It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids.
It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop.
The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes. Never have to check on the chicken (unlike a pan) or wait too long (unlike an oven). Mix them together and dinner is ready.
It's positioned as a new category of product. Oven on steroids won't sell because people already own ovens. It has to be a distinct appliance otherwise it's competing against a full sized oven. That's not the comparison you want a consumer to make.
I think you and the op are wrong (or maybe right?) for different reasons. Positioning it as a new category with less oil was right initially to get the thing off the ground but now it's maturing into a broader market with an installed base and that installed base has produced a ton of content, most of which is not for use as a less oil fryer, it's for use as a quick oven for when you aren't making enough of a dish for a family bigger than 4 people/aren't making something that will have leftovers for days.
The next wave of people buying these things are not going to be fryer junkies looking to cut oil, it's going to be people like me that looked at it and realized instead of waiting 20-40 minutes for my oven to heat up I could throw enough food in the air fryer to finish a dish in 7-12 minutes, which changes the dynamic of how I live my life culinarily for the better by a large margin. With the airfryer I can plan meal timing way less, have less pressure to be in the kitchen earlier, have flexibility to cook something like a roast in the oven on lower heat while polishing off fancy veg or multiple fancy veg (because the run time to cook is so low) in the air fryer, plus I save a lot on cleaning at the end because there aren't multiple big dishes to wash.
I agree but the next wave as you’ve described has already happened a year or so ago.
The majority of people I know have an air fryer at this point and that includes, of all things, a lot of senior citizens which is a disproportionate amount of my social circle due to my profession.
These things are out there in a big way. Lots of frozen products already have air fryer directions on them specifically.
I think it’s already the open secret that all they really are is a small convection oven.
The only issue is that people may get misled into buying an oven sized air fryer which defeats the whole point since their advantage is that they are a much smaller oven.
If they were called 'tiny oven' people probably catch on a bit better.
I have an air fryer which is literally a double walled cooking pot with a fan forced heater bolted on top. It's amazingly fast to cook and trivial to clean since it is small and fits in the sink but i fear many people hearing how good 'air fryers' are might do something dumb and buy an full size fan forced oven that's badged as an 'air fryer' which defeats the whole point.
> If they were called 'tiny oven' people probably catch on a bit better.
Tiny countertop (often convection) ovens (including, but not limited to, ones marketed as "toaster ovens") are very common, but a lot of them are under powered for their size compared to those markets as "air fryers", as well as having other design differences. And they existed long before air fryers, which needed to differentiate themselves from them.
> The only issue is that people may get misled into buying an oven sized air fryer which defeats the whole point since their advantage is that they are a much smaller oven.
Actually, I think it’s probably going to be pretty common for people to have multiple convection ovens / air fryers and use them for different purposes. The “whole point” of an air fryer is not the size: the convection oven + cooking basket setup has fairly great utility at all sizes. Yes, an oven with a powerful heating element relative to size is going to have the added advantage of coming up to speed faster, which has some additional utility. Yes, the particular design of the cooking pot + top fan you describe (or the InstantPot models with air-fryer lids that interchangeable with the pressure cooker lids) have some unique utility (“pressure cook & crisp” for certain recipes). But ones the size of a typical microwave (or combined with a microwave, as some are now) or a typical full-size range oven also have unique uses that smaller ones lack.
The whole point of them is that they cook quickly, and without oil. Small units are good for 1-2 people, but it won't prepare enough for a family of more than 3, thus the existence of larger units.
I think there's a point where you need to accept that you should use a fan forced oven. Air Fryers are literally a small fan forced oven in terms of tech.
The fast heating is due to the size. A fan forced oven is the same tech but slower due to being larger. Nothing more.
So if you are buying a large air fryer that's essentially a fan forced oven i have to ask "why not use the oven?".
I don't know that is true. I have always presumed the air circulation in the air fryer is far higher than that in my convection oven, since when they are both preheated, the cooking times are certainly much lower in the air fryer. Not only that, but some ovens have a specific air fryer mode now, indicating it is not just a typical convection oven. Should every oven maker add an air fryer mode to their convection oven, as some have started doing? Of course!
The tech is pretty hard to argue against. I mean you can literally look at what it contains and it's a heating element and a fan. Nothing more. You can Google this for yourself if you don't believe me but you'll find a lot of people patiently explaining this exact same point.
There may be a case that there's better circulation in most air fryers vs most fan forced ovens. In fact that's true in my case as my large oven and my air fryer have fans the same size (so more relative circulation in the smaller air fryer).
But they are the same tech. The difference in relative fan size probably has some effect but it's not a rule, it's really just a case of how big the fan in the device is and you may have air fryers with smaller or larger relative fan sizes and ovens with smaller or larger relative fan sizes.
If you're wondering why ovens now have 'air fryer' mode that's because marketing. I suspect it spins the fan a little faster.
> If you’re wondering why ovens now have ‘air fryer’ mode that’s because marketing. I suspect it spins the fan a little faster.
From what I can tell (and the detail provided on this is sketchy) differences include some or all of (varying between models):
1. Different fan position vs. ovens without air fry mode,
2. Faster fan speed in air fry mode,
3. Using “true” or “European” convection (heating unit behind the fan) in air fry mode, rather than “American” convection (bottom heating unit plus forced circulation fan), which may or may not be used in “convection” mode in a convection oven with an air fry setting.
I haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more peak output from the heating element was part of air fry settings, especially the ones where that is specifically marketed as, or has an additional mode for, “no preheat” air frying.
My usb fan and the blower on my central furnace are the same - both just move air. And yet my furnace with much more fire and a much bigger fan is not a convection oven, or an air fryer. The amount of air blowing around my air fryer is likely at least 10x the amount in my convection oven per interior volume (ACH or whatever they use for ovens), and 20x what my convection toaster oven moves. And the results are nothing alike. The differences are so stark, I can only see someone who has not used a good air fryer claim they are basically the same.
But of course, up the fan speed and the element size in relation to the interior volume, and make sure you place everything to get optimal air circulation and turbulence (my air fryer has several aero-vanes in its base to create turbulence in the air cyclone, and push it up through the bottom of the food), and you can make an oven that does what an air fryer does.
> it's for use as a quick oven for when you aren't making enough of a dish for a family bigger than 4 people/aren't making something that will have leftovers for days.
How's this different from a classic toaster oven? Serious question, I've never used or even seen an air fryer, but I have been using toaster ovens to bake single servings of salmon for over 2 decades.
Americans have giant ovens. It's one of the things I miss after moving to Europe. The downside to a large oven is the time/space commitment, but it is super convenient.
Convection is also not common in the US. At least where I am in the Netherlands, shopping for a new "oven" almost guarantees it will be some sort of combo microwave/convection thing. Then it's also common to have a countertop airfryer as well.
From Japanese people, I have the impression that they've largely given up on microwaves and toaster ovens, as inconvenient and space-wasting. Having an oven in a Japanese home is extremely rare, being regarded as professional bakery equipment.
Instead, they have a "deshi rehhhn-ji", which literally translates to "electric range". This will confuse people for whom "the range" is the thing you can place multiple pots and pans on to cook simultaneousely.
But a denshi rehhhn-ji actually is more like a combination toaster oven plus microwave with a single shared compartment, designed to use infrared and microwave power simultaneously. Attempts to market these in USA over 14 years ago failed, seemingly due to high prices and consumers' preconception that ovens, toasters, and microwaves are fundamentally separate devices. However, I've recently seen at a Target store in USA three different combination devices that may be similar, from different companies. Their marketing at that store was like "combination air fryer and microwave!" and "combination microwave and broiler!".
deshi reenji …but that the double 'e' is not an English "long e" but rather more like an English "short e" of double length.
That sounds like what I have here in the Netherlands. It can be used as a microwave, a small oven/toaster, or both simultaneously. It came with a special tray that is metal but also microwave safe for use with the dual mode.
The only way that it differs from a normal convection oven, is the lack of preheat options. If you want to "preheat", then you turn it on, wait 5 minutes for the compartment to come up to temperature, then add your tray of food.
Meta: I now see that primarily accessing HN from an Android client[1] has obscured from me that doing (cons thing asterisk) in a comment, and then at the end of the comment doing (cons asterisk description-or-explanation) doesn't do what I thought it does, because the actual site suppresses the asterisks and uses them as delimiters for italics.
bosch 800 series wall oven, takes forever to heat up, especially if you are looking for 400+, as does pretty much every oven I have ever owned over here in North America, with the exception of the purely mechanical 1970's era electric oven I had in a rental at one point. That one was 10-20 minutes depending on temperature target. I suspect the newer stuff is afraid to throw maximum power at the situation because of all the stupid electronics we have put in ovens. The cleaning cycle on that 1970's oven would turn everything to ash. The cleaning cycle on the bosch is a joke in comparison.
This is exactly right. An "air fryer" is nothing but a small convection oven. Most people already own ovens that can do convection cooking. So this very cleverly creates a new category of appliances.
That's a great description of them, a small convection oven. I already bought an air fryer before I realized/discovered that, and it's a wonderful thing. I know convection ovens exist, but I don't know if anyone I know has one, so air fryers (as tiny convection ovens) are a new capability. And a pretty awesome one too!
I don't know actual numbers, but a lot of people have them and don't know anything about them, or even that they have one.
I only have 3 data points, but every time I have used the convection feature at someone else's house, they had no idea it was a feature, or what a convection oven even does.
Edit to add:
These were all in newer homes, so could be a more recent trend?
Both gas and electric ovens without convection are common in the US; in 12 homes I can remember, as a child and adult, in almost 50 years, only in the most recent have I had a convection (gas) oven. (All have had ovens.)
Are you under the impression that most Americans live in giant McMansions?
Gas ovens are common and so are electric, but I didn't have a convection oven until I owned my own home. It's not really worth it for most landlords to make this upgrade.
It seems so ludicrous that I want to ask if you’re sure you don’t have them, based on my experience of never having lived in an expensive home or actually buying appliances.
But then again, I’m sure you are right. Perhaps this is an easy tell - check to see if the oven has convection features. If so, the house was built for living, if not it was intended for flipping.
> It seems so ludicrous that I want to ask if you’re sure you don’t have them, based on my experience of never having lived in an expensive home or actually buying appliances.
I get how it would seem that way. I think few enough people make home buying or renting decisions based on it, that most developers building (major appliances are often preinstalled) or landlords renting homes don’t bothers with the small added expense, and most renters don’t have the choice of replacements, and most homebuyers won’t swap out unless the old one becomes unserviceable. As a result, American recipes don’t focus on them, people don’t tend to know how to take advantage of them, and the cycle continues. Maybe the Air Fryer craze will chip away at it.
Interesting! I assumed all modern ovens are pretty much convection these days but I guess the tech doesn't make sense across the pond (for whatever reason?)
From what I mean before, it's basically unheard of to buy a single oven without it being a convection oven: https://www.johnlewis.com/browse/electricals/cooking/built-i... -- If you buy a double oven then the top one will likely be a "traditional" oven (mine is like this).
Downside with convection ovens is the heating element can shit the bed if you manufacturer skimps out on the thermal cycling. Had to replace mine yesterday after only 5 years of daily use, but was a quick 5 min job and £15.
If you can figure out which symbol it is. (My mom in the US bought a german oven, and each nob is a symbol, which means something fan, line, squigly line...). Once you know it makes sense, and this is a case where the internet helps.
but in the US convections ovens are not that common.
I had in the 90s the faberware "turbo oven". It was too big for me but it was a convection oven and quite fast. Caterers that did functions at the museum I worked hauled them in to heat food.
Its not even a new product. Convection ovens have been a thing for years. But because standard toaster ovens and convection ovens look so similar people thought they were the same.
The fan is much stronger too, so not literally it. Changing two of the most significant parameters gives it entirely new utility that ovens didn’t and don’t capture.
In effect it’s closer to a microwave meets an air sous vice. Much quicker heat up, much more even heat dispersal.
I have a convection oven too that’s the same size, we use the air fryer 5x more often and it’s almost entirely due to the fan not the size. Cuts cooking time in half comparatively.
I suspect shrinking all the components equally would preserve some of the effect, because my intuition without spending too much time is that there are scaling effects that would work that way.
But, I’m mostly saying that its not inherently the case that a small convection oven would have the advantages of an air fryer, and, a major reason for the name “air fryer” for the product categoriy is because countertop convection ovens without those advantages already existed, because they were optimized for other goals, so just calling them “countertop convection ovens” would have sent the wrong message to buyers familiar with the existing category.
And then you try it, still confused how this can fry. And after the first couple of cooks, you don’t care anymore and wouldn’t give up this gadget!
For me the USP is the slide in and out basket, ability to do a little shake. The convenience of that over a tray in the oven and the washing up and the turning and the burning one side of the items… is priceless
By definition you can't fry something without oil. The food would need to have some oils inside of it already or you would have to use at least a little bit of oil to fry the food. But you could fry something in an oven by putting oil on it too. Otherwise you are just baking it.
Haha. Funny, but doesn’t match widespread opinion. Personally it is the best money I have ever spent in my kitchen. Fantastic results. Food often even better than fried, oven baked, pan fried or grilled. I explicitly choose my air fryer for certain cooking even though all those other options available to me. So the opposite of substandard to be honest… there must be a word for that?
Strongly disagree. Maybe it's not "frying" in the sense of a big bucket of boiling oil, but there is a huge array of cooking that is vastly faster with my air fryer.
Roasting veggies, roasted potatoes, frozen foods like fries, things like that. I can be done with a batch of fries before my oven has even gotten to temperature. Massive time savings.
The problem with the marketing is that every ad I've seen for it makes it seem only good for making healthier, less tasty versions of food I like.
What it's actually good for is cooking some things faster than a conventional oven, reheating fried foods.
I have had success making good homemade french fries with my air fryer, but I still thoroughly toss them in oil before cooking them. The end result is not really much healthier than if I deep fry them, but it is a lot easier and less messy.
Are you sure? Feels like totally less oil than deep fried to me, even tossed in oil, it isn’t sitting in that oil… put too much and that all drips off into the bottom of the pan the basket sits over. I agree to makes fantastic chips (UK), even with oven chips without adding further oil, much better than those oven chips when cooked in an oven.
Air fryers blow significantly more air than a convection oven. Even my Breville toaster oven which is touted as an air fryer clearly isn’t - I find I need to cook foods somewhere between the convect instructions and air fryer instructions.
This I did not know. But besides the time, is there anything the air fryer does better than a convection toaster oven? Does the food taste noticably better? Otherwise, an air fryer strikes me as a unitasker that just takes up counter space. We get a lot of use out of our Cuisinart toaster oven because it can do a lot: bake a loaf of bread, roast a tray of vegetables, or broil a piece of meat. And, oh yeah, it makes great toast!
They usually have bins, which means you can pull the food out and shake it without worrying about burning your hands; or, plate it without touching it.
That's the big difference that I've noticed now that I'm reading about them.
It's got to be more than that, perhaps the bin shape creates a better air-frying environment? Why is there a difference in cooking results between the toaster oven "air fryer" and the bin type?
We got a Breville at home recently and I couldn't understand what the hype was all about, it did exactly what my last countertop oven did even in Airfryer mode.... this is making sense now. We were already heavy users of the old convection only model, so this didn't seem like much of an upgrade. I think the marketing hype is just pushing people to realize a countertop oven of any sort is very useful. (That said, the Breville is very well made and we'll keep it around. It works well, just didn't quite taste much of a difference from what we had before - an older Cuisinart FWIW).
Be sure to use the basket and don’t overfill it. But yeah - I don’t have an air fryer but if I put some frozen French fries or the like in there the air fryer instructions absolutely do not get the food done.
Clearly it’s working for them but it also I think loses them sales from people who would absolutely buy an oven that evenly cooks (if you’re an apartment dwelling baker you know the pain) and preheats in seconds where “air fryer” sounds like it does something totally different.
It’s the same thing with instant pot where they probably lose out a bit by not marketing themselves as a serious electric pressure cooker that can also do other stuff.
Well, I fry food, using heat and air, without soaking it in oil, so why shouldn't it be called an air fryer? I also have a convection toaster oven that cannot do that.
> Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast.
> The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.
Normal sized boneless chicken breasts should cook in a pan in about 10 minutes or less, and you really don't need to do anything other than flip them once. If air fryers are convincing people to cook their own fresh food I would say that's a good thing, but I'm still struggling to see how they're actually better than "traditional" cooking.
After a lot of research I've come to the conclusion people who swear by these often eat a lot of ready-made food from the freezer. The air fryer cooks it faster and makes them think it contains fewer calories (even though most frozen ready-made food already contains all the oil it needs to cook well).
Or they're individuals without the need to make large portions. For example I make lots of stuff in the air fryer, none of which are frozen. It's simply that I don't want to wait 30 minutes to heat up my oven when I'm not going to be using all of that space and heat.
Does your over really take 30 minutes to heat up? Mine gets to 350 in about 7-10 minutes. It's a mid-range GE model. Nothing fancy. Preheat. Do your chopping, sauce prep or whatever. Oven is ready by the time you are really ready to put anything in it.
No doubt, an air fryer made my son's college dorm experience so much better but I don't see the appeal for anyone who isn't single or who has a proper kitchen already.
because of new laws in Vancouver about power (building is <3yo), our stove and oven take FOREVER to warm up. the building electrician said they had to buy purposefully underpowered ones that were slow or it would blow the breaker. it's faster to boil water in an electric kettle for example.
I think Salmon comes out just as good if not better in the air fryer than by cooking it in a pan, although you need to cut the filets to a very specific size.
It's a miniature convention oven. There are foods you can cook in a pan but also foods you can't and must cook in an oven, like pies. It's best useful for individuals that don't want to waste the time nor energy heating up their large oven just to make an individual portion, at least in my case.
I wish this was mentioned more often. Air fryers are tiny compared to ovens. In my case where I typically cook a meal for two days for a family of four an air fryer is utterly useless.
Air fryers definitely are very different than ovens or pan frying, it's hard to explain, but it's definitely more comparable to frying in that it crisps up food by removing the water from the outside of stuff quickly.
By this logic it's particularly good at cooking food that otherwise would be better fried, but outside of that it does vegetables like brussel sprouts or small filets of fish particularly well leaving the inside soft and the outside cooked.
Air fryer isn’t the best choice for Chicken breasts, so your point is valid for that cut. It will of course still cook ok. But chicken thighs on the other hand, probably better than a frying pan as you can get the crispyness all over and juicy still in the middle, just like deep frying. The fattier the raw product, the more the cooking choice swings to the air fryer.
We got one in 2020 and we use it daily. Chicken, french fries, sausages, fish and bread is what we use it for most of the time. Some things like spring rolls are better fried with oil but overall we love it and it is a real time saver and of course less oil is used.
My partner is vegetarian and I’ve found that tofu and soy curls are near life changing good in the air fryer.
Cube the tofu, cook for 75% of the total time, pull out and dress in liquid seasoning, return for the last bit and the outside gets crisp while the inside remains juicy!
We don't make bread. We just make bread from the previous day hot and crunchy again. It just takes a few minutes. We used to do this with the oven but that takes quite some time more.
Interestingly, the Wirecutter recommends people just get a really good high end toaster oven[0] over an air fryer, since its just a convection mode cook.
That style of "air fryer" is just a convection toaster oven with an air fryer rack. Shameful marketing, if you ask me. A real air fryer (the ubiquitous basket style) cannot be replaced with another appliance, but replaces many, while doing a better, faster job.
I disagree. I bought an air fryer for my mom about five years ago, had an older breville toaster oven without the air fry capability I used for the better part of a decade, and moved to a new breville toaster oven with air fry capability about a year ago. The basket-design air fryers are a pain to store, don't have much space for food (we had to do fries in annoyingly small batches), and felt very one-note.
By comparison, the new breville I have does everything the old one did plus air frying, and the difference is distinct - I tried making fries in the convection baking mode on the old one and the result was noticeably worse than what I get from the new one in air fry mode. Noise and heat output approaches annoying levels with either air fryer, so I'm pretty confident the experience I get is close or the same as the purpose-build one. And the ability to space things out more gives better results, at least for my purposes. (I'll note that 95% of my air fryer use is for fries.)
For example, George Foreman decommissioned. Sausages never cooked any other way. Chicken nuggets, love them or hate them they cook great in the air fryer. Main convection oven only really used in our house to bake bread.
Same here I got one at the beginning of 2022, I cook steak, chicken, pork and more in mine. It has made it significantly easier to cook lunch and dinner instead of what used to be the much easier choice of just ordering out.
I wanted an air fryer, so I got the same one my friend has last year, one made by PowerXL. Mine produced this horrific chemical smell that filled up the whole house and soaked into the food. Reddit told me that it just needed to be variously washed or run a few times and it would go away, but it never did. I had to return it.
I suspect the plastics used were changed, or some preconditioning process was skipped to get more units out for a Black Friday sale or something. I haven't revisited the product category since.
I had multiple air fryer models over the years. The stirring functions (a rotating paddle that stirs the food) is an ABSOLUTE GAME CHANGER and a must for me.
Unfortunately those equipped with a stirring function come up as expensive. I would love to see a < $100 air fryer equipped with it.
I had both a De'Longhi FH1363 MultiFry Extra and a T-fal ActiFry.
You can throw in frozen vegetables, meat and seasoning, turn the machine on, come back in 25 minutes and your food will be cooked uniformly to perfection. E.g., frozen brussels sprouts, chopped chicken sausages, a bit of olive oil and sambal sauce.
Prep time under 30 seconds.
Bonus points: Both fryers come with dishwasher-safe paddle and bowl. You can detach and wash the lid too of the De'Longhi one.
I'm not trying to be critical, but am genuinely curious as someone who's lived more than half the years since 1997 in Taiwan without hearing that term before.
Not OP, but I am half Asian and worked in various Asian restaurants growing up in the US. When I read the term "basic Asian (brown) sauce" I'd assume some combination of soy sauce, brown sugar, oyster sauce, and chicken/beef broth. With options for garlic, ginger, sesame oil, and rice wine, plus whatever else to tailor towards the dish.
I'd wager that having spent so long in Taiwan you've probably never heard the term because there it would just be "sauce" :P (or less tongue-in-cheek, it's just something that is implicitly and silently understood and recognized rather than having some kind of formal name).
No reply from OP, but I know or know of a few people who do something along these lines. There are a set of ingredients relatively common though clearly not universal across East Asia and I suspect OP is making a pastiche of those. If it were a language you'd call it a pidgin. But it's food so I dunno what you call it.
Though the phrase "White Man's Teriyaki sauce" is running around in my head and yes I get the irony of that.
As someone else living in taiwan a long time, You wouldnt hear asian sauce in asia its just sauce haha 東亞醬 doesn't exist. We dont say american ketchup. But in usa numerous friends say make a quick asian sauce to dip the protein which as comments below explain is a concoction of personal tastes.
These do nice job with tofu. Cut into cubes, toss in some oil, salt and pepper, and air fry for 15 mins. Tofu comes out like that deep fried take out tofu!
Yeah this is it, right? People throw fries in airfyrers that just soaked up fat before put in their packaging thinking it's healthy, and it just takes 3x the amount of time to "deep fry" some french fries.
But that is really not it's strong point indeed! It's not an alternative to a deep fryer (but that is primarily the way I see it used), it a faster oven.
I just put fresh cut potatoes in mine, and they're done to a crisp in less than 10 minutes. So, it actually takes about half the time, when compared to deep frying them. And there's no mess or used oil to worry about. And I don't have to air out my house afterwards. So many benefits, including health!
> it just takes 3x the amount of time to "deep fry" some french fries
Perhaps if you have a deep fryer with oil that is already at temperature. But if you have to heat the oil it's definitely not 3x faster than using an air fryer. Also, no need to clean up splatter afterward, or monitor hot oil while it's cooking. Or figure out what to do with several cups of oil after you've deep fried some french fries.
No need to pretend it’s healthier. Some things will be, some things won’t be. Definitely doesn’t take 3x in a home setting. If anything 3x faster start to finish in my experience.
How does an air fryer compare to a speed oven? I want to remodel my kitchen someday with a speed oven (convection microwave) over top a steam convection oven (for cooking things with steam without pressure). I'm not sure what I would be missing without an air fryer (and none of those are less than $2-3k, so the price ranges are completely different).
If you're looking to do speed oven stuff (use the heating elements and the microwave to cook the same dish), don't get a Bosch. I have the Bosch 800 speed oven and while it's convenient to have a single appliance that acts as an oven and microwave, you can only use the speed oven for pre-programmed dishes, of which I think there are eight seemingly random ones.
It's the exact opposite. The "air fryer" marketing lets companies present it as a healthy alternative to deep frying, and people eat that up (heh). If they sold it as what it really was – a toaster oven – there would be a lot less enthusiasm and demand, and people would definitely not spend multiple hundred dollars on one.
You obviously have not owned an air fryer, if you think it's a mere toaster oven. Or you got one of those convection toaster ovens with an air fryer rack, which really isn't an air fryer, like the basket ones are. I haven't used my stove, oven, or microwave since I got one.
I’ve had one before and I don’t really get the hype. It’s an oven that heats up faster. I see the value in that but it doesn’t seem useful enough to take up counter space when I could just wait a few minutes for the oven.
It's cut my cooking time down by magnitudes, but even more so, my cleaning time. But I suppose it all does depend on the use cases. I, for one, plan on never having to wait for anything to preheat in my kitchen ever again!
We got a Panasonic combination microwave/broiler/oven/air fryer/etc. I kind of assumed it would be pretty mediocre at everything, but during this past summer where temperatures were unseasonably warm and our kitchen has no ventilation or access to fresh air/windows/aircon.
The device itself was more expensive than $200, obviously, but the "small oven" aspect of it saved us from having to run our regular-sized oven at all. I'd been wanting a small (not quite toaster-oven style) oven for a while, but without the counter space we could only justify it by sharing space with the microwave.
Not a literal lifesaver, but definitely a figurative one.
The "air fryer" marketing is actually quite good. It justified a whole new class of countertop appliance, even though many already have convection ovens.
And if you've had frozen fried foods like mozz sticks, chicken nuggets or eggrolls in an air fryer, it really does live up to the name
Does the fan get all oily & grimy? Is it hard to keep clean? I like being able to wash greasy kitchen items in lots of hot water and detergent. I can't imagine it is possible to immerse the business end of an air fryer in water?
A good air fryer should have a pan/grill that's detachable from the fan/heater section. The pan/grill should fit entirely in a sink.
If you get an air fryer that's the size of an oven it will be as hard to clean as an oven and will take just as long to heat and cook as an oven since internally the tech is 100% identical to a fan forced oven (a heating element with a fan). Don't make the mistake of bigger is better for an air fryer.
Air fryers are meant to be small pots that have a fan forced oven element bolted to the top that can easily be detached for washing in the sink. That's the whole appeal of it. It's a teeny tiny oven that heats up extremely quickly for little power due to its size. It's easy to clean because the non-electronic part fits entirely in the sink. It's only the size that gives air fryers an advantage. If you buy an air fryer the size of a fan forced oven you have literally just bought a less good fan forced oven.
Not as bad as you might think. Splatter happens when moisture comes in contact with hot oil/shortening. In an air fryer you don't have much oil and it doesn't as easily splatter. It's relatively contained. AFAIK, there's no mist of oil droplets like with a frying pan or a fryer.
It's a small convection oven, which a lot (definitely not all) ovens come with standard today. I bought 2 of the cheapest whole kitchen "packages" from HD and both came with a convection setting. The electric even called it "Convection/Air Fryer."
A friend saw that setting and busted with excitement "Your oven has an air fryer!?" Yes my oven has an oven.
They're all a little different, but this works for me. When it beeps to say it's done, in a single arm motion I pull out the tray, dump the cooked food onto a platter, and then rinse the tray in the sink. The key is to get the tap water on there while the oils are still hot.
But temper your expectations. If you need your cooking implements to be squeaky clean, an air fryer will be a lot of work. If you're satisfied with your regular oven having a few bits of carbonized food bits here and there, then you'll also be satisfied with a "camp clean" level of air fryer cleanliness.
Exactly this. It is kind of always a little bit greasy, a little bit crispy burnt crumbs inside. Really fatty foods like sausages, you dump the waste oil after taking the food out, and rinse it a bit. It’s hard to describe without sounding gross, but strangely seems not that gross when you have one.
Buy a small one. Smallest you can for your situation.
That might seem like a weird suggestion but remember the entire advantage of an air fryer is that it's a smaller form of an oven so it has less to heat and is thus faster for less power. Buying a big one makes it all pointless, just use the oven.
The small ones fit in a sink. Not much different than cleaning pots&pans.
I recommend a basket type and getting the biggest in area and power you can find. The surface area is important. More even and better you can spread the food better the result.
It works by forcing air from the top to the food, not slowly from the back like regular oven. So you get better result if food isn't piled up over itself.
I have a Ninja Air Fryer and the baskets are dishwasher safe. They are also very easy to wash clean clean with a soft brush, warm water and soap. Easy cleaning is one of the major benefits of an air fryer versus deep/shallow frying via a dedicated or appliance or the stovetop.
Easiest thing ever. Just rinse the basket with hot water and a little dish soap, then rinse it again and dry. Nothing sticks to the non-stick coating once dish soap hits it. I don't even scrub, just rinse. So fast, that I don't even use the dishwasher for it.
I have a small house/kitchen. I got rid of the entire oven. Replaced it with a two burner counter top and an instant pot that does 7 things (including air fryer). Certainly it limits cooking a bit and requires some creativity, but at the end of the day, couldn't be happier with all the extra space.
I googled air fryer and found out that is a second generation of kitchen tech. First generation was known as Air Grill and was good, but quite bulky, with big glass cover and not easy to wash after using, to be honest. Does anyone have used both and can share an experience?
