can hear the outside unimpeded, but there’s also this extra sound being injected into your head. Would recommend.
I have been using them for years… reliability is questionable… but their warranty is hassle-free. Got 3 pairs in one year .very little questions asked.
This. Got 3 in a year but got tired of playing all the shenanigans customer support played, got an equivalent $35 at Amazon and if I’ve to buy it 4 times in a year I’m even. Can also run it first trough warranty and get another pair next dsy so I’m always connected. They use to be the best and break about the 20 month mark,.now is just another device waiting to die quick.
Shokz are awesome. I can’t have my hearing impared at work for safety and just practical reasons but the shokz don’t block my hearing so they’re fine. The battery on them can also easily last through a whole 12 hour shift. I’ve had mine for a couple of years now and only just recently one of the buttons has started to act up, otherwise I’ve had no problems with them.
Very late reply, but thanks a lot for this info! I’m actually kind of excited to try those now. You’ve opened a door for me with this.
Thanks again!
3D printer. At any moment in time I could just print something out and it would be ready by the time I finish eating. The possibilities are endless, plenty of free models online or just learn how to design yourself.
Edit: I currently use an Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro
What are some fun or useful things you print? I see a lot of prints online that are toys or action figures, and that’s pretty neat but I usually am not impressed with the quality.
I almost exclusively print functional things so here’s my list of things I’ve designed or printed:
- Tubular key to bypass paying for laundry
- Furniture leg extensions on almost all my furniture to give minimum 4" clearance for the robovac
- Custom mounting bracket / spacer for mounting road sign to the wall with command strips
- Tapestry mounting shim to clamp tapestry in binder clips to hang on the wall without ripping the tapestry
- Rubber band powered sandal holders that stick to the wall and clamp onto sandals which can be used without using your hands / while holding something (I needed to keep my basement sandals from being eaten by my old robovac and I needed to be able to put them on and put them back without needing to put down anything heavy I’m taking to/from the basement, and the space required it to be flat against the wall)
- Replacement shelf pegs for bathroom shelves which are normally only sold in 20 packs for >5$ when I only needed 1, the print cost like 1c instead
- Replacement D-slotted electrical box key since the one that came with the box broke
- Backyard lamp holder that attaches to the fence pole and provides a loop to hang a lamp
- Replacement side panel clip for my PC case which came with 1 broken - manufacturer doesn’t sell replacements
- Custom piece for 2 sectional couch legs to slot into which keeps the 2 halves of my couch from sliding apart causing someone to fall in between onto the floor
Some of this could have been bought online but having a 3D printer really reveals how overpriced plastic stuff is. I rarely print something that costs me more than a few dollars in filament - and that’s if it’s a very large object, it’s easily less than the shipping cost of an equivalent item alone, and small things can often only be found in large packs online while usually costing only a couple cents to print. And plenty of the stuff I print benefits from being able to be made custom and to the exact dimensions I need, for example the furniture leg extensions I made fit perfectly on the furniture legs and raise them up exactly as high as they need to be for my robovac to go under, not a centimeter more. A whiteboard marker caddy I made holds the exact number of markers I have / want to have and attaches under a light switch wall plate which I designed in order to avoid needing to attach it with command strips or screws (it gets clamped between the wall plate and the wall by the existing light switch screws). The first item I listed, the tubular key, was printed with the exact bitting needed for the lock (layer height of 0.05mm is enough vertical resolution for the key to work).
I would love to see your models. Do you have a printables, thingiverse or something?
Sure, most of them are posted here: https://www.printables.com/@StephenSmith
I’ve recently been working on a cube tomato project. I have those models up on my Printables account. I’m planning on uploading more useful stuff I print up.
I use my printer for making replacement parts for things, and for making simple stuff I need like tools, and also for prototyping.
An example: I used to have this motorcycle. The mount for the taillight broke. A new one was $100, and it would break again the same way. So I measured the socket in the fender, measured the bolt holes, and designed my own, which worked flawlessly the rest of the time I had the bike.
Geometric frames of the same size and thickness to make a 3 tiered windchime from upcycled glass!
