Bidet. Not even the fancy ones. Like the cheap ones that are no more than $20-30. Every poop, I’ve got a squeaky clean butthole.
Almost never having to cram paper in between my buttcheeks is fucking heaven. No more shit smears!
Fitting username.
haha!
Totally agree; I hate pooping without it. Though I did upgrade a while back from a $20-30 one to this: https://luxebidet.com/pages/neo-185-plus-highlights
I took the old one off to really clean it and that sold me on this new flip up one.
I clicked on this thinking it was going to be a link to one of the $200+ electric models, but this is actually a relatively inexpensive upgrade I can get behind (pun?) It looks like it’s a lot easier to keep clean. Thanks for this.
I got a couple of these about two years ago. They work great and we’ve had no trouble with them. 10/10
I’ve been using simple cold water models for over 10 years now. But I really like this upgrade in design. Same basic simplicity, but it looks a lot easier to keep clean.
As someone with a currently chapped asshole, squeaky is not the kind of clean you want for it.
Used one for the first time recently. Seriously considering getting one of my own.
My Lumix S5 camera, it feels great to go from a micro43 camera to a full frame camera, though I am allready looking at the Sony A7 IV as a complement to my S5 due to it’s superior autofocus…
RAM update. Doubling your RAM on most low/medium -end consumer PCs will noticeably improve responsiveness and multitasking.
Recently had my RAM died on me and bought a new pair. I had a 16gb and the 32gb ones were on sale. Really felt the difference lol
I’ve literally never felt the need for more RAM, except on an old netbook that had 1GB and struggled with opening a website.
Clearly you haven’t had the joy of having 10 tabs on Firefox, a film playing on VLC, the torrent client running, and trying to open up a large Solidworks assembly file on a 16GB Windows 10 PC. It gets eaten up fairly quickly.
No. I can’t look at 10 browser tabs, a film, and a Solidworks assembly file at the same time, so doing that makes no sense to me.
GPS was life-changing. (Yes, I am that old.) It used to be necessary to find printed maps of wherever you were going, which wasn’t always easy. Then you had to figure out a route. The hardest part was often the last bit of the trip, since you weren’t likely to have a detailed map of your destination city. An if you got lost, figuring out where you were was sometimes quite difficult.
People tend to think of it as mostly affecting longer trips, but finding new addresses in a city was at least as much of an issue. When I lived in the bay area I had a Thomas guide that was 3/4" of an inch thick, just for finding my way around town.
First time I ever saw in-car GPS was arrive 2003 when I was hitchhiking in Japan. Heading the car just give directions was mind-blowing; it was like being in a William Gibson novel.
I worked as a delivery driver before GPS.
If you think looking at your phone while driving is dangerous, we were looking at a folding paper map.
I also had most streets in a major metropolitan area memorized.
But more times than I can count I navigated by the sun or the north star until I was back in an area I recognized.I gather that to get a London cab license you have to pass a test that requires you to know pretty much every street, alley, and major building in the city. I can’t imagine how long it would take to get all of that into your head.
GPS and navigation was a life changing thing for me as I am, how shall I put it, geographically challenged.
Give me the option of turning left or right and I will constantly choose wrong. I tested this with my family, who thought I was being dramatic and hyperbolic, and they witnessed my failures in all glory. Since then I am no longer allowed to ‘just wing it’ when we are on route…
My first “GPS trip” was using Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 on DVD-ROM with USB GPS adapter, with my WinXP laptop in the front seat powered by a 12v inverter from Radio Shack.
A buddy of mine was still doing this in 2015
MapQuest ftw! Did so many car trips that way.
Got lost so many times that way.
Better pray sweat/drink condensation/ANY moisture doesn’t get on that map, otherwise you’re toast!
I got lost leaving prom because I’d only had my license less than a year and didn’t know major highways. The printed instructions were illegible at night without your cabin light on, and that was dangerous too!
A Fujitsu Lifebook U9310x convertible laptop.
It’s my main computing device, which doubles as a tablet.
It’s light enough to take anywhere, has over 12h of battery on Linux, and holds up better mechanically than my Thinkpad.Smart lights. What a world of difference coming home to my lights being on either from them automatically triggering, or me turning them on remotely. Or, being able to take a shower knowing my lights will be able to turn themselves off on whatever timer I set. It’s been an excellent expereince
Light timers have been great. I feel having the ones in my bedroom work like a daylight alarm has been very helpful, and as you said, you never come home to a dark house, which is helpful if you’ve got arms full of groceries or such.