The reason I love my air fryer is that meat and fish both taste great cooked in it and there's no need to stir it or even turn it over since it cooks all over at the same time. About the only thing it isn't good for is eggs.
I have the instant pot vortex, which is really cool. The weird thing is all the oil and grease that materializes on the bottom rack thing. Does anyone else use instant pot vortex?
We just got that as a backup to our (older, Polish-made model) Philips air fryer. The Philips is much better, although the instant pot is as serviceable as other brands of air fryers we have used. All air fryers get grease build up below. If it's the same recipe, you were likely eating that before, so I am happy to see it.
I have the same thing, makes the greatest roast potatoes.
Wash and cut the potatoes into whatever's the appropriate size, put in the frying basket, pressure cook on high with the timer set to 2 mins (timer only starts once pressures built), release pressure, remove basket and drain + shake roughly.
Leave to sit for ~15 minutes on the counter while doing other shit, empty and dry the main vessel.
Bit of olive oil (or other fat) and seasoning onto the potatoes with shaking to make more surface area by fucking up the surface, pop it back in and air fry for 20-25m on 200*C, shaking halfway through.
End result? Absolutely perfect roast potatoes. Glassy crunchy outsides, fluffy insides, every time.
Also functions as a dehydrator and is super good enough to turn harvested mushrooms dry enough to powderise to make seasonings.
I cube tofu, cover in corn starch, throw in air fryer for 8 minutes. (chicken wings can be made the same in 20 minutes -- way better than anything from a restaurant)
when tofu is done, i add a little water, toss in some broccoli, close for 3 minutes, done
nuke pre-made rice and i have lunch in no time
i still use oven for longer-cook items like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and brussel sprouts, but only if I have a main cooking in the air fryer. but the oven gets used a lot less these days.
I disagree. I cook with a fairly wide range of techniques (e.g., sous vide, convection oven, slow cooker, smoker, pressure cooker), and my recently acquired air fryer has been a pleasant surprise. I was skeptical, but happy to be proven wrong. It is fast, versatile, and the results are often outstanding. It is great for things like fries, reheating frozen food, and fish. It is easily the best pizza reheating device I have yet encountered.
Yes, it's essentially a miniature convection oven. It cuts down a lot on preheating time. Life is short. It is also quite easy to clean.
edit: Also, I should point out that the "basket" form factor of the air fryer is helpful. In the convection oven things tend to lie flay on a sheet, and cooking is less even. Granted, I could put a basket-like container in the convection oven, but it would still be much slower to heat.
I hate to call it convection oven. In my mind convection oven is just bit better regular oven. Pretty much the same, only difference is that it is bit faster and you can put more stuff in if needed.
I have owned an oven, toaster, toaster oven, air fryer, dehydrator, deep fryer, microwave oven. Air fryers use a fan to circulate the heat. While a toaster/convection oven typically use radiant heat. Upside to air fryer is the speed. Downside is it will tend to cause fats to render out quickly making the food more on the dry side. Some foods/diets are suited to that style of cooking.
Growing up my parents almost exclusively used a pot shaped one with the fan/heater in the lid, to make roast chickens. The skin usually came out nice and crunchy and spicy. It would be tougher to get that same effect in a toaster oven or oven. They also tend to heat more evenly so for reheating they cook better than a microwave. But can not beat a microwave on speed.
Think of each of these as tool to get things done. Each one can mostly do what the others can. But some tools are better suited to cooking styles than others.
It's definitely not a toaster oven. The fan is important - there's a reason CPU radiators have fans on them, and it's not because they don't do anything.
You can argue it's just a convection oven with a faster fan, but that doesn't make it a "meme".
They're also, like, very much not expensive at this point. It's a very commoditized, competitive market, and you can pick them up for <$50.
You'll get some proper recommendations, but I'll mention that I have a very cheap no brand thing that cost under $50 at a grocery store. A skeptical, low investment purchase. It's amazing.
No fancy features, the design could clearly be improved, but chuck anything in this small chamber, crank up the timer and delicious food comes out 10mins later.
I've gifted nice models to others, without feeling any need to upgrade my own. Maybe when it breaks.
I would suggest sticking with a small one though. Quicker to heat, better circulation etc
I recently got a "Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro". I love it. It gets a little dirty inside, but it cooks so much better than a traditional over, is great for reheating food over the microwave, and the air fryer works really well. And it is a great example of user interfaces because it has no touch screens with dedicated knobs for everything. It is a breeze to use and a nice breath of fresh air when it comes to having physical knobs, which are additional quite nice knobs.
I'm going to argue the above largely misses the point of what makes a good air fryer and what you have linked about is actually just a fancy toaster oven.
You did mention it yourself - "It gets a little dirty inside".
Compare it to the $30 air fryers that are essentially an insulated cooking pot with a detachable heating element. They do the same thing but are so trivial to clean since they are a cooking pot that fits in the sink.
It's one of those things in life where cheaper is better in my opinion and i do not recommend the above product at all.
I got this one on sale for BF, and it's been absolutely amazing. I cook fish to perfect temp using the probe, without having to check it at all. And I cook my side dish at the same time, and this thing finishes them together with smart cook!
We bought a nice one and it smelt terrible, like awful melted plastic. We didn't even use the thing, we returned it. From what I can tell, the insides are covered in some kind of PFAS and I do not want to eat something from it. My oven does convection just fine.
We had this issue at first also. The company told us to run it on the steam setting with a bit of water and some vinegar. Did that a couple times and hasn't made a smell since then.
I paid a guy a bit under $200 to pull Ethernet cables from my basement up to the attic of my house.
Now I can keep heat-generating stuff like my storage server and the cable modem (surprisingly heat-intensive) in the basement, have a WiFi AP in the attic for great coverage in the yard, and I can easily drop lines down into rooms on the 2nd floor from above by just drilling a small hole in the top of a wall and feeding the Cat6 down, or put one into a 1st floor room by going up from the basement. Cat6 anywhere I want it, basically.
It's something I've wanted for years and held off doing because I knew I was capable of DIYing it, and therefore I hesitated to hire it out. This was dumb.
It took him an hour or so using various specialized tools ("fish bits", "fish tape", tall ladders, drywall saws, etc.), when it would have probably taken me the better part of a weekend and I wouldn't have done as clean of a job. He also knew from experience where the easiest place would be to get all the way from the basement to the attic, given my house's construction style.
Definitely worth the two bills, and also now I have a "wiring guy" for future projects. I've already called him back to help run wiring for PoE outdoor cameras, another thing I've wanted for years but haven't bothered to execute on.
I built my house 4 years ago (with liberal use of subcontractors), and one of the things I knew I'd want is ethernet everywhere. So I ran the wire, bought a big patch panel, and now every room in my house has 2-4 ports for whatever I might want.
As a bonus, if I (or the next guy) wanted to have a landline phone, it's in the same closet and it can be patched to anywhere in the house by swapping a single wire.
Given the opportunity, even after the house is complete, it's a very useful thing to do.
Running 2-4 Ethernet cables to each room is a must and cheap. Kitchen islands, garages, you name it. Between different devices, multiple Vlans, being able to run PoE equipment, it’s indispensable. Helps avoid a lot of small switches.
Security cameras if they are your thing should ideally be poe and avoid wifi.
There are some good Ethernet to HDMI adapters as well so prewiring ceilings with a double run for projector plus Ethernet doesn’t hurt.
Another clean option is MOCA, if your house has existing coax runs. It has the nice benefit of not needing to be 1:1. You can have 3 MOCA devices on three floors that all communicate directly with each other, instead of needing a core switch.
For home use, this is likely to be fine. MOCA operates as a broadcast network, though, so all bandwidth is shared among all connected nodes. The performance characteristics are closer to an old hub than to a switched network.
but its 2.5Gb. Each ethernet port is only 1Gb. You'd need have what, three pairs, all simultaneously trying to transfer their nearly their full 1Gb to saturate 2.5Gb.
If you have 5 or less, it shouldn't be an issue.
But yes, it would not necessarily work great in something in like an apartment.
Ethernet (at least oveR twisted pairs) is a full duplex transmission medium, so two devices should be able to more than saturate the MOCA broadcast network.
Additionally, >1Gbps is starting to become common on consumer hardware.
Again, it is probably not going to be a concern for most home networks, and MOCA should still be better than mesh networks or powerline ethernet.
I suppose in theory, yes. I'm not sure how often, in my home network, I would have full duplex 1Gbps transmission, unless I've accidently caused a loopback.
I have been running Ethernet cable through my house for 20 years. I even have cable running to my shed office which is about 15m away from the house. I recently unhooked the shed cable as WiFi has got so good. I have an external WiFi I point now mounted at the back of my house.
My pet project over Christmas was setting up a Windows VM on my Ubuntu Server in the attic. I teach in different locations and now have my own remote desktop.
Rather than go VPN to access my VM I created a cron job on my Ubuntu Server to check my Dropbox account every five minutes for a text file. If the file exists it adds the ip address I put in the file, updates the server's firewall to allow the ip, and then deletes the file. Simple but effective.
Same here. Once you get used to having Ethernet ports in all rooms and wired WiFi access points...there's just no going back. If we move to a new house in the future, the CAT6 will be pulled into all rooms before the furniture arrives even.
I'm gonna go against the grain here and list non-technical things!
I bought some new plants for my home, which makes the place feel a lot nicer.
I bought some outdoor-trousers - things that go on top of your jeans - when it is cold they keep me warm, and I can now roll around in the snow without getting wet as a nice bonus. (-10°C here today). That said it was only a couple of weeks ago that I came out of a sauna and rolled around naked in 30cm of snow. Bracing!
Other household things that have made my life nicer have included some decent concrete-bolts screwed into my walls and ceiling. Now I can hang plants, have an indoor hammock, and a hammock-chair too.
Finally I've started buying random paintings whenever I go to visit charity/thrift stores. Each time I go I buy a single painting, it must be "amateur", and it must have an artist signature and date on it. At the moment I've got a wall with about eight of these paintings hung on it. All different styles, colours, and levels of "goodness", but together they all look good, rather than a garish mismash. Kinda fun.
> I bought some new plants for my home, which makes the place feel a lot nicer.
I second this. My wife went through a health scare (she's fine now) early in 2022, during which she was a little depressed. one of her outlets was to go to home goods or lowes and buy house plants - one or two at a time, every week or two. those stores have pretty generous return policies if you kill the plant - homegoods 30 days, lowes - a full year!
I think we have about 25 houseplants now including a couple of large ficus and fan palm trees, she waters them all at once on the weekend and it doesn't take much time at all, maybe 15 to 30 minutes per week; there are some annual maintenance tasks as well like re-potting but the return on time investment is really fantastic. Guests always comment how lovely it is in our living room surrounded by plants, and she has a new hobby of propagating the houseplants and giving new plants as gifts. All in all, I'm sure it's more than $200 in total, but if you find good deals, $200 can probably buy between 5 to 15 very nice houseplants.
Hi from another Brit living in Helsinki! In the same spirit as your trousers (toppahousut?) this year I bought myself a pair of Icebug boots for handling the icy footpaths after last winter’s horror show. Best purchase I’ve made this year I think.
Aussie in Lahti here, on my third winter, and also finally got a pair of icebugs. They make a big difference!
I also highly recommend a pair of Halti (or whatever brand) soft-shell pants. With thermals underneath, I've been perfectly happy outside at -20.
By 'outdoor trousers' I assume you mean what hikers/backpackers/winter-folk would refer to as a 'hard shell?'
Just came back from an exceptionally cold vacation to Iceland and realized that despite years of backpacking and hiking in temperate weather, I knew not nearly enough about layering for truly cold weather.
I'm honestly not sure what their proper name is. They're thin, and waterproof, is the best I could say - not particularly insulated, but I know there are some which are.
I mostly bought them to keep my dry, rather than warmer.
Instant Pot.
Can be used as a rice cooker, slow cooker, pressure cooker (mostly known for this last use)
Though probably not as good for rice specifically as an actual high-end rice cooker,
it greatly increased the range of foods I eat.
Makes it easy to make nice one pot meals overnight for multiple days,
you can make really good broth soups from chickens etc quickly, or slowly if you prefer.
If you like to try tougher cuts of meat, this is also a good reason to get it.
The fact it doesn't occupy one burner is also helpful.
We got an Instant Pot and our Zoji rice cooker has collected dust ever since. It is great for brown basmati rice where the Zoji is weak and slow. Try 360g brown basmati rice (we don't bother rinsing it), 705g water, a quarter tsp of salt, 1 tsp of oil. Cook 23m on high and then let it sit for 10min before venting the rest of the pressure off. Remove lid, fluff the rice, and wait a minute or two before serving.
The one weakness of the Instant Pot is that most models won't go to 15psi and there is the odd recipe where a longer cooking time can't compensate. For example, there is a Modernist Cuisine recipe for pressure cooked root vegetables that uses a bit of baking soda to help bring a caramelized flavor to the party. Works great in a 15 psi cooker but is a disaster in an instant pot: the veggies just taste like baking soda. I suspect that stocks made in the Instant Pot might not be as good as well for similar reasons but haven't tried that yet.
If you're cooking both rice and a meal however, you might need that extra rice cooker (and cook the meal in the instant pot). You could also stack the portions in the instant pot, but that doesn't work for all types of meals.
I'm just the other way: had an Instant Pot for a couple years (which is great) but I bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Japanese medium-grain rice in the Zoji is amazing. I cook 1-2 cups nearly every day to snack on.
Dump in a gallon of milk, heat it up, let it cool, add a couple spoons of a store bought plain yoghurt (if you don't have some started saved from the last batch), put the lid back on and hit the yoghurt button and come back in like 8-10 hours. If you prefer a thicker yoghurt, strain it a bit before storing.
Gallon of yoghurt for the price of a gallon of milk and probably like 20 minutes of active work.
Mine mostly sits because I find the instructions and UX inscrutable. I've made some great ribs, but just as often something goes wrong and the device doesn't warm up enough, or doesn't form a seal and cooks off the liquid or burns the meat.
You don't get any indication that things are going right until the timer starts going down, but that's many minutes after you start it. It also comes with two completely incompatible rice recipes, one of which doesn't use rice mode, and no explanation of why. Just terrible UX.
I do pot-in-pot with 1:1 ratio of water to brown rice. We have a number of small stainless steel bowls that we set on top of the wire trivet (don't forget a small amount of water in the main pot too). I cook for ~15 minutes for most brown rice and then let the instant pot sit undisturbed for another 10-15 minutes while the pressure naturally releases, and the rice has a chance to take up any unabsorbed water.
White rice is the same deal, though I usually go a few minutes less (~12 minutes). I like to add a very small amount of some sort of oil to the inner pot with the rice.
1-to-1 ratio of dry rice to water, by volume. I typically make 3-4 cups (dry) at one time.
Multigrain setting on the Instant Pot, shortest cook time. I believe it is 20 minutes at full pressure. I do not know if the multigrain setting is on every Instant Pot.
20-30 minutes of natural steam release once the pressure cooking is complete.
Turns out soft and minimally sticky every time. Perfect for my palate. I was eating it with just butter and soy sauce for a while.
Me too. Instant pot for the win. Haven't tried meat in it. It's been Indian curries and lentil soups & such. I also bought a 3 quart version for my motorhome!
I've scrabbled together a pot roast recipe I follow loosely that gets praised every time I make it. I get a chuck roast (or something similar), evenly coat in salt and pepper to taste, saute it in the insta pot(about 6-7 minutes each side to brown it), deglaze with red wine vinegar, then put in half a small package of carrots and little red potatoes(onions can be added but nobody likes them here). I also add 2-3 pepperoncinis on this bottom layer, then I put the roast back in, put the rest of the carrots/potatoes/another couple of pepperoncinis on top and around. Then I add a cup of water and beef bullion, and set the pressure cook feature to around 1 hour 10 minutes or so. I use the keep-warm mode and while it's ready to go once the main pressure is done, it just gets better over time (and you can do it before leaving for work and come home to lunch or supper already waiting). I'm really lazy when it comes to cooking, but this has been easy, fast and delicious (plus leftovers!).
An even easier thing is shredded BBQ chicken. They can even be frozen and it's done in an hour. Would write the recipe but leaving for lunch now.
I do a very similar version, minus the pepperoncini. One thing that I've found can really take it up a notch is to add just a touch of soy/worcestershire sauce, maybe about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of each. IMO it adds a nice savory background flavor.
I have a similar pot roast recipe, but I've found it comes out better in a slow cooker, or a dutch oven. I've never really been all that impressed with the results of the Instant Pot. Time savings? Even that depends - building and releasing pressure adds 40+ minutes to cook time.
I just learned that I can make ten potatoes in about twenty minutes in my pressure cooker which has been a huge help for meal prepping. It's so great for so many things!
My Instant Pot-branded Instant Pot is pretty much useless as a slow cooker. Unfortunately, I donated mine upon getting the Instant Pot before realizing this. Maybe newer models have fixed this but the three times I tried, had to end up pressure cooking as it never got warm enough, even on high, to slow cook.
I love our Instant Pot! I keep finding uses for it. The other day I'd forgotten to thaw a 4-pack of pre-cooked chicken sausages. Threw them into the Instant Pot (steam tray w/ a cup of water under them), 5 minutes on low pressure (~10 min total), and they were totally warmed through.
I was using it as well, but after talking to my very knowledgeable dentist, pressure cookers destroy most of the vitamins from foods. Since talking to her I started using my pot without the pressure valve, semi open, and use it as a small simmering device, similar to a pot on a stove, but without needing to remember to turn it off.
What? That's the absolute opposite of what happens. More vitamins are retained in the food in a pressure cooker because of less water/more steam and less oxygen.
The latest revisions of the instantpot do a good job of sous vide. I've tried a sous vide roast [0] so far, 24 hours later I had the best roast I've ever had. Incredible.
I especially like cooking pork via sous vide (in my Instant Pot). Pork is really hard to cook in a regular oven/pan without making it tough, but a couple of hours sous vide, and then quick searing makes it wonderful!
Space heater, 20 bucks. In the past I chose to heat the bedroom a little on cold days and otherwise suck it up and dress while shivering (no point burning a ton of gas to heat an entire bedroom). Now, I use 1.5 kW for ~3 minutes (0.01 kWh) to have hot air be blown on me while getting dressed in the morning.
Because it changes how warm I feel while going downstairs, I also don't need downstairs to be as warm to get warmed up again. I'm already warm and can sit in a normal temperature room to work.
---
Air purifier (40 bucks on offer I think). We got it for unrelated reasons, it didn't help for that. Unexpected uses:
1. Neighbours' smoke occasionally comes into our apartment somehow and now I can do something about it. Before, I would just suck it up and try to convince myself that the little residue coming through whatever wall isn't going to impact my health.
2. This winter, people seem to like to heat the house with whatever old painted glued rotting wood they can find (or maybe also dead bodies, it's hard to tell). I can wait a few hours, but if it doesn't clear up and I want some fresh air before sleeping then what I do is open the bedroom window wide for a few minutes to replace the air, doors closed, then close window and turn on purifier on high for 30+ minutes, and then go back in there to sleep.
I took this even further, put air purifiers in most rooms and hooked them up to air quality sensors.
Mostly they run on the very quiet setting (or not at all), but they’ll automatically spin up if someone cooks, farts, opens a window or hits a vape pen.
Also add a CO2 sensor (not CO, carbon monoxide, but carbon dioxide). It is staggering how much CO2 is emitted when sitting in a room working and which literally makes your mind react slower and make you more dumb, essentially.
Agreed, I use the cheapest monitor on this page (currently $69 USD) – a little awkward to change the settings, but runs on USB power, monitors CO2 and temperature, and beeps when you exceed a (configurable) threshold so you know to open a window. I keep it next to my desk
Did something similar recently for fun and cost was ~20e for co2 sensor, attached to a raspberry pi pico or esp32 and it ends up being 27-30e. (add some more sensors like co or gas for 10e each, a mini display for 5e, hook up to home assistant or telegram and ends up being more useful)
To be fair, QA on these things tends to be valuable, so perhaps cost might be justified.
Cost likely can go down if you know what to buy, I didn't and just bought what a reputable seller had.
100%, a $70 CO2 sensor made a huge difference for me. I live in Germany, and there is no ventilation unless you open the window. I noticed that when I worked all day in the apartment, at the end of the day my brain would be toast, I wouldn't be capable of any really important thought, and I'd have a splitting headache and feel exhausted. Now I just open the window whenever the meter turns yellow (which actually means I just leave the window open almost all the time). Here's the one I use: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B00TH3OW4Q
I got a Philips air purifier with such a sensor, it's a different one though (it's oval and just white at the sides).
I would not recommend it purely because they decided to use an extremely poor touch interface for control which quiet often doesn't register when I try to manually adjust something like shutting the unit down temporarily or resetting an error code
Also don’t stress yourself out about air purifier quality. The only thing that matters is the disposable filter and the difference between cheap and expensive is how fast they can move air through it. They all reach the same destination.
Buying a purifier that can fit standard sized “box” filters will save you $$ in the long run.
Not exactly, price increases with some certifications and branding. In the high end of purifiers, they can handle much smaller particulates and gasses (e.g. carbon matter measured by dozens of lbs with replacement filters costing hundreds). The most effective filters for general use will have higher CFM. CFM also decreases with smaller particulate filtering. Unless you're spending ~$1k+, most activated be carbon seems to wear out faster than it's worth considering.
Overall, yes, a cheap box filter (placed specifically in the bedroom, if limited to one room) is often the most effective.
Speaking of expensive air purifiers, you can often find excellent deals on used IQair units. I got 4 GC Multigas units from a local museum for 100 euros each.
I have an alert set up on the local craigslist equivalent and constantly get emails.
I’ve changed mine once after 4 years of moderate use in a quite well insulated 1700 sqft apartment with wood floors, no carpets but a decent amount of visitors and occasional tiny dog.
Those filters were used though, no idea for how long (they only had like 70 hours on them according to the onboard tracking, but that would be easy to manipulate even by accident)
IQair recommends a yearly replacement for my HEPA filter, but my environment had a fairly low amount of particulates to begin with (new building with filtered air intakes) and workload split between multiple units.
When I used to mine cryptocurrency, I ran the miners as my space heater too. Now with gaming PCs and GPUs pulling up to 1.5 kW as well, I just use my computer, running GPU tasks, plying games, etc, when I need some warmth. It works well and at least the miner and computer were doing useful work rather than simply shedding heat.
> I just use my computer [...] when I need some warmth
The difference is that the computer's fans don't blow directly at you and make you warm while leaving the room effectively unchanged as in my use-case.
When heating up a room, regular natural gas central heating is usually a lot more efficient than electricity. A gas power plant creating electricity for you to turn back into heat is rather lossy. Heat pumps are different: they roughly break even if you have a 100% gas power mix, because they move heat at 300% efficiency instead of creating new heat.
That's true but I still get useful work out of the electricity to heat conversion. For example I turned off my heater the other day and upscaled a bunch of media on my computer, my room was quite toasty.
Oh sure, when you're using waste heat that you would otherwise be venting or actively cooling then this is definitely better. The way you phrased it, it sounded to me like you'd find extra gpu tasks to turn on whenever the room gets cold that would otherwise not be done at all. In that case, on most grids it's unfortunately still better to burn gas directly.
Which probably produced just as much heat as a $200 space heater. Technology Connections did a great video on that. https://youtu.be/V-jmSjy2ArM
I used to occasionally run a space heater under my desk on low because my legs and feet would get cold. It felt nice and cozy, but eventually I just got used to putting on socks and pants.
> Your math is off by a lot. 1.5 kW for 3 minutes is 0.075 kWh
Oh, you're right, I rounded the three quarter up to a one, but failed to remove the zero before it. Either way, it's a lot better than even just filling up the cold radiator with hot water, let alone it heating the rest of the room up!
I posted this separately, but look into a heated mattress pad too. Its life changing for cold climates. Direct heat into your covers makes it so much cozier.
I stay up later than my wife and like to go to lay in a cool bed. She likes it warm. So we compromised and got a mattress warmer for her, and I have the heat set to drop by several degrees at like 11 PM.
But then she gets up at like 7 AM (6 AM on workdays), and she'd be freezing, so I have the heat set to turn back up at 6 AM, which means if I wake up, I find myself roasting and can't get back to sleep.
What's the temperature in your bedroom? You say "drop by several degrees" (but not from what to what) so it sounds like you heat there during the day and let it drop at 11PM?
Got something like that too! Not sure why I didn't mention it honestly. So in the morning I get out of bed and turn on the air heating so I get dressed in warmth; in the evening I turn on the heated blanket while brushing my teeth and warm up the bed and covers. Also allows me to leave the room colder while not being cold in bed for the first twenty minutes.
I don't know the power draw while it warms up. The packaging says 100W but I measured it to actually use only ~30W, average during 1.5 hours. Maybe it does use 100W the first 5 minutes or so. Let's say it uses the full 100W for up to 15 minutes while I do my evening hygiene ritual as an upper bound, that would be 0.025 kWh (1 cent last year, 2 cents at current prices).
Kagi search engine subscription is easily my top choice (https://kagi.com).
I'm really glad something can finally, truly replace Google search and be just as good or better (neither Bing nor DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them).
If we're talking physical products, I'd probably go with the Apple Magsafe wallet. It's a little thing but I love not having a separate wallet to keep track of every day.
It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response.
If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old.
Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today.
No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to see a real-time example. A canned example FWIW could be a completely scripted search result.
Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations.
I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts.
Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use.
If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.
I was a beta user and paid for a while, but my search results were too intermixed with my wife's and my child's. It's absolutely worth it to me, but paying $30 a month for 3 users was a little too much for me to stomach.
To be clear, I pay $20/mo for ProtonMail Visionary so I'm not averse to paying! I just can't see the value at $30/mo when the other family members don't use it nearly as much as I do.
Maybe this is an untenable problem due to your costs and you need those low use paying users. I'm not sure.
To clarify: by intermixed I mean our tuning was different so it became somewhat interesting, as we all wanted to tune the settings differently. It's not a huge thing, but between that and feeling bad for having three people using one sub...
Good news, reduced price family plans are coming soon (we are aiming January). You'll get three users for $10/mo, four for $12/mo as a base membership. A lot of discussion about it going on right now in our discord server.
Most of your arguments regarding resources are in general valid points, but when you are showcasing 3 results as selling points how hard is it to keep them updated. If you're not personally bothered by this showcase -- which is your product advertisment -- you perhaps should be. Going against a trillion dollar company needs a very convincing pitch IMO to average user.
> We are a ten people bootstrapped team.
We are a 2-engineer startup. We give business analytics/market trends on mined webdata (through our B2B dashboards) with a 48 hour live data guarantee. Every time, user queries crunch through about 9 million data points for every day over last 36 months - in real time. Sorry, but it isn't a very good reason to have stale results.
You're demanding an awful lot out of a $10/mo product here. And I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's still an as-good-or-better search engine than Google with no ads and a focus on privacy.
The fact that it lists ballpark prices rather than exact prices is really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
My critique was about the accuracy of the results, and staleness of their showcase. If I would be a paying customer - be it $1 or $10/mo - I would expect it to be better than something I get for free. I already mentioned in another comment that Google shouldn't be a baseline to improve on, when so many competing innovative search companies such as DDG, Ecosia, You.com exist. Even DDG, Ecosia aren't visually that spammy either. For Kagi to win, the product strategy should win over by a visible margin.
They're not pitching to the average user. Average users won't pay for search.
Also kind of a dick move to compare to your startup to Kagi to justify it sucking. Analytics is very different to search. Your products sound completely different.
Then you're missing the contradiction. Average user won't pay for search, and paying tech-savvy user may not be convinced. I have nothing against their product - my critique is to improve their product showcase.
I never knew pointing out excuses was a 'dick move' when we are doing the same theoretically (mining web data). In my defense, you could take your opinion elsewhere.
It doesn't seem like it works all that well either...
Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150.
No offense again to the product. Please take this as positive criticism
Please don't compare yourself to Google. Most people on HN are well aware that Google search has become a terrible baseline. DDG, appending Reddit to query etc., are workarounds discussed a lot of times on the forum.
I have no beef against Kagi. I wish you guys succeed, but please have a better product argument. At this point, I actually find equally good suggestion on 'headphones' from both DDG & Ecosia. If Kagi needs to win over, it should be doing better vis-a-vis the upcoming search engines, not Google which has been SEO gamed over & over.
Non taken. I mentioned Google as for most people, 'better than Google' is already worth paying for (and for most people Google is also still the "king").
We may differ perhaps on what 'winning' means. For us having thousands of people pay for Kagi despite such strong and free competition is already winning. We do not have ambition for global domination, but are creating a search experience for people that want an alternative that has their best interest in mind. And when we have a product glitch, it is not like we are delibarately not achieving even higher quality - we are constrained by our resources.
Also have in mind that we launched our public beta just 7 months ago, give us a bit of time (Google has been around for 25 years, DDG for 15 years, Ecosia for 14 years) and we may reach your standards of quality. Fact that generally speaking Kagi already brought more innovation to search experience in such short period time than these legacy search engines did in decades (by legacy I mostly mean using legacy business model - ads) means that we are serious about it. Just need a bit of time.
Would you say Kagi has escaped the Google SEO deterioration? Google has essentially gotten so bad for me that DuckDuckGo, without noticeable improvement, is now on par with Google.
In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.
I like Kagi by the way, but my problem with it is:
1. major: I value privacy. I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.)
2. minor: The subscription cost is a little too high for my usage volume.
> I would not connect my identity to a search engine (we've learned from recent news events that promises/privacy policies mean nothing.)
You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments (like PrivacyHQ) if remaining anonymous is imperative to you.
