Not for everyone obviously, but I developed a synthesizer habit some years ago, and right now is probably the best time ever for a beginner to get into it. Korg’s Volca series, Roland’s Aira compact, teenage engineering’s Pocket Operators, Arturia’s Microfreak, and Elektron’s Model series are all affordable and a great way for a beginner to start making some cool-ass music. Beware developing a habit though. It only stays affordable so long.
My espresso machine. They’re expensive. I do not know why they are, but they are. I hemmed and hawed for years about us getting one and finally decided fuck it. Im an adult, I want one, we can afford it.
In 2+ years the only times I have not made myself a cappuccino are when I have not been home to do so. It is one of my most used appliances. Espresso owns.
They’re expensive because a good one lasts forever. We’ve had our Gaggia Classic for over ten years now and it daily chugs out coffee like the day we bought it.
Which one you got?
Breville bambino plus. I love it. It’s quarky with the cleaning (when it decides you need to clean it you CANNOT skip the clean cycle) but honestly probably for the best since if I could I’d just skip it too often.
I suspect they’re expensive because they pull 9-15 bar of pressure. That’s kinda nuts for something that sits on your counter and makes coffee
I think you meant for something that sits on my counter and turns ground up bean powder into PURE UNADULTERATED JOY ❤️
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.
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.
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.
Almost all my gaming is on my SD now. Love this thing.
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.
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
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!
I just got one so reading this makes me hopeful. Fallen out of love with gaming a bit in recent years
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
A wedding ring. Enlightens my life every day.
The one ring to rule them all?
You just need the ring?
I went the whole hog and got the package with wife/wedding as well. Like you, It brings me joy every day, but was probably a lot more expensive than just getting a ring.
Actually, the wife came for free. Got a complimentary upgrade from the girlfriend package from her… The fool. I’d paid all I had three times over for her. 17 days ago, she got me another upgrade with the “newborn son” addon. Can’t wait to see how that turns out in the long run. This one won’t be free though.
newborn son
In the short term you might regret that add-on but it definitely pays off in the long run.
Takes a while to configure its settings just right, especially when it frequently wipes them.
Those addons are fun for about 12 years, but then they become really expensive with micro transactions like crazy, and later ending needing an entire college DLC. Start saving.
I have a couple of the same addons. I’m on day four thousand and something. Can confirm those addons are not free.
Honestly?
A fidget cube.
Fidget toys got a bad rep, especially after Fidget Spinners became trendy for the younger generation.
But just having a little thing I can toy around with has been great for my pens and game controllers, as in the before times my grabby hands would fiddle with them whenever I was thinking about shit and it was bad for their durability.
For less than a dollar? (ay, currency exchange rates) Yeah, one of the best things I bought.
A Blunt Metro umbrella. Makes me happy every time I get to use it. It’s aesthetically pleasing, it oozes quality, it’s easy to bring with you.
a good compact umbrella is a core piece of kit. can just live where it is most accessible and can pop out when most needed. getting caught in a downpour is a good way to ruin a day
And now the downpour brightens my day 🙂
WTH is a blunt metro umbrella? (Retorical I am about to search it but still …)
I’m guessing some sort of collaboration with Snoop Dogg? 🤷♂️
A bedside arm for mobile phone. No more uncomfortable phone holding for bedtime youtube session.
Your physiotherapist and your sleep doc will both agree that watching or reading your phone in bed is a bad idea.
You may rock out a rebuttal that sounds like “I know driving drunk is bad but I need to”, or so, but your bed is for sleeping and sometimes play-dates.
So many people who want to play farmville in bed.
Hey. That’s between you and your doctor if you’re an adult and can make your own healthy choices. You can, right?
Who needs to rebut you? Your over the top nannying will just go unheeded.
Cool, except I have one room that I rent so the bed is really the ony option as far as relaxing goes. If the physiotherapist and sleep doc want to pitch in and help me buy a house I’m more than happy to switch to a couch though.
Its kind of silly, but VR. I like hanging out in vrchat with my internet friends and it makes me feel a lot closer to them. Even when we’re just talking and goin to cool worlds.
Can you suggest what headset to get? Currently deciding between Quest and PSVR.
Valve Index kit is the best overall setup for the money. Quest headsets are for more casual gaming but the Index uses the power of your PC and its GPU for the graphics.
Not op but quest 2 is a great deal right now for cassual gaming. It works stand alone and with PC. I have also quest 3, but quest 2 is insanely cheap right now and will hold at least a couple of more years. The differences vs quest 3 do not justify the cost difference unless you are hardcore gamer. Imo
Was also gonna say this since expensive gadgets weren’t excluded. I played a bunch of VR minigolf over pandemic to socialize with my irl friends who I couldn’t hang out with and these days VR has been the center of more than half of the social gatherings at my place where I demo games and we pass the headset around for everyone to try different stuff. Seeing new people try VR for the first time never gets old.
@Fumbles Bose Quiet Comfort 35 headphones. Though I suspect the noise cancellation doesn’t work as well. Also it’s been several years, I wonder if they make new ones like they used to.
On that theme: MegaBoom 3 (without Alexa etc) speaker. Awesome bass and volume for a portable, waterproof. Great for bike parties and frankly a shower radio.
If you asked me 10 years ago I’d probably not expect to love any Bluetooth devices.
Fidget cube, helps me get through boring but informitive youtube content.
Swapped out the head unit on my 2016 car for a touchscreen that supports Android Auto. I got spoiled using a similar one in my friend’s rental car. It was only $600 installed at Best Buy. It’s so nice not to have to fight with keeping my phone in a display holder where I can see the map, and now I can control my phone-streamed music with my steering wheel controls. Makes driving so much more pleasant.
I did this too around five years ago, but I installed it myself rather than paying for installation. I bought it from Crutchfield and they provided very good instructions.
It’s harder to do in newer cars though, since the head unit has more of the car’s systems going through it. Mine (2012 Mazda 3) only uses the head unit for what you’d expect - the radio, door/seatbelt chimes, and steering wheel controls.
My super automatic espresso machine. Dead simple to use and so much cheaper than operating a keurig. I bought it because I’m awful at real coffee machines and need to have a single serve option. Being able to use whole beans has made it pay for itself in the 3 years I’ve had it.
Share a model please 😅
I use the Philips EP3221/44
I paid $700 for it but it’s available on places like Amazon $400.
Works great, minimal maintenance, and makes good enough coffee. The milk frother is fine but you won’t be making any latte art with it.
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.
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.
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
