I bought a piece of 1.5 inch stiff foam to try to fix a sag in a bed. It didn’t work but having that thick piece of solid foam around has been a life saver.
Need something flat to put a laptop on? Throw it on the foam. Going to be doing something that requires you to be on your knees for a while? Get the foam!
It went from stupid purchase to something I’d gladly replace if it broke.
Got a bidet as a joke gift for Christmas a few years ago, it has been an absolute game changer. Hate pooping anywhere but home now, I actually feel clean, and use much less toilet paper.
When I worked at a small startup, we were moving to a new office and I was asked to help with the buildout. I engaged with the flooring vendor, and he came by one day to drop off a carpet sample. He put it on my desk where my mouse was. It was a rectangle sample of tight knit office carpet, about 18”x22”. When I got back to my desk, I just put my mouse on top of it and started using it as a mouse pad. That was 15 years and 3 companies ago, and I still use it as my mousepad. It’s perfect for the mouse to glide on, soft enough for my wrist to rest on, absorbent of sweat or drink condensation, and large enough I never hit the edge. I will never not use it. It is my mouse carpet, and I love it.
An oversized poncho cape from the local Goodwill. It was woven in different shades of blue and while I’d never wear it outside, I’ve used it as a wearable blanket at home for a few years now.
I found out it was actually hand made, and costs 300+ USD from the original shop. Bonus points, I feel like a wizard when I wear it
Here’s an odd one my wife and I were just talking about. Some years ago, we were redoing our kitchen and the contractor told us to go buy the kitchen faucet we wanted. We went off, looked at several, and picked the one we thought looked the best with what we were doing.
When the contractor went to install it, he opened the box and a battery pack fell out. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a faucet would need batteries. It turned out that you can turn it on and off by touching it anywhere (handle, faucet itself, whatever), you just leave the physical handle open and set where you want it, then you can touch on and off. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and we’d never use it.
Flash Forward to now and it’s one of the most used conveniences we’ve ever bought. All those times your hands are covered in raw meat or other cooking mess? Just touch the faucet with your elbow. Rinsing a bunch of veggies one at a time? Tap on, tap off. It works flawlessly, unlike those touchless ones at the airport: no delay and works every time. We will never have a kitchen sink without it - my wife wants them for the bathroom.
I needed a “lap desk” or something to put my laptop on, but I wanted it to be low-profile and I could only find a wooden cutting board. Now wooden cutting boards are the only thing I use as lap desks because most actual lap desks I find are super bulky.
A 3D-Printer, I thought I just play around with it and get bored, but you discover so many things that you can do!
The handle on the fridge broke? Print new ones. Need a Flowerpot? Just print one. The router needs a wallmount? I have one ready in a few Hours.
Also I can watch it print for hours, very fascinating and calming.
An ebike: I don’t even really drive anymore most of the time and it beats the hell out of being stuck in traffic. Getting around is fun again.
I always enjoyed cycling and still ride my MTB, but for getting around town quickly, ebikes are hard to beat.
Bug zapper flyswatter. Like you can buy at Harbor Freight for a few bucks. It might not be a terribly effective solution to the overall fly population, but in terms of grim-bloody-vengeance-per-dollar, it’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made.
Similarly - i love my bug a salt
I use it almost daily. Glad I bought 2, we stay strapped out here.
I bought like 10 of these at Habitat for Humanity and gave them out during a fly outbreak. Some of the neighbors looked at me weird (granted it was the first time I met them) but I’ll swear by these things. I hate killing bugs but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
My wife bought me a Beard Bib as a joke gift after I found it online one day. It’s basically a smaller version of the bibs you wear when getting your hair cut, but with suction cups attached to the bathroom mirror to hold it horizontal and catch stray hairs when using an electric shaver. It looks ridiculous.
I now use it every time I trim my beard, even if my wife still laughs at me every time she sees me in it. Cleaning up all the stray hairs was always a pain in the ass, but this thing does a surprisingly good job at catching 99% of the hair, and I can just brush it all into the trash when I’m done.
My bathroom has the worst-designed sink ever, with a tap that’s too long, a sink basin that’s too thin, and a medicine cabinet that means that if I want my beard hairs to fall into the sink while trimming I have to literally have my face pressed up against the mirror which is, of course, not something you can do while trimming a beard. I got one of these things too and it’s so good. 10/10, would buy again.
Cmon man, provide a link!
that product photo is fucking hilarious
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09FJZ9F5L/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A2CKC83T0MGN2W&psc=1 and a slightly cheaper version
Alternatively, get a mirror that hangs on the back of the door and shave in front of that (if using a buzzer that you don’t need to keep rinsing in the sink). It’s so much easier to just grab the broom or vacuum cleaner and get it all off the floor in two seconds than chasing stray bits of hair around your faucet handles and random objects on your counter.
