If it counts, definitely the Steam Deck. With that and emulators, it’s like having almost every game I’ve ever owned in one portable machine.
In a similar vein, I love my ps vita. Hacked, it’s an absolutely amazing console, and is able to boast the “actually fits in my pocket” award.
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
Sony wishing they didn’t make the vita is a double edged sword, because it also means you can be a completely obvious hacker, and Sony doesn’t give a singular fuck. And they still ban people for hacking on ps3, so it isn’t just age.
Yeah i have a modded psvita, scene is suprsingly active. You got ensō?
I have whatever I set up with when I hacked it tbh. I don’t really do much beyond transfer games onto it at this point
Have had mine for 10 years and it still going. The screen edges are a bit yellow but not a big deal.
I just got one so reading this makes me hopeful. Fallen out of love with gaming a bit in recent years
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.
Will do sir
If you like platformers Bzzt just came out and would definitely run on the deck. For roguelikes I’d recommend Darkest Dungeon, Hades, or Rogue Legacy. For a straightforward RPG with 3D models but pixel art I’d recommend Octopath Traveller 2.
I also recommend Dave the Diver as well, fantastic game.
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.
Omg same, but it’s been a rough year so this is my Christmas gift to myself I guess. Also glad to hear it’s helping you :)
It’s been great for getting to games I’m not sure I would have otherwise. Ori and the Blind Forest was the perfect game to play through on it!
I hope you have a better rest of the year and beyond. This year stank a bit for me too, but there’s been some good things as well.
I got a retroid pocket 3+ for emulators and it’s fuckin awesome. I feel like a steam deck may be in my near future lol
Along these lines, i’m thrilled with the ps portal as well. was only $200, but the ps online streaming is so good. i used to use it on ps4 on my ipad with an external controller from 1200 miles away at legit decent frame rate and latency.
ps portal’s display is crisp and beautiful, it looks so much more gorgeous than the steam deck (because all the rendering is done on the ps5), and there are some games that i don’t even really want to play on the big screen format that the portal has made awesome because they’re wonderful on handheld format.
best gaming purchase i’ve made in a long while
I came here to type that, so I’ll just upvote yours instead. Such a versatile device, the Steam Deck!
A bidet 💪 even a cheap one is nice.
After using a dedicated bidet for the first time, I was an instant convert! But the after market ones installed in existing toilets just aren’t the same. If I ever get the chance, I’ll be adding one to any house I own!
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 mean the stand alone ones built in beside the toilet.
Something like this
Ahh, yeah, I don’t like the notion of those. Never tried one but just conceptually it seems limited.
The kind I’ve got is just this, it’s super easy to attach to an existing toilet and is quite handy.
I’m Italian and I must support @FaceDeer 's point, these are standard in my country (and they should be standard everywhere, damn barbarians) and they are definitely better than a spray nozzle attached to a toilet. You can also use them for other things, like washing your feet.
So you have a dirty crack, you got to get up, and waddle through the bathroom with pants on your ankles?
Yeah, I’m wondering about that. I’m a filthy TP barbarian but, how exactly does one make this style of bidet work?
I think there’s confusion about which versions of bidet we’re talking about. The kind I’m lauding, the ones like a little shower head, are attached to the toilet you’re on. You don’t need to go anywhere to use them, just reach over and take it from its holder.
How do you guys use that? I’m guessing you live somewhere where it’s warm? That would be spraying ice cold water up my bum over here.
The opposite, actually - I’m Canadian. :)
All I can say is that if you’ve never tried a bidet before you’ll likely be very surprised by how little sensitivity you’ve got to cold water down there. It’s simply not uncomfortable or even particularly noticeable, either in my experience or in anyone I’ve talked to about it (which is admittedly not many - it’s not a common topic of conversation).
The hand bidet was super cheap and the shipping was free, so I figured “why not give it a whirl?” And it worked out great.
ill second that, i thought it would be a problem but decided to just endure the cold because i didnt feel like running power over to the toilet but turned out not to be a problem at all. if anything its sort of refreshing lol
How do you make it work though? You slip a hand behind you and aim at the crack at an angle so it sprays into the bowl?
