Does corrective eye surgery count? Because it fundamentally changed my daily quality of life
A temperature controlled pod for my bed. I used to sleep so hot all night long, constantly moving to find the cool part of the bed.
Now I keep it like as cold as can be all night, and my sleep has improved 10x. Plus my partner likes it warm so her side is nice and cozy. Both of us are happier for it.
My first very small mp3 player, something from sony. It was amazing.
My first digital camera, just being able to see your picture after shooting them. being able to delete photos was revolutionary.
My first wifi access point, having Internet at home without cable.
My first phone that could load msn messager. Also pretty cool.
I got a Microsoft Surface earlier this year. I have had phones and tablets with pens before but none were very satisfying to use and I have had laptops for decades at this point. This is the thinnest and lightest laptop as well as the best tablet I have ever used.
I no longer carry a paper notebook with me because I always have my surface. I have needed One Note for a very long time but didn’t realize it. having access to all of my notes and being able to carry all of them without having to find the right notebook as been huge.
A goddamn dishwasher. I used to wash a lot of dishes by hand growing up so it took until my 30’s before i realized that dishwashers are a wonderful invention.
Mac book Pro, I got the M3. Massive improvement from all the previous laptops I’ve had. Don’t have to put up with Microsoft bs, don’t have to tinker with it as I would with a Linux OS. Hardware is great, build quality is great. Can do everything I need for university on it, can play all the games I want to on it.
Personally I’m well past the mega corporations own the world and know everything about me doomer stage of my life and am okay with selling my soul to apple for a good laptop.
Linux?
A small vacuum and mop Roomba clone. Having two dogs leaving fur everywhere made vacuuming every day a necessary chore but now I only need to empty out their base every day and they take care of keeping the floors clean. I don’t have them connected to my Wi-Fi though so hopefully that helps mitigate any hacking attempts.
The Scooba? I was thinking about getting one of those. How do you like it?
They stopped making Scooba a long time ago. Broke too much.
The vacuum’s a Matrix Shark and the mop’s a Narwal something or other. Aside from them getting stuck in corners or entangled in wires once a week they work great! A little wire management and careful furniture placement lowered the chance of that happening again. One dog pretty much ignores it and the other eyes it with suspicion and wouldn’t be in the same room it’s running in but otherwise I haven’t had any big issues yet.
Upgrading my computer’s primary storage from a hard disk (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds.
Buying my first cell phone, which was a Nokia smartphone, in 2003. Having email and useful applications in my pocket, including maps and web search.
I find that my M.2 SSD (with Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC) is weirdly slower at booting up than my SATA SSD (Win 10 Pro) was. I’m not sure why, since the hard drive itself should be faster. BIOS itself seems to be slower.
I also can’t currently get it to even start if I have a hard drive plugged into the power supply and any of the SATA slots on the motherboard. IDK why. It reads the hard drives when I have them plugged in to an external bay and connected with a USB cable. It’s super-frustrating. I’ll try a SATA SSD and see if I have the same problem. If so, then I guess I’m stuck using M.2 drives. :(
You may have an issue with the boot order in your bios. Might be worth looking into. Your bios may try to boot from every other device connected to it before it tries the M2 SSD.
There’s literally nothing else connected to it though; no USB drives, no other hard drives, etc. When I tried to plug in my old 2tb 7200rpm drives from my last computer, it wouldn’t even power on to boot up.
Doesn’t matter, it will still scan for those devices
Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds
Pretty sure we don’t have such an young audience here on lemmy haha
Pretty sure one of the devs is still in high school.
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I upgraded mom’s PC from HDD to SSD, no regrets
With encryption it still takes a bit, but I love the silence.
I feel like the sheer jump in performance from throwing an SSD into an old system was akin to what people would have expected from the “download more ram” scam ads of the 00s.
TBF, before win95 there was definitely legit software that you could buy (not download) that would compress memory, amongst other tricks, to effectively give you more RAM.
himem.sys
QEMM was the shit!
I was thinking and nothing was to big a deal but you are right. ssd and before that optical mice were major upgrades relative to price (price being the factor when I finally bought them.)
induction cooktop? I’d say dishwasher but that’s probably more plumbing and pumps than “technology”.
With all the other gadgets, I’m not so sure. I’ve had computers, laptops, phones for ages. Of course my first everything back in the 90s or 00s was a big thing. But since then it’s just the newest generation, a bit faster and with more extras, but noting substancially different.
I’m… Skeptical. Mostly because I have a lot of cast iron and love it, and I’m not sure how well they’d work with induction burners. And also because I want to get a wok burner (yeah, the 100k+ BTU monstrosities) for doing stir-fry, and I’m not sure that the realistically affordable induction wok burners are going to manage that.
Cast iron like everyone else says works very well with induction, it’s pretty much the ideal material. However, unlike with a steel pan, you want to start on the low side and warm the pan up. It likely won’t cause issues immediately but if you frequently go straight to hot with a cast iron pan it can ultimately lead to the pan warping.
That’s good to know, and not something I would have expected.
cast iron is pretty much perfect for induction.
for the wok: try it. Technology Connections did a video about them recently.
Basically: They should be fine. But it really depends on your stir fry style.