Also the smart thermostat in conjunction with smart outlets lets me turn on the room fans and AC when I’m on my way home.
Even having the ability to change color temp is nice so you can have harsh bright white if you need to see something you’re working on, but the majority of the time you can have nice warm or soft light.
I’ve been in the home automation business for over 25 years. Can confirm that smart lighting is the absolute best investment.
I’ve installed and programmed lighting systems for over $100k but have personally spent less than $250 for Ikea devices for my apartment. Just the ability to dim and set the color of the lights at certain times of day is key for me.
Controlled Lighting isn’t only about convenience, it’s about setting a mood. You can set a warm dim scene to be more calming or a bright white scene for cooking or cleaning.
I’m curous about these, how is the privacy on the apps? Having my data mined from my lightbulbs is my last consideration against taking the step tbh
Not linked to your identity…
…
Identifiers…
This seems contradictory. I’ll avoid them for now, thanks!
I’ve been looking into some smart lights!
But I’m a bit confused, what do you use them for in the shower?
Not “In the shower persay” I have the Phillips hue lights and I have a set of them in my bathroom With Alexa, or any app to access them, I can set timers on the lights meaning I could have a 30-minute timer while I’m in the shower or whatever else I’m doing. They turn themselves on, turn themselves off.
Oh now I see what you’re saying, thanks. Yeah I thought maybe there was something about showering I’d been overlooking all these years lol
A small vacuum and mop Roomba clone. Having two dogs leaving fur everywhere made vacuuming every day a necessary chore but now I only need to empty out their base every day and they take care of keeping the floors clean. I don’t have them connected to my Wi-Fi though so hopefully that helps mitigate any hacking attempts.
The Scooba? I was thinking about getting one of those. How do you like it?
They stopped making Scooba a long time ago. Broke too much.
The vacuum’s a Matrix Shark and the mop’s a Narwal something or other. Aside from them getting stuck in corners or entangled in wires once a week they work great! A little wire management and careful furniture placement lowered the chance of that happening again. One dog pretty much ignores it and the other eyes it with suspicion and wouldn’t be in the same room it’s running in but otherwise I haven’t had any big issues yet.
Upgrading my computer’s primary storage from a hard disk (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds.
Buying my first cell phone, which was a Nokia smartphone, in 2003. Having email and useful applications in my pocket, including maps and web search.
I feel like the sheer jump in performance from throwing an SSD into an old system was akin to what people would have expected from the “download more ram” scam ads of the 00s.
TBF, before win95 there was definitely legit software that you could buy (not download) that would compress memory, amongst other tricks, to effectively give you more RAM.
himem.sys
QEMM was the shit!
Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds
Pretty sure we don’t have such an young audience here on lemmy haha
I’m pretty young, this place is definitely full of old people though
Pretty sure one of the devs is still in high school.
I upgraded mom’s PC from HDD to SSD, no regrets
I was thinking and nothing was to big a deal but you are right. ssd and before that optical mice were major upgrades relative to price (price being the factor when I finally bought them.)
With encryption it still takes a bit, but I love the silence.
I find that my M.2 SSD (with Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC) is weirdly slower at booting up than my SATA SSD (Win 10 Pro) was. I’m not sure why, since the hard drive itself should be faster. BIOS itself seems to be slower.
I also can’t currently get it to even start if I have a hard drive plugged into the power supply and any of the SATA slots on the motherboard. IDK why. It reads the hard drives when I have them plugged in to an external bay and connected with a USB cable. It’s super-frustrating. I’ll try a SATA SSD and see if I have the same problem. If so, then I guess I’m stuck using M.2 drives. :(
You may have an issue with the boot order in your bios. Might be worth looking into. Your bios may try to boot from every other device connected to it before it tries the M2 SSD.
There’s literally nothing else connected to it though; no USB drives, no other hard drives, etc. When I tried to plug in my old 2tb 7200rpm drives from my last computer, it wouldn’t even power on to boot up.
Doesn’t matter, it will still scan for those devices
induction cooktop? I’d say dishwasher but that’s probably more plumbing and pumps than “technology”.
With all the other gadgets, I’m not so sure. I’ve had computers, laptops, phones for ages. Of course my first everything back in the 90s or 00s was a big thing. But since then it’s just the newest generation, a bit faster and with more extras, but noting substancially different.
Induction cooktop is a game changer. Water boils even faster than with gas, you have much more precise control over temperature, and you can still handle the metal cookware while it’s on the heat. Absolutely love it.
