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.
When I worked at a small startup, we were moving to a new office and I was asked to help with the buildout. I engaged with the flooring vendor, and he came by one day to drop off a carpet sample. He put it on my desk where my mouse was. It was a rectangle sample of tight knit office carpet, about 18”x22”. When I got back to my desk, I just put my mouse on top of it and started using it as a mouse pad. That was 15 years and 3 companies ago, and I still use it as my mousepad. It’s perfect for the mouse to glide on, soft enough for my wrist to rest on, absorbent of sweat or drink condensation, and large enough I never hit the edge. I will never not use it. It is my mouse carpet, and I love it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
How do you know you’re not a wizard when you wear it? Have you tried magic?
I bet its fantastic orb pondering wear.
That sounds like a game changer.
Shadow wizard money gang
I was a Snuggie hater for many years, but I got an off-brand one as a Christmas gift probably 10 years ago and I live in that thing when I’m at home. It’s great for when I want to be cozy and play video games but don’t want to put my controller under the blanket.
If you ever break or have surgery on any part of your arm, you’ll be very happy to have that cape in the winter. I have a couple from when I broke my wrist and used them again when I had shoulder surgery.
Mechanical keyboard. Almost had no money back then, but wanted to treat myself. It costed 100$, and I regretted it the next morning. Felt like shit, but it was so cool to type on.
After 5 years, this metal-frame keyboard managed to survive many outside gigs, long travels, literal war, and it’s still with me. And I still love typing on it. Sometimes I code just to type. You can guess why I don’t use code completion tools.
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.
Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.
Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.
The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.
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This is me right now, I spent ~$2k on a bike 11 months ago instead of getting a second car for our household and had no idea if it would work out. At 1500 miles, almost all commuting, definitely worth the money. I back of napkin calculated that it pays for itself somewhere between 2k-3k miles with saved gas, wear and tear, etc. Also my wife wanted to buy a Tesla as a second car, and me leaving her the car during the workday has essentially saved us ~$45k in that respect. In better shape, eating better, sleeping better, and bike commuting has a lot to do with it.
It was kind of a stupid purchase for me because when I got it I wasn’t really into doing exercise or outdoor stuff.
Sigh… the notion that bikes are just toys or exercise equipment is such a harmful misconception, it’s ridiculous. Rather than writing a huge wall of text trying to explain the vast depths of how important cycling is I’ll just cite this blog post this blog post that explains it better than I can.
Of course, that article was written from an individual perspective, so even it manages to understate how important cycling is. Americans’ dismissal of cycling in favor of driving, and the car-dependent [sub]urban design that results from that choice, is the underlying cause for the housing crisis and all the other crises that stem from that!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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…not to mention the sprawl that makes not having a car difficult to say the least.
That’s by far the biggest issue (which I say not to diminish the others, but just to emphasize how bad this one is). The sheer space that cars take up in terms of roads and parking lots makes it practically impossible to design a city capable of accommodating them without ruining it for walking/biking/transit by having to spread destinations too far apart. We literally bulldozed thriving downtowns to make room for them (compare: Houston 1938 vs. Houston 1978)!
On top of that, cars are responsible for facilitating the literal Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. In short: subdivisions full of single-family houses with a lot of street frontage per housing unit generate less tax value per unit area than the infrastructure connecting them costs to maintain, making them inherently unsustainable financially (let alone ecologically, etc.).
Because Americans urban planners in the '50s had a hard-on for cars instead of taking bikes seriously as transportation, almost all of North America and increasing parts of the rest of the world are now fundamentally built wrong in a way that destroys health, the economy, and the environment all at once, and it’ll cost trillions of dollars to fix it.
I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: ditching bikes in favor of cars may vary well have been the biggest disaster in the history of the world.
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!
Monitor mounting arms that connect to the back of the desk. I have 3 times as much room on my desk now. It’s amazing how much room monitor stands really take up. It’s not just the actual stand but really the surrounding area because you can’t really set any large objects in the vicinity. It really is a game changer to gain a lot of desk space.
Yeah I got this thinking it wouldn’t work or there is a catch. Nope, the monitor arms are awesome and save so much space, easy to adjust, and also look nicer than two stands on the desk.
I got a similar effect by constructing a purpose-made monitor shelf. It’s not as good for having a wide area open for large items, but it allows multiple levels for stacking, which works out great. It has one low shelf inside, just high enough to fit a keyboard and hands underneath, and then the top surface to put the actual monitors on. Keeping the bottom floor clear makes it easy to slide the keyboard in to make some temporary room in front of the structure, and the inside shelf provides a large general-purpose cavity for papers, mail, snacks, or what-have-you. There’s also some room on the top to pile things up next to the monitors.
The original goal was just to get the monitors up to eye level, but I ended up enjoying the extra space at least as much.
I’ve actually been considering this recently. Are you able to give me any suggestions or tips for what to look for?
