What is a fun gadget you have purchased that has added value to your life?

Similar here: Anbernic RG280V. Fits in a pocket. Plays everything up through PSX. I use it all the time!

Such a cool console. Sony butchered it, but theres still so much fun to be had with it. We got a GTA san andreas port by the community ffs

Yeah i have a modded psvita, scene is suprsingly active. You got ensō?

Have had mine for 10 years and it still going. The screen edges are a bit yellow but not a big deal.

Check out “Dave the diver”. I’ve fallen out of love with gaming as well and I’ve been dropping a lot of hours into this game on my steam deck. Super unique and easy to pick up and put down. Feels fresh.

Also just ordered mine. Since I started working fulltime remote a year ago, I found myself not wanting to spend more time on my desk after work. That translated into me almost giving up gaming even though I used to love it. Moving to a place where I can have a second desk would cost me one Steam Deck per month so I just went with a Steam Deck lol

I got one recently too, and it’s already helping me with this. I hope you find joy in it :). I never buy myself anything so I was worried I’d regret it… but I really like it so far.

You mean those handheld bidets like a tiny shower head on a flexible hose? I actually much prefer those over the ones mounted inside the toilet bowl. I can aim them wherever I want, and I find it handy for all kinds of non-bidet things - you can hose things down in the tub or sink next to the toilet, for example, or use it to clean the toilet bowl itself.

I recently started carrying one of these in my travel kit. Absolutely recommended for just that reason.

https://culoclean.com/

How? Aren't you using more water than normal dry wiping, which uses none?

I find the cold water refreshing. That said, I've never tried a heated one.

I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven't run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.

The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.

I'm not the guy you replied to.

I originally stored my music in Plex and used Plexamp. I have a large playlist downloaded from youtube which caused horrible performance issues in Plexamp. Navidrome is pretty much a read-only service. It can only read metadata from the files, not add any or manage them. For me this feels safer to expose to the internet since my docker container only has read-only access to all of my files. Even if someone broke into the service for some reason, they couldn't do anything to my files.

I don't know if jellyfin has similar performance issues with large playlists since I already had navidrome set up by then.

Have you ever used one of these? I thought about getting one for backpacking trips; TP becomes a major consideration on those, and - frankly - I often have all the time in the world to wait, and airdry, and enjoy the view. At least, on summer trips. But I've wondered how well they work in practice.

I've cleaned it twice just to feel good about it, but it's been sparkling aside from some hard water deposits, which came off pretty easily. It always runs water over it after use, and the nozzle angle is so steep, it doesn't get poo on it. I have a toto one. (I've had mine since about mid 2021)

I still clean the toilet seat and the underside of the seat though, which can get a bit of pee on it if you're a guy. I'm a bit of a clean freak too, so when I say clean, I mean clean, lol.

Very uncommon in the US at least.

They're a little different. Kettles are small (1-2 liters) will heat water until it's boiling and then shut off(or have the user disconnect the heat source)

Water boilers hold a larger amount of water (3-5 liters) at a consistent temperature with a button to dispense it.

I upgraded from a kettle to a zojirushi water boiler and I've never looked back. The thing is incredible. Absolutely worth the price.

It's because the USA power standards are not suitable for kettle life. The 110 voltage on their power means it takes ages to come to the boil. The idea of putting a few cups of water into a kettle, pushing a button and having boiling water inside a minute does not exist.

That's why these tabletop things are useful: yes they take ages to initially boil, then they maintain that temperature. 110 volts is fine for that task.

No, these devices hold water at the appropriate temperature for long periods of time using extremely good insulation. They provide hot water on-demand after reaching temperature and are used in a way that is somewhat different from kettles.

No, I mean the things I linked to. They're like small countertop hot water tanks. I also do have multiple kettles.

In the US most do not own a kettle

While that is true in this case, I do remember a post about one of their rice cookers that bricks itself when the CR battery dies, that requires a soldering iron to replace.

Found it

Edit: ok not a total brick but still…

Yes, thank you

Ditto on the Arduino. I built a pickup winder for electric guitar, and it's more than made up for its price in entertainment alone.

AdGuard Home is better since it supports DNS over HTTPS, which prevents your internet provider from seeing and intercepting your DNS queries (which they can do even if you use a third-party DNS service like Google or Cloudflare). You can get DoH working on PiHole but it's a lot of manual work.

Boiling water is only for pasta to Americans

Most Americans don't drink tea. The only things that I know they are used for are tea and instant noodles.

I wonder if they're more popular now. I took this in a Walmart in California. https://imgur.com/d5ae1Po Although about half of those are not electric!

Why don't Americans use electric kettles? https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c?si=t7nyeDTJIuVDfsQq

Most Americans have a coffee pot instead of an electric kettle. Coffee is a cultural staple in the US. Tea is not.