I have an induction cooktop as well and I do have one complaint about it. It uses capacitive touch to adjust the temperature instead of a knob so I spend far too long tapping it buttons to get the temperature set right whereas with a knob I could have just turned the knob.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t like touch buttons on devices like this either. Fortunately mine has temperature control knobs, but all the other buttons are capacitive. Still worth it imo, but definitely annoying.
Sure. I don’t know why they design most of them like that… I really can’t be bothered to tap nine times to turn it on. I went to quite some stores and decided on one with two capacitive slider fields. That’s perfectly fine. I just tap somewhere at that slider and it’ll be 1-9 (boost) depending on how far left or right I touch it. Or I swipe. Main thing being, it just takes one tap. Except if I use more than 2 pans, then I have to choose which plate the sliders apply to. Yeah and it’s still the same inconvenience as with every capacitive control field and you can’t place a box of pizzas or anything wet or metal on top of the controls or it’ll complain and start beeping. I learned to place things behind the controls, but guests regularly get scolded by the cooktop.
If I had to make a wild guess as to why it’s designed that way? Cleaning flat buttons seems way easier than cleaning knobs. And no moving parts. Maybe more resilient (can be made with cheaper parts) considering the flimsy electronics that would be underneath the knobs compared to the more industrial (robust?) kind under an electric range.
I’m… Skeptical. Mostly because I have a lot of cast iron and love it, and I’m not sure how well they’d work with induction burners. And also because I want to get a wok burner (yeah, the 100k+ BTU monstrosities) for doing stir-fry, and I’m not sure that the realistically affordable induction wok burners are going to manage that.
Cast iron is fine with induction.
cast iron is pretty much perfect for induction.
for the wok: try it. Technology Connections did a video about them recently.
Basically: They should be fine. But it really depends on your stir fry style.
The somewhat good ones should be capable to get the heat into the wok. Keep in mind that a giant about of heat is getting lost on those burners. Not everything will heat the wok
Yeah, cast iron should work well. I also like the usual stainless steel or non-stick pans. I mean these get hot and cold almost immediately and I have good control over temperature. A heavy cast iron thing is made to store the heat and not do that. Depends on what someone is trying to achieve.
And something that doesn’t work are things that aren’t flat at the bottom. You just can’t have a wok that is completely round and put that on a flat surface. And also thin metals don’t work. So maybe use another cooktop for that. We own a wok that has a flattened bottom. But I don’t really like cooking with that thing. Not sure if it’s me or the wok.
There exists special wok induction stoves that have an indent for the wok, with the coils around it
Yeah, I’ve looked at those, briefly. I’m not sure if they would fit my wok, which is very thin cast iron (yes, actually cast iron, not a spun carbon steel wok). Hence the reason I want to get a wok burner that I’d end up needing to use outdoors.
Cast iron like everyone else says works very well with induction, it’s pretty much the ideal material. However, unlike with a steel pan, you want to start on the low side and warm the pan up. It likely won’t cause issues immediately but if you frequently go straight to hot with a cast iron pan it can ultimately lead to the pan warping.
That’s good to know, and not something I would have expected.
Steam deck finally got me working through my steam backlog again.
Might have played everything before I die now
Is it as good as they say? I really want one
I don’t use mine super often but every time I do I’m glad I have it. It’s a very nifty machine, and you’ll find excuses to use it.
The Steam Deck often feels criminal to me.
I used to be into game console hacking, and because you were going outside the walled garden, everything was always unstable and your butthole would clench every time you did something new.
Then there’s the Deck, which is just. Not a walled garden. It’s a full computer that doesn’t antfuck over what you do with it. I’m finally playing a bunch of titles from my Steam Library, yes, and it IS neat that Steam Cloud synchs stuff back to my PC so I can alternate between machines effortlessly.
But I also have mods on my games. And I have a bunch of tiny games like fangames and one-person indie titles from itch on it. And I ALSO have all my emulation stuff on it. AND sometimes when out travelling I don’t take a laptop, just the deck and a keyboard/adapter.
And a part of me looks at it with its comfy console form factor and says “… This shouldn’t be allowed. It’s too good to be true.”
Aw man I’m definitely going to get one, this sounds like a dream
As someone who buys a lot of gadgets and quite often barely uses them afterwards or has mild buyers remorse… I have never once regretted buying a Steam Deck. It really is an amazing piece of technology.
Yes!
Several things:
- Bidet. ‘Nuff said.
