I’ll second the meat thermometer. I bought one a little while ago and find that it prevents me from overcooking things out of an overabundance of caution.
I bought a scale to start measuring my coffee a couple years ago and only recently realized I could be using it for cooking. Was definitely a game changer
Yep, got one. They’re lovely and read in one second and are extremely accurate, but a simple 4 or 5 second reader will do the job just fine for most applications. Those can be had for around 25 USD.
For me, an under-the-sink trash can that hands on the cabinet door has been a huge QoL improvement.
A back scratcher.
Much more situational, but our back gate has a padlock that was originally different from our house keys. Kwikset actually sells “programmable” padlocks so now it is the same key as our front door, which makes life a tad easier.
A computer mouse that fits my hands.
Enough phone and laptop chargers to not have to constantly go to another room to grab one.
I started working on my generic grunt in my 30s and use it for all kinds of things: getting out of chairs, into chairs, picking something up off the floor, the first stair up or down, lifting anything with both hands, etc.
As time goes on I’m developing specialized grunts like a go slightly deeper on the first step down a flight of stairs than up.
What’s the current recommendation for those? Is it still Anker?
Also be sure to get a medium length one. It’s so much nicer having a 6’ cable, or 10’ if you want to get crazy with it. It makes traveling and transit much nicer (ex. University students working on campus), and it might be nice for home so you can roll all over your bed while on your phone
I’ve heard good things about Nomad Goods. I have some of their other accessories for iPhone and watch, and it’s the best quality stuff I’ve ever found. I can’t personally recommend the USB-C cables or wall adapters, but I plan to get some soon. I have a leather case, MagSafe mount stand, and a few watch bands. All are incredible, but pricey.
I do have some Anker cables and they’re perfectly fine. Much better than others I’ve tried, including Apple shit. Anker also makes some nice outlet extension/USB adapter combos that are super convenient.
If you want a fancy coiled cable, try Ventec edit: Ventev. It’s amazing for the car - keeps it off the floor.
CableMatters is my go-to when I need something I can’t find above, like a USB extension cable or high-speed HDMI. They don’t feel as premium and are a bit stiff, but they’re reliable, and they just seem to make every option you can think of.
Personally, I don’t buy Anker products since the eufy scandal, but their chargers are still top notch so I am sure you won’t have much to complain about.
I use Ugreen right now and am satisfied. I don’t have the equipment to measure efficiency, so I can’t comment on how good it is.
They sold these cameras claiming it does not use any cloud service, but that was a lie. They produced unencrypted streams and lied about it. They lied so much that it proves they are not trustworthy as a company, and why I personally won’t be buying any Anker products for a long time. They apologized and what I took from this is “we are sorry we got caught”.
Their charging department is probably not the same ones, but still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Pretty much all locks are re-keyable. Kwikset’s “smart key” system is different only in that you don’t have to buy new pins and take the lock apart to do it.
(I’m switching from Kwikset to commercial-grade Schlage because I wanted to upgrade the durability of my interior locks and wanted the exterior ones to match, so I’m about to find out how much more difficult normal re-keying is. Wish me luck!)
Normal rekeying is pretty easy, if you’re careful - push out the core (the “follower” will hold your spring pins in place), dump out the old key pins, swap to the new key, and put in the new key pins, replace the core. Even when I’ve completely screwed it up (pushed the follower too far so the springs came out, mixed all the key pins together so I had to work out which was which, and more) it’s not been more than a 10-minute job.
Washes your bum after using the toilet. Saves toilet paper. Gets your rear cleaner. This is a great suggestion. No power needed, just hooks right into the plumbing. I have this one . Bio Bidet Bidet Attachment for Toilet, White, Non Electric
Tongue scraper. Get a small metal one, will completely remove bad breath and stuff like garlic breath. It also removes cakes of plaque on your tongue sometimes. I’ve always brushed my teeth, but holy cow the tongue scraper helps. Better than mouthwash.