What sizes are your monitors? Personally I think gas springs are the best, as any good one will allow you to adjust height and position with relative ease. Biggest thing you really have to watch for is the weight of your monitor vs the capacity of the stand, but if you’re not dealing with huge monitors you likely won’t run into this.
They’re like two random bedroom style (ie, intergrated DVD players that don’t work) flatscreen TVs so I think I would need relatively strong mounts. The smaller one is a 19 inch. I guess the other is a 22 but I’m not sure or able to check right at this moment. I guess monitors get so much bigger than that now that maybe these sets aren’t actually that heavy in comparison?
Honestly, I don’t think you’d have any concerns with finding some that are suitable, those are the sizes of monitor that the overwhelming majority of the stands are made for. Monitors get absurdly large now.
Check if your monitor is VESA compatible and buy a monitor with that brack if it is. Don’t cheap out, you’ll want to spend at least $100 for quality arms IMO.
Also, make sure your table is strong enough that it won’t warp - you’re going to be putting a lot of weight in a small area. It ended up warping my IKEA desk but I didn’t mind since I got it second-hand. You can put a block of wood between the clamp and the table to distribute the stress and keep the clamp from leaving a mark as well.
Which brand/model did you buy?
North Bayou, but only because I got a deal on them for cheap. Not sure if they are any better than any others, but they work as intended. Edit: these might be them: https://a.co/d/0MJRj7B
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.
Same here with the ebike. I live near Seattle and everything I need is within a few minutes of ebike driving
If I can’t ebike, then I uber and it saves me a ton
Feel free to check out !micromobility@lemmy.world
Thank you for the recommendation!
It’s great that Lemmy is already growing with niche communities
Nice, this is the type of community I’ve been trying to find.
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can we get some more deets on what you use it for in terms of terrain/altitude/distance/weather?
Seriously considering an ebike to replace a 20 minute car commute (12 miles). There are some 750w used bikes on my local craigslist for ~1-2k USD, but there’s also a super cool dual-motor bike with rear suspension for $3k. Any advice?
I have an ebike I use as my daily commuter for a distance of 11 km each way (6.8 miles) over decently hilly terrain in a windy city as a large man. It still only takes 25 minutes and I charge my battery once a week? Maybe twice if I’m tired and using more boost.
Are you mechanically inclined at all? I purchased a motor conversion kit and a battery to convert my regular bike to ebike. It wasn’t really a difficult process, the hardest part was removing the bottom bracket as it was quite stuck. Took some thinking to get enough leverage without having the tool head chew out the bracket teeth. The rest was relatively plug and play. I was able to get the 500 W motor and 48 V 18 A hour battery for ~$1200 CAD together. I use it to commute to work so I wanted a longer range, if you don’t need as much power or as much range you could do it for cheaper.
I went for a mid drive motor which are more efficient but more expensive than hub drive, if you’re budget conscious you could do a hub drive. From my understanding the hub drive can be more difficult for maintenance (the wheel is a special version, so you need to buy another wheel that works with the hub drive if any issues occur) but I’m no expert.
All of that is a moot point if you don’t already have a bike to use, but you could find a local bike recycle store to get one cheap? Or you could get a new bike and convert that. I had a marin fairfax 2 that I converted over and it works great, haven’t had any issues and I’ve put on a couple thousand kms on it since converting (the display tracks total distance which is handy). I believe the marin was $700ish new from my local store.
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B083J95GJP?geniuslink=true&psc=1
https://www.amazon.ca/10AH-Electric-Bicycle-Lithinum-Battery/dp/B09C1RP9KV
You could search for other options if you don’t want to support amazon, there are different sites to source the parts from, those were just the first two that I saw.
Here’s a battery from a Canadian company.
https://lunacycle.com/no-drill-battery-mount-kit/
Here’s a mounting bracket for the battery if the bracket seems unsteady or the holes don’t line up like with mine.
This is what I ended up going with. Let me know if you have any questions, I’d be happy to chat about the process more.
All of this is canadian specific because I reposted the meat of it from an older comment, bug I’m sure you could find local alternatives easily enough.
You don’t need much, 500w is enough.
I ride an ENGWE EP-2 Pro, I got it because it was on sale for $700, can fold up into the back of my hatchback, and seemed to have a reasonably well designed battery. It is fun, it looks kinda cool, has lots of features including cruise control, but is by no means the best bike.
It weighs 74 lbs and the range in practice isn’t all that great: Part of me wishes I saved up a little more to get a Lectric Xpedition because it has crazy range and more storage. If the battery goes out, this thing is not fun to pedal uphill.
Farthest I’ve ridden is 12 miles one way, took about 40 minutes. On average I usually ride maybe 1-5 miles a day, not far really but everything is pretty close to me. The only major exception is when I take it joyriding, up to maybe 20 miles. I have only had it for a couple of months so far so I don’t know how it’ll do in cold weather or snow, but I suspect the thicc tires would do well even without chains.
Speaking of extreme weather, extreme cold and heat are problematic for batteries, so don’t expect to go on a big journey in -20 F cold or 110 F heat.