- automatic litter box. Took a lot of training for our one dumb cat but since then … life changing.
- ebike. So many times I used to drive because I was feeling lazy or woke up just a smidge late… now I can just dial up the assist a notch and it’s no problem.
Be careful which ebike brands to trust. Avoid Rad Power Bikes. Even though the brand’s American, its customer service and reliability’s a complete joke. I had a lightly used Rad Runner who’s battery died a little after a year of light use. Their warranty only covered up to a year and they said their only solution is to buy a new $600 battery that doesn’t even come with a warranty itself.
Gazelle. Sold by my local bike shop which I trust.
Little pricy and all in all I’d prefer something more open than Bosch. But… so far so good.
A good docking station plus KVM for a good work & home setup since the pandemic hit.
I can dock my work laptop when I work from home and have my two screens, ergonomic keyboard, mouse, webcam etc all attached in one go, then a single button on my desk to toggle to my gaming desktop and start playing without having to disconnect anything, reducing wear and tear on the connectors.
The next upgrade is Synergy (the software) so you can run both systems side by side with the same keyboard and mouse. Been using it for probably well over ten years now and it’s become something I can’t live without.
If I had a monitor to dedicate for each, sure, but I prefer using all my monitors for either systems I’m using, plus my work computer is on a dedicated network on a VPN tunnel so that wouldn’t work well for that anyway.
Which one did you get? I am currently looking for this for my home setup.
For the docking station I got a WD19TB from Dell provided by my employer, and for the KVM I managed to find this one that does 3xDP v1.4 to ensure it supports VRR (I’m only using two monitors, but it’s nice to have the extra capacity), has three USB ports (to plug the mouse, keyboard and webcam) and has an audio out + mic in so that my headset follows the computer I’m using.
I made sure to use good DP cables to make sure the capabilities of the KVM and my hardware are always met, and so far it’s been quite smooth.
A countertop water boiler, I have one of the Zojirushi 4 liter units. It turns out I drink 3/4 of a gallon of tea or so per day. So not having to boil a kettle for every round is oddly luxurious.
I usually microwave a mug for 1.5 minutes, but this could also be nice
Are you from the US?
What?
I remember Technology Connections doing an episode on the Electric kettle. Its fascinating. Microwaving is still the fastest around the house, but I like being able to make more than one cup at a time.
I actually did a little research and apparently it’s sacrosanct to a Britton to even suggest heating water in a microwave.
You are correct. I had a British coworker. He gave me the fish eye when I did it the first time. I personally don’t care as long as it gets hot.
I think you mean “Sacrilege” or maybe “Sacrilegious.” That means “The violation of something sacred.”
Sacrosanct means “sacred and beyond question,” which is related, but kind of the opposite of what you mean.
You’re 100% correct.
I have one close to this and it’s been amazing. Great Christmas gift idea too.
And they are super efficient, and insulated. If you have the counter space it’s a good kitchen tool.
Bidet attachment for a toilet. Absolute life changer.
Hell yeah bidet.
It’s sad how there are people out there who look down on the bidet. It really is a game changer. I still use toilet paper, but the process is so much cleaner and easier.
When putting it in, an older family friend (male) asked me, “oh you got that for your lady friend?” No…I want to save money and have a cleaner experience as a male.
Wait you have to put it in?
I have the “portable” kind where you can just put it under the toilet seat you have and it connects to your toilet’s water system that brings in water. It was about $30 off Amazon.
It is really straightforward, but my issue was that after I installed it, I had unknowingly unscrewed one of the components in the toilet and it was leaking and I needed some help to figure that out and get it fixed correctly. It was when I was screwing in the new T shaped pipe that it was unscrewing something in the toilet.
There are also the kind that can come built in a toilet, usually on the higher end toilets, or you can get one of the dedicated bowls that is like a secondary toilet seated next to your toilet too.
I hate bidet hate. If I upend a bowl full of brownie batter on a shag carpet, I’m not going to “clean” it with dry paper towels. Use your heads, people!
The downside to installing a bidet is I now hate pooping without the home court advantage.
Truth, it ruins you for all the other toilets.
Any recommendations?
Nah. Anything on Amazon should be fine
Ah, a person of culture. A most pristine brown eye.
Roomba.
I got a different brand, would love an open source one for sure, AND it’s amazing to have an actually clean floor pretty much ongoingly. One still has to do stuff to prepare for the robotic underlord; they don’t like string, or cords, afterall. or like them all too much.