Warning. Purchasing a bidet will ruin travel because you don’t feel clean the entire trip
I recently started carrying one of these in my travel kit. Absolutely recommended for just that reason.
As someone who speaks Spanish
culoclean
choking on my White Russian
Same here my friend! They nailed the name.
It literally saves so much water. 💧
How? Aren’t you using more water than normal dry wiping, which uses none?
It takes a lot of water and energy to make toilet paper. Well, a lot more than turning on my bidet for 10 seconds.
I would also add on that, unless you REALLY rocked that toilet, every poo becomes a single flush. Rather than potentially needing to double flush to avoid clogging it
While you’re shopping for a bidet also shop for an Australian toilet. The half flush saves a lot more water too but the proper s-bend makes everything a single flush even if you rocked it hard.
and by rocked it I mean you filled it with mercury for some reason
One of those is a bathroom remodel and the other is twenty minutes with a wrench in a rental
What’s this now? There are a number of US toilets that have the dual flush feature, but what’s this about a modified S bend?
Literally no other countries have problems with toilets clogging. It’s not a modified S, it’s a normal one
That’s my secret, I’ve got a 50 year old toilet with a five gallon tank. There’s nothing this bad boy can’t take down.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/DGyaFzRciMA?si=AAOU8yHrWBnT0ti4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ahh, that’s an interesting angle I hadn’t considered. I wonder if there’s a way to quantify the water savings this way, like a volume of water per TP roll or something. I feel like that could be a solid selling point to get more people interested in buying one.
I was curious a while ago and researched a little. Bidets are the environmental champ for butt cleaning.
Ten seconds? I think Mother Nature can understand if you wanna live it up a little bit more you know?
I spray my ass with the force of a thousand tsunamis—10 seconds is more than enough.
Hahaha well then what better experience can you have with an ebb and flow like that? That’s beyond living it up, and more like riding the storm 😆
What i mean is that you can save a lot of water by cleaning yourself using a bidet + bath sink instead of doing a full shower. 🚰
You don’t need to shower every day. 🚿
You don’t need a shower everyday just because your ass gets dirty. You need to shower everyday because the rest of you is dirty too lol
To add: not everyone needs to shower daily, either. I don’t have a physical job, I shower maybe twice a week. More than enough for me. Also use Aleppo soaps, because they keep you clean longer. High oil percentage.
There are very few people in this world in my opinion who shouldn’t be showering daily or at least every other day.
I can spend all day doing nothing and still reek at the end of the day. I’m sorry but you sound gross. Ain’t no high quality shampoo. Keeping the stink off you that long.
Sounds like you don’t have enough experience with talking to people about hygiene? I know many people who don’t shower daily and are perfectly hygienic and not smelly at all, me included, and my wife. Kids definitely usually don’t need to bathe daily either. Sometimes weekly is enough. Especially infants shouldn’t rinse too much, else they develop skin problems.
If you spend all day doing nothing and reek?? Sounds like a you problem. Probably genetic.
Research Aleppo soaps. Might actually help you!
Good luck, stinky! ❤️😊
Came to say bidet. I have the poor man version … 25 at Amazon. I suffer Everytime I have to go back to only tp when not at home. I feel like a savage caveman without one. Smearing poop is just nasty and uncivilized to me. I have used the fancy ones in Japan but really did not like the warm water. I prefer the shocking cold glaciar feeling of butt refreshes. To anyone reading this…get a bidet, ANY KIND… Try cleaning up peanutbutter from your arm with just paper to experience what we talking about .
Cold water tho
Gotta get a heated one
I find the cold water refreshing. That said, I’ve never tried a heated one.
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It’s hand crafted in Ukraine and it has a steel sculpture of Thors face adorned on the front.
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Bitchin’
Now that is a B1tchin’ cane.
