Ask Lemmy

My Thinkpad T440p, its a reliable laptop that works amazingly. It may not be the most powerful but the keyboard is amazing and the build quality is better then any modern laptop.

RAM update. Doubling your RAM on most low/medium -end consumer PCs will noticeably improve responsiveness and multitasking.

noise canceling bluetooth headphones (Sony XM3s, in my case). They are always near me. Thousands of hours and I haven't even changed the earpads yet. I don't know how I lived without them.

Not very high tech, but I love it: a projector clock (an alarm clock that can project the time on a ceiling or wall).

Not having to turn over to see the time is extremely nice when I’m cozy in bed. I didn’t even ask for it - it was given to me as a gift. If you get one, be sure that the angle and orientation are highly adjustable.

Motion sensor and smart light switch. There are two rooms in my house with multiple entryways and awful light switch options, so without these I’d just stumble in the dark.

We also have it for our carport and it’s so pleasant for the light to automagically happen and then go off without needing to remember to change anything.

(And all of this done through local mesh and Apple HomeKit. We do not use proprietary services that can be shut down on us.)

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

I got a microwave with an inverter magnetron.

When you set your microwave to, let's say, 20% power, a typical microwave will cycle the magnetron, so that it runs at 100% power for 20% of the cooking time and is off in between. With an inverter, the actual power output of the magnetron can vary, so it's actual 20% power for the whole time. It does an excellent job of gently reheating things like sandwiches and cooked rice without drying them out or scorching. Also, if something has instructions written for a lower wattage microwave, I can just turn the power down until it's close to that wattage instead of doing calculations to modify the time.

Last January I got a new laptop that blows my desktop out of the water in terms of specs. I was dumb and decided to get a budget desktop because of all the USB ports and the disk drive it has. It was something like $300-400USD. My current laptop was roughly $1000USD before tax.

Had to remove the complete spyware win11, but otherwise it's been a great laptop (minus the few times I've either somehow broken MXLinux or broke KDE Plasma). Totally better than my old laptop as well considering I don't need to constantly charge my new one to keep the battery from dying and it doesn't have a lot of damage.

Going full homelab with a rack, battery backups, and 2.5gb backhaul on my home network. Absolutely game changing from an appliance management standpoint where any one node can go down for any reason and there’s a backup and replacement on hand in minutes with built in redundancy. Not to mention the learning and experience opportunities when setting up hardware and software services. Sure is sweet to have data redundancy and protections!

Stand mixer. It's so much easier to mix things now and I make less of a mess.

Egg cooker. Hard boiled and omelettes were already easy but the cooker made it even easier, with less water, and less cleanup.