For me, it’s an electric toothbrush. It doesn’t matter if you go with Sonicare or Oral-B, once you start using an electric toothbrush, regular toothbrushes don’t ever feel like they clean your teeth properly. The smooth plaque-free top layer of your teeth that you can feel after using an electric toothbrush can’t be replicated with a regular toothbrush.
Wireless charger for my phone. No more fiddling with cables.
Some little wireless ear buds. I just got cheap ones but I use them all the time, they’re small, the case charges them, so they last ages. The sound quality of mine is mediocre, but I’m sure there are ones with better sound.
I love my wireless charger. I have an older iPhone with their stupid lightning port, no USB C for me. So instead I just use my wireless charger. No fuss with cables, put it on the pad to charge, pick it up to check something, put it back on. No fuss, no mess, perfection.
It’s a pricey one, but a kegerator converted to corny kegs. Infinite seltzer water.
Plus room for another carbonated beverage of your choice.
This is the answer right here. The ability to rock up and fill a quart size insulated tumbler with bubbly water on a hot day is literally one of the best things in my life right now.
I need to work on getting one of the corny keg lids that has a water input post plumbed to a water source and an internal float so it is self filling thus replenishing
Cotton floss, portable water pick, electric toothbrush.
You cant afford to have dirty teeth.
I haven’t been able to go to the dentist in over 25 years. I can’t afford to have clean teeth.
I agree with this. I have a friend who is a pediatric dentist and she said to get a sonic toothbrush and use it the rest of my life. It immediately made a difference and I credit it and regular thorough non-alcohol mouthwash rinsing with keeping dental infections at bay, which I was prone to beforehand.
If you’re in car land, a good solid jump pack.
I recommend Napa .
Mine is also a portable compressor, a flashlight, and it’ll charge your phone. And it’s way more powerful than jumping off of a small car battery using cables.
Those are great !!
I had a combo unit that was all of that, AND a car jack!! It was VERY slow and there’s no way I’d go near a car using it as a Jack, but as an absolute emergency it was useful
Does a bicycle count? Changed my life.
As a Dutch person I would assume everyone already owns at least one bicycle.
_At least _ one.
Pressure Cooker. I have one from Fissler and it’s my go to for so many dishes that normally would take ages to cook.
It’s also so convenient to throw dried lentils in there and have them ready in half the time lol.
I just got a pressure cooker as a gift and have no idea when to use it! I did read it makes chicken tender?
It does! I will admit it sucks to find good recipes that use it but you can just cook anything you want in it as long as it normally takes a long period of time. Think sauces, beans, lentils, meats, etc. Things that normally take hours can take 30 minutes for example. Rice is also great and easy to make in it if you don’t have a rice cooker.
So basically if a recipe calls for you to cook something for a long time - throw it in a pressure cooker! Reddit is a great source for info and your pressure cooker should have come with a manual on how long every ingredient should take to make.
I very often make a quick meal with bulgur and some veggies for example. Also try Indian cooking, a lot of it uses pressure cookers!
20 computers. I can’t stop getting more computers I need help there’s so many computers they’re in every room and they’re computing aaaaaaaa
Wait, when did I leave this comment?
Someone I know (who isn’t close to me geographically) said their laptop just broke and now they only have their phone… I wish I could get to them. I have like six computers waiting to be used for stuff, the rest of them I’m playing with/learning with!
You certainly won’t regret buying 20 computers.
I mean, they’re not 40 cakes or anything!
Oh I have this problem too hahah
I had this same disorder. I cured it temporarily by giving them away to everyone I know. Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, everyone’s getting a computer, doesn’t matter if you already have one.
They’re starting to pile up again though and now I don’t know what to do because all my friends and family won’t talk to me because I keep giving them computers.
Cordless drill. I was a die hard corded guy but then I tried a friend’s one during a big move. Went out and bought one the next day.
I also recommend a cordless impact driver. The amount of torque you can generate with a drill is limited by your ability to hold the drill. The amount of torque you can generate with an impact driver is magnitudes more. Great for driving screws, tightening nuts, I’ve even used it for drilling through wood with a spade bit.
I really don’t like the proprietary batteries each company use for their cordless tools though. I don’t want to be locked into 1 company and I don’t want to buy 8 different batteries.