I’ve been struggling with gout in my knee and ankle off and on. When it gets bad I’m almost immobile and I broke down and finally bought a cane to help me hobble around when it’s at its worst.
Mine also came from Ukraine and like you I wanted something with personality. I got an oak, ball top style stained cherry and I love it!
I got one made of holly, with a phoenix feather core. It’s very nice and supple.
did you pick it or did it pick you?
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Physical Therapy! Do the exercises/stretches. If you need to go back and ask a doctor for another round, do it. I get it though.
Sometimes KT tape can do wonders, but it really really depends. Personally, the best was with knees and arms. I wear a different kind of brace for my ankle, a Trilok, but there are apparently a whole bunch of similar ones now.
Other times you just suffer in silence…
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Dude do it. I dealt with chronic pain for way too long and just accepted it as hopeless. I had tried stretches and exercises on my own with no luck so I wrote physical therapy off as pointless.
Eventually I gave in and 6 weeks in to physical therapy my pain is like 80% gone. I started noticing improvements after a week.
Probably it doesn’t quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it’s much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.
wow that’s amazing. so it’s connected to all other PCs in the house? did you have to buy a lot of new storage?
I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven’t run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.
The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.
I bought a cheap low power minipc. Don’t know the numbers but having a 10yo desktop powered 27/7 can’t be that great for your power consumption.
The one I bought is an Intel Alder Lake N100 Quad Core up to 3.4GHZ, 16GB DDR5 512GB for €160.
I recently picked up a 13 year old dell inspiron to run my instance of home assistant and Plex. It was an upgrade from a shitty old Linux laptop that was literally falling apart. All I had to do was add ram (it only had 6gb and it wasn’t stable, so I maxed it out with 16gb) and I swapped the old slow HDD for a crucial SATA SSD and it’s been perfect. It probably pulls more wattage than necessary but it’s exactly what I need for now.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
I’m not the guy you replied to.
I originally stored my music in Plex and used Plexamp. I have a large playlist downloaded from youtube which caused horrible performance issues in Plexamp. Navidrome is pretty much a read-only service. It can only read metadata from the files, not add any or manage them. For me this feels safer to expose to the internet since my docker container only has read-only access to all of my files. Even if someone broke into the service for some reason, they couldn’t do anything to my files.
I don’t know if jellyfin has similar performance issues with large playlists since I already had navidrome set up by then.
Thanks! I don’t have too much music on it yet, I guess, so not sure on the performance. I do like that read only approach, though. Currently I’m running just the regular jellyfin app on my Mac. What made you use it in docker? It sounds like in Linux it’s a safeguard to prevent dependency issues but I don’t think that’s really a factor on mac
Mostly ease of management. I have a server on which I run multiple applications. If I don’t need something anymore, I can just purge the container. The directories used by that container are clearly listed in my docker-compose file so I never have to wonder whether I purged everything that is now unnecessary.
It also makes it very easy to deploy a new service.
Bidet for sure. A good one in the $300-400 range. It is such a gamechanger to always have a clean ass. And without TP, the toilet never clogs and you aren’t spending extra on TP. Also helps with hemorrhoids if/when you get those, as TP is really rough on your asshole/not good for you.
I still have some TP for guests, but with the dryer built in, it really isn’t needed.
Also, a bidet is a lifesaver if you like extreme hotsauces. Basically, it’s the only piece of daily furniture that makes me go “God, I’m so glad I bought this” for literal years since I got it in the pandemic. No cold toilet seat during winter. Heated seat that doesn’t slam. Hot water. Hot air blow dryer. Self-cleaning.
Came to say bidet, but I have the poor man version … 25 at Amazon. I suffer Everytime I have to go back to only tp when not at home. I feel like a savage caveman without one. Smearing poop is just nasty and uncivilized to me. I have used the fancy ones in Japan but really did not like the warm water. I prefer the shocking cold glaciar feeling of butt refreshes. To anyone reading this…get a bidet, ANY KIND… Try cleaning up peanutbutter from your arm with just paper to experience what we talking about .