Kagi is 100% privacy respecting though, with the data you choose to trust us with (we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data).
Not GP but do you mean Privacy.com? As far as I'm aware it requires truthful personal information to use just like any other financial service.
As such, it can still be used to link a person to their Kagi account which means it's not private or anonymous in any meaningful sense. Additionally the service is only available to US citizens. I would strongly urge Kagi to consider adding cryptocurrency payments - ideally Monero.
This is coming from a paying Kagi customer. I like to put my money where my mouth is but I'm not a fan of the current payment options. I understand that Kagi is a small company in early stages, but I would expect cryptocurrency payments to be available 12 months from now.
You are correct, I thought there was a company called PrivacyHQ that offered anonymous payment cards, but I see now I was wrong. Privacy.com does not fullfill that gap.
> "You do not need to. You can register with an anonymous email (like SImpleLogin) and use anonymous payments"
Well, that would be an improvement, but all searches will still be linked to 1 account, whereas i can search on other search engines without this privacy issue.
On top of that, privacy laws in the US are... quite bad (even compared to Europe.)
> "we are in the business of search, not the business of monetizing data"
I appreciate your effort, i might reconsider at some point.
Thank you for your reply!
> Well, that would be an improvement, but all searches will still be linked to 1 account, whereas i can search on other search engines without this privacy issue.
We do not log searches or associate them with an account (check our privacy policy). This is because this would only be a liability for us, with no benefit. We are in the business of selling search results, not user data.
When we looked into it, it was hard to find a simple API that a USA company can use to allow monthly subscription payments with Monero, similar to how Stripe enables fiat subscriptions.
Fyi, it’s pretty simple to add a custom filter to any decent adblocker like uBlock to prevent annoying domains from showing up in search results. I haven’t seen a Pinterest result or Stackoverflow clone in years…
I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.
I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for.
Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.
Yeah, the dreaded !g in DDG is an all too familial feeling.
I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.
The problem is knowing when it is failing. How can you know what you may be missing? How can you know how much time you are losing by not getting the best results? Etc.
Yeah, I used DDG for about a year. It just became such a pervasive weight I went back to google. Despite the crappy seo it is still less of a pain / faster than ddg - but I know google is not surfacing high quality results from sites I found through it years ago. At this point, the web is far less useful than it was, mainly because you can't find the good sites anymore. I am going to give kagi a spin, since I really wanted to make something non-google work, and google looks like it will never improve. This feels exactly like my back and forth with linux as my daily driver. It took 15 years, but it eventually became the least bad option.
I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.
Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since.
For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.
I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again.
But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google.
I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.
I keep going back and forth between you and brave. I love the concept of brave's goggles but I wish it was more like point/click and it could automagically pick the best goggle based on keywords etc.
The all matching socks strategy breaks down over time. Eventually you need to buy more socks, and the new ones aren't as worn as the old ones, so you end up having to match them anyway. My solution to this is to buy a large batch of identical socks. Then when you need new ones, buy another large batch that are slightly different - e.g. grey hiking socks instead of black, or wool hiking socks that have a slightly different pattern but are still the same style. This reduces the matching problem from matching all pairs to matching into a couple different sets, which is much easier.
They have lotion in the fabric. You probably want to wear them more than once, if possible, maybe stretch them to a couple days if you didnt make them gross right away. Once you wash them they turn into regular fuzzy socks.
But on those days that they are fresh, there is nothing like them. I have a stash tucked away for special days, and once they are done, they get added to the normal fuzzy sock rotation. Turns out you can wear black fuzzy socks pretty often.
This is how I operate with normal socks - I never buy a single pack of socks - I just do a "line change" and replace them all when the old rotation is too far gone to meet my needs.
I have a few specialty items for exercise or dirty yard work, but those are easy to separate from the daily drivers.
My sons still wear socks I bought for myself 22 years ago. They also wear my 40 year old wedding and funeral dress shoes. My feet grew, so I can't wear either.
99.9 percent of the time nobody will notice. You almost have to draw attention to it deliberately before anyone notices. Any nobody ever cares - the sort of person who would you probably wouldn't want to be around anyway.
I work outdoors a lot and have 100% merino wool thermals to wear as a base layer in the winter (or when skiing), beats the pants off of what most of the rest of the crew is wearing.
I have 12 pairs of the same lightweight Darn Tough socks that are perfect for year round use (I don't live in snow). I've had them for ~10 years now and when a given sock gets a hole in the bottom, I put them in a pile and wait until I have 4 then send them back for two new pairs of socks. They were initially expensive, but after each being replaced a couple times, they are dirt cheap (even when factoring in one-way shipping). Thankfully, they have kept the exact same style all these years. Fingers crossed that they stay in business and that 80 year old me will have saved a lot of money by not buying socks.
If you need to dry stuff really quick, get a little cheap desk fan of the kind sold in warm summers and point that to the wet stuff. I use it to dry out my children's boots.
> - all matching socks. No more time spent pairing.
after my son started wearing unmatching socks (and refuses to wear matching socks), I started doing the same and I'm now hooked. Granted these are unmatching socks of the same style (i.e., I have 5 pairs of Nordic socks) and I like just throwing them all in the box after laundry and pulling out 2 at random. Probably not going back to matching socks unless it's required :)
I used to have socks with 'Monday', 'Tuesday', etc. I used to wear them randomly. A lot of people used to notice it and comment why I'm with Friday socks even though it's only Tuesday:)
>- all matching socks. No more time spent pairing.
Around 5 or 7 years ago I found 100% cotton socks on a massive discount, don't remember how many, but I took more than 40 pairs, full backpack I had with me that day. I use them pretty much most of the year, except in summer. Never bought socks since and due to all that "mismatching", I only had to throw a few of them, they were shredded and composted.
Oh cool, did you shred/compost yourself or is there a service for that? We compost everything we can but I have been throwing out clothes that I can't use for rags.
I saw this practice on instructables. You can simply use old non-plastic socks as a protective bag for plants. Fill a sock with soil or compost, stick a branch/stem cutting, small tree, you know just anything that has fragile roots into the sock, stick it in soil. The sock will keep moisture a big longer and protect roots from worms eating them for a few months. It simply buys plants some time to grow. Eventually the sock will decompose. I planted 4 berries, a few yews and pines this way. I can't tell if this actually helps the plants, my sample size is too small, but doesn't seem to harm them.
Some corporations like H&M accept donations of old clothes for recycling, in return they give you a voucher.
I KIND OF do this; I have a couple different brands with slightly different styles, but they're all black ankle socks so I don't care if one has a gold toe and one doesn't. Drives my wife mad, but it doesn't bother me and I'm either at home or wearing shoes, so...
I replaced all our hangers over years with wooden ones and not getting wire hangers tangled up or small plastic hangers messing up the shoulders on my t-shirts is well worth the expense. My girlfriend doesn't care, the barbarian, she will throw in a plastic or wire hanger from the drycleaners and I go full-on Joan Crawford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOILKHmZBwc
yah, i bought 100 flat black hangers a few years ago (~$15 at ikea back then) so i could hang all of my casual clothing (rather than folding, which is more time-consuming). the flat ones allowed me to hang like 50% more stuff in the same space. my fancier clothes go on wooden hangers (also ikea) so they have more room to breathe.
They complement one another: using keyboard-driven programs, and having a good keyboard.
Especially if you're willing to put effort into your tools: vim's sophistication requires effort to learn, but has advantages. I think the same can be said for fancy small keyboards.
The Keychron K2 keyboard supports both wired and wireless so when it's at my desk it's wired but I can take it on the go and pair it with my laptop to use it wireless. It's a good medium :)
I have the K2 V2 and it's actually really bad when being used for both wired and wireless.
The issue I've mostly had (and found that others have as well), is if you run the battery to 0 using it on wireless mode, it won't even work on wired mode until it's fully recharged. Like you can't use it "offline".
A bidet. We got one with heated water and seats and going to the bathroom feels super luxurious now. Not to mention all the toilet paper we save and increased hygiene.
Reddit loves bidets. Has for years. Based on all the glowing comments, I bought one and installed it. Even after some practice and experimentation, I wasn't clean nor felt clean. Plus, the bidet added numerous crannies for urine spray to accumulate. I went back to wiping and discarded the bidet.
> The real protip, which feels weirdly inappropriate for HN, is shaving down there.
I've heard very much the opposite.
Or at least, shaving down there makes it amazing for a day or two, but then the hairs start growing back and it's stubbly at first, which makes it INSANELY itchy.
My experience is that this happens the first few times and it gets less bad on regrowth each time.
I did an experiment when I started shaving my legs where I only shaved one for a while and then later shaved both, only the one that hadn’t been shaved multiple times was painful when the hair regrew.
What's the famous story about the guy who Nair'd this region as a joke/prank and he didn't realize the side effect of: the hair down there acts as a buffer for the scent so flatulence comes out much much worse?
Temperature control of the water and seat are the killer app, pressure control and nozzle width are really nice too. Blow dry, not so necessary, takes a while.
One thing is I find that it's really water pressure dependent. At least with the class of no-frills, not-expensive toilet attachment ones I buy.
I moved recently and at the new house water pressure overall is noticably lower and it's far more difficult and slightly frustrating. If I hadn't learned/trained/experinced on higher water pressure I probably would agree with your assessment.
There’s a wide range of how effective they are. Some people are happy with cheap toilet seat attachments but there’s a reason people spend significantly more on expensive toilets.
> Even after some practice and experimentation, I wasn't clean nor felt clean. Plus, the bidet added numerous crannies for urine spray to accumulate. I went back to wiping and discarded the bidet.
This is one of the reasons I haven't looked into a bidet more. I'm no stranger to waiting until I can be comfortable taking care of business, but to be dependent on an appliance to do something as fundamental as using the bathroom, seems a bit too far.
Now, if I lived in Japan, somewhere famous for the widespread adoption of high-tech bidets, sure, it makes sense to adapt. But in basically all of America and Western Europe, it's still a luxury that if I adopted it now, I would be much more uncomfortable anytime I need to go to the bathroom away from home.
Problem here is getting electrical to your toilet location? I was thinking about that too, but I didn't feel like making the leap to hiring an electrician to install / create a new outlet there.
I use something called a Tushy. It's purely mechanical. Downside is it's not heated, but that's proven fine for me. Took me about 15 minutes to install and I'm no plumber. No leaks, though I did have to check for them during install and tighten things a bit to get it right.
Search for 'Brondell swash nonelectric', available at costco and jeffazon. I have this and the electric version, and I find the non-electric is good enough and a fraction of the price.
140 year old victorian home. I managed to run a new 12 gauge circuit to my second floor bathroom myself to get an outlet in the right place. Took me a few hours to puzzle through how to get the line up there without breaking open a wall, but I managed it in the end.
Its going to be a _little_ tricky to get lines to the other bathrooms, but I'll figure it out when the time comes.
Yes. Not to overshare but I find that failure to actively dry changes the biome back there; in short it can get itchy. Just pulling up and heading off is not enough (use a small towel). That said though, it is great.
I am using a small hygienic shower with the button for more than a 15 years. It is really easy to install, a skilled plumber will do it in an hour, putting a T-connector where the toilet takes its water. Did it in every place I rented since. 10/10, highly recommend.
On days I don't work from home, I try to always use the bathroom at the office instead of at home because the bidet makes it so much nicer. It's a small thing but it makes me feel like royalty.
If you want heated anything or a blower, you'll first need to consider how you'll get power to your toilet's location. If, however, a cold water bidet is fine then just grab a cheap LUXE.
A TOTO WASHLET is still the gold standard though. That's what I own, and it has been great. Only thing I wish was slightly better was the blow-dryer. The pre-rinse/pre-mist is legit good in terms of keeping the toilet cleaner for longer.
PS - Quick note about mechanical bidets like the LUXE, it has no sensors/safety features. So if a child goes in, turns it on, and runs away it WILL flood your home. TOTO and similar quality bidets automatically turn off the water when weight isn't detected on the seat.
A huge (A0, 33-1/8 x 46-13/16 in-sized) 12-month calendar with the months laid out in long strips.
I wasn't doing enough. Too much YouTube and reddit, so I stopped and decided to do things.
I used different colored markers for different aspects of my life-- health, work, fitness, recreational travel, home maintenance, etc) and decided I had to do something every week.
The different colors even accounted for down time. Too much color? Draw a nice relaxing blue line for a couple of days and do nothing.
I went from being a hermit to a EMT-qualified volunteer at my local volunteer fire department on his way to Firefighter I training, a spotlight operator at a local community theater, an enthusiastic yogi, and by having the year laid out I can look at weekends with holidays and plan my year's travel months in advance. I make notes on when to plant what and have a pretty front yard.
Digital calendars are nice, but they can't beat having a huge-assed poster right next to the front door with everything laid out in black and white and red and blue and green and yellow and........
If you feel like you're not getting the most out of life, get a huge-assed calendar, start googling local volunteer opportunities, write it down, and then do it.
They are basically bionic ears. Headphones, headset, earplugs, hearing protection, hearing aids, extendable ears, and more. Wish they could act as universal translators, but I suppose that's still yet to come.
Second this. I upgraded from the first-gen Pros after seeing many strong reviews about how much better the noise cancellation is. I can tell the noise cancelling is much better because previously I couldn't cook with our (very loud) exhaust fan on and listen to podcasts. Now it's no problem.
For me, I view the purchase as an investment in my hearing health. Instead of having to turn up the volume to account for traffic background noise or the like, I can keep the volume low and use ANC. While $200 is a lot to drop on a piece of electronics with a limited (<3 year) useful life, the calculus changes dramatically when viewed through the lens of a medical assistive device.
It's also nice that there are more volume/seek controls built into the stems, versus the v1.
I just gave a pair to my mom who uses hearing aids. She was able to enter her audiogram in them and use them as both backup hearing aids when her regular ones are on the charger or in for repair and as headphones that match her hearing needs. So heck yeah they can be viewed as a medical assistive device.
That doesn't make any sense. They just sit in the outside of your ear. Nowhere near where earwax is produced.
There are other brands of in-ear headphones that you jam into your ear canal more like earplugs. Possibly those could have an effect. But AirPods Pro are nothing like that.
AirPods Pro are in ear, they compound the issue of earwax on your outer ear into a worse problem. That's according to me ear doctor, feel free to argue further with me but that's what he said.
Interesting. I would believe there is more ear wax when I use them a lot. Does that not reverse to ordinary levels when they are not used? What problems does this (or other non-hearing issues) create?
I agree that we need to be mindful of rapid and dramatic changes to how we interface with the world, since our bodies may not react well in the long run.
I think it's more a case of constant ear bud usage packing in the wax and concentrating it. It got so bad for me, even the water tool they have at my doctor's office didn't work to remove it.
I have terrible wax issues from before I used in ear headphones, mostly from swimming. I have found an earwax cleaning kit called Earwax MD and it works great for me. The peroxide based kits didn’t remove my wax and I needed to do periodic ENT appointments to scrape it out when it got impacted. This Earwax MD formula really eats away the wax and dries it out so that it can be rinsed out or fall out on its own.
And before anyone raises a stink about this being bad for my ears, I become functionally deaf when my earwax gets impacted which happens about once ever 2 years.
Whoa, not good! I assume they found another way to get it out? Did they have any tips (aside from not using earbud-style headphones) to prevent the issue from recurring?
Do they actually provide hearing protection? Hearing protection requires a pretty tight seal, which I wasn't aware of any headphones providing aside from in-ear monitors.
That is an advertised feature, so I assume that the lawyers have looked into those health claims as somewhat defensible.
First, they do seal, so even if it's not as tight as a foam earplug, it is something.
Second, there's the ANC which is producing out of phase sound and lowering the sound pressure level reaching your ear. I have seen commercial hearing protection with ANC, though I'm not sure if it's allowed to be advertised as such. The theory is sensible at least.
Thirdly, the ANC is allowing you to listen to your audio content at lower volumes, especially in a very loud environment like an airplane.
Fourthly, there's an advertised hearing protection feature in passthrough mode where external noises loud enough to cause hearing damage will be automatically reduced.
Fifthly, There are sound pressure measurements being sent to the iphone for audio content loudness in real time, and also over time notifications you receive if you have been listening too loudly.
So all in all, yes in practice, but we're not exactly talking OSHA here.
I have often wondered if the ANC creates more noise in overcoming the outside noise. I did some googling, but the results made me feel like I was asking a dumb question.
I'm genuinely curious: are there any audiophiles on here that could answer?
FWIW - with the ANC off, sounds that make me 'cringe' (sawzall, table saw, hammer drill, etc.) are very much muffled and seem to be just as muffled as when using foam ear plugs. As others have said, there is a big difference between noise levels for a guy remodeling his bathroom with power tools and a someone that saws concrete for a living.
Not a dumb question at all! At a basic level, ANC creates "anti-noise", a waveform 180º out of phase with the noise, and they cancel each other out. So the resulting waveform is much lower amplitude than the original.
I don't know anything about this channel but I watched a bit of this video and it seems to be a good explanation of how it works:
I mean hearing protection isn't a binary thing. I doubt they would pass hearing protection certifications for things that they're normally used for, like heavy construction or whatnot, but it'd be hard to imagine sticking something in your ear wouldn't offer hearing protection, not even considering the ANC.
While true, I think the marketing should address those. I have seen and heard of people using them as ear protection for heavy and loud equipment, like lawn mowers and motorcycles and stuff, and I’m not sure they apply there.
You don’t need nearly as much hearing protection for lawn mowers and motorcycles compared to someone operating a jackhammer or similarly loud equipment for hours a day.
I don't think that's entirely true. Motorcycle noise on highways can be in excess of 100 dB and is broad spectrum noise. Most highway motorcycle rides are in the tens of minutes to hours range, but the damage can occur in just the single digits to teens of minutes.
Beyond a certain point, it doesn't really matter much that something is worse for your hearing than something that will permanently damage your hearing. Plus, people are interacting with lawn equipment, motorcycles, and other such things far more frequently than jackhammers.
Jackhammer’s can be 130 decibels it’s easily a thousand times as loud as motorcycles so we really are talking different realms of sound protection being needed.
Also Motorcycle helmets should reduce things. Further it varies but motorcycles really shouldn’t be 100db, California’s legal limit is 80db for motorcycles manufactured after 1985.
At highway speed here in France, (110-130 km/hr), the wind noise is sufficient to cause tinnitus for me, if I'm not wearing ear protection under my helmet. The bike style is a factor - my touring bike has a movable windshield that can push the airflow above my head, but the wind noise from the daily bike, with a tiny windshield, is like sticking your head out the window of a moving car.
I've used them in situations where the "ambient" music is ear-splittingly loud (Apple Watch saying GTFO or you're gonna go deaf). Aipods Pro 2 in and I can still hear what people are talking, but the loud noises are brought down considerably.
AW decibel check goes from 90 -> high 60/low 70 with ANC on.
Not as good as actual proper earplugs, especially the ones that look like pine trees, but I carry my Airpods with me everywhere - earplugs I don't. The Airpods go to the Airpods pocket in my jeans, I do have earplugs in my bag, but it's not with me at all times. My pants are =)
I wear AirPod Pros on flights and when walking over a busy freeway for lunch. The noise cancellation feature works really well. I can continue listening to music or podcasts at an indoor volume. The AirPod Pro does form a seal.
My only complaint is that something in the noise cancellation mic tends to wear out over time. After about 18–24 months of use, I start to hear an unpleasant high-pitch sound whenever I touch the mic opening on an earpiece. This could be related to dropping them, which is inevitable. I'm on my third set now.
I used my original AirPods Pro as hearing protection on a table saw. It's not a terribly loud saw and I use thin kerf blades, but it's quite comfortable. At age 36 I can still heard 16-17kHz tones (typically you hear up to 15k by 40), so it seems to be working well enough.
For my giant router I use muffs. The AirPods act funny around stuff that loud, and it stops feeling comfortable.
As far as I can find Apple does not advertise an official Noise Reduction Rating (NRR) for them though there are some review sites claiming they have a NRR of about 22-23, comparable to basic foam earplugs. I personally wouldn't rely on them for anything where you actually _need_ hearing protection - shooting, loud machinery, etc.
My concern with the Airpods are simultaneously playing music through a small speaker, with its own negative affect on hearing (long term), while also trying to attenuate (poorly) loud noises.
Yeah I would not use them as hearing protection against industrial level noise.
In my experience, Jackhammers and rivet guns will absolutely blast through the foam and the ANC will not be fast enough (the noise also too sharp and high frequency).
Everything else works great but people reading this thread: wear proper hearing-protection!
I've used this service when I was in Asia. You don't need headphones, you can just use your phone via the Google Translate app. Place your phone down within speaking distance of both or all participants, then speak. It will translate and reply back and then allow the other person to speak, repeating the process. It worked extremely well even several years ago so I assume it's gotten better since then.
I was in Asia a few months ago and can confirm, it worked like a charm. I was able to have a long and enjoyable conversation with my cab driver during the full 40-minute ride. By the end, I almost forgot we were speaking to each other through translations. It's hard to say what mistakes it made, but there were never any moments of real misunderstanding. It was the first time I'd used it at length and I was pretty blown away.
I'm not aware of any evidence of that, though for me I rarely notice my tinnitus unless I am in a quiet space. It is almost never quiet for most people in most cities, so I can understand someone noticing it for the first time while using ANC.
Not that I could find any news about. Someone did sue Apple back in May about hearing damage caused by an amber alert, but I can't see any progress on that since then -- and "someone has sued" is pretty weak evidence of anything, in the US legal system.
I haven’t heard that, but I’m curious to learn more since I use ANC a lot and would like to protect my hearing! Do you think the noice cancellation causes the tinnitus, or do people suddenly realize the ringing when the silence makes it more noticeable?
anecdotal, but I cannot use ANC while riding the NYC subway
the amount of air pressure I can feel in my ears when a train is coming into the station is definitely much larger than just letting the silicone tip do the little noice attentuation it can
the weird part is that it's not a sound I can hear, I normally have an ok range of hearing but this is just _pressure_
I finally bought a pair of 1st gen AirPods at the end of 2021, and while they have some issues (tap gestures stopped working and/or became very unreliable at some point, occasionally in-ear detection gets messed up) the convenience of them is hard to overstate. No untangling wires or having to be tethered to the device. At the gym I can throw my phone on the ground nearby and continue to get my music while I do exercises, and at home I can pop in a single earbud and have the stereo audio converted to mono in a single ear to listen to podcasts while playing a video game. And it wasn't until using that that I realized how much of an annoyance having my ears tethered to my pocket was, and having to constantly keep the mental overhead of not snagging the wire on my fingers or a doorhandle or something while using wired headphones.
I do wish they'd come down in price more, and ideally in the future be more sweat-resistant and most importantly have replaceable batteries. I don't really love the idea that they're essentially a ~$200 every 2 years subscription at the moment, all while creating a craptonne of ewaste.
I'm hoping I can get a good few years out of mine. Just from research it seems people were averaging about 2 years, and some even less from sweat/earwax accumulating in ports and wrecking them. And I do use mine for working out, and I produce a lot of earwax, so I worry mine are gonna be on the shorter side of lifespans.
Agreed! Having had Airpods 2 (non-pro) since launch, I only now appreciate the ANC feature. My listening volume went from 80% to 30%, even 10% at home.
Seriously, if you have headphones in every day mainly to mask environment noises, these are a must-have. Best buy in a looooong time.
i have to use different sized tips and they push out over the course of time.. i like them and accept that it's my ears, but after the airpods pro i'll go with something with a hook or over the ear.
I’m a wrestler and really struggle with getting a secure fit. This isn’t specific to Airpods, but it does seem worse than other buds. I tried foam tips from Comply. They worked reasonably well, but their longevity was short and the small size means there isn’t much physical room for them to compress/expand for a good fit. Some attachment issues as well (though I’ve heard they had been sorted out).
More Airpod Pro form factors would be welcome, but the functionality is pretty good.
I find the Pros migrate out no matter what size I use. I was hopeful that the new XS size on the v2 Pros would help, but it doesn't appear to.
As a result, I use my old Airpods (not sure what gen, but pre-Pro) for zoom calls. I don't need ANC under these circumstances, and I prefer to not be reaching for my ear every couple minutes to push the pod back in.
I have small ear canals and tried every possible aftermarket ear piece for my airpods pro to no avail. Now I use bone conducting earphones. They don't sound nearly as good and they don't block outside noise (which is both a negative and a positive depending on the situation), but they work well for all kinds of activity.
FYI for those of you more concerned with hearing protection: I use a product called "Plugfones" which actually create a tight seal in your ear canal. I got the blue-tooth version and use it on my motorcycle rides to listen to music (on low volume) while filtering out the wind noise. They're about $70 for the blue-tooth "Liberate 2.0" model. I've owned it for over a year and it's worked out great. Durable and no issues with battery life so far.
There was no problem with my Airpods pro gen 1, but I bought new gen 2 version just because I wanted to support Apple for making such a great product. I never leave the house without them. Got it on sale for thanksgiving holidays
All battery powered in-ear headphones have the same "problem".
It's nearly impossible to make something that small _and_ get a 10/10 iFixit score. You can't put any sane screws in anything that small, stuff needs to be glued down.
Also surprisingly comfortable to wear while laying on a pillow, at least compared to anything I've tried so far. White noise + noise cancellation makes for pleasant naps.
You lose enough of the features that I would not use them with Android regularly. Most importantly, the only high fidelity bluetooth codec they support is AAC, which most Android devices do not support, causing you to fall back to SBC. You will also not be able to adjust any of the settings.
I can't comment on Air Pods since I don't use them, but there are other high quality ear buds with ANC that work on any device. I'm particular to Bose ANC 700 which are over-ear and more comfortable for me, but definitely don't fit snugly under a hood. Jabra elites are excellent and similar form factor to Air Pods.
They function as headphones. The main issue, for worse or sometimes for better, is that you need an iPhone to update the firmware. Apple's Quick pairing also won't work, but Android doesn't really have an equivalent anyway.
my wife took my $5 timex watch and just put her mouse on the face of it. kinda blew my mind because her request was very out of left field. but it works!
I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].
I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.
[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.
[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".
The mousepad itself has an eink or similar display to change it over time and have the mouse detect some motion. The "active" part is turned off (to just be a regular display) when there is pressure on the wrist rest.
The mousepad is a USB hub (to get power for itself) that you can also plug the mouse and keyboard into so that its one less cord back to the computer.
Years ago when optical nice were a new thing, I pranked my co-worker in the IT department by taping a feather to the optical sensor and then taping the mouse right behind the power supply fan on his tower PC. Then I plugged in a second mouse and put it on his desk. The constant jitter of the mouse drove him bonkers. He replaced the desk mouse several times, went back to a ball mouse and even reimaged his PC (we used Ghost back then to image the company PCs in-situ). Every time he replaced his desk mouse I thought he'd see the rogue mouse, but he always did it "blind", tracing his cable back, pulling it out and fumbling with the replacement usb plug for 5 minutes, cursing USB ports. If he once pulled out the tower or crawled back there to look he'd have seen my ruse.
I must check whether placing a mouse on laptop's screen would work. As the screen blanks out would it register as a move and the system would not lock itself?
It's way easier than it sounds. Logitech provides a tool that lets you program their gaming mouses. They use Lua. I don't know Lua but there were plenty of guides for different gaming macros like recoil compensation and the Logitech documentation was decent enough.
This is making me feel old. Totally agree it is difficult, but not impossible.
Logitech is the problem here for even allowing this in the first place. No CRC checks for mouse firmware or anything? It screams poor implementation. I will not be surprised if anti-cheat software starts banning people or companies like Logitech.
Kind of sad to see the number of threads and communities online encouraging this. The point of games is to have fun, when you cheat all that goes out the door.
There are multiple mice vendors that allow this. And you can’t ban them because the cheater focused ones will just set their device ID to match some common device.
If it can be done on exe's at runtime, it can be done on hardware attached to the computer. Signing things securely isn't a hard problem to solve, it's keeping people from attacking that signature that is hard. Something tells me the kids writing lua scripts as aimbots aren't quite smart enough to crack a proper signature implementation.
> Something tells me the kids writing lua scripts as aimbots aren't quite smart enough to crack a proper signature implementation.
They don't have to.
All they need is a signature of a valid firmware, and then inject code that returns that signature.
The "kids" won't be the ones writing the cheats. That'll be someone who knows how to write code that injects code into another running process, and then they sell the cheat software.
Blizzard tried for YEARS to detect a bot program for World of Warcraft called Glider. Every time they found a way to detect it, the bot engineers found a way to evade the detection. It was constant cat and mouse until Blizz sued the developer and had them shut down.
More back on topic, most of the cheaters are just script kiddies. There are only a couple that actually develop cheats, and they tend to be quite clever.
If on Windows, I use their "Power Toys" (free, btw), which has a keep awake function. My company user policies do not allow me to manage my energy policy, which is what kept shutting off my screen (and therefore necessitating the complicated password). Power Toys solves this problem.
Pretty sure that isn't legal in most countries where HN'ers work from
Which is not to say that it is not done, but personally I have enough options that I would like to see them try to fire me over something like that. If I'm staring off into the distance to think about something or reading source code without pgdn'ing for five minutes, yes it's not uncommon that my screen turns off while reading something (until I get around to setting the timeout higher at least) but that doesn't mean I'm not working.
Does this eventually "wear out" our monitors/displays because now they never turn off. I have expensive monitors and I work from home and keep my laptop always docked. Never turning off the displays makes me wonder if I am rushing them to going bad too soon.
Our dogs are frequently out in the yard, so other than spring pre-emergent I try to avoid herbicides. I bought it after a hand weeder broke pulling up crabgrass.