Why does America look like poor Poland villages

Can't say I know what that looks like, but the US is a big place. There's a lot of different looks to it.

But even poor Poland Villages have electric kettles.

We do have them. You can get one at nearly any big box store. They're cheap too. Most Americans still don't own one because we have no particular need.

This is where the 120 volt power makes it a little worse for us Americans. 2200w would be 18 amps, easily taking most of the power on a breaker.

If kettles ever got more popular in the US maybe they could put 240v outlets in kitchens for kettles, but that would be a huge change.

At 110V that's a 20A kettle. So you aren't getting that high of wattage kettle in the US. Most standard US residential breakers are only 20A (some are only 15A) and they aren't designed to continuously run near the max amperage so the biggest we can run on a "normal" circuit is probably around a 1760W kettle but it would also have to be the only thing running on that circuit at the time.

I want 135 degree water.

Unfair! We in Europe can't have that!

I got a Topping E30/L30 stack but you can't go wrong with a JDS Labs Atom stack or a Schiit Magni

I use the older version of this Xduoo XD05 if I'm going "mobile".

Apple USB C dongle + Schiit Heresy is my combo, I love it

Can you recommend a good VPS service? I've been meaning to get a Synology, but it's out of my budget for now.

I have a domain name on cloudflare DNS, Let's Encrypt certificates that auto renew and an Nginx reverse proxy pointing at the services I host. Port forwarding through the opnsense router for https.

It's been a journey setting it up, but its basically been unchanged for about 5 years now and works well. If I need to I can VPN in too.

I setup my own VPN using this on a raspberry pi. Using the ikev2. I like DietPi for the OS.

https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn/tree/master

Out of curiosity: did you ever test noise cancelling headsets in that high noise environment? I’d think that in-ear and over-ear nc headphones should work quite well too.

If I now say that your premise is wrong (headphones don't cause hearing loss, loud noises do, independent of the source), does that automatically answer your question? 😛

Now to dig a bit deeper into that, there is a lot of research into MIHL from using PLDs, and the key thing is always people turning up the volume higher than they normally would, usually due to the context of where they are. That is, we use our little headphones in noisy environments, and to drown out the noise we turn them up too much and start damaging our ears over time.

In that regard, bone conduction headsets are worse. They are intentionally fully open, and don't in the slightest bit try to reduce ambient noise. That is, if anything you'd be tempted to crank them up even higher.

I will however say that the models I've used all came with an interesting "safety" in this regard that stems from the way they work: At a certain and not that loud noise level, they start vibrating physicially off the skin during playback, in turn plateauing the achievable volume. I suspect however that this level is already beyond healthy.

So, in other words:
If you're concerned about hearing loss, keep the volume in sane reaches. If you also need to ignore outside noise while listening, this means getting enclosing and/or noise-cancelling headphones, not open ones like bone conducting. However, if keeping the volume low, say during listening at home, bone conduction is no different from other forms of receiving audio, both still stimulate the hearing canal hairs.

I've had a look, not purchased, but watched a lot of review videos and I'd recommend you to do the same as no one here is going to have really tried all the different models available.

Unfortunately, the price does seem to correlate with the quality and performance and the most expensive auto vacuums cost in the £300 region. They also will never be as powerful as a traditional upright, can't do stairs and of course you still have to empty them and take them up and down the stairs to do the different floors of your house. But yh, the price is the biggest reason I've not gotten one myself.

I had Neatos for years. They worked great until they didn't; I always had to do a lot of troubleshooting. Now I have a Wyze vacuum, which I think is a rebrand of a larger Chinese brand. It doesn't clean as well as the Neatos, but it's had no problems so far, and it was much cheaper.

There's plenty of reviews out there if you want to get into it, and it does seem like some of the more expensive ones out there have some really nice features. But if you've been on the fence for a while my advice is to pick a well reviewed affordable one and go for it.

Once you have something cleaning your floors you'll have more time to research which one is the ultimate vacuum.

Roborock S8+ with the dock is awesome. It's a straight upgrade from the last gen flagship Roomba.

Way better mapping and battery life.

https://us.roborock.com/pages/roborock-s8

I personally like the Eufy brand ones. Bonus, they are in my experience very repairable and the company sells spare parts at reasonable prices 😊

Get a Valetudo supported one. There’s no need to share your room layout with random strangers. I’d get one of newer ones from Dreame.

I have a Roomba j7+ and I love it. I also have a Braava Jet M6, so mopping is taken care of too. The mopping is slow, but it's quiet and it's not like I have to wait for it.