Well, you can spend 300-400 or you can buy a “portable bidet bottle” and clean your asshole with warm water. You’ll still need to use some toilet paper (or maybe a towel) to dry, but you’ll be spending $15 more or less and you can carry it with you when you travel.
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 been using a 0.5L one for years now. Usually it’s enough, but there are times that when I dry (with toilet paper) I see that I need a little more cleaning and then I either finish with the paper or refill the bottle and try again.
i have a backpacking bidet (culo clean specifically) and I would say it gives mixed results. basically, you need to practice and develop a technique to “get the most” out of it in terms of water usage, how clean you can get, etc. I don’t have a normal bidet so i have nothing to compare it with and maybe my technique isnt so good. mine gets me mostly clean but i still need a square of toilet paper to make sure in almost every case. better than not having it, but not the results I was hoping for.
How well do they self-clean? How often do you need to clean it manually?
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.
A countertop water boiler. It turns out I go through just about 4L of tea a day and now I spend a lot less time boiling water. And when you refill it and it comes to temperature it plays Fur Elise
edit: typo
You mean a kettle? How did you not already have one?
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.
Oh! Ok, you’ve sold me! :)
It also keeps the water still hot because they’re insulated.
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.
There are 240v outlets in the USA, but they’re usually only used for things with heavy power draw (clothes dryers, EV chargers, electric hot water heaters, etc). Some areas have 208v instead of 240v though.
But yeah, boiling water is slow in the USA and a lot of people do it in the microwave (whereas I never saw anyone ever do that in Australia). We’ve got a Breville espresso machine that has instant hot water, which is useful for some of the use cases we’d use a kettle for.
We use our breville for hot water too
This is kinda true and kinda not. Even on 110, an electric kettle is faster than a kettle on a gas stove. The real answer is that Americans just don’t drink much tea. My family is unusual in that regard.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This is kinda true and kinda not
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This video also proves my point. And he knows it. Nearly 5 minutes to boil a litre of water? That’s hilarious!
I just replicated his experiment, with an identical bottle of water in my kettle, and was surprised that it took 2:47 to boil. I honestly would have thought it quicker than that.
This isn’t about tea, either. In fact, I boil the kettle for coffee far more frequently than for tea. I would also boil a kettle to quickly get 2L of water for cooking pasta. But since I’ve just boiled it and it’s 10:30pm, I make peppermint tea. Ahhh.
Did you miss the part about how it’s still the fastest way to boil water? Yes yes, it’s slower than yours, we’re all jealous. Even still, we would all have electric kettles if we needed to boil water all that often because it’s faster than anything else we have. But:
- People don’t make pasta or rice every day, and even when you do you usually have plenty of time for it to come to a boil while you’re chopping or stirring or whatever. People who do make rice that often typically use a rice cooker.
- You can’t really boil enough water in a kettle to cook potatoes or vegetables or anything else.
- Coffee makers of most types typically boil their own water (yes there are pourovers and chemexes, but they aren’t that common and people who use them do buy kettles).
Nobody would buy a kettle for just cooking even if we did have more power delivery, simply because you don’t cook anything by boiling all that often. Case in point: my family drinks tea, and so we own a kettle, but tea is really the only time we boil water (in the kettle or otherwise) for anything on a daily basis.
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
What? I’m American and everyone I know owns one.
And Zojirushi sells parts for their appliances! So instead of having to buy a brand new boiler, I just got a lid for my 15 year old boiler. I’ll always give business to companies that support their products like that
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.
Edit: ok not a total brick but still…
+rep for Zojirushi. My water boiler lid recently began chipping and pretty much disintigrating and on their website I saw they even have replacement parts for discontinued products. Very cool of them
Example: https://www.zojirushi.com/app/spare_parts/item/8-CDQ-P010
fur elise? fleur de lis is the ⚜
Yes, thank you
would a raspberry pi count? i’ve been self-hosting a nextcloud instance and my RSS feed for a while now and i’ve really been enjoying it
Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.
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.