This thing has oddly been one of the most satisfying purchases I've made in years. You put it in the ground, step on it and the thing easily pulls out weeds and only in the spot you put it. Then you get to shoot them off the claw. I have a bucket I try and shoot them into. It's oddly therapeutic.
I refuse to use herbicides for a variety of reasons (pets, kids, and our property backs up to a creek and I try my best not to contaminate) but I despise pulling weeds the old fashioned way. Can't believe I've never seen this before. Definitely getting one - thank you!
This works great for me! I use it to rip out dallisgrass weeds, which can not be pulled out by hand and they are very hard to kill with chemicals (at least without also killing your grass as well). After using this, those weeds never come back as this device completely removes the entire root. Highly recommend. Totally agree about it being therapeutic!
These are great, and I use mine, but I discovered that much cheaper and more robust options exist which work as well. I actually found an all-metal option at around $40 CAD that my sister-in-law has was quite a bit nicer to use. So anyone interested in this, definitely look around!
This thing is so satisfying. I've done something to mine though, I feel like the claws have moved down a little or something else has moved up. It keep getting jammed and I have to give it a boot.
Our backyard definitely needs this, and I also hesitate to use herbicides because of pets (and insects and whatnot). Had no idea this existed. I'll definitely get one, thanks!
A solid long desk. I didn't focus much on the standing desk stuff too much but instead zero'd in on desk length and depth. I feel like 55inch width is bare minimum at this point. If you pick the longer desks that have well designed shelves, or even some of the L-shaped stuff, you can tuck away laptops/desktops in such a way that your main surface work area is huge blank canvas. The space and lack of clutter is almost therapeutic.
This is not the one I have since I have mostly wooden stuff in my crib, but this one looks nice and long and cheap:
Big fan of big desks. I just moved down to a 57 inch desk. Fifteen years ago I needed a temporary desk solution and bought the cheapest bare wood door at Home Depot and laid it across two filing cabinets. That turned out to work great for the next fifteen years and I still kind of miss it (but it was time to upgrade the home office decor.)
> bought the cheapest bare wood door at Home Depot and laid it across two filing cabinets.
I'm surprised how many people don't build their own desks (especially those of us who work at home). I spent about $1,200 on a pretty minimalist (but very large) desk in my early 20s. I could build my ideal desk for half that price.
Even the "cheapest bare wood door at Home Depot", switch that out with "cheap (but straight) wood" or layers of thick MDF or other durable surface, add paint, grout, tile adhesive and window molding (or something wood for an edge) and cheap ceramic tiles. Cut the MDF to ensure no tile cuts are needed, sand/spray paint the edges to match the tile and you have a pretty decent looking/functional/durable desk of any desired size.
I did a dining table that way in my 20s. It was a curb rescue that the top was destroyed (someone used it as a work bench) but it had a really nice set of thick oak legs that would clean up. I re-used the top after a lot of sanding but the tiling/painting job was maybe an hour's worth of work done mostly by brief instructions given to me from an older gentleman at Home Depot (I owned a dull hand saw and plug-in power drill given to me by my grand father). It took a weekend to complete between the various "waiting for things to dry". I sealed mine, as well. It cost less than $75 about 20 years ago.
Honestly, if I were to do it all over again, I'd skip the $1,200 desk. I'd watch Craigslist for a large hardwood dining room table with the right characteristics[0], preferably with leafs. It's a huge work area. If pressed against a wall, you could set a number of deep cabinets wall-side, put the monitor in the center of the table and even access cabinets behind (but above) the monitor pretty easily.
[0] You'd want legs that wouldn't be in the way of your knees while working at it. Ideally, leafs that are attached in some way which could be re-engineered into a printer/computer stand.
On the big desk front, I just found a solid wood dining table on Craigslist. 36x72" without plywood or veneers for $60. The depth is great for ergonomics and the length with me have some reference books and electronics without it seeming cluttered. Best desk I've had
A one-hour shopping session with a personal stylist, at about $175. I desperately wanted to break out of my t-shirt/blue jeans habit, but parsing clothes sizes, trying things on, and getting opinions is equal parts sorcery and torture for me. (I'd tried Stitch Fix and felt like it wanted to reinforce my habits rather than break me out of them.)
After sending her details about my problems and the kinds of styles I admired, the stylist experience was very old-school retail — a department store — but she was unexpectedly pragmatic, giving great advice about picking durable clothes and materials that specifically fit well on me, with lots of wink-and-nudge budget advice (like "This would look great on you for $50 less" followed by flashing me a Nordstrom Rack or Poshmark listing of it).
Also, finding out that the department store has a complimentary tailoring service for hemming and adjusting the waistline on pants you buy from there permanently changed my clothes shopping process.
I don't want to belittle your experience as stylists can be helpful for achieving a certain look, but often department stores (especially Nordstrom) have sales associates trained as stylists.
They will spend a lot of time helping you with your style for free, albeit you'll probably want to buy from that particular store. Nordstrom clothes are a bit on the pricier end, but ~most~ are often good quality.
We went to a Nordstrom, actually, and worked with their designated stylist who did quite a bit of the picking. The value for the hired stylist was not working for Nordstrom, which meant being able to say "that looks good, here's something that will look as good and cost half as much, and also here's why that looks good on you and where you can find it elsewhere".
EDIT: I really also want to stress that the stylist was just... nice. Completely non-judgmental about me waffling over things, offering lots of advice beyond just the clothing — how different postures affect fits, being able to explain to me why layering was sometimes uncomfortable and how to alleviate it, how to better adjust my fit when my body's size changes, even a gym recommendation. The in-shop stylist was also very nice, but the hired stylist got me through the door to the shop, and for me at least, that was worth the $175.
Interesting, I have a preferred stylist at Nordstrom in Seattle and there’s never been even a suggestion she would charge $175 (or anything) for services. Definitely possible to not take along your “hired help” and be successful!
I spend 60-90 minutes with her a handful of times a year and it’s been awesome - something I wish I’d started doing a decade ago in fact.
I also never felt entirely happy with Stitch Fix, or shopping the racks myself in stores. It was harder for me to find items which work well together and which fit well.
Nordstrom also tailors almost everything I buy in at least a minor way — length of arms, waist size, length of leg. Really does make a difference.
I get it, and I've been back to that Nordstrom without the hired stylist and gotten advice from the in-shop stylist. I expanded my answer a bit, but I never would've gone into the Nordstrom to shop if it hadn't been for the hired stylist. I didn't know what I didn't know.
Maybe $175 wasn't a good objective value for that, but for me, it worked.
I think that’s a good point, some things are extremely obvious for some people and they don’t need any consulting on that subject. Good for them, but it may not be obvious for other people. That’s normal and that’s fine.
It is completely normal to hire a trainer for learning a new sport, why shouldn’t you do that for other skills. If you’re bad at picking clothes, you can easily spend way more than $175 on stuff that isn’t comfortable and you will never wear.
And if you look at people on the street, at least one third seems to be bad at shopping clothes ;)
No, I’ve never tipped them. Once asked if that was expected and she said no.
I believe Men’s and Women’s is 8-10% commission rate, but believe Kid’s is higher. Shopping in Men’s a single jacket from Armani runs about $1500-1800, formal trousers in the $350-500 range, decent jeans or shirts seem to be in the $150-250 range, tees they carry from e.g. Robert Barakett around $70.
It adds up and I feel like it’s hard to get out of there with a few new outfits for under $2000. It’s worth using their loyalty program [1] and worth considering their store card, although “Icon” status means spending >$15k per year on their store card.
If you end up liking Zegna then you’re up into the stratosphere at $3500-5500/ea for many of their items.
I guess it’s possible tips are appreciated if you’re going to visit, take an hour of their time and emerge with one $70 tee at the end? That’s not been my shopping experience, I don’t wear Zegna, but I usually buy a few pairs of Paige jeans and some Bugatchi shirts, perhaps a new merino wool pullover, probably some shoes. By the time I’m ready to spend 90 minutes in Nordstrom shopping and getting the tailor to measure for alterations, I’m usually looking for enough new stuff that the stylist will make $200-500 in commission.
Edit: Oh, and worth knowing is Nordstrom does sales at the start of the AW season [2] for incoming items. It’s a quirk, and it’s worth timing some of your shopping to coincide because it’ll save you 15-30% off a lot of items!
Usually they work for commission, at least where I shop. They either go to the cash register with you or put stickers with their personal number on the price tag.
Which means they will give you the clothes with the highest commission, and are going to tell you that those look best on you.
I used to work at fairly expensive furniture/houseware retailer. They had a big squad of interior designers who all worked for free. They drove so much additional revenue that we didn't need to charge customers at all.
I have no experience here, but I'd guess they would. It would be better to guarantee a sale than alienate a customer who would consider returning of the experience went well.
A lot of current season clothing will have MAP (minimum advertised pricing) agreements in play meaning you’re probably paying list almost anywhere which is an authorized retailer.
Now, what you can do is figure out what brands suit you and fit well, what sizes are good, then shop past seasons in Nordstrom Rack or elsewhere. Popular sizes and colorways may sell out quickly so it’s a more frustrating experience, but you can see items marked down 55-75% too!
I did the same thing several years ago, only in my case I was able to follow the guides at /r/malefashionadvice for free, highly recommended if you don't want to or can't afford a personal stylist right now.
Look at the guides on their sidebar (on old reddit at least) and they have everything you need, such as a basic guide, what to buy for $X, and so on. Take particular notice at their What Are You Wearing Today (WAYWT) threads, while they are sometimes ludicrous, they often show the current fashion zeitgeist.
Is there not a simple "look book" that exists and gives you examples of where you can find / buy the kinds of clothes that you see and like? (hopefully for less than premium prices)
I find it odd / annoying that all the clothing is made in low cost countries, but we need funnelers of information or access or recommendations who tack on a surcharge at every step until you're paying $50 for a simple t-shirt.
I equally find it very strange that, for companies making and selling clothing, I can only imagine it costs very little much more to make good-looking clothing and copy the latest styles. Why does cheap clothing always seem to be so unstylish?
Example: someone manufacturing a tie (if people wear those any more even), the material and labor scarcely costs more if it's ugly versus nice. Why are ugly ties still made?
Just looked up stitch fix to see what that was since I never heard of it. First results include news stories of the CEO stepping down and laying off 20% of its workforce in the last 24 hours. Ouch.
its not personalized. Funny story. My wife tried it out one time, and we went to meet up with a friend who we haven't seen in 5 years who just came back from working in Japan. The friend and my wife have vastly different body types, hair colors, height and style. Guess who ended up matching exactly in clothing for the night?
It’s not personalized at all when I tried it about a year or so back.
I signed on and in my intake explicitly said I wanted new shorts and I live in Texas so don’t need jackets.
They sent me a jacket and some shoes and shirts and no shorts.
If you’re looking to build out a whole new closet it might be okay if you just want whatever the current style is but if you want something specific it didn’t look like a good product.
Which is hilarious since they were well known for having an insanely huge data science team supposedly working on really tough problems in personalization. They had a constant stream of (interesting) blog posts but I was always curious how much of that work really touched the product. AI/ML was supposed to be their big market edge.
Not too surprised that didn't work out given my experience with every other company that had built out massive teams of largely inexperienced DS people.
I went to Nordstrom looking for a nice blazer to up my wardrobe with a hard limit of $400. I had a couple guys who kept bringing me pricey items that didn't match what I asked for and half heartedly saying "looks good bro trust me". It was annoying, I know they're on commission but at least make an effort to sell.
Finally another of the sales guys started chatting with me. I explained what I wanted and he went and grabbed exactly that. The item was less than my limit and on sale. With the savings in mind I asked if he could suggest a couple more items, told him the colors I like and general style. He brought a few more told me what he honestly thought (if it looked good or not) and I knew this was now my personal stylist.
Now whenever I walk in if he's not working I just come back another day. This guy is good at his job, and has learned what I like. He makes recommendations, I give my feedback when I don't like something, and he rolls with it.
So all I can say is create a litmus test, and don't be afraid to tell them they have totally missed the mark and you're gonna look around on your own. Soon enough someone else will walk up and you try again.
My wife is a stylist and does an online-only version of this (and other related services) over at https://estilistas.co.uk/ (hope no one minds the plug!)
I'm always surprised how often her clients come back multiple times per year. She's had quite a few from the US and Canada too. She caters for men & women
> I'd tried Stitch Fix and felt like it wanted to reinforce my habits rather than break me out of them.
Wow, same! Who/what service did you use? This was my biggest gripe with Stitch Fix, my friends are all surprised I complain about it. I wanted an opinionated new style and all I got was the same stuff I usually wear, just more expensive.
The "stylist" part of Stitch Fix disappointed me the most. I had a different stylist each time even when I didn't request a change and none of them seemed to take feedback into account in the selections. It made me doubt that the "stylist" was anything but a vague algorithm with a boilerplate letter generator.
I used FernDate,[1] which is pitched as a dating profile consult but lets you select services a-la-carte. You can find local stylists and negotiate with them if all you need is a consult — the prices they list on their websites are often expecting to do a full wardrobe assessment, outfit curation, and co-shopping for a femme client, but (in my limited experience) will mark prices down a bit if you're masculine.
Thanks for that. I'm in the PNW and I've been looking around for a good tailor. I was ordering some of my stuff pseudo-custom from sonofatilor but it's a bit hamstrung by how bad I am at taking my own measurements. Other than that the shirts are really nice, but the wool is a bit fragile (no afilliation). I also have a bit of an odd shirt size so this is helpful
Lots of Googling, then a little calling around. I started with one in my neighborhood who also runs a hair salon, who was also the only one I found who specifically advertised a masculine-specific wardrobe assessment service.
When I described my problem, she gave me a shortlist of several other stylists who were outside of what I thought I was looking for, like FernDate, Duchess, and some local vintage-specific pickers who just aren't online.
Ordering frozen croissants online. Before going to bed you leave one in the oven. Wake up, turn oven on, hit the shower. When you come out, it's ready to eat = cafe experience at home, coffee and a croissant while checking the news.
Same, but with an air-fryer it's just 10 minutes from frozen to done, so I usually pick them from the fridge, put them in the airfryer, boil some tea-water, and then have tea and croisants for breakfast in 10 minutes.
The only problem is this: a random croissant once a week as a treat is negligible to your overall calorie intake, but a daily croissant means you eat croissant for breakfast every day. Huge difference. In the book "French Women Don't Get Fat", one of the things that the author points out is that our invisible daily habits are the biggest factor in our calorie intake. If your commute walks you past a donut stand that you cannot resist, change your commute.
Of course if you have a well-worked-out diet and matching exercise plan that accommodates a daily croissant, this is great (with the air fryer).
This one is a big win. I (occasionally) buy Costco croissants and reheat them in the air fryer. It takes like 3 minutes on the 320 degree setting for a perfect experience.
I use a button with the icon of a bread on it. I guess it is air fry since my air fryer seems to only have one mode with fan and heat both on. That defaults to 320f, 8 minutes, which is far too long in my experience. Temperature is about right, you want it as hot as you can go without burning.
Where I live, if you order frozen food online, they're delivered by a courier specialized in delivering frozen goods (like UPS but only accepts frozen parcels and delivering them using refrigerated trucks).
If your oven has an electronic timer, it should have a function to finish at time x, so you could even wake up to done ones. Great, for coming home from work to perfectly slow-cooked ribs, for example.
Are these already baked then frozen, or raw pastry? I used to work in a cafe where we'd bake croissants from frozen (raw pastry) and they were pretty great.
This is gonna sound dumb but an ice scoop for my freezer. Always just used my hands or cup but it would make it slightly annoying to get the right amount of ice. Plus if I’m making cocktails for other people it’s just so much easier and more hygienic.
From working in a restaurant in college, one thing the health inspector always checks is that the ice scoop handle is NOT touching the ice. Apparently, that is a huge source of bacteria being introduced into "food". You might be able to rest it in a way where this is possible, or get a little holder for it that keeps the handle up and out of the ice (that's what most restaurants have).
I finally got rid of my Samsung fridge, which had a bottom, open ice box. I too recall when we found the perfect scoop. They are actually hard to find. I believe this one was intended to be a candy scooper, at one of those do-it-yourself frozen yogurt places.
I can't recall the name of the store... It's a chain store that is overpriced "imported products" found next to an REI or some other middle/upper scale strip mall.
I can second the immense utility of an ice cube scoop. A basic plastic or metal one is just a few dollars, and will probably last forever. No more touching ice cubes with your hands!
It wasn't a new purchase so I didn't think of it for this thread, but I started leaving a water pitcher beside the sink. It's handy for watering plants, carrying water to the dog bowl (instead of carrying the dog bowl to the sink), filling the coffee maker, adding water to pots on the stove, and filling water glasses at the table. It's nothing big, but it's helpful in many small ways.
That is a great idea. I‘ve also always been slightly annoyed and picking up ice cubes and having them stick to my fingers, but it didn’t occur to me to get a scoop that’s just right for this purpose.
I gave up on flaky WiFi mesh networking and connected the APs to my home's inactive cable wiring using MoCA adapters. Local bandwidth increased 4x, and I was able to achieve solid coverage throughout the house.
I also replaced a rock, a brick, and a rubber wedge with magnetic door holders, each about $5. Now when we're bringing in the groceries, we can keep the door open without the rock, and it's easy to close when we're done.
How did you spend less than $200 on APs and MoCA adapters? Each MoCA adapter is like $50 and you need at least 2 of them to be useful. It seems like cheaper APs can run ~$30 but only support 2.4Ghz/300 Mbps.
I just invested in 4 MoCA adapters and a Ubiquiti UDM/2 small APs (tall & skinny row home with 3 floors but now I get 500 Mbps everywhere in the house including the roof) but it ran way over $200.
Most of the mesh APs I've seen on the market also have Ethernet ports so you don't have to just extend the wireless signal around the house. So if OP already had the APs (which it sounds like they did), they just needed to get the MoCA adapters.
Yup, that's what happened. They are $50 each on Amazon US. I think they even included short Ethernet cables, so I didn't even have to root around in the garage to find extras.
FWIW, I got only the 1Gbps speed, rather than 2.5Gbps, because my fiber internet tops out at around 900Mbps and I'm the only one in my family who does anything substantial the local network. For once in my life, I might have enough bandwidth at home.
Thanks but these guys appear to be quite expensive up here. Cheapest MoCA units I can find on Amazon.ca hover around $163 C$ a pair. However, in the process, I discoved that DirecTV DECA adapters can be used on "dark coax" for $41 C$ a pair. Whoa! They top out at 100MBit/sec, but that would be plenty for my use case. And I just happen to have a fair bit of this "dark coax" running through my house.
Neat hack! If you ever do light up that cable with TV service, remember to unhook the adapters, because they can't coexist with digital cable.
I wonder whether DirecTV engineers approached their management during DECA development and said "we have a problem: this technology we're working on interferes with digital cable," and management replied "uh, yeah, that's not a problem." :)
Which mesh routing system did u have that was flaky? I just closed on a home and have been thinking about going mesh. Ideally would like most stuff hardwired but I’m being lazy
Google WiFi (not the Nest ones with the built-in microphones). They're fine for most cases, but every so often I'd discover that one had gotten voted off the island, causing the remaining two in the mesh to deliver a weak signal to some of the house.
Another problem with mesh networks in general is that they're very sensitive to placement, because they need to be able to see each other (in an RF sense, not visually) to form the backhaul. It adds an additional constraint on your physical topology beyond the regular one of wanting to use the laptop on the couch and in the kitchen. So you end up moving the mesh nodes to corners of the room where you didn't really want them to be, aesthetically. At a certain point you ask yourself whether it would have been easier to run the damn cable through the ceiling than to play musical chairs every few weeks.
If the house already has coax ran but no ethernet then MoCA adapters really are the way to go. For some reason that's how my 2021 new construction house was built and now I have wired connections in all of the rooms that I care about.
Honestly, I've tried a few myself, and none of them were that great. The Orbi was pretty fast, but the satellite needed rebooting every couple of weeks.
I ended up going for in-ceiling AP's, having the house wired for Ethernet, and powering them with PoE. Now the network is faultless.
Don't know how big of a home you have but I've been pitched mesh wifi but I realized I didn't really need it (~3k sqft home). My ~$150 Netgear router works perfectly fine. My recommendation is to see if a regular router works for you before you invest in mesh.
Ethernet over power is another good option. After messing about with bad wifi in a townhouse for a few years, EOP has been going strong for over a decade
Me too. I was doing a bit of RTS gaming and flaky wifi is terrible. I got a $199 a Base/Satellite Netgear mesh starter kit (Mk62 I think) on some kind of discount. It's also not the latest/top model. I later added a 3rd satellite and it's great. The satellites even have an Ethernet port so that you're only using the base-satellite backhaul channel and not the normal wifi client ones.
I helped my building build a simple PoE + wifi access points network and I was surprised at how cheap (~$150) it was and how effective. Makes me think that all the name-brand-Eero-style wifi extender stuff is pointless if you can take just a few more steps to install this kind of thing (which is not hard, but of course depends on your walls/configuration).
The Carpio 2.0 by DeltaHub (https://us.deltahub.io/products/carpio-2). It's a wrist rest, but not like you probably think. I would get severe hand pain being at the PC all day, but this little contraption completely relieved that pain. It took a couple weeks to get used to, and now I use it while working and gaming. One of the best purchases I've made in a long time.
Nice, I use IMAK RSI Computer Gloves which have little beads in the palms. Now, I don't use them for carpal tunnel or RSI at all, but just pure comfort of because the hard surface of a desk or sharp edges of a laptop are annoying as heck.
Your Carpio 2.0 suggestion looks like it could be an improvement because I don't have to put the gloves on and take them off. Because my main complaint with the IMAK gloves is that when I'm on a video call and use hand gestures people always assume I have some injury or pain and ask me about it, and I have to explain that I just don't like hard surfaces, sharp edges and shiny palms, so I end up not wearing them as frequent as my hands would like to be comforted. Carpio looks like a way to solve that!
No problem! In the beginning it will feel weird. You may want to stop using it because it feels awkward to have something under your palm. But stick with it for a week or 2 and you'll get used to it.
Aftershokz Aeropex bone-conducting headphones. I could walk, hike, drive listening to music or phone calls while hearing the environment around me and without exposing anyone else to my taste in music :)
I'm on my 3rd pair of (After)Shokz. Previous one was an Aeropex, which I still have and use some times but it rattles a bit, especially with lower pitched sounds. I replaced it with the newer OpenRun Pro. Same awesomeness, noticeably better sound quality and more volume.
I use them almost daily for running, cycling, walking and climbing. My only gripe with them is the long neck bad, so I've had to stop myself from splurging on a Mini when it came out. :D
Aftershokz OpenComm should be the default on all job sites. True, full ear protection via ear-plugs, hands-free communication, no bulk, and the opportunity to listen to your music without adding noise to the environment. Oh, and magnetic charging.
If you do any work in a noisy industrial or trade setting you owe it to yourself to get these.
I used to buy the 3M connect earmuffs but their connectivity is bad, the ear-cushions break down and the mini-usb charger port snaps off. I had to buy a new set of earmuffs once a year.
I thought I’d like the OpenComms but the Bluetooth stuff seems flaky. Not sure if this is everyone or just me, but if you pair them to 2 devices (e.g. a phone and a laptop), then shut down one of those, the Aftershokz will beep every few seconds thereafter to let you know you lost the connection, even while you’re using the other audio source.
It’s crazy: shut the laptop and walk away to listen to a podcast on your phone and they just beep beep beep.
I'm single sided deaf and have exclusively been buying Aftershokz products since I lost my left ear in 2019. I own 7 pairs (because of an Amazon screwup mostly, but hey, free headphones). I thoroughly recommend them. I can wear them ALL DAY LONG and not feel uncomfortable. This makes calling and listening to music much better now.
I got the cheaper truefree F1 - not bone conduction as such, but sit outside your ear canal and shoot the sound in. Work really well and a lot cheaper, though others can hear your music if it's quiet around, so not the best for some situations.
Can confirm. They're cool. Battery life is decent and yeah, they do exactly what's claimed here. Don't expect the most high def sound, but they're still completely acceptable for a lot of scenarios.
It just depends on your use case. If you want to appreciate music while sitting at your desk, no. But if you need to listen to a podcast or music while trail running, biking, at the gym, or other situations where situational awareness is important, then the degrade in audio quality is worth the trade off.
I think so. I was getting skin irritation if I exercised while wearing earbuds and the AfterShockz eliminate that problem for me. Sound quality is good for podcasts. I don't listen to much music at all with them.
seriously ? I have experienced the opposite. Got a TREKZ Titanium as leave-behind from my son. I love them. This Black Friday I got some OpenRun and had to return them as they did not sound just as good. what a mistery
The Zendure Passport III worldwide travel adapters changed my reality in 2022 (~$70). It sounds boring, but man. I've had many worldwide plug adapters in my day, and many chargers. But the Zendure has a 65W USB-C fast charger in it, plus 3 more USB-C and a single USB-A. When I travel (and that includes "traveling to the coworking place"), I used to bring:
* A plug adapter
* My big ol' laptop charger brick and cord
* A medium-sized USB-A charger for phone, headphones, power bank
* A USB-C charger for iPad, Kindle
* A small power strip because I had to plug several things in
Now I just bring the single Passport III adapter. Done. It has a single power outlet pass-through, but I haven't even needed it because the only thing I ever plug in is chargers.
I went to buy this months ago and when I saw that it had a tipping field in the check out it left such a bad taste in my mouth I just went with another brand. Tipping!? To use their online shop??
it's only a matter of time before all these threads and those on reddit are ridden with ChatGPT based posts pushing products (and more). It's now possible to write up convincing sounding content and copy with a product placement woven in with little to no effort.
Then the poster just needs a couple of aged accounts to publish the posts, and a handful of botnets to inflate vote counts to boost visibility. It can be extra convincing with some shill bot accounts that post (controversial) replies which spark more organic interactions. These comments may then trigger ranking algos to further boost visibility, to drive more platform engagement.
Cost about 30€ instead of previously used 3€ cotton T-shirts.
Can wear one for about 3 weeks without washing, with no body odor. Much more pleasant to the skin, even for doing sports, driving, etc. Also, warm in winter, airy in summer. Plan to switch most clothing to merino wool.
My partner and I have put holes in merino wool after a month of use. Merino is NOT abrasion resistant if you're active. We're trying out Nuyarn, a merino blend that claims more loft and abrasion resistance (should also be lighter weight).
For moisture management/warmth in colder weather, we're also checking out mesh baselayers [1] since merino does not dry quickly under multiple layers.
Agreed. A merino mix can be extremely comfortable, and as Darn Tough socks have proven, very enduring. I usually look for a merino blend with something stretchy mixed in
Just for info, the wool is officially Australian (https://merino-shop.ro/ro/content/4-despre-merinito-lana-mer...), the seller is Romanian by origin (lives in AT, no physical presence in Romania) and there is a claim the production is done in Romania, but no information to confirm that. This is not bad, I am planning to order some of their products and test it in the spring.
I'd love for a Darn Tough like company to offer a lightweight Merino blend T-shirt with a lifetime warranty. I know nothing about the clothes business and wonder if it could be profitable.
Merino wool everything. Kinda counter to what you might thing, merino wool underwear is amazing in the summer too =)
I rotate through 3 merino T-shirts alternating one every day. If they start to smell, you can just hang them out for the night and they'll be fresh as daisies again.
I think I wash them like once a month or two in a wash that has lanolin in it, which replenishes the natural fats in the fiber and makes it last longer.
They have a very different feel from cotton t-shirts, which I would normally change daily.
I was also quite skeptical when I heard, and occasionally ask others to make sure I'm not fooling myself w.r. smell. Also, if I did heavy sports in them, I may stop, even if it was just a week or two. Casual daily wearing could easily go for a month.
Pit stains stem from a chemical reaction with the aluminum in antiperspirants. The easiest way to never have to deal with them ever again is to switch to using a non-antiperspirant deodorant.
Is there a single one of those aluminum-free deodorants that actually works? I've tried about 4 brands, and scent blocking lasts about 4-6 hours. Not good enough.
Good old white-colored old spice (I'm allergic to the blue colored ones) last about 30 hours.
I gather that body odor is closely tied to your own personal skin microbiome, which might explain very divergent effectiveness of products unfortunately.
I really loved mine, but I couldn't justify the cost for how long they last. Gonna check out the place you linked though, because thats a better price that second-hand icebreaker stuff, which is what I had been doing.
the 3 or 4 I have are pretty covered in holes now (no, not moths), I just keep them around for base layers during the winter.
I found that Icebreaker's merino underwear is particularly fragile. Having tried assorted brands, though hardly everything on the market, I'd recommend Wool & Prince's underwear instead, which holds up very well.
We set up a motorized curtain in our bedroom. It's been really nice to black everything out at night while sleeping (some of our neighbors leave outdoor lights on) but in the morning, wake up with natural light
I bought Ikea Fyrtur motorized shades on my south facing windows. Individually less than $200. These can also be trimmed down (if you're brave) to fit smaller windows, and are available in a variety of sizes. Being able to connect them to home automation to manage heat in south-facing rooms is fantastic.
For folks who don't have good windows or lighting for this: I invested in a "Lighten Up" timer that slowly trickles power to a light via a dimmer setup on a schedule. It has made it IMMENSELY easier to wake up at a consistent time. And it's very gradual. Caveat: spend some time finding a good dimmer bulb! So many CFLs and LEDs do weird things on a dimmer. One of them flickered like crazy. Another strobed. If you have any old incandescents around, they work great.