Also, if you do have to clean up those bits of hair on your counter, use a piece of TP. Wet it a little so that hair sticks to it better, then either fold each wipe into the middle or start a new piece before doing the next wipe so it doesn’t just leave old hairs behind when you’re trying to pick up more of them.
Similarly, a nice fog free shower mirror for me. My wife would get so mad about stray hairs (it’s easy to miss some when it goes everywhere) Got a waterproof trimmer and started doing it in the shower - cleanup is super easy now!
Yes, same exact scenario here. My wife got me one as agag gift for Christmas, I used it and it makes clean up so much easier. I don’t know how much they cost, but I would say it’s worth $20!
Just shave in the shower? That’s what I do
My wife got me a fitbit. I resisted a little bit because I didn’t want to have yet another device to monitor, charge, and maintain etc. I’ve been really surprised and impressed and how effective it has been in subtly encouraging me to make some small improvements in my habits. Not a bad deal for $100.
Mechanical keyboard. Almost had no money back then, but wanted to treat myself. It costed 100$, and I regretted it the next morning. Felt like shit, but it was so cool to type on.
After 5 years, this metal-frame keyboard managed to survive many outside gigs, long travels, literal war, and it’s still with me. And I still love typing on it. Sometimes I code just to type. You can guess why I don’t use code completion tools.
Bed sheet suspenders. Dumb problem, stupidly cheap, horribly made, and ABSOLUTELY fixed the friggin sheets being yanked off the corner of the bed twice a night by my tumble-dry-medium sleeper of a spouse.
When they finally broke after almost 2 years I sewed some that’ll last 10 years and I don’t regret them at all.
Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.
Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.
The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.
Custom-made ear plugs. Even if you only wear ear plugs occasionally (I do when in a noisy hotel, or when a neighbor goes a bit too crazy), they are so worth having.
Basically you go to an audiologist and they put something kinda liquid in each of your ears to take a mold of your ear canals. A couple of weeks later, you have plastic earplugs that have the exact shape of your inner ears.
Upsides: • They work, always. I would typically use wax or silicon disposable ear plugs before that, and sometimes in the middle of the night they might move and let the sound in; those don’t. Also, foam disposable ear plugs don’t stay in my ear, don’t ask me why. • They never hurt. Since disposable ear plugs get shoved into your inner ear until they take the shape, they continuously push against the walls of your ear canals. I would often feel kinda bruised after using them for a long time. • They are crazy comfortable. Put your ear on a pillow, and you barely feel them at all. • But do they block too much sound? That’s up to you. Basically, you choose the level of noise you want to keep out, which I believe is achieved by using different kinds of plastic.
They’re not a trivial purchase (I think mine cost $150), but then you use them for decades, so it’s definitely worth it. It was a stupid purchase in my case, because I bought them on a whim out of anger against my neighbor’s party one night; but they’ve followed me everywhere since!
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This is me right now, I spent ~$2k on a bike 11 months ago instead of getting a second car for our household and had no idea if it would work out. At 1500 miles, almost all commuting, definitely worth the money. I back of napkin calculated that it pays for itself somewhere between 2k-3k miles with saved gas, wear and tear, etc. Also my wife wanted to buy a Tesla as a second car, and me leaving her the car during the workday has essentially saved us ~$45k in that respect. In better shape, eating better, sleeping better, and bike commuting has a lot to do with it.
It was kind of a stupid purchase for me because when I got it I wasn’t really into doing exercise or outdoor stuff.
Sigh… the notion that bikes are just toys or exercise equipment is such a harmful misconception, it’s ridiculous. Rather than writing a huge wall of text trying to explain the vast depths of how important cycling is I’ll just cite this blog post this blog post that explains it better than I can.
Of course, that article was written from an individual perspective, so even it manages to understate how important cycling is. Americans’ dismissal of cycling in favor of driving, and the car-dependent [sub]urban design that results from that choice, is the underlying cause for the housing crisis and all the other crises that stem from that!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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…not to mention the sprawl that makes not having a car difficult to say the least.
That’s by far the biggest issue (which I say not to diminish the others, but just to emphasize how bad this one is). The sheer space that cars take up in terms of roads and parking lots makes it practically impossible to design a city capable of accommodating them without ruining it for walking/biking/transit by having to spread destinations too far apart. We literally bulldozed thriving downtowns to make room for them (compare: Houston 1938 vs. Houston 1978)!
On top of that, cars are responsible for facilitating the literal Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. In short: subdivisions full of single-family houses with a lot of street frontage per housing unit generate less tax value per unit area than the infrastructure connecting them costs to maintain, making them inherently unsustainable financially (let alone ecologically, etc.).
Because Americans urban planners in the '50s had a hard-on for cars instead of taking bikes seriously as transportation, almost all of North America and increasing parts of the rest of the world are now fundamentally built wrong in a way that destroys health, the economy, and the environment all at once, and it’ll cost trillions of dollars to fix it.
I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: ditching bikes in favor of cars may vary well have been the biggest disaster in the history of the world.