Heck yes. I never want to use the internet anywhere but my house because my husband installed a Pihole and it’s the best thing evaaaar.
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.
It’s pretty easy to put unbound on with pihole.
It’s even easier with AdGuard Home though, since it uses DoH via Quad9 out-of-the-box. People usually use solutions like PiHole and AdGuard Home because they don’t want to mess with it at the command-line, just via the web UI.
Steam Deck. Without question. I don’t think I would have been able to cope with the last year and a half of my life without it. This year has been very rough and I have been able to escape life while still spending time with my family. Top-tier psychological maintenance for me.
Same. Long Covid has me tied to my bed and with the Steam Deck I can at least get some gaming to pass the time. It’s awesome!
This one seems silly, but one really useful cheap thing I bought that I use much more than I thought I would is an electric kettle. (I should point out I’m in the US) I use it to make iced tea, my wife uses it for hot tea, and we both use it for boiling water for whatever cooking project needs it. We have a gas stove, and it takes about twice as long to heat up a liter of water as this kettle. It uses a normal US 120v outlet and I think it draws 1,000w. (Edit: I looked it up and it’s 1,100 watts)
A good pair of headphones and a decent amp and dac to power them. It’s like discovering music all over again.
My personal recs: Modhouse Argon Mk3, Hifiman Sundara, Sennheiser hd6xx
Any recommendations for amp and DACs?
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
A home server. Originally a Dell R710, now a custom built desktop.
If I can possibly self host something now I will do that over using big tech proprietary services. I feel free.
Same. I’m almost completely off the cloud at this point and I love it.
Just don’t forget backups! I use Borgbackup for mine.
I know some people don’t want a home server because of the space it’d take up, but you can get pretty powerful mini PCs these days (look for ones with an i3-N305 processor) or buy cheap second-hand ex-office PCs on eBay.
For people that still don’t want to have a physical server at their house, you can do a lot of the same self-hosting stuff using a VPS. If you live in an area with expensive electricity (like California or Australia), you can usually get a VPS with a modern processor, ~8GB RAM, and a decent amount of NVMe disk space for $5/month or less, which is easily what it’d cost you just for the electricity usage of a home server.
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 like GreenCloudVPS, and they’ve got a “budget” line that’s very reasonably priced: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale. They’re currently running a promotion where if you pay for three years in advance, you get double the RAM. I think they’re sold out of their cheapest one ($15/year) at the moment though.
RackNerd is good too. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/182479/official-b-l-a-c-k-f-r-i-d-a-y-thread-community-endorsed-take-a-peek-racknerds-black-friday/
A lot of hosts had good Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales recently so it’s probably worth browsing LowEndTalk and seeing if any deals are still active.
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How do you access it away from home. I’m able to access my NAS since Synology gives us a domain to use and we do everything using port forwarding. I would assume that if you set everything up by yourself, you would need to get your own domain and ssl certificates and everything?
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.
Last time I needed new headphones for going out, I bought a Shockz bone conducting headphone.
While the specific one I bought was the wrong choice (the Run I got is slick but needs a proprietary charging cable instead of the USB-C the Move uses, and they sound 100% the same), overall the concept is really good. I enjoy hearing people around me, for someone who more listens to podcasts and radio shows not music the quality is perfect, and I can wear these on my bicycle without having to worry I won’t hear something.
Also, since they don’t sit in the ear not enclose it it’s easy to semi-forget them there as they’re so comfortable, no stuffed feeling or sweaty ears. I sometimes just use them at home instead of shifting a podcast onto the sonos speakers. Just easier.
Yes. I love mine. I originally got some bone-conduction headphones to use at my job because I work in a high noise environment and they still work while you’re wearing earplugs, but I use them pretty much constantly now. It’s really nice to have my music or podcasts and still be able to hear when someone asks me a question, or to be able to hear traffic coming if I’m out walking or jogging.