Somewhat similar, I've used a smart light (Philips Hue), Home Assistant (with a ConBee II zigbee dongle), and a lighting rhythm plugin (https://github.com/claytonjn/hass-circadian_lighting) to adjust brightness and color temperature. Much more expensive, but I get other benefits, like dimming lights nicely in the evening
Significantly more than $200, but we had motorized external screens & shutters put on the bedroom windows. I flashed Tasmota onto some cheap Sonoff modules to control the motors and integrated via MQTT into Homebridge so we can easily set schedules or ask Siri to put the shades up or down.
We're sleeping so much better with the room mostly blacked out (we also have rear neighbors with bright lights, and cats that roam the neighborhood and set off everyone's motion sensors all night).
Having an exterior covering on the southwest-facing windows has also massively reduced the need for cooling in the summer — our original reason for having the install done.
Our bedroom has ~99% light reduction with the external screens, and our toddler's room upstairs has completely opaque roller shutters and gets DARK, which has made for very easy nap times and great overnight sleep. When we ask Siri to wake the kid up, a scene is executed that rolls up the shutters, turns on the overhead light, and plays a happy song on the HomePod. Always puts him a great mood.
This was a game-changer for us as well. We are blessed with for pretty-tall windows in our bedroom and we realized that we just never opened them - too much hassle. Now they're all motorized and we can toggle them with a button-press on a remote.
I've been looking for something like this. Is it DIY or something off-the-shelf? My spouse requires absolute darkness when sleeping, but I have SAD and require the blinds to be always open in order to... not want to die.
Not the OP but I am really happy with the IKEA Tradfri blinds [1].Every night at dark they close all the rooms so I don't feel like living in fish bowl. 30 minutes past sunrise they all open. Best investment ever.
For the more technical they are Zigbee and heard all of IKEA zigbee stuff works without the hub. I personally have had issues with HomeAssistant and Tradfri integration so just use the IKEA app and the hub with no issues for over 6mo now.
Directly connecting these blinds to my Home Assistant instance via the ZHA integration and a HUSBZB-1 Zigbee/ZWave stick[0] works pretty well. I've got 8 of them around my house, and some automations to open/close with the sun, etc.
Only small issues I've identified are that 1) Zigbee meshing doesn't seem to behave with these, so you'll have to pair the blinds directly to your hub. This is fine, as long as your place is small enough for there to be no signal quality issues. And 2) if Home Assistant instructs the blinds to open to a specific position (i.e. "80% closed") rather than fully open or fully closed, it can take a really long time for the blinds to update the hub with their state. This means they show as "opening" in the HA UI even though they're finished moving.
I use zemi smart curtains, they were a huge pain to assemble but work great now. We’re just using the remote so I can’t comment on the smart home features
I bought the Manta sleep mask this year instead of going the curtains motorised route. Far cheaper and it has been just as effective in getting a great night sleep. It is really well designed. Very-breathable material with soft foam near the eyes and doesn't ever feel too tight.
A little pricey for what it is, but it is really a no-brainer when you think of how crucial restful sleep is.
> Sodastream. Has significantly increased the amount of water i drink and conversely decreased other crap being drunk
I agree with carbonating your own water, but sodastream is expensive compared to a DIY carbonation setup. Get a 5LB CO2 tank, some carbonation caps on Amazon, and a good gas regulator. Total should still be less than $200 USD.
The 5LB tank will last at least 5 times longer than the sodastream and total assembled size on my counter is about the size of a sodastream setup. Refilling that tank at a food safe gas supplier is even cheaper than exchanging a sodastream tank.
We grabbed a soda stream at the thrift store. The expense of the canisters is bad, but if you go to a welding & gas supply store they'll refill the canisters for much less than soda stream charges for a fresh one. We also noticed that soda stream will happily give you expired canisters.
> The expense of the canisters is bad, but if you go to a welding & gas supply store they'll refill the canisters for much less than soda stream charges for a fresh one.
Yes, but it still adds up to more in the end. The cheapest within driving distance I've found [1] is half the cost to refill the sodamistic 60L bottle from what sodamistic charges, and almost half the cost of refilling the 5LB tank, but the 5LB tank holds 5x more CO2, so after 2-3 refills you're already losing money compared to a DIY solution when accounting for cost of the whole setup.
I tried this- someone left a 5lb CO2 tank on my corner and I had it refilled- I was excited since I am a home brewer and have always been interested in kegging. I got a regulator, the cap, and then tried to carbonate a 16oz water bottle. It in theory worked, but I could never get the same carbonation levels that I could from a soda stream or store bought bottle. And doing the shake thing for 30 seconds felt like a lot of work for lackluster results compared to the soda stream as well.
The sodastreams have a better cap for sure. They suggest 2 rounds of carbonation IIRC, and I do 3 to achieve the same levels. Shaking is a must because increased surface area exposed to CO2 increases absorption into the liquid, although I only shake for 5 seconds on each round. This is done with sodastream too IIRC. I also use the 750mL bottles instead of 2L bottles.
Also higher pressures are better obviously. Another tip is to use cold water because that apparently absorbs CO2 better.
You can also carbonate wine. My girlfriend was very excited to be able to buy cheaper white and rose wines and just carbonate them instead of buying more expensive bottles of sparkling wine.
> I am a home brewer and have always been interested in kegging
Once you start kegging your homebrew, you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
After primary fermentation, I siphon from my carboy into a 5 gal corny keg, then I hook it up to my CO2. Turn the pressure up to maybe 20-30 PSI (strictly for carbonating; turn it down for serving) for maybe a day or two. If you want, you can shake it to dissolve CO2, but I'm lazy and just let time do its thing. It's awesome. So much less work than bottling.
Yeah I am not a huge fan of bottling, but living in the city, space is always at a premium. It's more about just not having an ugly kegging setup somewhere. I now have a basement and am actually just thinking about keeping it there if I get one. I have also been hoping to "fall into" a corny keg, but the value of those just seems to keep going up over time.
I think of a soda stream as an entry level device to get your foot in the door. You'd be hard pressed to convince many people to drop 200$ on soda water equipment but if you let them buy a 50$ soda stream and they love it to death. They might upgrade. You can retrofit sodastreams to use those CO2 tanks too.
I use a USB switch to swap mouse/keyboard/webcam, but I switch my main monitor between two inputs manually because if I use a monitor switch, then once I swap it to my work computer, Windows detects the monitor is gone and moves all my windows to the second monitor (Which is also a different resolution and has different scaling, so they also all get resized) which is a pain in the ass.
I know you can get so-called "active" switches that tell both host computers that there's still a monitor plugged in, but they're expensive, especially if you use a monitor higher than 1080p. I'm not even sure once exists that will support 1440p @ 144 hz with GSync.
However, I haven't looked for KVM switches in almost two years. Has this situation changed? Is there a KVM switch that will tell the host machines that there's still a monitor hooked up when I switch it to the other machine that will support my resolution and refresh?
I had a 4K Dell monitor as my main, a lower res monitor on one side, and a 16:10 in portrait mode on the other side, all serving two computers. The computer that used DisplayPort for the 4K monitor had the issue you mention; when I swapped source from one computer to the other my open windows all jumped around to the side monitors. Apparently it's the DisplayPort driver that's the problem; HDMI, DVI, and VGA don't behave this way, but DisplayPort does.
I've replaced the 4K Dell and side monitor with a big curved 8K Dell, which has a built-in KVM. My keyboard, mouse, headset, external speaker bar, and webcam are all plugged into the monitor, and they all swap from one PC to the other with a keyboard shortcut that also switches the monitor source. It's a lot handier. However, if I manually switch my portrait monitor to the PC that uses DisplayPort, my windows will still get moved to it when I switch everything else to the other PC. So I just don't switch that portrait monitor very often anymore. Using the keyboard shortcut has made my lazy and I don't bother with the last monitor unless I really need it.
Also unable to find an HDMI switcher that supports greater than 60hz. I have the same issue. Dual 170hz for desktop with Digilink base for work laptop. Just manually switching monitor inputs in settings.
Sodastream is a money making scheme. Canisters are super expensive.
After years of paying $30 per exchange, I decided to switch to an Spärkel Carbonator machine, which just takes a tablespoon of citric acid powder ($5/lb) and a tablespoon of baking soda ($1/lb) per bottle. So much cheaper.
What is the purpose of the carbonator machine? I recall making sparkling water as a kid by mixing the right amount of sodium bicarbonate and tartaric acid (very similar to citric acid) and no hardware was needed: one just had to put them in water, shake until they went into solution and drink.
Just making sparkling water. You don't drink the water that reacts with the soda/acid though. The CO2 produced is pressure injected into a separate bottle.
How long have you had your Sparkel machine and used generics?
I'm very tempted to order the system and use it in a 220V country with a stepdown transformer. The specs on the website say that it's 110V only — I assume that's true for the actual product?
On the website, they explicitly warn against using generics. I guess that is to be expected. But they specifically say that using generics can clog the device or cause other problems because they are not in the right ratio or of the wrong grain size. Did you ever have any problems in that regard?
I'll put in another vote for just using the 10ml (2 tsp) baking soda and 10ml citric acid (I actually bought dedicated measuring spoons after weighing the two different sachets they sell to see how much was in each: https://www.amazon.com/Adjustable-Measuring-Ingredients-Mete... )
If one wishes to set aside Sparkel saying "don't use generic" out of their financial interests, the counterargument I can see is that if one just uses a careless method for loading the baking soda and citric acid into the chute it actually is pretty easy to have it crystalize in the actual latch, or gunk up the rubber seal on the top-latch. I found that the $0.99 funnel from Ikea is the correct length to fit into their chute but under the top latch: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/uppfylld-funnel-bright-yellow-8... I'm, of course, positive there are hundreds of other funnels, but if you're already in Ikea, can't beat it.
As a frame of reference, I was in the kickstarter for the Sparkel, and thus this is the 3rd or 4th year of making my own charges with no ill effects. I've even recently upgraded to storing them in some of those lidded sampling cups so I can mix up 30 charges at a time versus having to get out the spoons for each bottle
My setup at home is 3 monitors, and I switch between a connected laptop (work), and my home desktop machine.
IT means when I finish work I have to hit the switch to change input on each monitor (and with one setup vertically, it can be awkward, and one requires going through a menu, which is annoying).
I also have to swap the USB dongles for keyboard and mouse from the laptop docking station to my desktop.
Would a KVM fix this for me ?
SO I can just hit a single switch and it will swap over the keyboard / mouse and my monitors?
I too have 3 4k monitors at home (in the "office", which is really the shed at the bottom of the garden); all of them are linked to a work machine and my own Mac Studio.
It's not one button, it's 3, one per KVM, but yep - I just tap the button on each KVM (under the monitors) and the desktop changes, the mouse/keyboard work, and the other machine is up and running in front of me.
Even the webcam mounted to the monitor switches over - because it's not just mouse/keyboard, there's a couple of USB ports too.
One thing I'd recommend (because otherwise wiring gets unmanageable) is to bunch together the mouse, keyboard, video cables using some split-sheathing. I have an 8-way KVM for the main monitor (all ports used) and this makes it much easier to figure out what's going where.
Dell makes monitors with built-in KVM switches. At home, I have one single monitor, webcam keyboard, and mouse between my work computer and home computer, and I switch between them with a software defined keyboard combo. I highly recommend.
You can get KVMs that switch multiple monitors, but you pay more for multiple monitors and for multiple input types (HDMI & Display port), so depending on your setup, it may make sense to have the some monitors on the switch but manually select inputs on others.
KVMs tend to work well, except
- you need to pause for a second when switching to allow the USB devices to reconnect, or sometimes things get into a weird state, like keyboard thinking a modifier is pressed
- rarely things get confused anyway, and I have to unplug and re-plug in devices to one of the computers. Cheaper KVMs and smarter mice and keyboards seem more prone to this.
In conjunction with a KVM for switching the USB between devices, you can use this software to automatically swap the inputs on the monitor (if your monitors support the command protocol, most do but one of mine doesn't support the "change input" instruction): https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch
Otherwise you'd need a KVM that supports 3 monitors which I'd imagine is a compatibility nightmare if they're beyond 1080p@60hz
I saw this a while ago and then promptly forgot about it. I should give it another try! I wish I could disable auto switching on my cheapo USB 3 switch though, sometimes my laptop will update and reboot and steal input from my desktop which is irritating.
I have a personal computer, a work computer and a gaming computer and I switch between them using an Aten USB switch [1] and this software that switches monitor inputs when your plug/unplug USB devices [2]. Works quite well and costs less than 50€.
As someone that drastically simplified their desk setup for 3 computers this year: YES. A KVM would easily solve this.
You would need a triple monitor KVM with at least 2 USB inputs. You could also get an Ultrawide monitor to simplify further, which is what I have done.
I didn't technically buy a Sodastream, but it's been a great addition. We used to regularly buy pads of Lacroix from Costco. Now it's just the plain fizzy water (with occasional home-made flavor experiments).
I use these to flavor my sodastream. 1pk per 1L of soda water. It's dehydrated (crystalized) real fruit: https://www.amzn.com/B008GE87BG/
I also use them in cocktails (about 1/4 packet per cocktail), put in first and pour cocktail ingredients over the crystals to dissolve (or shake if not using any carbonated ingredients).
I got a Sodastream in 2020 and I have to say, for like a 50€ appliance, I use it constantly. Of course, there's ongoing costs with the cylinders and flavouring, but definitely been worth the money for me.
I came here to say rice cooker as well. I got a $15 one years ago and it's still my most-used appliance. What high end one do you have? I've been considering an upgrade given that I use it so often.
I do the same thing (plug both computers directly into different inputs on the monitor but use a USB switch to switch the mouse & keyboard). If you install this software on both computers, you can eliminate the "switching via OSD" step, because it will watch for the USB connect / disconnect events and initiate the input switch automatically via the DDC connection to the monitors, so it gives you true one-touch KVM switching at the cost of a USB switch.
This works especially well in cases where an actual KVM switch would be expensive or unavailable (in my case, I'm switching three 4K HDR DisplayPort monitors, which would require a very expensive KVM switch).
That's a neat trick! Didn't know that was possible.
>4K HDR DisplayPort monitors, which would require a very expensive KVM switch).
When I was investigating this nothing seemed to support both >1080 res and >30hz refresh regardless of price. All the ones advertised as 4K have 30hz in the fine print which is rather sad on a 144hz screen.
Stream deck was a surprisingly good buy for me as well, although in 2020. Previously I had a keyboard with a lot of macro keys, but that died and I didn't want to go without the handy shortcuts I've set up. Now I'm using the stream deck for much more than what my keyboard offered.
In terms of best buy in 2022 was the Peak Design Capture Camera Clip. For a photographer it's amazing to not have the weight of the camera around your neck but securely attached to my backpack strap. The ease of attaching and removing the camera makes me actually use it more on hikes.
> Previously I had a keyboard with a lot of macro keys […] Now I'm using the stream deck for much more than what my keyboard offered.
Would like to hear more details about what you and OP and others use the stream deck for. I’m trying to understand what it can do that a regular keyboard plus macros couldn’t.
It’s really just a dynamic macro pad in a really polished overall product platform. No more guessing what blank button does what.
The killer feature for me is that it can also be an output device with the right tweaks, so for my use case in triggering long running jobs, the icon on the appropriate button updates to indicate the job is in progress and then again when it completes.
Just saw this. I have a capture clip with a DSLR and 24-70mm. Depending on your bag setup, you might need to opt for the Pro Pad to give a bit more stability (https://www.peakdesign.com/products/propad). I've been quite happy with mine.
It's kinda funny that you can buy a 256 GB SSD for less than the price of this sticker-pocket, usb cable combo. My Macbook has a 256 GB internal SSD that can barely handle installing both the OS and XCode at the same time!
It's pretty secure. You can honestly save money be going with the stock USB c cable and duct tape, but I prefer the aesthetics of the pocket and short cable
Although duct tape sounds pretty amazing now that you mention it. If somebody walked into a hacker meetup with a drive duct taped to their laptop I'd assume they were pretty awesome.
It won’t be nearly as fast, but you could easily have a slim fit storage device in the SD slot. You’d want some microsd to sd adapter made specifically for the MacBook.
I've done that, but there is a caveat. All SD cards are optimized for sequentional read/write (photos/videos) and are very slow for random access. In real life scenarios it can become very slow and sometimes the bandwidth wouldn't be enough for HD videos to load normally.
Do you know the difference between the T5 and the T7? From what I can tell, the T7 has faster transfer speeds, but is noticeably cheaper online. What's up with that?
I have steadily been replacing all of my socks with darn tough socks. They absolutely are tough, but the replacement warranty is super simple, too. I snagged one on a loose trim nail, and got a new pair within a week from the company.
There's nothing wrong with DarnTough, but for value the Costco wool socks at ~17 for 3 pairs are the way to go. In more than a decade of use I've probably worn out four pairs.
I didn't buy this, I inherited it from my dad, but now that I have one, if it broke I would immediately go replace it, and that's a nice DeWALT cordless drill combo, with two batteries and a charging station. In the past I have always had cheaper cordless drills, because spending $150+ on a cordless drill seemed kinda silly, but I use this thing all the time, everywhere, for all sorts of stuff.
Would definitely recommend for anyone that does more than the bare minimum. Or anyone that only does the bare minimum but has some cash to spare.
The gap in reliability, quality and functionality between the little Ikea drill or $50 Black and Decker and even a low end Dewalt is _huge_. The gap between that and a $300+ drill is _mostly_ in longevity and its ability to stand up to sustained abuse.
Keep an eye out around father's day. There's pretty consistently sales on tools, or at least some sort of deal. I picked up tools up on fathers day a while back and it was was on sale _and_ included two extra free batteries. The batteries charge quickly enough that I've never been able to run them down before the other could charge.
I fought with cheap power tools for years before I finally bit the bullet and I regret not doing it sooner.
When I bought my house I went deep into battery powered tools (Ryobi, but I think its all similar). I have 2-3 drills and 2 impact drivers. It is really nice to not need to change bits often, and with my ADHD having a few sitting around in the room where I'm actively doing heavier work is nice too. Lots of batteries, handful of other tools from them.
Having multiple of some seemed very silly, but it really is so useful!
Nothing's worse than trying to mix the perfect water temperature at 3 AM while the baby is screaming, waking up the rest of the family. (We use pre-boiled water for the baby's bottles, so it's not as easy as adjusting a tap.) We bought this after we had our second baby and it's made feeding the baby slightly less stressful.
Exactly what we did with all 3 of our kids. Made a few bottles up ahead of time. The last time we were at the pediatrician with our youngest (who is now 7) and told that to the nurse she was a bit aghast :)
We have a machine that just auto boils and doses the formula water at the right temperature. You can go from zero to a bottle ready to feed in under a minute. I am sure you can get an equivalent where you are.
My wife and I have been using an electric kettle that can be set low (105°F) to heat bottles. It's not perfect, but it's good enough and nice not to have an extra appliance on the counter.
We have the same one and used for the same purpose. The only complaint is I wish the temperature setting wasn't a rotary dial. Going back and forth between lukewarm (100) and coffee brewing temp (195) requires a lot of rotations which could be a few button taps.
I'm a big proponent of co-sleeping and breastfeeding. Of course, I'm the father, so it's less of an inconvenience for me. But much easier for mom to roll to her side and feed when the baby wakes up. We still use the bottle warmer when I'm the one caring for the baby and need to warm up some milk though.
We went with the baby brezza formula pro which mixes, warms water, and dispenses into the bottle all in one click. Worth the $, every time we travel we hate ourselves for not bringing it.
My wife and I used various warmers and threw them all out for microwaving water. 8oz is 30 seconds. 6oz is 22 seconds. It's easy, fast and reliable every time.
CO2 sensors for every room in my apartment. Before monitoring the CO2 levels I did not realize the relation of tiredness, mental fatigue and high CO2 levels.
Which ones did you get? I've been thinking along similar lines recently, but they are somewhat expensive and it's hard to say which ones are even legit.
So far the MH-Z19 modules are on the top of my list for pairing with an ESP or something and logging data to NAS but I've yet to order any.
Senseair S8 paired with ESP-32 has served me well over the past 3 years, but they have to be exposed to outside air at least once a week or so. Otherwise they quickly lose their zero point and start reporting thousands of PPM as mere hundreds.
I think other models with auto-recalibration also suffer from this (including MH-Z19). It's probably not a problem for you, but if you too live in an extremely polluted area and have to keep your windows shut for weeks at a time, it might be.
I got the Netatmo Smart Indoor Air Quality Monitors. They are somewhat expensive, but I got a good deal, 69 EUR a piece. They also monitor temperature, air humidity and noise levels.
I recently bought one expecting to see something interesting and it mostly just stays stable all day, even with the door closed. Maybe my house has good ventilation.
At a company I used to work for we started wonder why one meeting room got especially rowdy if we had our 2 hour team meeting there.
Had the building management install a CO2 sensor, it got up to 1500ppm. We were practically drunk in there. Turned out it wasn't meant as a meeting room at all and it had zero ventilation ducts - they were all in the room next door, they had just slapped a wall to split it into two.
I’m honestly just a huge skeptic about indoor CO2 levels. OSHA says 5000 ppm is a safe upper limit, and nuclear submarines operate at pretty high levels too. I strongly suspect this is just one of those weird social media health crazes.
My dad had a balanced heat recovery ventilation installed few years ago. I think it might be undersized a bit as it’s somewhat loud when running at 100%. He doesn’t like the noise so he runs it at 40% or so.
After getting meter I found it’s def not enough, especially in rooms with more people doing some activity. He still doesn’t believe my meter is accurate tho.
I thought our ventalation was fine. Then we got at CO2 sensor for covid related reasons. When we replaced our 30 year old windows the numbers went through the roof.
We updated our air exchanger to fix the problem. Venmar and Vanee are two big brands in america.
I live in Germany, and here the houses generally don't have machine ventilation so one has to air manually and regularly. As an example: earlier today I closed the door to my office (ca. 18 m2 / 194 sqft). The window was closed. After 2 hours the CO2 levels rose from 935 ppm to 1966 ppm. Letting air in for 20 minutes reduced the CO2 levels to 869 ppm.
If you control 2-3 computers next to each other, I recommend the Logitech MX Keys and MX Master 3s. I can control multiple computers and switch between them by holding ctrl and bringing my mouse to the edge of a screen. It then jumps to the other computer seamlessly. Now my desk is clutter free of multiple mice and keyboards.
I just wish Barrier worked with Wayland. First Synergy claimed they were "working on it" years ago, now Barrier's movement seems stalled as many of the developers have moved to yet another fork, Input Leap.
And here I had brainstormed some geeky-ass eye-tracking solution that automatically routes the input to the computer connected to the monitor I'm looking at. I'll have to look into this (and Barrier as mentioned by another commentor), thank you. Looks like magic.
did you try this tool "Mouse Without Borders" from Microsoft Garage[0]?
seems to work well for my modest needs. you can either make the mouse move between screens using Ctrl or another key or make it freely roam ...without borders
allows drag and drop of files, shared clipboard etc
I don't like being tied to one company's peripherals. The best solution I've found to this is to use a keyboard with firmware that instantly switches between bluetooth and wired (I use an M60 python keyboard). That way I can use a key combination to switch. I also just use two different mice, since they are small.
I've tried a few software solutions over the years but they all seem to run into issues eventually.
If you use their software with Flow setting, you don’t need to hit the mouse button, but as you state. This isn’t Linux friendly. I also use the logi bolt, which removes the all switching lag.
The button being on the bottom of the mouse is the absolute dumbest thing that they did with this setup for sure.
I only control one, but the MX Master 3S is an amazing mouse either way. I always wanted a high DPI mouse, but with the Logitech wheel. This is finally it.
I bought my first robot vacuum and it's pretty great (eufy 11S for $110).
It is as dumb as these things come. It has no navigation other than IR on the front to not bump into things. It doesn't connect to wifi. I'm not concerned about it sharing data because it has no way to do so.
I turn it on once or twice a week as I'm about to leave for work. When I come home my floors are in decent shape. It saves me about an hour a week on sweeping.
Minimum wage here is $12/hour so even if that's what I made, it would pay for itself in less than ten weeks.
We have that one and accidentally programmed it to run first thing in the morning. Turns out that works pretty well. Acts as a bit of an alarm.. runs from like 7:30 to 8:30 or so. Manages to completely fill itself up with pet hair every other day.
I thought about getting a robot vacuum, but I have long-haired cats which are prone to coughing up hairballs, and I don't want my cleaner to smear one of those all around the room.
Fancier models use a camera to detect all kinds of shit (literally) so they can avoid it.
Not counting the hairball issue, a robot vacuum is perfect for a home with hairy pets, cuts down on the amount of random pet hair everywhere quite a bit. Just have it run every weekday on a timer so you don't forget.
Psychologically it's easier to just run through the house and throw stuff out of the robot's way than it is to chase it down and poke it to stop running - and then YOU have to vacuum manually =)
There's always a lot, but a few things really helped me this past year (all less than $200):
- I got one of those Stagg kettles[0]. I make a lot of pour-overs, and a nice kettle neck gave me a lot more control than I expected. Coffee tastes the same, but making it is more fun.
- Not Boring's "Habits" app is fantastic[1]. I've been trying to nail down a meditation practice, and this finally did the trick for me. It helps me stay on task without making me feel guilty for it. I've been meditating consistently every day for a few months now.
- I got a copy of "Salt Fat Acid Heat" and read the whole thing[2]. It's made me a lot more competent at cooking than I was, and now other cookbooks make more sense and are less daunting.
Heh. Wanted that for Christmas a few years ago, somehow my mom got confused and got me the not exactly similarly named "the science of cooking", which ended up being in the same ballpark, and helped improve my cooking anyway :)
In a similar vein - Ratio by Michael Ruhlman does a great job of breaking down the whys of recipes so you can start exploring and making things your own.
Arcteryx Delta LT jacket. At first I thought it was an impulsive purchase, but it end up being the most versatile jacket I've had. Whenever I don't know what to wear or carry on a trip, I toss in the Delta LT and it ends up being really useful.
My company gave me one of their jackets a few years back for being involved in some recruiting efforts. I honestly had no idea how expensive they were- I have an LT hood of some sort- their product line is absurdly convoluted, but I later found out it was about $260. I ripped mine in a bike fall a few months ago, but even after finding the price to replace it, was absolutely resolved to get anther. For a jacket that weighed nothing, it kept me plenty warm down to about 30F degrees, kept the rain out, and looked great. Its almost like magic how good these are.
A keypad door lock. Knowing the door is always (automatically) locked, being able to leave the house without a key, and being able to let someone else when I'm not there either with my phone, or by giving them a code.. I'm living in the future.
I have an NFC dot on the doorframe and unlock my door by holding my phone up to it. It's definitely slower than using the keypad, and probably slower than getting out a key, but it's way more satisfying than either.
Any NFC sticker should work. I used a non-writable one, with an iOS shortcut that calls the "unlock" URL, since I don't use HomeKit.
For things that aren't security-related like a light, you can use a writable one, and write the URL to the dot so that anyone's phone will be able to turn the light on/off from the sticker.
I’ve done this for a long time now. One keypad in front and another in back. I proactively change the batteries once a year. I also have a keypad for the garage. I haven’t carried a house key in years.
Do you live somewhere very cold? If so, use lithium batteries. They're significantly more tolerant of low temperatures. Going from akalines to lithiums made a huge difference for us.
A rice cooker. I was sceptical for a long time, because we can just cook rice in a normal pot? But the result tastes a lot nicer and feels surprisingly more convenient, and keeping rice warm for longer periods is also handy. As a result we eat a lot more rice (and are less tempted to just order in when we're feeling lazy).
Also, a Hario V60 + Fellow Stagg EKG Kettle, really upped my coffee game. Though if you include the Timemore C2 grinder it probably comes to just over $200.
I was anti-extra-appliance for a long time and firmly in the just-cook-rice-on-the-stove, but not anymore. We use the $20 simple cooker to make rice, farro, sorghum, wheat berries, and all sorts of other grains which we can then simply add to almost anything to make a heartier meal.
It's one of those things that people from cultures that don't eat rice don't understand until they get one. There's a reason why every asian household has one.
Washing the rice is slightly annoying, but process otherwise couldn't be simpler. Get the measuring cup full of rice add water, maybe some bouillon and press button. Some bit later rice kept at temperature.
Not the first to say this but: Sodastream. I wanted glass bottles so I didn’t think a sodastream was possible for me but it turns out there is a glass bottle Sodastream and Lu can get it on sale for a bit above $100. I have bottles and haven’t spent a penny on Perrier since buying it. Plus I can take advantage of my fancy home water filter.
There are DiY videos for going the cheaper route and just buying a large CO2 canister that will last you a couple years and hook it up to the same device after buying a couple valves. It's on my project list after I finish my kitchen reno.
Not sure where you are but most big grocery stores will have them at the front or the meat department in a special bin. just ask for how much you want and they dish it out. i know ralphs/kroger/staterbrothers should have them.
There's a set of string lights in my apartment that were left installed when I moved in. They look pretty nice and they provide decent illumination in an area that's difficult to light, but I virtually never used them because I needed to plug them into an outlet in order to turn them on. I finally bought a device that goes between the plug and outlet with a cord to a pushbutton switch. I now use the lights daily and I have no idea why it took me 6 years to fix a problem that could be solved for around $10.
A bluetooth OBD2 monitor for my car. It can read engine codes and other diagnostics, and it can clear a lot of check engine warnings. It less than a single visit to a mechanic.
This one is way less general, but I finally bought a treadle feeder for our chickens. There were several bird flu scares over the past year and our old open-tube feeder would attract a ton of wild birds (plus the occasional rat). The treadle feeder requires the chickens to stand on a treadle which opens a cover over their feed, and they learned how to use it pretty quickly. I'm amazed at how effective it's been; we're going through significantly less chicken feed now because the wild birds were eating nearly as much as our chickens were.