I wanted to punch someone when i realized my Bosch drill and Bosch electric saw use different batteries. They’re identical in size, but the plug part on one is a mirror image of the other and so not interchangeable
While I agree that vendor lock in sucks, getting a universal standard open source tool battery is not likely to happen. I decided to go with the Milwaukee M18. They have a huge variety of tools available, and they all use the same interchangeable battery. I have a drill, an impact driver, a circular saw, and hedge trimmers.
I also agree, but to take it further, I decided I’d had enough of cables on my circular saw. Got a small, lightweight one, and omg, it’s SO good.
To be fair, the early ones were pretty crappy compared to what they have now.
At the start, you really couldn’t use it for real work. The convenience came at a huge cost.
These days all but the most extreme tasks can be done with cordless.
There’s actually a pretty cool community sort of tangentially related to this! !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
Anyway, my pick is definitely just a GOOD mp3 player. Whether that be an open hardware one you can crack open and repair, a proprietary one that can at least be Rockboxed, or bare minimum a proprietary one with a good iFixit rating.
What’s the advantage over a smartphone?
Durability I imagine. My 10+ year old MP3 players still work fine. My phones from 5 years ago don’t.
For me, the primary benefit is that it’s NOT my smartphone. Music is a separate, intentional thing, divorced from the pocket distraction machine. YMMV.
Also wondering this, VLC can run so many formats too
- Better quality DAC
- Don’t have to drain my phone’s battery
- My music collection is big enough to fill my phone’s storage, and they don’t come with SD card slots anymore
- Smaller and lighter than a phone
- Definitely will last way longer and is easier to
- My phone doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack 😭
That’s everything I can think of right now
well yeah. But most phones w/o a 3.5 mm jack don’t have an integrated DAC anyways, so the choice is up to you.
But the storage and the fact that it’s all in a light weight bundle, that’s indepedent of your phone is pretty convincing.
I remember having on, back in the day, that ran on a single AAA battery for a week an was marginally larger than one of these. Unfortunately I tinkered with trying to run it on an external power supply when I knew to little about electronics and ran a few too may Volts through it. Otherwise this thing would probably still work fine. I kinda never looked back since was content enough with my phone for listening to music. But I do have fond meories of those things, and I miss the 3.5 mm jack on my most recent phone, maybe I should reconsider…
Maybe so! If you do pick one up, you’ll have to tell us how it goes, I’m curious
I guess it’s not for everybody, but for my specific context it’s pretty great. I think if I did have a phone with expandable storage, a 3.5mm jack, and still had an unlockable bootloader I could run Graphene/Lineage/Postmarket/etc on, it could probably replace the music player easily enough. I’d probably still end up eating a lot more battery that way though
- Warm white christmas lights. Diffuse lighting is so much better.
- Induction cooktops. Because gas cooktops are toxic both inside and outside the home.
I found gas struggles to do low temps too, minimum power in the smallest ring is still too hot for rice unless you want to keep stirring it. Induction I just get it to a boil then leave it on low and it won’t burn without stirring and leave it for 15 mins.
Wake up light. If you live in places where is dark most of the time this is quite handy to initiate a sunrise…
I have one from Phillips, but it lacks more music tracks.
A Vitamix blender. Most reliable blender I’ve ever used and so many things you can make in it. Smoothies, nut butters, you can even cook soups in them.
They are on the expensive side, but the worst model refurbished is still well worth having and goes on sale from time to time.
Bought a tribit Bluetooth speaker. Now I have music all around the house and it doesn’t give a fuck what I do to it. Dropped it in mud? Ok I’ll throw it in the sink, it’s fine. Shower music is fantastic.
I needed a Bluetooth speaker for my work PC (I work from home). I got one with a radio tuner as well. I’m fortunate that I have several radio stations in my area that play music I like. I prefer having some music on in the background while I work, but I was getting tired of having to actually think about what I wanted to listen to next. So I’ve been listening to OTA radio quite a bit, and it’s a nice change of pace from streaming music. And it’s not like the radio bits added much to the cost of the speaker.
Edit: also eyeglasses (sure, I’ll count that as a “gadget”. I hadn’t been to the eye doctor in probably 20 years. Hadn’t really noticed any problems but wanted to get my eyes checked since I had just gotten insurance. Doc recommended a prescription and now it’s like seeing the world in HD instead of standard def. If you’re in your late 30s/early 40s and haven’t gotten your eyes checked, it’s possible your vision has slowly degraded over time and eyeglasses will help more than you realize.