I can tell you that my best advice would be to find your nearest reputable bike shop, get their input based on what they carry, and then do your own research to verify it’s a decent brand before you buy. One of the most important and often overlooked things when people buy an ebike is whether they can get it serviced or not.
Another possible consideration if you’re handy would be to take a traditional bike you think would be ideal and then use a conversion kit to make it electric. If you are mechanically savvy, you’d get more bang for your buck and would probably do all your own maintenance and repairs anyhow.
It weighs 74 lbs and the range in practice isn’t all that great: Part of me wishes I saved up a little more to get a Lectric Xpedition because it has crazy range and more storage. If the battery goes out, this thing is not fun to pedal uphill.
I own an Xpedition and can confirm that it’s a great bike. (I didn’t have the choice to shell out for anything less because my primary use-case was carrying two kids, and when it comes to cargo bikes that one’s literally the cheapest option.) That said, an Xpedition would definitely also suck if you had to pedal it without assist (even on flat ground, frankly), so I’m glad I got the dual-battery version just in case.
My advice is that range/battery life depends greatly on things like rider+cargo weight, terrain hilliness, and which assist setting you’re using (or worse, if you’re just using the throttle and not pedaling at all). Get more battery than you think you need. (The exception is if the bike you choose is more of an “e-road bike” that would still be pleasant to ride without assist, but most e-bikes are not like that, and you wouldn’t want that kind of bike for commuting anyway.)
Otherwise, the 750w bikes are perfectly fine – you do not need that “super cool dual-motor bike” for commuting.
IMO, the other main factors you should be considering are cargo capacity, drivetrain style and budget.
Regarding cargo: you can carry groceries etc. with a basket and/or rack on a regular-style bike, but if you want to carry a lot of stuff (or kids as passengers) you should look into long-tail cargo bikes or even a box bike (a.k.a. “bakfiets” because they’re popular in the Netherlands).
Regarding drivetrain style: there are two main types, rear-drive and mid-drive.
Rear-drive tends to be cheaper but slightly less pleasant to use because it relies on a cadence sensor to activate the assist. In other words, when you start pedaling there’s a bit of lag before the assist kicks in, and when it does it’s either on (according to the setting you picked) or off. It’s not “variable” in terms of responding to how hard you’re pushing the pedals, only whether they’re turning or not.
In contrast, mid-drive systems can sense the torque being applied to the pedals, and can apply assist more immediately and more smoothly in response to how much effort you’re trying to use (at least, that’s what they say – I’ve never tried one myself). However, they tend to cost more.
Based on my use-case (which involved carrying two small kids to school), I bought a Lectric Xpedition, which AFAIK is the cheapest electric long-tail cargo bike currently available. I’ve been very happy with it so far and think that bike, and Lectric bikes in general, are a good recommendation for people who want the best value-for-money.
For people with other circumstances, I might make some other recommendations:
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If you’re doing a mixed bike+transit commute, taking the bike with you on airplane trips, or otherwise carrying it around a lot, I think going all the way to the smallest/best-folding bike you can reasonably have – an electric Brompton – is worth it.
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If you want to carry a lot of cargo, but (unlike me) you also have plenty of money and space to store the thing, a high-end bakfeits with a Bosch mid-drive and Gates carbon belt instead of a chain is what you want. Those things can cost $10K, though!
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If your needs are generic – you don’t specifically need cargo capacity or folding – and you aren’t completely mechanically hopeless, then get a rear-drive bike from a lower-end-but-still-well-known mail-order brand like Rad or Lectric (either new or used via Craigslist).
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If you are mechanically hopeless and/or still clueless about what you want and/or have a higher budget and are willing to pay for good service, find a local e-bike shop and let them sell you one of their bikes that they recommend. It’ll cost more than the previous suggestion, but they’ll have the best support and will be able to do the maintenance on it for you. (This is apparently a bigger benefit than it seems, because although you can get a regular non-electric bike worked on anywhere, I’ve heard that lots of bike shop mechanics are unwilling to work on e-bikes they don’t sell themselves.)
One last thing: whatever you do, avoid random no-name Chinese bikes from Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/whatever. This is one of those cases where you really do want a company with a US presence (it doesn’t have to be a “US company,” but they need to at least have a US phone number/mailing address) to hold accountable for warranty issues and to have some confidence that they’re complying with US safety regulations so the battery doesn’t burn your house down or something.
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Hell many people can get by with just a cheapo e-scooter.
Privately owned ones are illegal in the UK :( you can only use ones owned by rental services and they’re only in a few cities
You can it them from Halfords so they can’t be that illegal… https://www.halfords.com/scooters/electric-scooters/
I meant illegal on public roads…so effectively illegal if you want to use one as a car alternative for short distances
I got a really girly looking beanie (I’m a guy) at a white elephant gift exchange and it became my favorite beanie. It got stolen and I’m sad that I can’t find it again.