I finally purchased a rice cooker. I enjoy rice a lot and it's heathier than pasta, plus it's kind of set it and forget it and you can prepare other food while it cooks. But the best part is that rice comes out perfect.
If you're diabetic or pre-diabetic, then the glycemic index matters quite a bit. I know someone that pretty much can't eat rice at all (or only very small servings of it) because she's diabetic and it spikes her blood sugar to pretty dangerous levels, 280+ mg/dL from it (she can tell because she has a continuous blood glucose monitor), for example, whereas she doesn't get as bad of a spike with pasta.
And:
"According to the University of Michigan, blood sugar levels of 300 mg/dL or more can be dangerous. They recommend calling a doctor if you have two readings in a row of 300 or more."[1]
An Oura ring. Some quantitative insight around sleep, heart rate, heart rate variation, temperature, etc. SUPER interesting to see how things change when sick, drink alcohol, etc. Also- I confess to not minding the tone/language the product uses for coaching purposes. It is not an asshole.
Relatedly, tracking food/calories/water consumption in the (free- no need to pay them) Noom app has been useful quantitative insight as well. Rare that the free version of a paid thing has any utility whatsoever.
I bought Oura a couple of years ago because it's a ring that runs Linux and gives you some insight into your life.
Well, it does run Linux, but the rest - not so much.
Did side by side tests with another sleep tracker and Oura was pulling its data seemingly out of its ass. Completely random stuff. After seeing that all other data it reported didn't instill much confidence either, nor did it correspond to what I was actually observing. So packed it up and stashed into a closet. It's still a cool gadget, but inaccurate to the point of being utterly useless.
Yeah, I have definitely seen an evolution, shall we say, in their modeling and data aggregation and smoothing. Oura is doing a public "beta" of a new sleep model now and it is VERY different! But much better. So it goes.
There are also inherent power limitations in the ring form factor compared to the watch, which impact data granularity. If you want to be monitoring apnea you really need seconds level resolution, and Oura is tens of seconds.
Anyway, agree about limitations. It has still been very useful for me! Cheers.
That applies to most wearables unfortunately. I was thinking on buying a moderately priced smartwatch to track my BPM during exercise but correlation can be as slow on 0.3 on some devices and with delay and never accurately reporting peaks and valleys due to aggressive exponential smoothing. Just bought a cheap ANT+ chest strap instead, does the job without requiring an app.
Are there really any concrete advantages to the Oura ring over something like the Apple Watch? I used to own an Oura ring, but I returned it after I found basically no difference between ring's data and the watch with an app like Training Today. Maybe I just wasn't looking at the right stuff, though?
My sense is watches actually have much finer granularity data collection, because of power capacity. The Oura collects data during wearer sleep about once a minute, while Samsung watch at least collects every 5-10 seconds. But in terms of sensor modalities they are the same.
Personally I much prefer rings to watches, that's all.
I keep hearing good things about Oura ring, but I'm fended off by subscription model for the hardware that you buy and own. Is there any way around that? I don't want to pay for Yet Another Subscription
No, it's a subscription. But I look at it like- the hw will have a limited lifespan, both because fingers are a very high traffic modality, and because hw and sensor advancements are going to come fast and furious. Useful life will be 2 maybe 3 years. So it's basically a $500 purchase on a payment plan. Then I'll buy another of something, maybe Oura, maybe someone else.
I just started tracking the same stuff with myfitnesspal, but I did see Noom as well. Do you have any experience with both? Maybe I'll check out Noom, myfitnesspal sometimes feels overly complicated.
I'm surprised by how many things mentioned here are things that improved my own 2022 (air fryer, Steamdeck, bone-conducting headphones, etc.)
A couple of things that I haven't yet seen mentioned:
A LifeStraw Home water filter. It removes the slightly metallic taste from my home tap water.
Cable management boxes (multiple brands). These allow me to hide away the unsightly power strips, power bricks, hubs, excess cords, etc, and make my desk/office much more organized.
For my desk, I got a really long (48 inches, 1.2 meters) power strip like you'd use on a workbench, and I screwed it to the back side of the desk near the top.
Cables hang down behind the desk so they stay off the floor and you don't see them.
It has 16 outlets, so there's one near whatever I want to plug in and I always have a free outlet.
Yep, I attached one of these on the underside of the back of my desk. Means I basically have two cables from the wall, Ethernet to a switch and power. Works great.
> it removes the slightly metallic taste from my home tap water.
you should look into a reverse osmosis unit which has multiple stages of filtering. I recommend Watts [1], easy to self-install under the kitchen sink. The company has been around for sometime and is even publicly traded.
I went a little bananas on filtered water a while back and bought a giant Berkey. I love it. My family goes through an entire container each day somehow. We use it for cooking as well as drinking, but it's still a lot of water. I highly recommend it if you ever decide you want an even more thorough, longer-lasting, high-capacity filter.
I feel like I've never been able to get a handle on cable management despite using velcro cable ties, and baseboard cable clips, and other stuff. I just have never found the right thing. So I'd love if you linked some of the ones you used (granted they're probably all random drop-shipping Amazon brands)!
I guess I'm a bit late for this thread, but this just occurred to me because I had to pick up a package: I got a little sign with the UPS, Fedex, and Amazon logos on it that says "deliver packages here". I put it on my porch, so that the guy drops the package where I can see it through the window. I think it cost $10.
Before buying that sign, here are places where I've found packages:
* My yard, helpfully hidden behind a flowerpot to fool thieves (and me)
* My neighbor's yard for some reason
* The sidewalk in front of my house
* Right in front of my outward-opening door, so that the package blocked the door from opening.
Ever since getting the sign (~6 months) all my packages have been dropped in exactly the right spot. I think the logos are important, because it draws the guy's attention.
Old houses used to have passthrough doors built into them for things like ice, milk, and coal to be delivered. I'm really surprised this feature hasn't made a comeback for package delivery.
- Proper cycling / mountain biking glasses. The amount of air that slips in from the sides with normal glasses can tire your eyes on longer rides or at high speeds.
- Safety razor. No longer do I have to buy $30+ cartridge refills but rather 100 packs of blades for ~$10
- A pickleball paddle. The game really is addicting and so far the community has been welcoming.
Started using a safety razor maybe 10 years ago. Still haven’t gone through all of the blades I bought back then. This is maybe one of the best inexpensive purchases I ever made.
Prints of photos I've taken and the materials (I'm a woodworker) to frame and hang them in my house. Double whammy in terms of pride and great way to keep good memories fresh.
Tools and hardwood which makes it easier to be in the shop (my garage) and not in front of a computer. When I'm in there all my life's woes fade away and always come out in a better mood than when I went in.
I pay 135 bucks a month for access to a co-working space. It’s got amenities such as unlimited coffee, call booth, ping pong table, gaming console, etc. Not to mention an environment of friendly people (mostly contractors) who want to be just as productive as you. Working from “home” and on side-projects has become a breeze this way.
A refurbished Fujitsu FUTRO S740 (J4105 and 8 GB RAM) and 2 SSDs for a super low power home server and mini NAS. All in all less than $100
A weighted blanket (11 kg), after i had the chance to test one at a friend's. I'll miss it in summer when it'll be hot to use.
A Rösle (German high end kitchenware brand) salad spinner. Pretty expensive for 80€, but every other is either too small or crappy (and we have salad for breakfast almost every day). Ended up being worth it.
Right when I submitted enough wine patches to get Affinity Photo v1 working on linux, they go and release V2 with a couple WinRT lib calls which are basically completely missing from wine :(
I'd still be very interested in hearing if v1 is running (or what's left to be done, particularly for Designer/Publisher, but your progress on Photo is also welcome!). I use Affinity consistently for work and would love to split less time between systems. Been using v1 for enough years that reverting to it wouldn't be an issue.
I don't actually use Affinity much, I've held off purchasing a license at least until it gets to be fairly safe to run it on linux. I don't do much editing or art creation anymore. Just the occasional small edit.
For v1, this PR fixes saving: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/1444.
There very well be more missing code, things in file menus or tools that I haven't tried. But if you build wine with this patch, it should run and save.
With v2 they seem to have made the big shift to windows store, which probably requires a lot of winrt junk.
To run v1:
1. compile with this patch
2. run regedit and set the renderer to vulkan (see https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys)
3. install dotnet48 via winetricks (maybe corefonts too)
I spent a half dozen evenings trying to implement stubs and interfaces for v2, I've got it running, but it crashes if you open the edit menu for example. I'm not the best c developer, and honestly its too much work when there isn't some finances behind it. I have a job too aha. (not to mention wine makes it even harder because they require you write all the dll's in c, but most of the windows code is c++, so its a bit trickier to re-implement things from their headers)
1. Gymnastic rings - cheap, so simple yet so complicated. Magic ancient alien technology from the future (whatever that means)
2. Anki - free, you remember what you want to remember, but you have to RTFM to use it properly.
3. Wax earplugs - cheap. My sleep quality is at least 2x better since using them.
4. Org-mode - free.
I’ve been tempted to get a set of gymnastic rings for a while. For someone like me who tries not to accumulate too much junk, buying any kind of bulky gym equipment is not an option.
Gymnastic rings seem like the perfect minimalist’s exercise equipment… the only thing is I have no idea where I would hang them.
Info dump alert, Anki is a deep deep rabbit hole. These resources have helped me immensely. I didn't have any specific hurdles in mind - I had many "eureka" moments, but they were highly personal, only applicable to my situation. In the words of Michael Nielsen "Anki use is best thought of as a virtuoso skill, to be developed", so don't get discouraged by this big list, take one step at a time. If I had to give only one recommendation then the top link would be it.
Like 50 bucks, keeps it's shape, keeps it's chills (regular pillows come stoves to me), keeps my head straight without folding a pillow in 4, keeps some support of my head why I tuck my arm under so I don't put much pressure on my shoulder.
Been travelling for 3 months and carrying it, makes every bed a good bed.
I got one of these recently, and it's worked out even better than I'd hoped. The way I can nestle my head into it and it just holds it in place is unmatched by any other material I've slept on. The one thing I don't like is that it is loud while I'm nestling my head into place, and that can be a little shocking to my sleepy ears. Once I'm settled, though, it's very quiet and wholly comfortable.
Hahaha yes, buckwheat. So many typos in my comment, my bad.
I'm looking now for another sleeve to split my pillow's content in two and have one for my bum, that way I can be comfortable when working from wooden chairs, which are most common.
> A keychain that acts as a coin to unlock shopping carts.
That's a concern of mine. Once we go all cashless, how will we unlock the shopping carts? Here it's currently being debated if stores should be allowed to reject cash, I think someone forgot about the carts.
It's a system that was never introduced in the US, and in fact I've never even heard of it until now. So surely one option is to remove the system altogether.
That written, I'm also surprised there's any serious talk of going cashless there. We have plenty of cash-only businesses here that preclude any serious consideration of the notion.
You apparently have never shopped at Aldi. You need a quarter to get a cart. When you take the cart back and lock it into the carts then you get your quarter back.
That's probably why in the US nobody put their cart back. They would do it if they had to get their coin back. Again, to fight laziness, go for the wallet!
You can just hand out a token to people when they become customers/have them buy one for an insignificant amount of money and you'll get more or less exactly the same effect.
There are stores here that hand out coin shaped pieces of plastic that unlock the cart that they give out for free. But if i'm not losing my whole 50 euro cent coin that removes the incentive for returning the cart because i've got a unlimited supply of plastic coins so why are we bothering with a lock?
That'll be a while, and by that point we'll also have carts that beep loudly when removed from the shop area and try to drive themselves back autonomously heh.
Yes please - also put smartphone holder so I can go thru my checklist hands-free (encouraging checklists would probably loose money to shops as now they incentivise mindless browsing and buying useless crap)
Recently, I got air purifiers. I really like them so far, and I purchased a couple models from Vornado. Their air flow technology pairs really well with the air purifying. Their fans are the only ones I buy.
Logitech unifying wireless mouse and keyboard. Really seamless to use between two computers and my monitor’s built in KVM while only taking up a single USB port. I even alternate between mice for ergonomics.
Window cat bed that attaches to a glass door that gets naturally heated up in the morning by the sun. My cat loves it.
I got a Philips AC2889/10 air purifier because we relocated and I wanted to make sure to reduce mold spores. I discovered as a side effect that it really helps reducing dust as well.
I have one that I've had for nearly 20 years. And for anyone wanting a desk fan, their Zippi line is awesome. Their technology really does work the way they say it does. For the air purifier, we blew out a candle, and I was able to watch the smoke make a bee line towards the air purifier due to how it circulates the air in the room. I have a crossbeam in my living room, and when the air purifier is on high, I can actually feel the draft of the air coming across the ceiling and hitting the beam and directing downwards.
Sinilink USB Switch: Oh sorry, you meant link 4 (the sinilink usb switch). This device is cool. It has Wifi and a Physical ON/OFF switch... BUT beware: Without tasmota it is total trash and the firmware flashing process is very tricky (Tasmotizer + 1.27mm pin plugs).
Can be used for Power AND Data, so I use this for my usb programmer, my soldering fume extractor, etc on my desk and on christmas I used it for my christmas tree LED, because it also has a cronjob possibily via open firmware in Tasmota, so I could turn off the lights manually but also it was turned of auto, if I did forget it. I also once used it for a little cooling fan, that had only be used on sundays for specific reasons :-)
Original:
Baseus 100W Power supply: I have a bunch of devices laying around requiring USB-C and USB-A (notebook, cell, powerbank, iPod, etc.) and I had one power plug so I was looking for a power supply, where I could put every cable I needed in. The baseus works pretty flawless with all devices plugged in...
I bought a Keychron keyboard as others have mentioned.
On the $300 end though I got a walking treadmill for my standing desk. It is changing my life.
I'm about 2 weeks in and usually avg 5.5 miles a day. Words per minute is still 80 and accuracy hasn't suffered. Worked my way upto 2.6mph. I had to set the office temperature to 66 degrees F though. Worked up a sweat :)
Good disclosure. If they're offering $20 for a review, that means they must be throwing big money at negative reviews to try and make them disappear too.
A fountain pen! I got a LAMY safari and it's so nice to write with. It's expensive for a pen although cheap for a fountain pen which can get expensive. I was peckish about buying it for 20 bucks but now that I use it I'm eying a $200 LAMY 2000.
A Japanese-style ryoba hand saw. I'm a hobbyist woodworker, and I didn't believe the hype until I tried one myself. I just have a $30-ish one, and it's like night and day compared to any other hand saw I've used. Having ripping teeth on one side, and crosscut teeth on the other, alone is worth it. Then, you get into how much less force they require and how rarely they bind.
I drove around yesterday looking for my wallet/bag after the power outage. Visited the hotel I stayed in, my gym, etc. Came home and tore the house apart, it was next to my bed. Where I never, ever put it. But in the chaos of the storm, I did the unprecedented. Ordering.
Excellent build quality and grind for the money. A joy to use every morning and I expect it will last a long time. Their large range of models is confusing and takes some time to understand but with enough youtube reviews, you can decode it. Might be a bit over $200 in the US but I think I bought it at a discount to roughly be at $200 after currency conversion.
A common error people who love coffee frequently make is underestimating the value of a good grinder.
My first grinder was a regular bean chopper, and when I upgraded to a capresso I thought I was finally at a better place for fresh ground (at the time I though $100 for a grinder was insane).
I finally started looking for real high-end grinders (> $1k) because my espresso was still not up to snuff and all my barista friends kept telling me that the quality of my grinder was what was holding me back.
Funny thing was, even though I was willing to spend $2k on a grinder, supply chain issues had other plans.
Got the 1zpresso K-ultra and wow, each shot of espresso I pull now is a work of art.
Even if you're not an espresso person it will make any way you serve the coffee taste notably better.
Being manual is not even a big deal as it takes very little effort to grind coffee every morning. It's instantly replaced my capresso for not only espresso but pour over as well. I also have no plans to upgrade to a more expensive home option now.
> A common error people who love coffee frequently make is underestimating the value of a good grinder.
It’s probably the online-bubbles I’m in, but I’d say it’s the opposite: A common error in people who love coffee but don’t drink espresso is overvaluing a grinder. Almost every cheap one will be okay as long as it’s a burr grinder.
> but I’d say it’s the opposite: A common error in people who love coffee but don’t drink espresso is overvaluing a grinder. Almost every cheap one will be okay as long as it’s a burr grinder.
Not all burr grinders are made the same. The more expensive ones tend to be more ergonomic.
I think one mistake some people make getting into manual grinding is buying a Hario Skerton (or one of its many clones) as their first grinder. That's probably one of the more poorly-designed grinders out there, despite the Hario brand.
Grinding consistency (not too many fines or boulders), which is also higher with certain grinders, also plays a big part in making sure that coffee's extracted evenly.
I've had lower back pain for 10 years now. Rolling on top of this for a minute once per day was painful at first but after 4-5 days it felt fine and I've had no back pain since. I believe it realigned my vertebrae. Now I roll once a week or so to keep things aligned.
Do you roll with the roller horizontally aligned or vertically? Although I really like the idea of cracking my back into line I worry about the shear forces generated on each vertebra while rolling with it horizontal. On the lower back, specifically, where there aren't ribs to spread the load.
This year I purchased bulk latex foam noodles ("LaNoodles") from CozyPure, plus two high-quality cotton zippered pillowcases with wool batting from another store.
I was already a believer in Talalay latex as a mattress material, which is what my current bed is made of.
I stuffed two queen-sized pillows to almost bursting with the LaNoodles. One I place in between my thighs, and the other is my normal head pillow. They are ridiculously thick but I no longer have knee pain or neck pain and sleep much better.
$305 for a scythe (snath + blade) to replace a gas-powered riding trimmer. Quite a different experience coming from a loud, heavy, bouncy, overly-destructive machine to a much more elegant, surgical, and meditative tool. No need for noise cancelling earphones, can listen to audio book/podcast/news/birds, and is more wildlife friendly (deer will walk and graze past me over avoiding the area entirely for one). Super relaxing once you figure get into a good form and rhythm. It's a slow-and-steady effort giving me a better position to observe the field or my thoughts.
Looking forward to using it on fresh, green growth this spring since I had received mid-summer when the grass was already tall and dry.
How long did you have to wait for your scythe? It took about six months in 2021 of waiting to get one, due to snath manufacturing delays in canada. Love it around trees and certain areas where i want to retain full length clippings but still need a mower until i figure out an appropriate blade for it.
Wasn't too bad for me though I was a bit worried because I needed it before fire season was in full-swing. ~35 days from order, June 1 to 1st week of July (onescytherevolution.com).
Yeah real great for navigating around trees. And avoiding other natural plants that grow in the middle of grasses allowing them to flower and provide food for pollinators/arthropods.
This year I'm looking at getting a peening hammer and related tools to improve the blade. The one I have is quite soft. A second blade would be nice for thicker black-berry, bramble type stuff.
A basic KVM switch [0]. Got tired of switching my mouse, keyboard and monitor cables between my work laptop and my desktop PC. This makes it a 1 button press.
During the day desktop PC is off and I work on my laptop, then I turn it off and switch to the desktop PC. With synergy one would always have to be on.
(living in a small flat, few things improve my quality of life like really good storage solutions; the ikea "norden occasional table" (https://www.ikeaddict.com/ikeapedia/en/Product/40245741/us-e...) might well be one of the best returns on investment in my entire decade living in the place)
Meater plus, a wireless meat thermometer. We don't even do BBQ, just cook in the kitchen. The phone app shows meat internal temperature, oven air temperature, tells you how long to cook, estimated time remaining, and how long to let your roast, chicken or fish rest after taking it out of the oven. The app also keeps a log of your past cooks.
If anyone from Meater reads this: Please add a feature to add a photos of the food to the cooks log.
Thanks, can I just use it to measure the temperature of the oven? I don't eat meet but it sure would be nice to know what temperature my roasted potatoes cook best at and for how long. From my observations using an analog thermometer the set oven temperature often is inaccurate.
> can I just use it to measure the temperature of the oven?
You can stick the probe into a large potato. BBQ people call it a "sacrificial potato", when they put it inside their BBQ to measure the inside air temperature, before they even add the meat. The sensor at the tip of the Meater probe cannot stand hot (over 100C) temperatures, so it needs to be inside a food item. Whereas the sensor at the other end is meant to measure the air temperature of the oven or a BBQ.
You might get better value from a product like this
if you primarily want to measure the oven air temperature.
For me, most of the value from Meater comes from the app, which tells me how long to cook and then how long to rest. I don't really bother to look at the temperatures, I just do what the app tells me to.
There are two sensors in the probe. External is good up to 280C (but can go up to 300 with app's alarm blaring), internal - up to 100C. So the potato trick works.
Nit: it makes great coffee (I'm a user myself and as long as I'm awake enough not to pour coffee everywhere but the press, or hit the press once I've put the coffee in thereby pour grounds all over the counter, it's absolutely stellar), but it's nothing like an espresso. Espresso doesn't mean "coffee which isn't shit" (there are shit espresso), nor does it mean "strong coffee".
No, you can't get 9 bars from an AeroPress, but you can get a little closer to the result with a pressure-actuated value basket like the Prismo: https://www.beanground.com/fellow-prismo-review/
Kinda, it helps that you can do a proper pre-infusion phase, but in the end the bottleneck is human - there's no way you can get anywhere close to espresso pressure (not just 9 bars, anywhere near 9 bars) with your arm. You need mechanical advantage at least.
The Prismo doesn't really increase the pressure in the chamber you can have by that much.
> but in the end the bottleneck is human - there's no way you can get anywhere close to espresso pressure (not just 9 bars, anywhere near 9 bars) with your arm.
Not just human either, the aeropress' plastic isn't built to withstand high pressures and it's going to buckle, to say nothing of whatever you put the press on.
Hoffman measured the prismo at 1.3 bars after adding a paper filter to the metal filter.
I was in Italy this summer and the AirBnB had an ancient Mokapot. It made great coffee-like-stuff. Came home and bought one... it tastes terrible. Every couple of days I'll make a pot hoping to season the device. Sadly, I'm about to give up. I might be nomading it soon, so no big purchases, but if I was buying a house my first purchase would be a proper espresso machine.
I've never used a moka pot but I don't think they need seasoning. They work off of a pretty simple principle, the device ain't going to fix itself out of nowhere. If the outcome is bad there are lots of options but the ones I would consider are:
- the recipe itself is wrong, however I assume you're using the same recipe you got success with in italy, though that requires that the devices are the same kind (e.g. stovetop v electric) and powered the same way
- the device itself is broken
- the coffee you're using is different enough that the recipe doesn't work, or possibly the coffee you get at home is completely unsuitable for moka (wrong roasting, wrong grind size, ...)
In my personal experience the amount of water poured inside the moka pot makes a big difference. The more water you pour in, the higher temperature the coffee brews.
If you pour the maximum amount of water that fits inside, then your coffee will brew close to the boiling point of water, which is too hot and makes the coffee bitter.
If you pour less amount of water, then the coffee brews at a lower temperature.
The principle is that the coffee is pushed out by both the steam and the expanding trapped air inside the moka pot. The more expanding trapped air you have there, the less pressure you need from steam, so the coffee starts brewing earlier.
I've tried different recipes, different beans, etc. Right now I'm on Illy espresso (got some on sale).
I hear your suggestions :-). The beans in Italy were basically beans in a tin, open to the air. But it was Italian air, Venetian salt seasoned air, and I was on vacation. Could've been that.
An other possibility is maybe the device is setup incorrectly e.g. the filter / gasket is not sitting right or something? Though I assume you've taken it apart multiple times at this point and would have noticed.
As you've already tried multiple things and covered the basics, I would suggest trying to find some sort of coffee enthusiast group around, or maybe a bit of a fancy / hipster coffee shop, with someone who knows their way around a moka pot who could help you diagnose the issue (whether it's in the device or its usage).
Seems a shame to have had a good experience, and to have bought a moka pot, and to not get joy out of it.
Agreed.. my next gambit is to use the aeropress paper filters, which apparently fit. I do have the right flow now -- it drips out of the spout without making a mess. I made some coffee that basically exploded out of it and needed the lid to contain the mess. But I'm past that. And if I have the aeropress filters, I'm pretty close to getting an aeropress too.
Yes if you have espresso grind it's way too fine, Moka does have some pressure but it's around 1.5 bars. Moka pots are usually used with drip / pourover grinds. Maybe a pair of stops below, but not espresso-fine.
With an espresso grind, the moka pot will struggle to push water through and you'll have a very bitter coffee because it'll be way over-extracted. Is that what you experience?
Most likely culprits here for the discrepancy is which coffee you're using/freshness thereof, consistency of grind, and water quality (and second the JH recommendation)
I like great coffee more than I like espresso. We recently added on a milk steamer to our aeropress setup and now I can make my favorite drink at home: the humble cafe au lait.
I put my Aeropress coffee in a cocktail shaker, add ice, oat milk, and a tiny bit of maple syrup. Shake and pour. The result is awesome and much cheaper than the $7 iced latte you'll get at a coffee shop.
I love the Aeropress and have been rocking it since Obama's first term.
I had several holiday let stays improved by bringing my Nanopresso that I got last Christmas - it's £70 but the pressure gets you really good espresso.
I have the Nanopresso, which was the bigger and earlier version.
The AeroPress doesn't do real espresso, while the Nanopresso somewhat does. I never really got into the espresso that the Nanopresso produced though, while the AeroPress almost always makes a decent filter cup for me.
I've never had salo, but tried several types of słonina (Romanian, Polish, and a weird Siberian brand I found at a Slavic store in... Porto). Looking at the wiki page for salo, it's very close to the PL/RO snack.
You're right that boczek has more flavour, esp. the home-made version if you can find it (super difficult, imo). Usually the home-made boczek will be meatier/more smoky/more garlicky than, the store bought-stuff.
Słonina has little flavour, besides slight smokiness + saltiness. Normally it's used to highlight the flavour of the next dish or as a snack served with vodka. Similarly to lard, you'd serve it before the main dish to make the palate more sensitive towards any fat-soluble flavours. I'd say słonina is 90-95% fat plus a barely noticeable amount of meat.
The Siberian one I got though... had waaaaay more garlic and a little bit of pepper. It was lovely, but something I'd eat at the "caviar serving" amounts.
Useless trivia #123: it's likely a coincidence but in Polish "słonina" literally means "elefant meat" ("słoń" /swoń/, comp. the suffix -ina w. "wołowina" for beef, "wieprzowina" for pork).
> Maybe I need to work on my tofu this year
Smoked tofu is sooo good. I have some good kimchi + gochujang I want to cook tonight with pork belly, but now you made me think of replacing the meat with some smoked tofu I bought.
Usually goes on my weak but improving attempts to replicate my #1 favorite BBQ, inihaw, but any kind of basic grilled meat over rice is a candidate.
I’ve been drinking Guinness and Heineken, plus other ones occasionally. Best cold. Some have been sour and meh, but they are definitely getting better and better. See also low alcohol cocktails. I used to get grape juice made from wine grapes, fabulous.
Bluffworks Chinos. I travel a lot for work and these are the first slacks I’ve owned that look professional rather than tactical/adventurous and actually travel well.
On the more technical side of things, an Evoluent vertical mouse. Has made a massive improvement in my hand fatigue/pain.
I absolutely love my Bluffworks jeans and I'm sad they stopped selling them, but Ministry of Supply does sell them (although they're currently marked "final sale" so I'm guessing the end is near): https://www.ministryofsupply.com/products/mens-chroma-denim-...
Here's another shout-out for the dress shirts made by both companies, if one has need of dress shirts
I have a pair of QC20 wired earbuds that I have been using since forever. I have really bad hearing and ironically, I am very sensitive to loud noises (e.g., mowing, flying, road noise on road trips). I really like to have the best noise suppressing earbuds I can find.
Last year I tried many different wireless ones as my QC20 were wearing out. I tried Samsung, Sony, and Bose QC earbuds 1. The ANC (Ambient noise cancelling) in the samsung and sony were just not to the level of my wired QC20’s. The Bose earbuds1 were actually better at ANC than my QC20’s. I was shocked, BUT I had so many problems with 2 different pairs I had to return them. It was all software issues as far as I could tell, but they either stopped connecting to my devices, or the left bud stopped working.
Fast forward to the Bose QC earbuds2 coming out and I gave them a try. They are expensive, but the ANC is world class. The fit is also WAY better than anything else, including the earbuds 1. The nailed it. At $300 I would not hesitate to buy these again if I lost them.
I've had those Bose wired ones for years as well, they were great. My attempt of finding good wireless ones ended at the Airpods Pro. Much better than any other wireless option at their time.
A small portable scanner. I don't take it anywhere I just got a portable one due to it's size so I can stick it in a drawer.
I've been able to save a bunch of space and get rid of 99% of documents in my filing cabinet by making a digital copy and getting rid of the physical ones. Now when I get an important document I scan it save it to a few places and get rid of it.
Why not just a scanner app for your phone? They work pretty well. I have a flatbed scanner that I keep stored away most of the time, until I need to scan a bunch of stuff quickly. If I need to scan the odd receipt, I use Tiny Scanner.
The main reason was I had 2 filing cabinet drawers filled with paper and wanted something that could be relatively hands off. I was able to do double sided paper and load multiple pages at a time (24 pages before it didn't work well) so it was easy to burn through the them. I've tried a scanner app before for one off things and have had okay success with them. I guess now the backlog is burned down I can compare the two for things that are just a couple of pages.
I ended up getting the Canon imageFORMULA R10 off of amazon but there are a few similar options. Does double sided scanning and I was able to load 24 pages at a time.