The somewhat good ones should be capable to get the heat into the wok. Keep in mind that a giant about of heat is getting lost on those burners. Not everything will heat the wok
Yeah, cast iron should work well. I also like the usual stainless steel or non-stick pans. I mean these get hot and cold almost immediately and I have good control over temperature. A heavy cast iron thing is made to store the heat and not do that. Depends on what someone is trying to achieve.
And something that doesn’t work are things that aren’t flat at the bottom. You just can’t have a wok that is completely round and put that on a flat surface. And also thin metals don’t work. So maybe use another cooktop for that. We own a wok that has a flattened bottom. But I don’t really like cooking with that thing. Not sure if it’s me or the wok.
There exists special wok induction stoves that have an indent for the wok, with the coils around it
Yeah, I’ve looked at those, briefly. I’m not sure if they would fit my wok, which is very thin cast iron (yes, actually cast iron, not a spun carbon steel wok). Hence the reason I want to get a wok burner that I’d end up needing to use outdoors.
That’s crazy. I think I’m fine, though. I own enough spezialized kitchen equipment 😆
Cast iron is fine with induction.
Induction cooktop is a game changer. Water boils even faster than with gas, you have much more precise control over temperature, and you can still handle the metal cookware while it’s on the heat. Absolutely love it.
I have an induction cooktop as well and I do have one complaint about it. It uses capacitive touch to adjust the temperature instead of a knob so I spend far too long tapping it buttons to get the temperature set right whereas with a knob I could have just turned the knob.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t like touch buttons on devices like this either. Fortunately mine has temperature control knobs, but all the other buttons are capacitive. Still worth it imo, but definitely annoying.
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Sure. I don’t know why they design most of them like that… I really can’t be bothered to tap nine times to turn it on. I went to quite some stores and decided on one with two capacitive slider fields. That’s perfectly fine. I just tap somewhere at that slider and it’ll be 1-9 (boost) depending on how far left or right I touch it. Or I swipe. Main thing being, it just takes one tap. Except if I use more than 2 pans, then I have to choose which plate the sliders apply to. Yeah and it’s still the same inconvenience as with every capacitive control field and you can’t place a box of pizzas or anything wet or metal on top of the controls or it’ll complain and start beeping. I learned to place things behind the controls, but guests regularly get scolded by the cooktop.
If I had to make a wild guess as to why it’s designed that way? Cleaning flat buttons seems way easier than cleaning knobs. And no moving parts. Maybe more resilient (can be made with cheaper parts) considering the flimsy electronics that would be underneath the knobs compared to the more industrial (robust?) kind under an electric range.
They could do it like I mentioned mine does? A slider is just a slightly larger touch sensitive area. I guess there are other elements on touch devices we could take inspiration from. And one company has these magnetic knobs. You can just take them off and you’re left with a flat glass surface. The majority of the industry seems pretty set on the buttons, however.
A raspberry pi.
Installed Pihole on it and now get almost no ads on all devices at home.
SBCs are pretty cool. ESP is pretty cool too.
Automatic litter box! They’re so pricey, I always wasn’t in a place to do it, but I finally bit the bullet. I don’t think I can go back. It’s so easy, and my cat wasn’t scared at all. I also feel better knowing she always has clean litter. When she comes to bed I can just run the box from my app.
Bonus: it rotates sideways so my cat can keep her head. 👍🏾
I love mine but the cats often like jumping out so litter gets kicked out occasionally. Other than that, and that it stops working during power outages, it’s great. Changing a bag is so much easier to deal with than scooping litter.
I started panicking, but from your last sentence it sounds like you’ve heard some of them might be dangerous and you have one that isn’t.
On a tangent, is it just me, or has there been a notable uptick in this type of question? Feels a lot like astroturfing, but so far as I can see there’s been no malicious intent
Could be a setup to post ads in the comments, could be sourcing material for a listicle, could just be a genuine question. It is some pretty low-level malice if present, or my imagination is too weak here.
My guess is that due to money being more tight, people want to make sure that they spend it on things that actually matter.
I don’t think lemmy is relevant enough for companies to target. The user base is tiny.
I like these kinds of questions here because of that. You get actual people talking, not just bots regurgitating the same shit over and over.
Fair enough, it must have just been a fluke I saw a few posts like this in a row
It’s also almost the holiday season!
Dehumidifier - 5 years and counting drying laundry indoors overnight with no risk of rain or wind!
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.
I have a “No clocks in the bedroom” rule. As a person who has struggled with falling asleep, having a bright glowing display constantly reminding me how tired I’m going to be in the morning just gave me more anxiety and made it even more difficult to fall asleep.
I still have my watch and my phone, but those are things I need to purposely move to look at.
A projector clock sounds like hell to me.
I use my phone or watch as my clock or alarm but I have a rule to not look at the time if I wake up early. If I’m not wide awake I go back to sleep until my alarm goes off. It’s bliss even if it’s only for 15 more minutes since I wouldn’t know how long I’ve been out again.
Interesting take. I wish you the best.
Yeah. I think there are two schools out there, us anxious types that have to have the room pitch black without light source anywhere or we feel like a laser is drilling into our brain, and then normal people.