I’ve had a couple pairs of them now and weirdly bone-conduction headphones seem to be the one electronic device that under promises on its battery life. I don’t know if maybe I just got lucky, but the cheap no name set I got off Amazon promised 5 hours, but even after a year still regularly lasts 8 or 9. My Shokz Open Run Pros promise 10 hours, and I routinely get 15 or 16 hours. So that’s nice.
Out of curiosity: did you ever test noise cancelling headsets in that high noise environment? I’d think that in-ear and over-ear nc headphones should work quite well too.
No, because active noise cancellation doesn’t offer any hearing protection. It doesn’t make the noise go away, it works by sending out an extra soundwave which is a mirror inversion of noise to be cancelled, sends out peaks where there were troughs and troughs where there were peaks, and they cancel each other out as far as your brain is concerned. But to work the destructive soundwave has to be as loud as the sound it’s cancelling, and now you have two sound waves blasting away, still moving air and putting pressure on your eardrums, and it’s that pressure causes the damage to your hearing.
Proper PPE has a passive barrier that physically blocks the bulk of the vibration from reaching your eardrums in the first place. Active noise cancellation does kind of the opposite of that.
I’ve heard of these for a while and general question for you and anyone else who’s looked. What are the red flags? Nothing comes without risks and years of research has shown the hearing damage from traditional headphones. There has to be a rub with these. What are the negative rumblings of using these style of headphones. They have to be there. We just don’t have the decades of research yet.
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.Agreed 100%.
Before I got my noise cancelling headphones, I was very aware of the volume that I have set when trying to watch a movie in a plane. After I got the noise cancelling headphones, I no longer have to set it that loud anymore.
That said, some airlines need to relook their volumes of their PA system. Some of them are shockingly louder than necessary. Lol
Yeah, I love my ANC earbuds. In pass-through mode, I can hear ambient sounds almost better than I can without them, especially on a bike where I can tune them to blank wind noise but allow voices and bells. And you’re right about not needing high volume to hear music well. They have great sound quality, and the ANC is indispensible on airplanes.
The downside is cost; GP’s bone-conducting headset is $90, and the other pair they mention is $60. A good pair of ANC earbuds starts around $200, and some of the better pairs are upwards of $300.
Worth the money, IMO, but if $60 is all you can afford, GP’s might be the better bet than super sketchy-quality cheap ANC earbuds.
What’s the frequency response like on those? Can you hear low-end bass in a way that sounds good?
Y’all this sound crazy, but the Bug A Salt is fucking awesome.
It’s worth it if you can get a black Friday deal or something under 30$ because it’s just a little salt when you shoot it and there’s no guts on your wall, no dirty fly swatter, no chasing, no jumping, no reaching, and you feel like a sniper hitman.
Its not a toy. That shit hurts when you get hit lol
Robot vacuum. Autistic and ADHD and could never keep on top of keeping my floor clean. But I can now!
Been looking at these for a while but I can’t seem to decide on one, any suggestions?
Roborock S8+ with the dock is awesome. It’s a straight upgrade from the last gen flagship Roomba.
Way better mapping and battery life.
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.
yh
Dereference this?
It means “yeah”
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.
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.
I personally like the Eufy brand ones. Bonus, they are in my experience very repairable and the company sells spare parts at reasonable prices 😊
These free up so much time. Love mine too. I cook a lot and mess around a lot in the open kitchen/living room area and had to sweep the floor daily…not anymore.
Flipper Zero - I’m not being devious with it. Yet.
Kidding - I bought it since I am a ham and I can find a dozen uses for it in the field.
It’d probably be worth it just to turn off the TV’s that blare ads at you at train stations and such if it can do that.
they had TV b gone years ago. I’d wager it is still around or has many improved copy cats.
I hear the modded firmware takes all the restrictions off, and you can broadcast in a greater range, for car remotes, as well as read more from RFID, like credit cards. Not that I would know of course
I’d have a ham sandwich
Ham here too, what practical uses have you found? Mine is sitting in a box, I got it almost a year ago and haven’t checked the latest firmware or apps in almost that long.
Any idea if they ever go on sale? $175 seems a bit much for what it is.