Might be slightly over, but some cheap loadable dumbbells. I was never a weights guy, but these made it so I could get a simple workout in at home between meetings. They are annoying to change weights on, but everything is just a solid piece of metal, so they'll last forever.
I'm by no means a strong guy, but I've significantly increased the weight I can lift over the course of the last year. For me, it's really awesome. My biceps and triceps have also gotten way more defined and it's really cool when people notice. Feels good to see a more physically defined body in the mirror.
Space is tight for me, so I bought the "Bowflex SelectTech 552 Adjustable Dumbbells" on Amazon. They were like $300 for a pair, which was more than I wanted to spend, but they are super convenient and versatile.
Just another upvote for these. They're great if you don't have room for a dumbbell rack, and (of course) they're lighter than the standard dumbbell set.
Similar story here! I got the PRCTZ brand dumbbell from walmart (online). I just got one ($75), and it's adjustable from 5-25lbs (they have a heavier version too).
I started playing online video games with a friend and his son, and they do one exercise between each game. Pushups, sit ups, dumbbells, etc. After a 90 minute gaming session, I've also done one circuit of exercises.
This is a fun one because it can scale below and above 200. If you the loadable dumbbells (like Pepin) then yeah it's a bit of a pain but at least they can be expanded.
I got the 5 to 90 lbs powerblocks (700 Canadian used..) but with the way they are built I'll be able to use them 50 years from now. Just a solid long term purchase.
Google Assistant. I had a smart clock for years but only now got the full benefit now that I've switched to Keep and Calendar for so many things rather than using various notes apps.
My Kobo Libra 2 reader has been great. Although sometimes I wish I'd bought a Kindle or waited for the Scribe, because Kobo books often cost more than Kindle books, and it seems like Kindle has better sideloading support now.
Wall mount hooks. Now that they have nicer looking ones with drywall anchors instead of the old eye hooks, I've found lots of uses for them.
> it seems like Kindle has better sideloading support now.
For books? Hasn’t Kindle always had amazing sideloading support? I think even over a decade ago you could just email your pirated books to a kindle.com email address to have them automagically show up on the kindle.
Not 2022, but in 2021 I switched all of my clothing to synthetic including socks and underwear. This made living in a high humidity area (90+ pretty much every day) soo much more comfortable.
Interesting. I think this shows what a change there's been in synthetic materials in the last 20 years.
The standard advice I used to hear was to never wear synthetics in hot climates, because they'd be terribly uncomfortable! Instead you were advised to wear only natural fibers in the heat, particularly cotton and linen, because they were more "breathable".
What I also find interesting is that many of the 'new' synthetics, including the "Bamboo" derived ones, are basically updated versions of Rayon, a fiber that had a terrible reputation in the 80s and 90s (and was typically associated with very cheap faux-silk clothing that was hard to wash and harder to keep unwrinkled). Some of my older family members were shocked to find out that the high-tech synthetics were made from wood pulp in a manner similar (although obviously much improved) to the 'manufactured silk' of the early/mid 20th century.
The odor problem with synthetic clothing has been solved as well. Fifteen years ago, synthetic workout clothes stank after you owned them for a couple of months. People shared all kinds of tips online for removing the stink or delaying its development, and I tried many of them, but nothing really worked. Now none of my workout gear stinks after being washed. I even own a synthetic shirt that I've worn day after day without washing on multiple backpacking trips over years, and it doesn't retain any odor after washing.
I wished for some heliotex shirts for my birthday. My in-laws asked if I am sure cause they are 100% Synthetic. Only better shirts I have are the UF-Pros which are also 100% synthetic.
High-tech synthetics came a long way and are robust as hell. I have little kids and they are little ruffians. None of the synthetic shirts ever buckled
A keyboard tray, that attached to my desk, I never realized how many of my frustrations were just the slightly awkward ergonomics of my keyboard being a few inches too high
Upgraded to a standing desk last year.
At first I didn't add my existing keyboard tray since the desk height can be adjusted for correct keyboard ergonomics.
Very soon identified some problems:
1. My display cannot be adjusted high enough (this can be fixed by putting a book under the display).
2. Keyboard and mouse take up valuable space on the desk.
3. (most important) Display is physically closer and occupies more of my field-of-view. After a day of work this made me dizzy.
I’m surprised keyboard trays aren’t more popular. I use a tenkeyless keyboard to bring the mouse closer, prevents awkward bending at the elbow. However, most trays require a long track attached under the desk. But most desks have support beams that get in the way.
So true. Thanks for reminding me, I really need to get myself a tray. I have the autonomous standing desk and even at its lowest height, the keyboard is still too high. The only way I can get the angle of my arms/hands to feel normal is if I raise my chair really high, but then that comes with its own issues.
I have an autonomous standing desk (only company I could find march of 2020 that sold solid 71" long desks that are over 30" wide/deep).
The lowest setting on mine is 26.0", that's still too high? I would imagine a keyboard tray would drop it another 2-3 inches setting your keyboard below 24" from the floor.
I believe we have the same desk. It's the 70.5" x 30" XL classic. I just measured the height from the floor to the surface of the desk and it's 29". Maybe I'm doing something wrong. If I raise my chair up higher so that my arms aren't angled up, my feet are no longer flat on the floor and they're dangling which is uncomfortable. Part of the problem might be my Kinesis keyboard which is raised up a bit. I have the adjustable stands on them and just lowered them which seems to help a bit. The other issue is that when I raise the seat up enough to have my arms at the right angle, my monitor is then too low even at its highest. I might be able to solve that my putting some books underneath it.
I've had a tray for years but I've only ever used it to store the keyboard when not in use. Typing this from the tray now and it sure feels interesting.
I bought a 30x magnifying glass with LED lighting for $16 on Amazon. I didn't know I needed it but I now use it daily.
I find the magnifier super handy to grab for reading tiny print on things like USB chargers. My reading glasses don't help in such cases even if I happen to be wearing them. I have 40x one too put it's more like jeweler's loupe with a very short focal length so less useful on a day to day basis.
Is a phone camera's macro mode not good enough for occasional use? It's kind of wild that my phone has telephoto and macro with more resolving power than my eyes on both ends (and I have normal vision).
Sounds useful! In a pinch many cell phones have a macro capability that can substitute for a magnifying lens– something to keep in mind when you don't have a magnifier.
I found that it ultimately ends up saving deskspace (since the device doesn't need space to move around). I found the device's size to be more comfortable for my hands than the small Logitech bluetooth mouse I was using.
I've got a Logitech Ergo M575, and an Elecom Relacon handheld trackball that I toss in my bag for when I'm working from outside the house.
I like the Relacon as a travel device vs. a larger trackball or small mouse because I can move my arm, hand, and wrist more, and more naturally, and still have the same control. I often find myself holding it across my chest or waist, and I can even type (not quickly, but still) while holding and using it. The buttons feel like the shoulder buttons on a Switch joycon, so there wasn't that much of a learning curve.
Did you do the mod to replace the bearings with ceramic? I bought a Huge after seeing praise for it and was kinda underwhelmed with the experience out of box on the ruby bearings (they were sticky), but after doing the (trivial) mod to replace them with ceramics I really fell in love.
I haven't replaced the ruby bearings with the ceramic bearings yet.
But, I agree that the out of the box experience, moving only a small distance is very 'sticky'. (Whereas, precisely moving to something isn't difficult).
I used an external trackpad for a while before going to a vertical mouse, then trackballs. I liked the external trackpad better than the fixed position of a laptop but that's the best thing I can say about it — it didn't alleviate wrist pain and it didn't add much flexibility to how or where I work.
When I absolutely need gestures, the laptop's trackpad is still there.
As for accuracy, after using a Logitech trackball for about 6 months, I'd replaced my gaming mouse with it for FPS games. The only thing that had a significant learning curve was precise placement of click-and-drag operations, and that was mostly training myself to let my thumb off the ball before releasing the click.
> Do you prefer large trackball over large trackpad?
I've never used an external trackpad. I have used the excellent Macbook trackpads.
I'd think e.g. "hold button + drag" is slightly more difficult on a trackpad than a mouse or a trackball.
Rather, I'd say that a trackball feels just as intuitive as a mouse does, whereas a trackpad doesn't feel the same as a mouse.
> How is accuracy?
As one of the replies to my comment points out, the particular model I got isn't very good at small movement. (Many people say they swap out the ball bearings & this helps a lot).
Practically, I found I was able to play games with it without affecting how well I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_N_XB5XeDA
(I haven't tried gaming on a trackpad; my impression is mouse/trackball are better suited).
I bought a used Dell office PC from FreeGeek for about 100 bucks, then installed Proxmox on it with Portainer. Now I've got a place to put all my crap that isn't AWS, which is not only easier, but faster, and way cheaper.
As much as I dislike the inability to host the bulbs locally, it has done wonders for my sleep. I set them to slowly dim over a 45 minute period at night and slowly turn on over a 45 minute period in the morning. I have consistently gotten 8+ hours of amazing sleep and fall asleep + wake up so much easier now than I ever have before.
> I dislike the inability to host the bulbs locally
Only a few years ago, one could program MagicLight bulbs pretty easily. It seems their newer versions use a different protocol that hasn't been reverse-engineered, so you're stuck using their crappy phone app. I would probably consider spending a reasonable amount on bulbs if I could self-host -- mostly because I want arbitrary control/fine-tuning of them.
> As much as I dislike the inability to host the bulbs locally
Have you checked DigiblurDIY's Youtube channel, Discord server and subreddit? Some of these can run alternative firmwares like Tasmota, OpenBeken or ESPHome.
A Stream Deck (and later a Stream Deck +). Useful and fun to code your own plugins too.
I work 100% remote so I also went for another Elgato product - a ring light - so my work video calls look a bit better. If all of your interaction at work is via video it seemed worth doing it well. My desk now looks more like a YouTuber's but it's all for coding.
I'm a student, so I write a lot, and the rOtring 600 mechanical pencil is incredible. I've not used a single genetic #2 pencil since I bought it last year, and I don't plan on using one ever again. The feel of the pencil is super solid, and rOtring also handles small lead sizes much better than any other brand I've used (especially .35mm) which means I rarely break my lead.
Other than the pencil, maybe my Peak Design everyday backpack? I got the v1 used on eBay for ~$100 and I've used it for maybe two years now. It's still a decently student-specific purchase, though.
I bought a 600 (0.5mm) recently, as well as a Uni Kuru Toga (0.7mm), with the automatically rotating lead.[0]
The Kuru Toga’s point stays sharper than the rotring while I write, and always has the same edge. I wasn’t prepared for how well it’s “engine” works. It sits a bit more comfortably in my hand as well.
Aesthetically I still prefer the rOtrings look, feel and weight.
I use the same bag (also bought 2 years ago) and I'm not a student. It's great for transporting things to and from work, and I travel with it too. I suspect you'll find it useful for a while!
It's so easy to organize for all kinds of trips. I love the dividers, and I generally feel way safer keeping electronics in that bag over others.
Also, I bought a mechanical pencil (more specifically a lead holder, I guess) 20 years ago and I still have it and use it. They're such a great investment. Mine isn't rotring-nice, it's just a little blue staedtler thing, but it has been a great tool. It's essentially this one:
A Sanpao TJ800 mini TV. It's a really stinking adorable display styled like a retro CRT TV and it has the guts of a cheap Android TV box inside, or you can plug in an HDMI input.
I found the HDMI input on mine didn't work but I figured out how to put Armbian on the TV box inside and so now I can turn it into a mini retro emulation console!
A $60 shaved ice maker attachment for my wife's KitchenAid mixer. Now she can make Snoballs any time of year. Seriously, if there's someone in your house who loves to cook, you need a KitchenAid mixer. It's a godsend, like Visual Studio Code for the kitchen.
Replacement battery for the family MBP. Going strong since 2014, and I want to see how far we can use it safely as the family computer without replacement.
I upgraded to the M1 air and it's the difference between night and day. The air on an M1 can do all my heavy development work no problems and I also don't have a loud fan anymore.
Bought a replacement battery battery for my wife's mid 2012 MBP. It was really slow even even after I upgraded RAM to 16GB and put in an SSD. Replacing the battery restored the performance.
DevonThink - My digital life has never been so well organised.
Omnifocus - My task management has never been so well organised.
BusyCal - My time management have never been so well organised.
Handheld Scientific BT-500 - Allows me to use my mechanical split keyboard wirelessly.
So far in 2023:
Nebo Notes - Allows me to write long form with Apple Pencil on iPad and convert it all to text afterwards far better than any other app on the App Store I've encountered.
Creative BT-W3 Bluetooth Transmitter - Was getting stuttering with Bluetooth headphones on my MacBook that was making them virtually unusable. Connected the headphones to this and I now have zero issues.
I agree with you. I was quite shocked that, with Apple's reputation and the amount I paid for this computer, that the bluetooth wasn't working as I expected. But then I try and remind myself that tech is hard and there are so many moving parts to try and juggle it's a wonder that any of it works at all and for the most part I'm pretty happy with it and wouldn't want anything else. If you do go down the transmitter route you may want to look at trying this out, makes selecting your sound output a breeze https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/
I've been Team Kindle since the very first models that had a keyboard.
I'm at a level where my kindle broke down when I took it out during lunch (half of the screen updated, other half didn't), I just grabbed my phone, ordered a new one then and there and kept reading the book on my phone's Kindle app :D
I went from maybe a book a year to 20-24 books a year.
It's easy to keep always with you, it weighs the same even if you're reading Brandon Sanderson's latest 1600 page tome and it's always on the exact page you left it at.
And if you read longer book series that end in a cliffhanger, you can tap to buy the next one, grab more tea and continue reading even if it's 2 in the morning and you need to work the next day :D
The best thing about a Kindle is that it removes the barrier to reading. When I have to carry around a paperback all the time (and a bookmark) I just end up taking out my phone instead. The Kindle allows for replacing the phone with a book, so I don't end up scrolling Twitter (or HN) for the 8th time in an hour.
Also: Kindle users should check out Libby[0] - it's like a public library but for eBooks, and you can probably sign up through your local public library. It's great for books that might be interesting, but aren't an immediate read.
I'm still hoping to find a list of all libraries you can sign up to online. I found one in New York and Essex (UK).
I will probably never get through all the books they offer but I want MORE! :)
This was my 2020 buy that was a game changer. I really, really love the e-reader experience. Being able to dim it down at night and read myself to sleep is very pleasant.
The Sony SRS-12 (or SRS-13) very small bluetooth speaker; $35ish.
Judging by this speaker being sold out in many big box stores before Xmas it seems a lot of people has a use for this.
In my case I have a small computer (asus pn51) that runs my dumb TV. When everyone else is in bed but I still want to watch basketball I turn this speaker on and perch it easily on my shoulder. I can hear it just fine but it's inaudible from 3 or more feet away. Everyone is happy. Marital bliss for $35 is a good deal.
A pair of Sennheiser Hd58x's from Drop. I never want to use ear buds again. Really loving the 'open back' experience, makes me feel less claustrophobic and the sound quality is amazing. Really enjoying just sitting around listening to music again.
I bought a longboard and it was the most fun I have had doing an activity outdoors for years. it was a bit of trick to get used to it, but then I used it more than any other type of mode of transport. Great for balance, relaxation, and getting some exercise.
So after an abrupt breakup of a long term relationship, I decided to evaluate a lot of my habits and methodology for doing things and decided I wanted a new routine. I've put on a bit of weight over the years, and as most adult males on the wrong side of 30, I'd grown facial hair as a way to hide the features of my face that I was uncomfortable with. But I want to look in the mirror and like what I see, so to facilitate that, I shaved all the hair off and invested in a skin care and shaving regimen. I want to be more accountable to myself and decided that looking at my chubby face every day was a way to get motivated.
So while I now have a 4 part facial care strategy for my skin (cleanser, differin, moisturizer, sunblock), I also have a new shaving routine. My razor is nothing fancy... I've tried Dollar Shave Club and been disappointed because it has TOO many blades and gets clogged too easy, but I also really wanted a shaving brush.
So I picked up a badger hair brush and a set of Proraso pre-shave cream, shaving soap, and balm. I'd never used the product before but saw ads in old barber shops I'd go to as a kid. Shaving used to always irritate my skin, and I expected it to be doubly so because I hadn't set razor to face in forever. To my surprise, I had no irritation at all. Completely smooth and not a single nick or red bump. I don't think I've ever been more happy with a set of products.
At the same time, I was looking to eat healthier. And I love ice cream. So why not make a healthier version of ice cream without spending a fortune?
High end restaurants usually have one or multiple pacojet systems in them. Pacojets are basically glorified ice shavers that shave ice down inside of a small container. Restaurants use them by freezing ingredients in containers to make ice creams and sauces.
Well, the Ninja people created their own cheaper version in their Creami system. I've made chocolate ice cream by throwing some sweetener into a bowl with cocoa powder, agar agar, and coconut milk. I've made a sorbet by tossing a can of fruit into the container with juice or syrup, by tossing banana chunks into strawberry or guava nectar, etc. Really, its only limitation is that you're limited to the containers you have on hand and the ingredients. I even saw a recipe for pumpkin pie ice cream and I've made bananas foster sans ice cream and just tossed in some heavy cream for a nice treat. It's vastly more convenient than having an actual ice cream machine.
A pair of running shoes that actually fit human toe shape (Altra). Years of wearing pointy shoes gave me a Morton's Neuroma and severely limited my aerobic activity.
I'm a pointy-toed runner. When Saucony stopped producing my favorite zero-drop shoes (the Virrata), I bought a pair of Altras but ended up donating them after two short runs because it felt like I was wearing clown shoes thanks to that that broad toe-box.
That said, I definitely appreciate that the running apparel market has expanded to accommodate the broad diversity of human shapes and sizes.
I did the same in 2022 and I managed to rewire my brain to switch from AZERTY to QWERTY. I used typingclub.com and practiced 20 minutes each day for a couple of months. Enough to get the good habits in muscle memory.
For me, what worked was switching to a new layout (QWERTY -> Colemak) which made looking down entirely useless. Tape a printout of the new layout to the top of your monitor for the first few days until you've got it, no matter how slowly you're typing, then go cold turkey. Some time later I went back to QWERTY in the office and was able to pick up touch-typing that layout without much thought or trouble; now I can jump back and forth between the two. Colemak feels a lot more ergonomic, too, as an added benefit.
I used [0] every night for 1 hour, it’s a website that’s going to build your muscle memory by small steps. If you commit to it you’ll get pretty good in a month, for a friend of mine it took even less than that!
I've been thinking about upgrading my computer A/V but haven't taken the plunge. Seems like a bit of a potential rabbit hole for me.
My item is a 65W GaN (gallium nitride) USB C/A wall charger. It can charge pretty much everything I own and is tiny compared to the Apple 65W charger. It has 1 Type-C and 2 Type-A but if you use more than one then the wattage splits (not 50/50 more goes to the C or one of the A ports).
Logitech Lift mouse ($57.47 shipped). Tossed the highly non-ergonomic Magic Mouse that was starting to give me hand/wrist pain. Having also used the MX Master 3 before, I even prefer the (cheaper) Lift. 200% recommend.
did you have to install the software to use the mx master 3? i've been reading a lot of negative reviews about the software eating up a ton of resources, but without the software things like horizontal scrolling doesnt work etc.
I did, and I haven't noticed any issues with resource usage.
I only really use it for CAD, most of the time I use the touchpad on my MacBook as I prefer the ergonomics of the keyboard+touchpad even when plugged into multiple screens.
Make sure to drain out the oil pan drain plug every once in a while to get the small shavings which should be stuck to the plug — it’s magnetic to hold on to them.
I bought three wireless phone chargers/stands, one for each of the bedside nightstands and one for my desk. Having a phone that's always charged and not having to fumble with charger cords has been amazing.
Citrus squeezers are so much faster and easier that I can't believe I used to live without one. I use lemon and lime juice so often for cooking (and cocktails) that it makes sense to have one, even though it doesn't fully replace my reamer, which I still keep in a cabinet somewhere in case I want to juice an orange or a grapefruit.
Oil will typically cause eggs to stick unless you use a lot of it. You can use less butter and have less sticking. 1 Tbsp butter for cooking an egg is much easier than 1 Tbsp oil. And it’s not nearly as bad, at least in this amount, as commonly thought.
Solo Stove bonfire pit. It burns so efficiently and is pretty much idiot proof. They work great here in Minnesota winters, and are nice when you have people over for parties and they throw crappy wood in there that would normally smoke a bunch. We've also had solo stoves out in the middle of the street for block parties. Highly recommend.
Prescription sunglasses with photochromic lenses. (Under $200 at Costco if you can find a sunglass frame there that fits you.) Like most people I had written off photochromic lens technology decades ago (too slow to respond to light changes). But the current generation is much better (they've gone through something like eight of them by now) and I do a lot of utility cycling in the Pacific Northwest. And that means that you can go through everything from bright sunlight (OK maybe not bright by most peoples' standards :-) to overcast to darkness in a trip to the grocery store. Having a single pair of glasses that can take me through all of those conditions is surprisingly liberating.
One limitation to be aware of is that the material in the lenses responds to ultraviolet light. Which means that they really only work outdoors. So you're still going to need a separate pair of sunglasses for driving.
My AirPods. They work well and allow me to listen to podcasts while grocery shopping and doing mindless tasks. There other headphones out there but for whatever reason these fit best and sound OK.
A 30w phone charger. iPhones charge rather slow. This charger helps get over that. A lot of my daily routine is done through my phone.
I can (road) bike with an Airpod fairly securely in. For longer rides where I want to listen to a podcast, a little bit of surgical tape brings even more security.
You may be aware of this, but the recommended way to wear Airpods (especially the 3rd gen non-Pro?) is to twist the stalks towards your face to 'lock' them into place better.
(I discovered this when I was about to angrily throw out my new 3rd gen Airpods, as they were fatter than my original gen 1 model, and just wouldn't stay in place. I've never seen anyone else doing this [and I sometimes get comments from people for wearing mine oddly] but it's a game-changer.)
It's very dependant on your ears and the eartip size you use. I personally would not bike with them, because as good as the passthrough audio is, there could be small differences in localizing sound that could really cause trouble on a bike. The passthrough is great, but not life or death situation great.
Edit: this is for the Pros. The open non-pros seem like they would be safe for biking at lower volumes.
I bike with them, and while they fit me fine, the wind noise is a bigger issue. Shokz[0] are probably better for biking speficially, but AirPods work fine if you just pause your podcast on the descents.
They are pretty snug without hurting. I sometimes even fall asleep with them and they stay put most of the time. Mine are the regular cheaper air pods. Not the pro or whatever they call it.
A Bamix immersion blender; powerful enough to blend frozen fruit in my morning smoothies and safe for a deep pot of soup that needs blending. Also makes top notch Hummus.
I only recently learned it's painless(?) to make oat milk with one of those; I got one of these (https://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Milker-Kitchen-Wooden-mortar/dp...) but realistically I think any deep container and then straining out the oat pulp with a normal sieve would be just as effective. I haven't tried it with alternative milks (soy, rice, almond) because I'm happy enough with oat milk and it is incredibly inexpensive
A pizza peel, a pizza stone, a wire cooling rack, a kitchen scale, and some round plastic containers with lids for holding doughballs, and watching Vito Iacopelli on youtube. Now I can make pizza myself in my own home oven that is better than anything I can have delivered, and it's fun.
For us in FlyCode it's Stigg (https://stigg.io). Really streamlined the way we manage subscriptions and define pay blocks. Saved us about two weeks of development work (and we are still pretty small!)
Seems to have quieted my snoring/sleep apnea to levels where people want to sleep next to me, and I can as well get a good night sleep. Sleep Apnea is no joke.
I too bought my first pair of wireless earbuds (One Plus) last year. I'm really amazed how well these things work. Fantastic battery life, for such a tiny package. Pretty decent noise reduction. And they always seem to guess right which of the many devices they're paired with I want them to stream from.
I was, however, disappointed to discover that when in duplex mode, sound quality drops from hifi to first generation gsm quality. As I understand it, Bluetooth still has no better profile for duplex.
New battery for our Dyson. Should have bought one way earlier (old one was almost 4 years old). Went with the original one even though that's more expensive.
I'm still using the old one during the week as it only takes a few minutes to swap.
I've been putting this off for so long I use to be able to vacuum my entire house 2,500 sqft ish (minus furniture, etc) with battery left over. Now it dies halfway through.
I might follow you and just get a Dyson branded instead of aftermarket.
Ring cameras. Gave me peace of mind while away from home and caught my landlord entering my apartment unannounced once while I was away. Gave one to my parents, who reluctantly accepted it. Caught and deterred would-be burglars entering their house 2 months after setting it up.
I used to manage my parents' old-style security cameras, and now I realize what important features they lacked. It takes a lot for a system to catch people in the act, regardless of how high-quality your cameras are and how much disk space your DVR has, and convenience matters too.
This was a game-changer for me and my wife. Previous, I'd be laying naked on top of the covers, too hot to sleep, while she was under a thick comforter in pajamas asking me to turn the heat up another two degrees. Now she'll let me keep the house cool enough that I can even get under a sheet.
Surgical Tape. I read Breath by James Nestor[1]. One of the suggestions is to put a one inch tape over your mouth during the night. It prevents mouth breathing and reduce instances of sleep apnea. I tried it; I start feeling refreshed after 3 days. You can give it a try, surgical tape is like $5USD.
Instant pot (rebuy with air fryer lid). Use this thing for everything. The air fryer lid is amazing. So much better than my stand alone air fryer which I got rid of. Much quieter. Takes up same space as the air fryer that I had before, but with much more functions! I don't do many fancy recipes in it, but makes cooking rice, chicken, yogurt or anything else simple fast and efficient. I live in the Eurozone so heating up the oven can be expensive. Pressure cooking a chicken in 10 minutes I believe is much more economical.
Not your parent, but I got the Instant Pot 6 quart Duo Plus, and use it for everything from making yoghurt, to stews, steaming potatoes, proving bread dough etc. it’s fantastic.
(In fact I have 4 litres of Bulgarian yoghurt fermenting as I type this!)
This won't be relevant for most readers, but my answer would have to be the $20 Gentle Leader for my dog. She is an incurable leash-puller, to the extent that the nerves in her face were damaged and her jaw was completely paralyzed for 6 weeks. Needless to say, our twice-daily walks were very stressful for me for over a year. After acclimating her to the Gentle Leader, the problem is entirely solved. The only downside is that passersby often mistake it for a muzzle and assume she's dangerous.
ThermoPro meat thermometer - not instant read, the kind with wire leads that actually go in the oven. I'm not even into high-end grilling or smoking or anything. It's just really nice to get a pre-seasoned slab of beef or pork (the teriyaki skirt steak at Trader Joe's is a family favorite) and have it come out just right every time. As a bonus, this one has a remote so I can hang out upstairs and even wear headphones instead of having to ensure that I can hear the beeps from the kitchen.
- darn tough socks: these retail for 20ish a pair last I checked but they're super high quality
- water boiler: can get a basic one for less than 30 bucks, or go with a higher end one for 100+. either way, having hot water readily available will change your life
- kettlebell (20lb, 35lb): these go for like 30-40 bucks on amazon. there are a lot of compound movements you can do with kettlebells that will highlight various muscle imbalances you have. super easy to incorporate a few kb exercises into your workout routine
Womier low profile brown switch keyboard. Does wired, 2.4ghz, and 3 bluetooth modes at the press of a button. Was the winner after trying lots of mechanical keyboards. Tape mod and o-rings (about 20 minutes of work) and it feels and sounds incredible.
Privacy film so that I can leave more window blinds open on the windows facing the street.
Elastic laces for some of my shoes to make them slip on.
A silicone face scrubber for gentle exfoliation on a regular basis.
Honeycomb style seat cushion. Used for meditation, car, floor sitting, etc.
I got a retractable screen door for my bedroom door that goes to our back porch. Instead of a swinging screen door it just unhooks and rolls up to the side, and can be pulled back out.
It's great for getting a breeze on nice days, without letting mosquitos in. There was one on the front door when we bought the house, wish I hadn't waited so long as it was super easy to install. Will probably get one for the door to the garage as well this year.
Making bread with a mixer is fun but takes a lot of time. With the bread machine there really is no reason to buy preservative and sugar laden bread from the store.
Are these good these days? I LOVE bread and had bought several of first automatic bread makers in the 1990s. I really tried to use them but they really didn't produce good bread at all reliably. Curious if they work well now. Which one did you get?
In France, everyone seems to have a Moulinex; and I've never heard anyone complain about theirs.
I'm very happy with mine ("Moulinex Pain Plaisir"), though I'm slightly annoyed some programs (kneading-only and baking-only) cannot be put on a timer.
The no-knead (or low knead) recipes from J Kenji Lopez Alt are incredibly simple and incredibly good. You need to plan, but the actual active time spent is a couple of minutes. Works great if you're working from home.
I also upgraded to a split keyboard and I love it. I really liked the Microsoft Natural keyboard, but slamming my mouse into the number pad was driving me crazy, so I decided to get a split keyboard without one. I have the Kinesis Freestyle Pro. As a bonus the mechanical keys are nice to type on! My only complaint is it takes a moment to get it dialed in for placement if it's been moved.
Meta comment, but I'm curious about the money range of $200-$1000. Many threads like this are for cheaper products (granted, upper limit here of $200 is higher than usual), and a lot of the answers are repeated. I feel it's hard to justify spending larger amounts of money in the range I provided, but in the end, there are times when the value absolutely is worth it. Finding those times is the difficult part.
Standing desk with memory, not the ones with just the up-down buttons. I can just slap number 2 on the desk, push back and stand up. The table will stop exactly at my standing work position.
Walking mat for said standing desk. A coworker of mine swears by this, I'm still considering one. They even walk while watching movies on the TV :D
A proper working chair, your ass is going to be on it for 8+ hours. Don't skimp on it.
