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.
Bidet crew represent
Bidet 2024!!!
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
I bet its fantastic orb pondering wear.
How do you know you’re not a wizard when you wear it? Have you tried magic?
You need to get a matching wizard hat
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 bought a house with these and didn’t realize it had this feature for like a year (batteries had died). Now I love it. I find myself taping every faucet it use and am annoyed when others don’t turn on.
I actually bought a handfree soap dispenser to go next to it, which is a great combo. Preparing meat or something, I can clean my hands and tap sink with elbow and not worry about cross contamination of everything.
Does it have a timer safety thing? I know my cat would turn the faucet on and let it flood the house lol.
It does! It runs for minutes without retapping, but not like ten minutes. Never really timed it, and only noticed when I was filling the sink up (it’s a big sink).
This sounds like something I’d like to get for the shower, but with multiple memory settings, that’s a much different product… Unless I ducted two shower knobs… Oh fuck I feel a project coming on…
We’re about to redo our bathrooms and have started looking at things. One thing we saw that sounded cool are these new thermostatic shower controls: you set them to a temperature and it mixes the water to keep it at that temperature regardless of fluctuations in the hot and cold input. Huh, sounds neat. So we looked at one - over $3000 for just the valve. It doesn’t sound that neat.
Sorry, new?! Unless this is something different from what I’m imagining, thermostatic shower valves have pretty much been the standard in Denmark for all of my life. You can get them for 80 usd (or probably even lower). These are purely mechanical, no need for batteries. I can even find one on US Amazon for around 50 usd (https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Thermostatic-Showering-Temperature-Control/dp/B071ZP4ZHN/ref=ex_alt_wg_m?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B071ZP4ZHN&psc=1&pd_rd_w=MLPp3&pf_rd_p=e06954f1-ab26-49e7-940f-21fea3d5decd&pf_rd_r=1YGK573NBS6VC329GYD0&pd_rd_wg=PC4iL&pd_rd_r=4415efd7-7117-45ad-8b60-0a1c86e84ef0&content-id=amzn1.sym.e06954f1-ab26-49e7-940f-21fea3d5decd).
Edit: I realise that this sounded more aggressive than it meant it to. I was simply quite surprised! :)
They’ve been code where I am in the u.s. for 20 years.
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.
I read that as “fap desk” was intrigued then disappointed.
For fap desk you really want silicone
Just cut a hole in the cutting board
That’s how you end up getting a cutting board stuck on your dick.
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
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.
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.
So noob question - I got a 3D printer relatively recently and have printed a few things with it by downloading files from various websites.
How do you go about making or getting files for your specific custom jobs like these please?
ventilate my dude. read up on breathing around your 3D printer while its printing. no bueno
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.
my tumble-dry-medium sleeper of a spouse.
ROFL! Hahaha… I am gonna call my gf that from now on…
Maybe not stupid, but I purchased a pair of bone conducting headphones just because I thought they would be better for running, and harder for me to lose. I wasn’t expecting much, but damn, they have been so much better than I expected. Even though the sound quality isn’t quite as good, they work so much better with my sensory processing issues, and I can just leave them on all day without concern. Because I’ve got curly hair, people don’t even know I’m wearing them, and because they don’t go in my ear canal, they don’t impact my ability to hear/talk/interact with the world around me.
Uhhh I have sensory issues but am uncomfortable while wearing headphones. What’s this? Do what now? What kind of headphones? I NEED ALL THE INFORMATION WITHOUT OPENING A SECOND APP THAT IS FULL OF ADS AND NO USEFUL INFORMATION!
To be clear, these don’t reduce my sensory issues. It’s more accurate to say that they enable me to wear headphones with background music etc, without adding to my sensory issues
Man i had the opposite experience. Bought some great ones for running and lab work but when i set them at a volume i could hear they were basically just normal headphones and everyone else could hear them too.
Im a skinny dude with no hearing issues, wish they worked better for me.
I got the glasses with 90 degree prisms in them so you can read while laying down. The person on the product page looked like an idiot and thought it would be funny, but I’m on my 3rd pair now
Need testimony from people using this with prescription
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.
Shower mirror. It has a base that suctions to the wall and a reservoir that you fill with hot water so that it doesn’t fog. I had no idea how much better it was than shaving at the sink. If I’m in a hurry I’ll sink shave but I love shower shaving and I love that mirror.
Edit: Here’s the one I use. No major complaints, just remove the mirror between uses and re-suction every once in a while.
What the actual fuck.
I’ve been shaving like a caveman my whole life.
Forty thousand years of evolution and we’ve barely even tapped the vastness of human potential.
A Raspberry Pi. I bought it out of a whim and now I use it as a portable desktop computer, I can use Alpine Linux with my files and my setup on virtually any system that doesn’t whitelist MAC addresses.
Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software, I feel like I’m breaking the law.
Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software
What…
Well it’s a good thing that Microsoft has embedded linux + its userspace in windows via WSL 2. That means using Linux + its userspace in Alpine is completely Koscher as long as you rename the root Alpine project to be “OceaneAlpine”, right?
Do you realize that calling it “Koscher” implies that any billionaire would secretly be a Jew? It’s antisemitic propaganda.
Anyway, I don’t think you got me. I implied that I was plugging peripherals on my Raspberry Pi, working on my university campus with better ergonomics than on a laptop.
A burr grinder for coffee beans. I thought coffee snobs were full of shit. I was wrong.
Which one did you get? I’m looking for a good one that won’t break the bank.
Not op but I have the baratza encore. Not exactly cheap but could be affordable if you save up. They’re 150 new on Amazon and go for around 80-100 on ebay here in USA. It’s really good too, especially if you stick with coffee only being a casual hobby or even just want your morning coffee to be good and don’t wanna futz with anything else.
Also an FYI, if you ever do get around to doing espresso, you’ll see a ton of PPL saying you can’t use it for espresso. They are honestly just more enthusiastic about coffee than I am, because I used an online deep cleaning video from Baratza to change the gap between the burrs and it does espresso just fine to my tastes. Like it does well enough that I can’t justify the expense of a better one yet and I’ve had it like 3 years already.
Obv there are better ones, and there are cheaper ones, but th Encore will just last you a long time in your coffee journey, and potentially forever if you only ever want it to do non-espresso grind sizes
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!
