Sort of. I paid for Linode so I could stop babysitting dynamic DNS. Before that I had a piece of hardware sitting at home and did weird stuff to make it routable from elsewhere.
The surprise benefit of Linode was their web interface to tear it down and reimage it for free whenever I bricked it. And I bricked it at least half a dozen times.
Today, instead of dynamic DNS, you could probably just use IPv6, or maybe get a nice router with built in dynamic DNS? But I haven’t researched those options.
Because I now pay around $2 per month for a root account on a small dedicated cloud hosted Linux VM from AWS EC2, and that includes some pretty nice non-dymamic real enterprise DNS for like another 10 cents per month.
I bought a Global brand Santoku knife like 20 years ago and it’s still my favorite knife. It was when I got my first solo apartment and I had basically no kitchen stuff. Instead of a cheap knife block, I got one good knife.
I hate calling “purchases” “investments” but it might apply in this case.
Was going to comment about a knife as well but you beat me to it. Though I went with Wusthof. The difference a good knife makes a huge difference for cooking.
The same applies to cookware. Don’t overpay buying a whole set is a waste. Buy the couple pots and pans you need individually and save.
Community Rec center membership. For a one time fee of $10; it’s easily the best $10 I’ve ever spent and is a great city perk. I’ve gotten in great shape since going there.
They felt extravagently expensive at $300. But I’ve had them for 7 years now, wear them a few hours each day, and they still work like new. They sound amazing and the noise cancellation has had a tremendous positive effect on my sanity as an apartment-dweller.
Every year I buy a replacement set of earcups for like $15. I’ll keep using them until they poop out.
Form me personally, I’d have to say my automated espresso machine. For context; I was buying 1-2 coffees from a shop per day (let’s say 10/week on average).
Cost me $700 on a sale. Grinds & presses the beans by itself, then pushes boiling water through to give me espresso shots. It paid for itself in 8 months of ownership by weening me off the local shops, and it’s lasted for over 6 years so far.
Came here to say this. Wasn’t as often but I’d get specialty coffee for $8-$10 a couple times a week. I bought a off brand espresso machine for $100 that is running to this day. If I include various accessories I’ve probably spent around $200. I did wind up getting a work bonus and splurging on a $400 Eureka grinder so I can have freshly ground.
Last I did the math at most I spend around $1.00 a cup, for a savings of around $8. I’ve made at least a couple hundred coffees it has definitely paid for itself and then some.
A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn’t be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.
I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write .bat files and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblast drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS’s included DEBUG tool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.
I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.
By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C.
All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.
I’ll say right off the bat that my roomba i7 self emptying vacuum cleaner has been a game changer for me. 2 big ass dogs and the dirt/fur that comes with it made me loathe sweeping/manually vacuuming. $700 well spent.
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