I’ve used one for the past 15 years and I can wholeheartedly agree. This thing will most likely outlive me (I don’t think any future children would want it as part of an inheritance though). Your sense of taste will also improve because your tongue isn’t covered in gunk.
honestly I got one of these and ended up going back to brushing my tongue. maybe I am like more thoroughly brushing my tongue than other people or something but it never was as clean from a tongue scraper as from brushing
I was never able to get much off my tongue with a toothbrush. Your tongue is kinda like velcro with fuzz stuck in it. The tongue scraper kinda depresses the velcro so you can remove the fuzz (plaque). If your tongue is where tinted white, that’s plaque, which can be scraped off. Also removes stuff like garlic or oregano breath pretty well.
$5.99 magnetic measuring spoons. They stick together and nest.
$18.99 MagSafe phone car mount. I use iPhone and my car supports Android Auto/Carplay, but there isn’t really a good place to stick your phone. This thing is basically a big magnet, I plug my phone in, throw it on this thing, and we good. Worth noting, even if you have CarPlay (guessing Android Auto as well) even though you don’t need to use your phone, some apps have some functions when you’re using them in this manner. EG: maps displays the next few turn by turn directions on the phone screen, and the overview of the map on the carplay screen.
decent/good chef’s knife. I think the one I’m using now is about $30, but you can get the ol’ reliable Victorinox for around that price or a little cheaper.
cabinet lighting pucks. I think Walmart has them for like $12 for two, but they are basically stick somewhere, motion activated lights that are battery powered. Paired with rechargeable batteries, I can now see the food that we push to the back of the cabinet to die.
new streaming stick thingy. Though I greatly prefer Apple TV, it’s hard to justify the price of those compared to Roku/Fire TV. That said, if you’re hanging on to an older version of the Fire TV/Roku, upgrading helps the annoyance factor because it’s just far less slow. We just added a $24.99 4k Fire TV stick, much nicer.
Wireless chargers for phones. You can get them for like under $10. Buy 5, put them where you generally set your phone down. Or more simply, right next to the bedside. I generally only charge at night, so much nicer to be able to just drop it on a pad/magnet, etc.
$9 dimmer switch. Our master bath is weird. The toilet/shower area has a door. The sink area connects directly to the bedroom with no door. The sink area has large mirrors and massive amounts of lighting. Fucking sucks if you’re just getting up to pee and you now have the light of the sun on you and your partner at 3am.
more niche, bunch of smart home shit:
just think about how $10-$20 and a little bit of thought can improve your life. I have a switch connected to my espresso maker, now I can yell in the shower to turn it on to pre-heat. If I had a regular schedule, I could automate this further just on time. I have it set so that once I tell it to turn on, it turns off after 20 minutes.
motion sensor lights. though technically you don’t need a smart home for this, there are some lights in my house that I only want to turn on when someone is there. I have a hallway, for example, that is more or less a cave tunnel. Any time I’m in that hallway (or anyone else) I want to have some light. So I have a motion sensor that turns the light on, and based on the status of the sun, it dims accordingly. When I walk into my garage, there are a few lights that turn on in sequence and it feels like you’re walking into the bat cave.
buttons! You can buy many different remotes for < $20. Pretty much anything you automate via voice you also need a button for. Pro-tip, use in-wall switches where you can, but in my case I didn’t have a neutral wire because it’s an older house, and my options were pretty limited/expensive.
last example: my entryway lights. I have a door sensor ($10-15) so if I open it I can perform an action. My entry light has a smart bulb ($9.) I also have a floor standing lamp adjacent to this that has a smart bulb. What this allows me to do is check when I’ve recently arrived, and if it’s after sunset and the bigger light isn’t already on, turn on this entry light. If my TV is playing a movie, the light goes on in the dimmest setting so arriving people don’t disturb.
Mine are all on wifi outlets and switches. I currently have them connected to Google Assistant, but I could easily connect them to some other smart home hub.