Steam Deck. Seriously. It made gaming fun again. My gaming PC hasn't been booted since September when I got the deck. I can only do one thing with it, play games. It's always suspended on exactly where I left with the game I'm currently playing through. I can use it on the couch, toilet, train, vacation or even when there is downtime at work =)
Ask! For me, I got 2 months of personal training for about that much (2 one-hour-sessions per week).
I was hesitant because I thought personal training was too expensive given that there were so many resources online, but I’m VERY happy with the purchase.
It forced me into the gym regularly for months, I didn’t have to think about what I’d be working out, and my trainer kept me honest, kickstarting a habit and confidence I’ve tried countless times to develop.
Of course, YMMV and some trainers are terrible, but I would have happily spent much more.
A properly fitting bicycle that will get you out for exercise and transportation will pay immense dividends. Decent e-bikes are in this range now, and can now realistically replace a car for many people who would not consider themselves ‘cyclists’.
Similarly, a membership to a gym or other kind of physical activity (martial arts, etc.) that you’ll stick with is worth it to anyone who largely sits in front of a computer for work.
Pretty much anyone can also benefit from a few months of therapy. We all have baggage from our childhoods that can be overcome, and all of your personal and professional relationships will prosper as a result.
Me too, these make a huge difference in screen ergonomics compared to just using a laptop directly, and most of them fold, so they're much more portable than an external monitor.
And using the computer like this you also get the benefit of a real keyboard that you chose yourself, and is easy to repair/replace, etc.
Having a UMIK-1 measurement microphone for use with REW (or similar) has been really great for my year. I'm building a recording studio at home, and having the quick ability to capture and measure data about my room over time has been fantastic. I've also used it to measure the volume of some things, and profile why a few of the rooms in my house were too echoey which led to remediation techniques.
I also got a FLIR infrared camera, which was a little bit more than $200 - but there are cheaper models that would have done the trick just as well realistically. My home was built 140 years ago, and some ability to inspect heat-creating things through walls has been useful.
Another really useful one in this price range was a Logitech MX ERGO trackball. I like how it requires less space and solid surface than any mouse. I also like the angle it puts my hand at. Multiple device support is good.
I bought a Fitbit Charge 4, originally to track my heart rate/steps since I've never owned one and always relied on my phone for time.
With my phone generally on silent and by not checking it so often, I've found my use of social media/apps has reduced drastically this year. To the point that I recently forgot my phone at home, something that I didn't imagine possible.
That was my experience as well with getting an Apple Watch! I thought that wearing a smart watch would be more distracting but it’s actually less because I don’t feel the need to have my phone in my pocket at all times.
This HOCl generator has been amazing for removing household odors and reducing cleaning supply usage. Lots of applications. Great hack for natural cleaning supplies.
A dog recovery suit. It's a breathable, close-fitting suit that you use instead of a cone to prevent biting at healing wounds. Available for $25 or so on Chewy.
Buddy had some surgery and would have been in a cone for 2 weeks (!!!), an utterly shit experience for both of us. This prevented that while making sure he didn't lick or bite at his stitches.
It wouldn't stop a persistent dog like a cone would, but I felt like it gave me enough time to observe the behavior had he bit or licked and stop it without opening the wound.
It's easily my best purchase of the last 5 years, except perhaps for my instant pot, which I use every day to make steel cut oats.
It was given to us as a gift, but I would say our Breville Bambino espresso machine. We were already making morning cappuccinos or lattes ourselves with an Italian "moka" stovetop, but this is considerably better, especially when coupled with a decision to buy better quality beans from local roasters (we're lucky to be in a city with good quality roasters and coffee shops). We're getting as good or better as we could get in a good local coffee shop (and I don't mean Starbucks) for a fraction of the price, plus the convenience.
Also, to defray the higher cost, and for health reasons, my wife and I cut our afternoon coffee. Less is more.
(Update: After writing this I checked online and it turns out the Bambino costs $350, so not sub-$200, oops.)
Weird timing - I saw some on Amazon yesterday (clicked in to see if there was another three things I wanted in order to get 5% off ... but it was all bizarre tat, who wades through all that, or finds four useful things anyway, for 5%?) and wondered what on Earth they were for, I didn't realise this was/could be an issue - certainly not commonplace enough that there was a product for it anyway.
Winco fish spatula. Super flexy and thin. I can now make eggs the way I like them (over easy, zero browning) without destroying the egg or chasing it around the skillet like when I use bigger spatulae. Plus also much better for fish, oddly enough: the flexibility matters a lot.
Huge fluffy wool slippers that go up past my ankles: $30
I used to feel cold in the winter, no matter how high I set the thermostat. Now I feel cozy with the heat barely running. I even think they cured my winter gloom. Turns out I was just loosing a lot of energy through my feet.
ヽ(´▽`)/
Wacaco Nanopresso. I'm travelling a lot these days and I need coffee every morning. Many hotels don't have electric kettles so I also had to buy a tiny water heater to boil water right in its tiny cup.
Saw some people go as far as using a portable coffee grinder but that's a heavier toy
I got the picopresso and I've used it daily for about a year now. It is more precise and finicky and you need the right grind, but as youtubers have shown and i agree the quality of the espresso and crema is amazing for something so portable. With hot water and pregrind some fine grounds you can bring say to a few day camping and have espresso like a third wave shop quality. I'm in love with this thing. Toss in a ball jar over ice and oat milk and a splash of syrup and i have a inflationary 7 dollar hipster latte for like 50 cents.
For people that don't enjoy espressos, the CLEVER Dripper is a good option[1]. I think this gadget combined with a cheap burr grinder is the best way to get flavourful filter coffee.
Small round wire sieve that fits on top of a mug, < $20 at the supermarket. I'd bought various devices intended as tea strainers before, but they were hard to clean and didn't let the leaves drain properly. A small thing, but it's meant a lot less irritation.
I've used one of these daily for 5+ years. You, or others, may like it too :) It's a metal basket perfectly sized to fit in a medium-sized mug, to make loose-leaf tea one cup at a time.
The best investment was a connection hose for the sodastream that lets me use industrial co2 tanks. That 13kg tank has lasted me 1.5 years already and is so much cheaper and hassle free-er than the tiny things that cost 20 euros a pop at the supermarket.
I got an adapter hose from co2 supermarket [0] that fits my local standards.
I also added a standard regulator to my setup because I trust it more than the sodastream, tho the pressure rating of the sodastream should be enough.
Then I got a tank of food-grade co2 from my local supplier. I guess welding grade co2 would be good enough as well, but as the price difference was non-existent it was a no-brainer.
When you get a regulator, make sure you get the highest flow-rate you can find as some of them will be problematic to get enough pressure for your beverage.
Mine does not go nowhere as high as the regular sodastream bottles directly, but the result is that it takes me an extra 10 seconds per bottle to get the same result.
I’d be interested to know where you get the industrial tank too. I read it needs to be food grade.
I wonder why no one has made an open source Soda stream that connects to the big tanks right out of the box in a thoughtful way. Or better yet, a system for refilling the sodastream tanks from a large canister so that the sodastream can still sit easily in your counter.
Not OP, but in my experience you can pretty much always buy food-grade CO2 tanks from homebrewing shops. They usually do refills and exchanges too, as well as selling all the hosing and gaskets and clamps and whatnot you'd need.
I'd never risk that. The pressure that builds up in such a tank, and what happens if you were to somehow dent the tank should scare the crap out of you.
They are absolutely massive. The tank that holds 13kg itself weighs about 30kg. So the amount of force to 'dent' that amount of steel would need to be ridiculous.
The weakest part is (by design) the valve. Technically I rent the bottle and buy the gas. Each refill is an exchange of the bottle after which the bottle gets pressure tested, etc.
Asking to a pro if Air fryer worh buing he said: "think about professional kitchen. If you found something in a restaurant then can be helpful even for no pro. But I never ever saw air fryer in a pro kitchen. It s Just a low quality Owen. Just marketing. If you have a good Owen you dont need air fryer"
My air fryer has a spinning thing in the middle, wich turns my chips around, so i would say thats a plus!
But yea, it is basicly a small oven. Maybe it uses less energie.
By virtue if being smaller it does yes - there's an argument for using as small an oven as possible for sure - but the return on investment of that for having multiple different sized ovens is bound to be longer than the product's lifetime.
(I broke my oven door, rather than pay £150 plus labour opted to pay £280 for a new oven. That was a Bosch, certainly not the cheapest possible.)
Personally the return on the air fryer for me is a direct result of it being smaller. For most things my larger kitchen oven needs time to preheat. That's an additional step that isn't required when I just want to roast some vegetables / meat or heat some frozen potato products quickly in the air fryer. This time / extra step is well worth cost for me ($20 of fb marketplace).
An air fryer that does a good job can be had for under £100. Show me a pro-level oven in the same price range and I'd buy one of them. As it stands, I use the air fryer.
Because they're a lot smaller? Anyway your house/flat probably came with an oven, so it's 'free'; the 'under £100' for a countertop oven/air fryer is additional.
Assuming you only look at electric fan ovens (the vast vast vast majority these days) more money buys you better insulation mainly. A brand too of course (maybe better R&D/thought gone into the controls/ergonomics etc. hand in hand with that) - but not somehow better food.
'Pro-level' ones obviously cost more, buying reliability & service primarily. Still not somehow better food, don't buy a commercial oven for a home kitchen.
I don't know why are you so against an air fryer. Not all apartments in some countries come with ovens. It's a great device and many people love it. I get this impression you are just minmaxing it without trying it.
It's the marketing of them that rubs me the wrong way. If they were 'mini ovens' or 'countertop ovens' or whatever, fine, and I have no problem with anybody having, wanting, or liking one while understanding that is all it is.
It's largely from disappointment - I assumed initially that they were designed to save oil vs. a deep fryer, that they blasted jets or misted oil over the food. That I think would be novel and interesting.
As it is, if you have an oven already, the RoI is too long to do it on a cost basis. Maybe there's an argument of time-saving as they pre-heat a smaller box quicker? Hardly takes long as it is, I think that's a stretch.
If you don't already have an oven, then yes, if the capacity is not a problem then it's a great option, they start cheaper than bigger ovens... Obviously I suppose.
(I suppose I shouldn't have generalised so much above - I was speaking from my experience in the UK. Other than perhaps a tiny studio flat (single room apartment, no separate bedroom) I would think it's pretty much unheard of to rent somewhere without one here; buying it would normally (almost always) be included, but if not there'd be an obvious gap where yours or your newly purchased one would go.)
I've never rented a place that came with a convection oven. When I recently purchased a home, the oven that was here was also not a convection oven. An air fryer is just a small convection oven that sits on the countertop. But this has real benefits. You get better browning by being close to the element. It is more energy-efficient because it heats far less air. You get the benefits of convection. They also tend to be much easier to clean.
There are costs - you waste counterspace and you need to own another thing. But "just buy a convection oven" isn't an option for a lot of people.
Interesting, where (country) do you live that that's the case?
Honestly, if they didn't put separate fan temperature/time on the back of stuff (increasingly they don't actually, more and more I'm seeing fan only) I'd honestly never have known anything else existed. I've never lived anywhere with one, didn't see any for sale when I bought one (to replace broken one) a couple of years ago. (UK)
I think that surprises me even more, because aren't 'toaster ovens' - essentially duplicating grills/'broilers' - already commonplace? So this trend is a second appliance to partially duplicate something a third, in many cases, already does.
Personally I think I'd rather just replace the oven for one with a fan and grill, reclaim all that countertop, but at this point there is probably just a large cultural factor at play.
It's not possible to fry without oil or another type of grease, and that's by definition.
Did you notice that to use your air fryer you need to use oil anyway? There's a fantastic debunking video on YouTube about that. Unfortunately it's in Italian only.
Yes, exactly. Problem being that it does not fry with air, but with the oil that you need to put in it anyway to fry your chips. That's the thing to be debunked, that air can not fry anything and to fry you need oil or grease.
Seems that almost everybody is blindly believing to the marketing name instead of actually realising that the item is still frying with oil. The oil that they put in it. C'mon.
Yea everyone knows how they work, you aren't lifting the veil here. But as other comments point out, air fryers are actually very similar to ovens. You seem to be confused that the word "fryer" means that they need oil.
Oil is optional, just like in an oven. Would you call oven cooked chicken "fried" because it was basted in olive oil? The same chicken can be air-fried, basted or not.
Even then, basted chicken, and basted potato chips, use far less oil than an oil fryer. This has some health benefit, it's also way more convenient.
Apart from being clever marketing, I believe they use the word "fryer" to describe the immersion in a very evenly and highly heated fluid, in this case air.
While not very different from a fan-forced oven, the design of a small chamber with a vented basket and high air circulation does create a more uniform thermal environment over the entire surface area of the food, than the usual convection oven with a flat tray.
Almost none of the terms we use are "correct" in some absolute sense.
No queen has ever slept in my queen sized bed, nor am I aware of any rectangularly shaped queens. My airpods aren't made of air. When we combine words or even parts of words we don't produce meaning by simply summing the meaning of the parts.
Absolutely zero harm is caused by calling something an "air fryer" rather than a "countertop convection oven", especially since "air fryer" more easily conveys the idea that you can cook things like french fries in one reasonably effectively without deep frying in oil.
Oh, I agree with you. People just love being technically correct (the best kind of correct) on the internet for some reason. Is an air fryer actually a convection oven, yes, but do I care, no.
Just another good way to help relieve chronic pain. Amazon holiday sales and market oversaturation are bringing them down to US $60-70 now. Gave the spouse one for Christmas, she used it on her shoulders (rotator cuff) and back and didn’t turn it off for at least 45 minutes.
I’d also recommend a TENS unit, can also be found for cheap ($20-40). Both can vastly improve pain management without relying as much on medications.
Saved me from having to get massages. I use it for my neck from sitting at the computer all day. It's also been useful for super random things like punching cushions outside or some random thing. I've seen someone use it to help them sift flour easily.
- standing desk; standing burns twice more calories than sitting; I went with Ikea's Trotten model for 220€ (its cheaper but requires a lot of manual hand rotation to change the height and it forced me to stand up longer; it was hard for me to stand and work and because I don't have a simple button to lower the desk, it forced me stand up longer)
- tennis ball to massage my back by leaning with it on the wall
- laptop stand, external keyboard and external trackpad; for better posture during standing and sitting; trackpad is more comfortable for me than mouse)
- vitamin D supplements for the winter
- smartwatch or smart band to keep basic track of sleep and fitness; I went with Xiaomi Mi Band 6
- smart weight to keep track of my weight and set goals; I went with Mi Body Composition Scale
This has been a total game changer for me, as I could never find a stand that would get the laptop up as high as I wanted.
My posture has never been better!
I’ve been using LEVO tablet stands for five years now. Pricey but <$200, and nary a complaint. Used on all sorts of iPads and will outlast a few of them. No wear evident and only one tightening over five years…made me pleased in 2022.
Saved a bunch of money to spend on our house, honeymoon and shared projects, but sure, take the time out of your day to downvote somebody that views marriage differently than the downvoters.
Surely they have a monopoly on happiness that can only be expressed by clicking the down arrow.
I can only imagine the depths of their marital bliss based on expensive jewelry.
upvote, you achieve the symbolic gesture of a ring, while maintaining wallet girth and if one is lost or worn out cheap to replace. sounds like a great buy.
Yep! That’s the philosophy! Rings are just stuff with the minimal practical value of signaling one’s marital status. As a piece of stuff they’re something that could be lost and replaced, wholly different from people or relationships.
The ephemeral nature of a cheap ring is meant to evoke the importance of the intangible value of an invaluable relationship.
The stuff and the important relationship are intentionally separate.
While Seattle doesn't get that cold during the winter, the combination of 40 degree weather and moisture sure feels colder than it is. And our office is constantly swinging between warm and chilly for some odd reason.
UFO202 + Grado SR125x (I actually have the more expensive version of the same cans but the above just fits into $200, and in conjunction with an impulse response EQ deliver an incredible level of broad spectrum clarity for a relatively low price)
• Instant pot with air fryer hat ($150) is now the primary use I have for my kitchen. I rarely buy processed food, and I rarely use a stove. Microcontrollers on pots, man.
• Decent running shoes ($180). My entire wellbeing is better thanks to them.
$15 DisplayPort splitter to allow 120Hz on an external monitor for both PC and Macbook. Screen refresh rate has a huge effect on how enjoyable your experience is, whether it's working or gaming.
Related, the G915 I just got last month though it's not sub 200 outside sales.
Firmware is a bit eh as is typical for Logitech, but being wireless, mechanical, having macro keys and media controls is a total win. Also sits very low.
do you have palm rest? I bought RGB version and became instantly smitten with with it, but I found it a too tall / high to use, and I just couldn't get used to using with palm rest.
I felt the same way initially, and wanted the get a palm rest right away. I am using it for months now without it. I guess I could just got used to it.
No OP but I also use Keychron with Grifiti palm rest; aligns almost perfectly with the Keychron and is very comfortable. Don't buy the slim one though, I use the 17" one (you can search for "Grifiti Fat Wrist Pad 17").
I don't have a palm rest. If I didn't have a Garmin watch to bump up my wrist height I'd probably get one though as it is bulky. I was surprised at how heavy it is.
A cheap table-mounted vise with a 360 bearing. The bearing lock failed pretty quickly but I can just as easily clamp it down in any orientation regardless.
It's been super practical for all kinds of hobby projects.
Wasn't purchased in 2022 but I was just now talking to my wife about how great a purchase this had proven over the years. A Black Condor T&T Pouch. I tossed the map insert in the middle, the drawstrings inside, and the Molle attachment loops in the back, and it has served as a really fantastic organizer for pens, mechanical pencils, knives, erasers, Macbook dongles, precision screwdrivers, spudgers, and so on. Tough as nails. $30, available in lots of places.
Contrary to (seemingly) everyone I liked the Touch Bar MacBooks. I barely ever used the function row, but the software that came by default wasn’t the best. But pock.app was perfect. It put alt-tab visually on my keyboard.
My daily driver is now a Mac mini, and Touch Bar MacBooks time has passed.
The stream deck replaces that functionality really well.
If you don’t have one, but think it could be helpful—it’s probably worth a shot. There’s nothing like a dedicated for a specific action.
My previous keyboard was a Bloody B840 that I won at a contest at a PC gaming event (PDXLAN). The switches were designed to feel and sound like MX Blues (very clicky), but the frame of the keyboard would let out a terrible metallic ping with every keypress.
I replaced it with a Keychron V6 keyboard with TTC Silent Bluish White switches. Now the keys have a nice thokkish bump with each press. Much quieter, and I love the way it feels.
Logitech Master MX 3. Perfect for anyone with bigger hands that ache after a while of mild mouse usage. Also, long/free and side scroll features are super nice.
A powerful compact GaN USB-C charger. Freed my backpack from bulky laptop charger, and can at the same time charge both laptop and a phone. Strong win-win.
OneBlade is pretty great. I bought the base model and use this the "YINKE Guide Comb Guards for OneBlade 14-length Precision Adjustable Comb 0.4 to 10 MM" accessory.
I have both shooting protection and a couple of pairs of general aviation headphones with ~25dB passive noise reduction. While the shooting protection is more comfortable, the GA headphones can also be connected to a source of ambiental music while coding, with the downside that they are pressing quite hard on the head to make a seal and be effective.
fyi i got a massive deskpad at Daiso and it was like 3 bucks. I love daiso for 1 off weird trinkets and accessories like cable ties that are good quality sometimes made in japan even and are cheaper then buying a pack for 8-15 bucks of something off of amazon.
Something silly off the top of my head... We bought a “dog backpack”. We have a pretty small dog but love longer walks or strolling through smaller shops. With the backpack, he can go with us anywhere and it has been a really fun experience.
Also our dog hates walking in rain (he will refuse to move). Now he goes in the backpack, we put a scarf / other clothing over it and we can go on for a bit until we find shelter.
We bought a dog stroller, which helps for when he stops wanting to walk, or is too bad, but it's a pain to take when he does go the whole way (it's a cheap one that has many design flaws). I kind of wish I got the backpack, but I think he would have hated it and made it unusable.
Our dog seems to love it. If we get the backpack out and open it up, he will jump in on his own and curl up there. He does also love his crate and a carrier we got for flights, so he is used to it.
But as with anything, YMMV. Best to do whatever is comfortable for your dog.
Our dog really doesn't like going in the buggy, but it's actually the best way to keep him walking along instead of endlessly sniffing and truffling for tidbits to eat. We just ask him if he wants to get in the buggy and he start motoring. He'll last for a little while in there before he starts crying to get out, unless he's really cold or hurt. A backpack would be awesome, but it'd be like trying to stuff a squirrel in your pants.
Baratza Encore burr grinder! I might upgrade soon, but it's served me incredibly well for a year.
Also got a Craigslist road bike from the 80s for ~$250 cad (less than $200 USD). It's needed a few repairs but has absolutely been worth it and impactful to the year.
Also a good compact air sleeping pad for backpacking. Haven't used it as much as I'd have liked, but its made a few moments much more pleasant.
I bought 3 things with total under 100$. been working from home for last 2 years, due to space constrains adding big office style furniture is not feasible . back pain is starting for me, a small adjustable table which I can work while sitting in sofa, a small laptop stand which I can keep on my bed, and a good natural latex pillow if I am lying on stomach and having my elbow on it.
For $99 at Target we bought a mattress warmer with a timer just as the Bomb Cyclone dropped our temps to 10°F. Most effective $99 I've ever spent -- our Texas house cannot stay above 60°F in that weather.
Someday the same product will be controlled by a Home API and your phone and BTLE and cost $99/year for the app, but for now it has escaped the relentless march of "progress".
Not last year, as I haven't bought anything cheap but:
Rice cooker was nice unitasker. For making rice.
I could use electric pressure cooker, but rice cooker makes it simple enough and I can make almost small enough amount at one time. Or not too much waste.
Small handheld electric screwdriver from Lidl was reasonable purchase for cost. Not too much use, but was semi-useful during a move.
If you eat a lot of rice, a rice cooker is a must. My wife and I used to eat rice meals once or twice every week, and the dead simplicity of pouring in the rice, adding the water, and pushing a button and having perfect rice 15 minutes later is just such a time and effort saver.
Is the vinegar for the taste? I was told to cook hot for 10 mins then turn off heat and leave the lid on for 10 mins. Usually comes out pretty good. Twice as much water as rice. Rice cookers must be popular for a reason though?
I've bought a bunch of things, each of while is below 200.
1. Logitech MX Ergo Trackball mouse. I LOVE this thing.
2. Aftershokz Aeropex and OpenComm. I'm single sided deaf and these are the best I can get for listening to music or taking any calls.
3. Powered sunglasses, I can walk around sunny areas without squinting.
4. Books: the daily stoic.
Use to have cramps and pains in by hand, not nothing. Amazing purchase
Its over 200, but Sony XM4s are great. I use it without ambient mode and noise cancelling, i think its the perfect amount of noise cancellation at least when working from home, and still wanting to be aware of surroundings(family members, dog, etc)
After trying vertical mouses, I'll never go back to regular ones. Regular ones cause pain in my wrist after using them for some time, while with vertical ones there's no wrist pain.
Beyond the obvious uses, a high chair was a great purchase because our daughter would start crying every time we tried to set her down to eat dinner, so only one of us could eat at a time, but once we got the high chair and she could be sitting at eye level with us, she was content to sit and let us eat.
I tell people it works like a muscle relaxer (pill). Supposedly the heat goes deeper than a standard heating pad. I’ve got a bad back (scoliosis included) and other things. It helps heal a blown back and is great pre-yoga or any kind of stretching or stress.
We’re talking barely able to move around to normal daily functioning after twenty minutes. (I’ve used it for 8 hours in the past during very stressful periods. At some point I felt my muscles release like a muscle relaxer.)
Thanks so much for the detail. That sounds amazing. I’m surprised this is my first time hearing about the tech, do you have a particular pad you like to use or are the standard Amazon offerings good?
A really nice car phone mount with Qi/wireless charging was great for me. I've hated most of them I've used, finding them flimsy or just awkward. With this, I just throw my phone on there and go.
A coffee maker and a pair of motorcycle jeans. The coffee maker is extremely easy to use (with capsules and a single button), while the jeans is something I was considering for 15 years, I always thought they are too expensive but then I bought it and found it extremely versatile, comfortable and safe.
Bought a LiDAR based vaccum cleaner from Amazon over holidays for $250. It does both mopping and cleaning. Our house stays a lot more cleaner, I didn’t realize how much it would add to quality of life not having to do such chores. It does a decent job and goes back to charge.
A Moto M2 audio interface. Having a dedicated volume for my microphone is very useful and it has independent headphone and speaker outputs. I has great out of the box Linux support
Most people who own a dedicated DAC would probably be just fine using this IMO.
My automatic cat feeder will likely be the most useful of 2023.
I am not trying to derail the conversation, but I just have to comment on the product you listed.
I am clearly not the target market (I think?), but that marketing video on their home page “describing” what this is, has to be one of the worst marketing videos I have ever seen. I watched it and still have no idea what it does. I am guessing it allows you to switch the app that you are streaming? I give up…
EDIT: I am getting downvoted but I am going to leave this up. I am really not trying to be overly negative, but I feel like this is a missed opportunity for a company that has clearly created something creative that appeals to a certain market niche.
I know that sometimes it is hard for someone that is passionate about their product and wants to create good marketing material, but has a hard time describing things to those “outside” their circle. Hopefully they see this feedback and can use it to further expand their product’s reach.
It allows you to program macros for streaming. Things like reconfigure your screen share, change the audio input levels and source, anything that you can imagine a television producer might want to do for their broadcast.
It presents an array of hardware buttons with small displays in them to let you do all of that easily in a live broadcast environment.
I bought the MZOO brand off of amazon and like it over the other brands I've tried. Taking a 20 minute nap in the late afternoon helps my late day productivity that it makes up for the 20 minute nap. My original intuition was that with my eyelids closed how much darker can it be to have an eye mask. The answer is: a lot. Put on this mask and close your eyes for a minute or two, then remove the mask while keeping your eyes closed. It is like someone is shining a flashlight on your face.
These are inexpensive but they work well and I find the strap to be comfortable. The main differentiator vs some other brands is there is a big cup around the eyes. While sleeping (or trying to sleep) your eyes still dart around, and it is very distracting to have your eyelashes sweeping against a flat eye mask.
Another brand that is inexpensive and is even darker is from "Albatross Health New England". It completely removes even the small amount of light that leaks in, but it has to be worn tighter to get that seal. The main thing I don't like about it is when adjusted for my particular head size, the adjustment buckle is sitting right behind one of my ears and if I am on that side it is uncomfortable. But for $10 it is worth a try:
A solid computer chair mat that doesn't bunch up or shed. $15 wireless phone charger.
I don't buy anything, but these basics helped. Things over that amount that I think would be meaningful - good vacuum, good screen, good chair. Renting dumpster to throw away junk.
A sleep blindfold with Bluetooth headphones built in. It helps me stay asleep until the alarm goes off, and listening to ambient music helps silence the thoughts that used to keep me up all night.
An electric under-blanket - you can lower bedroom temperatures (saving money at current European gas prices) and be quickly cosy in bed. Pair with a plug timer and wake up cosy, too.
Peak Design mobile case + magnetic desk stand charger + other mounts. My phone is now always charged and I can transition from desktop to car to tripod to bike seamlessly.
I purchased a $100 Insignia TV off Amazon and a stand for my trainer bike setup. Cycling workouts are far less tedious with YouTube or Netflix in front of you.
Based on recent reads (will edit if I remember more):
* "Daros" by Dave Dobson https://www.amazon.com/Daros-Dave-Dobson-ebook/dp/B0946C153P - At the heart of the plot was a powerful artifact with different groups vying to gain access for different reasons. The humor, especially the chapter titles, worked well for me. Features mysterious creature, a sassy AI, a fast paced plot with good amount of action, etc.
* "Dim Stars: A Novel of Outer-Space Shenanigans" by Brian P. Rubin https://www.amazon.com/Dim-Stars-Novel-Outer-Space-Shenaniga... - Fun and filled with humor that had me laughing almost every page, especially enjoyed the slice-of-life feel in the first half of the novel
If you liked Dobson's book then I heartily recommend Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand", which I've read half a dozen times over the years with equal pleasure.
The Intel NUC platforms are pretty nice for my use case.
I use an old Thinkpad laptop with its docking station, and some Intel NUCs as my homelab devices and the multihead systems. The PCBs of the Intel NUCs have a 14V power port that can be used with a small step-up converter from eBay. As the docking station is also @13.9V, the same step-up converter can be used for it, too :)
The monitors were a different story, because it was a bit more complicated. Had to test their PCBs a little before I found out how the power circuit works (so that I don't need ~230V there).
Oh, multi-terabyte SSDs here, dirt cheap micro-SD cards there, no product in particular. It just blows my mind that I can buy many gigabytes of storage on a device the size of my pinky nail for the price of a non-fancy cheeseburger. The computer I first learned to program on had only 1k of memory and loaded data from a cassette tape.
$20 IEM is crazy good. I'm lazy to find out if $100 IEM is already above 97th percentile of human ears capability. A lot of illusion of great quality above p90.
In ear monitor, I believe. The "headphones" that some musicians use on stage to hear themselves. I have heard that you can get them custom made to fit your own ears for a perfect fit.
I've been carrying around my FlipperZero, but aside from playing with some NFC cloning haven't found much real use for it. What are some of the more fun things you've done?
It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids.
It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop.
The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes. Never have to check on the chicken (unlike a pan) or wait too long (unlike an oven). Mix them together and dinner is ready.