How much salt do you think it shoots lol fr tho it's just a little for each shot

Old farm houses don't really seal well enough to make that matter for me lol

I think my window isn't sealed correctly in one of my rooms because somehow bugs can all come in even though there is a screen. It's frustrating because it means I can't leave them open for fresh air at night.

I pop the ones on the screen from the inside out to let off some steam from time to time. Yell out a random movie quote with accent before going to town! ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)

That's fair, but no fun and still bug guts.

If you use temu there is a knock off for 7$ us on there

they had TV b gone years ago. I'd wager it is still around or has many improved copy cats.

This year, my partner and I traded our large "traditional" vacuum for a robot + cordless stick vacuum.

Honestly, a great decision. Robot vacuum runs once a weekday, house has never been cleaner. Anything it doesn't get, we can quickly grab the cordless for.

I almost exclusively print functional things so here's my list of things I've designed or printed:

• Tubular key to bypass paying for laundry
• Furniture leg extensions on almost all my furniture to give minimum 4" clearance for the robovac
• Custom mounting bracket / spacer for mounting road sign to the wall with command strips
• Tapestry mounting shim to clamp tapestry in binder clips to hang on the wall without ripping the tapestry
• Rubber band powered sandal holders that stick to the wall and clamp onto sandals which can be used without using your hands / while holding something (I needed to keep my basement sandals from being eaten by my old robovac and I needed to be able to put them on and put them back without needing to put down anything heavy I'm taking to/from the basement, and the space required it to be flat against the wall)
• Replacement shelf pegs for bathroom shelves which are normally only sold in 20 packs for >5$ when I only needed 1, the print cost like 1c instead
• Replacement D-slotted electrical box key since the one that came with the box broke
• Backyard lamp holder that attaches to the fence pole and provides a loop to hang a lamp
• Replacement side panel clip for my PC case which came with 1 broken - manufacturer doesn't sell replacements
• Custom piece for 2 sectional couch legs to slot into which keeps the 2 halves of my couch from sliding apart causing someone to fall in between onto the floor

Some of this could have been bought online but having a 3D printer really reveals how overpriced plastic stuff is. I rarely print something that costs me more than a few dollars in filament - and that's if it's a very large object, it's easily less than the shipping cost of an equivalent item alone, and small things can often only be found in large packs online while usually costing only a couple cents to print. And plenty of the stuff I print benefits from being able to be made custom and to the exact dimensions I need, for example the furniture leg extensions I made fit perfectly on the furniture legs and raise them up exactly as high as they need to be for my robovac to go under, not a centimeter more. A whiteboard marker caddy I made holds the exact number of markers I have / want to have and attaches under a light switch wall plate which I designed in order to avoid needing to attach it with command strips or screws (it gets clamped between the wall plate and the wall by the existing light switch screws). The first item I listed, the tubular key, was printed with the exact bitting needed for the lock (layer height of 0.05mm is enough vertical resolution for the key to work).

I dunno about other guy, but I came here to say 3d printer.

I've printed small plastic parts to fix the flush mechanism of a toilet for pennies. I've printed little utility items like hangers for parts to paint. Holders for dnd minis to make painting them easier. Storage boxes to organize small parts for various other hobbies. Giant realistic cock and balls turned into a trophy. Replacement parts for board games that have been lost or broken over the years. Custom dice towers and dice boxes for dnd dice sets. Etc.

The ability to see a need, take some measurements, and spend a few minutes in a cad software to have a replacement part that you otherwise can't find (or can't find by itself) is honestly amazing.

The simplest thing I printed is the one I'm most happy about, I had a power bar dangling beside my bed for all my chargers and I printed 2 small clips and it holds it great.

I printed bookcase supports, an air filter and tons of custom boxes for electronics. I learned the basics of SolidWorks so I could design stuff for my printer (ender 3 S1)

I've recently been working on a cube tomato project. I have those models up on my Printables account. I'm planning on uploading more useful stuff I print up.

https://www.printables.com/model/573244-cube-tomato-mold-v3

I use my printer for making replacement parts for things, and for making simple stuff I need like tools, and also for prototyping.

An example: I used to have this motorcycle. The mount for the taillight broke. A new one was $100, and it would break again the same way. So I measured the socket in the fender, measured the bolt holes, and designed my own, which worked flawlessly the rest of the time I had the bike.

Off the top of my head I made a ssd>hdd mounting adapter for my pc. A replacement clip to fix my headphones when they broke, a latch for a pet carrier, replacement part to fix a lamp to it's base, and a mount for a bearing my mom used to make a lazy Suzan.

Geometric frames of the same size and thickness to make a 3 tiered windchime from upcycled glass!

Shokz is a brand that makes them. I haven't had a pair but a student of mine had them and liked them.

Mine are Shokz, I've had them a couple of years now with no issues at all, the battery lasts for many hours, I've never had then run out for.my use case