My entire setup is a bit of a Frankenstein as I originally started with more wifi stuff before moving to zigbee. Anyway, what I’m running now:
Dell Wyze thin client from eBay. Was about $30, and I put a $20 ssd in it.
Sonoff zigbee controller, think that was $30-35. YMMV, but generally as long as you watch out and buy zigbee stuff, you can avoid buying hubs for all of the different manufacturers.
Various zigbee stuff. I have a bunch of Ikea remotes, motion sensors, and bulbs. I also have a few Lutron Caseta switches (they were the only reasonable option at the time that didn’t require a neutral wire.) I also found some Lutron Aurora dimmer switches on clearance for like $10 at home depot, so I bought the last 4 they had. Ditto for 3-4 Phillips Hue bulb. There are also a few aqara and sonoff pieces besides (buttons, bulbs, etc.)
and I still have a handful of wifi only stuff. I couldn’t find a good fan controller for my ceiling fan that was zigbee, but I was already bought into the Tuya system, so I bought a compatible device there. There are also a small number of bulbs that I still have in use (like my porch lights, which are just off at dawn, on at dusk.)
The whole thing runs on Home Assistant, which tbh does take a good amount of time to understand and get setup, but it allows you to do some pretty powerful stuff. For one, I only have this as my hub, and everything works through that. I can also use this to control all of the equipment without a bunch of intermediaries like ifttt and all that. It also allows me to do things like connect my ikea remote (zigbee) to my wifi bedside lamp. All of the major smart home platforms (google, Alexa, HomeKit, aqara, etc) are also massively more limited in what you can automate. Just that simple little entry automation I posted above isn’t really a thing because most of the basic smart home things don’t allow simple stuff like conditionals (turn on only if it’s dark) and certainly not stacked conditionals (turn on only if it’s dark, and I’ve just arrived, and the door actually opened.) You can also hook it up pretty easily to smart tv’s or plex, so you can do things like “if I pause the movie, bring the lights up.” Or I have a dumb automation that I can tap one button for and it plays a random ep of TNG for when I can’t sleep on a Fire TV, which is just not even close to doable on the pleb platforms.
I think I found this in the Home Assistant forums, which are generally a great resource. I’d also warn that you might want to be careful going this route. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as just popping the SSD in and installing an OS. IIRC, and I know I don’t recall why, I had to DD a disk image to it. That said, there are lots of these thin clients all over ebay where it is literally that easy.
Loved this list and just added those measuring spoons to my house’s wish list. To the home automation front, for Home Assistant users I really like IKEA’s line of zigbee controllers. With HA and a cheap dongle you can control any smart device with them, not just IKEA stuff.
I have one of their speaker controllers hooked up to my partner’s Google smart speakers, so I can turn down the volume and play/pause without shouting at the voice assistant.
We have a five-button light controller on each of our nightstands so we can control our lamps and overhead lights (on/off, brightness, color) without getting out of bed. Great when my partner leaves their lamp on - I don’t have to reach over them to turn it off. (Now if only I could turn off their TikTok stream when they fall asleep watching it…)
Their $10-$12 light switches to control the lamps and overhead lights in all of our rooms. Tap once to turn everything on or off, double tap to turn on just the lamps for some gentler lighting.
And this isn’t IKEA, but I need a colder bedroom to fall asleep, and my partner wakes up pretty early and wants it to be warm. I have a space heater connected to a smart outlet and a Bluetooth thermometer. At 4am it will start heating the room until we reach a comfortable temperature, idle until the temp drops, and turn itself completely off after I’m out of bed at 9am. If you need to buy the space heater or equipment to set up Home Assistant, this definitely breaks the $50 budget, but if you’ve already got those the thermometer and 15A rated smart plug will be maybe $30 total (cheaper if you can wait for longer shipping).
This is the way. Though this isn’t exactly cheap to start, I have a $50 eBay thin client (including the price of throwing an ssd in there), a $30 sonoff zigbee controller, install Home Assistant, and boom you’re off to the races. Ikea’s stuff (as well as Phillips hue, which I was able to snag some deals on clearance for) and Lutron Caseta are all zigbee so I have complete local control over most things in my house, minus a few wifi pieces that I’ve been replacing over time. We do similar with the 5 button remotes, and I also have a few different button controllers from sonoff. Ikea’s motion sensors have also been rock solid for me.
And yeah, heating is currently my white whale. My home has electric radiant heating which leaves my only option for thermostats down to one or two units that are $120 or so, and I have like 7-8 in total in the home so that’s just going to have to stay manual for now. Space heater isn’t a bad idea, though.
The FireTV is great - we added it to a circa 2008 LCD TV (of the dumb variety) we have hanging in the bedroom and got rid of the cable box. Now we just stream whatever we plan to watch. Works great!
I will note the person that originally told me about FireTVs now recommends the Roku stick instead. I haven’t tried those, though.
If you have money, I would recommend AppleTV, especially if you have an iPhone. It’s by far the best platform in terms of not being solely an advertising vessel and sucking up your data, and integration with the iPhone even just out of the box is pretty great. That said, they’re the most expensive by 2-3x.
Runner up is def Roku, which is much worse, but still pretty good.
And then there’s me with a Fire TV, mostly because I buy them when they’re $25 for the max fire stick config, and you can automate through the android debug mode. So when I want to use the device, I rarely use the main interface, which is extremely garbage.
Thanks. My wife has an iPhone, but I’m an Android person.
What interface do you use? I have two of our Fire TVs connected to home assistant and can sort of control them (play, start, pause) but is there a way to open different apps and select programs?
Yeah, I explained this poorly. I do have a led strip on motion sensors that turns on with varying brightness depending on whether it’s dark outside. The dimmer in this case is more for me and my wife to get ready in the morning. She’s got makeup to do, so she needs to the light all the way up, I’m extremely not a morning person so I barely turn on the dimmer.
Yep. I was the first and the last to rip on Apple for getting rid of the headphone jack… but wireless headphones are just superior in terms of what you can do. You can start a video, walk to the kitchen to check on something, walk back, do laundry
Get a sharpening stone, brand doesn’t matter imo. I have one with 1000 grid for rough sharpening and 6000 grid for making it really sharp. It does require some learning tho.
I also recommend a honing rod; a good ceramic one will run you 40 dollars or so. Takes some skill to use, but it will change your life. Your blades need to be realigned.
It differs from a sharpener in that a sharpener takes material off the knife. You should hone every few weeks; sharpening should come once or twice a year. Sharpening too frequently will a noticeable reduction in the knife’s physical size relatively quickly (not that it still wont cut).
As other comments have alluded to, a sharpening stone is a far better investment and only takes a half hour to learn.
Even if you do a bad job it’ll likely be a better result and better for your knives. Most sharpeners absolutely destroy knives and take far too much material off.
A clever tea maker / mug all-in-one. I imported it from China, it’s not expensive or anything, it does use Tritan for this steeping chamber thing where it only decants at like a 45° angle. I have some food containers I use for lunch which use the same plastic and they work well, don’t get stained. Hope it doesn’t have some new kind of cancer or medical issue associated with it, I’ll update this post in ~15 years if that’s the case.
I have a dog-shaped teddy bear which I almost need to support my arms. It has such a novel shape as a pillow, there are so many uses compared to a rectangular/square cube or tube.
Humble Bundle. Individually they are under 50 so I count it. Humble Choice is 12/month and I have gotten some of my favorite games I play on PC through there. I also have purchased many of the book bundles to expand my knowledge on particular topics.
We got a heated mattress pad last year. It is so nice. Each side has its own controls and timer. Does make it even harder to get out of bed on cold mornings though!
Honestly, it levels up going to bed so much. You tale a showed and come into a prewarmed bed. It’s so lovely and so much more effective than a hot water bottle. Easier too.
The key to getting out of bed in the morning is to set the timer well. I usually set it to ~1 hour after I expect to be asleep, so I don’t wake up sweaty in the morning.
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