Smart lights. What a world of difference coming home to my lights being on either from them automatically triggering, or me turning them on remotely. Or, being able to take a shower knowing my lights will be able to turn themselves off on whatever timer I set. It’s been an excellent expereince
Light timers have been great. I feel having the ones in my bedroom work like a daylight alarm has been very helpful, and as you said, you never come home to a dark house, which is helpful if you’ve got arms full of groceries or such.
Also the smart thermostat in conjunction with smart outlets lets me turn on the room fans and AC when I’m on my way home.
Even having the ability to change color temp is nice so you can have harsh bright white if you need to see something you’re working on, but the majority of the time you can have nice warm or soft light.
I’ve been in the home automation business for over 25 years. Can confirm that smart lighting is the absolute best investment.
I’ve installed and programmed lighting systems for over $100k but have personally spent less than $250 for Ikea devices for my apartment. Just the ability to dim and set the color of the lights at certain times of day is key for me.
Controlled Lighting isn’t only about convenience, it’s about setting a mood. You can set a warm dim scene to be more calming or a bright white scene for cooking or cleaning.
I’m curous about these, how is the privacy on the apps? Having my data mined from my lightbulbs is my last consideration against taking the step tbh
Not linked to your identity…
…
Identifiers…
This seems contradictory. I’ll avoid them for now, thanks!
I’ve been looking into some smart lights!
But I’m a bit confused, what do you use them for in the shower?
Not “In the shower persay” I have the Phillips hue lights and I have a set of them in my bathroom With Alexa, or any app to access them, I can set timers on the lights meaning I could have a 30-minute timer while I’m in the shower or whatever else I’m doing. They turn themselves on, turn themselves off.
Oh now I see what you’re saying, thanks. Yeah I thought maybe there was something about showering I’d been overlooking all these years lol
Steam owen. Haven’t reheated my food un the microwave ever since.
Recently, my car. I was driving around a 2006 and recently got a 2024. A backup camera is amazing. The collision detection, touch display, and Bluetooth are a nice bonus also.
Back up cameras and 360 parking detection sensors. Heated and cooled seats. Android Auto with integrated Google Maps. New cars are so much better than my old beater.
Yeah, I recently went from a 2005 to a 2018, and even the jump in that was amazing! Bluetooth for music and for phonecalls, it’s changed my driving experience to be a much better one.
VR, it was janky and barely worked, I still can’t wait for the future of AR.
64gb of ram. 32 cores.
if you keep many chonky applications open it’s lovely.
Does corrective eye surgery count? Because it fundamentally changed my daily quality of life
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.
Stand mixer. It’s so much easier to mix things now and I make less of a mess.
Oh, I forgot that in my list - I upgraded mine to a model that can handle my 2 loaves of sourdough dough (about 2 kilos) and it’s glorious. Had wanted one for a dozen years, finally started watching the prices and got it last year when it hit the lowest I’d seen.
My girlfriend and I are on a huge sourdough kick right now, and we’d love to start making it ourselves. Do you have a recipe you’d recommend? Any tips and tricks you’ve learned from experience?
For 2 loaves, this one doesn’t need the mixer, way more process than recipe, super simple ingredients.
1000g flour (between 30-50% whole grain something, the rest white bread flour), 20g salt
700-750g water
200g refreshed starter, 100% hydration
Mix everything and let it sit 20 minutes to hydrate. Then I smush it into a big ball and wash the bowl, leave it wet and dump the dough back in. Stretch and fold immediately, then every half hour 3 or 4 more times. Cover the bowl with a plate or towel in between. No, you don’t have to knead it. Once it looks strong and elastic, after the last stretch and fold, make it a smooth ball (flipping it over usually works) and let it rise 2-3 hours, covered, until bigger and lighter.
Dump it carefully onto a big flat surface and split it in two. Make lazy dough balls, dust them with flour and cover with a flat towel or t-shirt cloth. Let rest for 20 minutes - this is called ‘bench rest’ Meanwhile line 2 bannetons (or flattish bowls- something shaped like you want the top of the dough to end up) with flat kitchen towels and dust with rice flour. Shape each loaf carefully and place into the baskets with bottoms up. Let rise then bake in preheated cast iron pot at about 450F, 230C ish, no fan, 20 minutes with lid then 30 without - I have to tent mine with foil because oven heats from the top.
There are 2 places you can pause this, since it’s such a long process. Either after stretch and fold (cover bowl with plate) or after putting them in baskets, which is what I do. If you do this you have to enclose them in plastic loosely, I use produce bags for that, and even if they don’t look like they rose in the fridge, the cold dough into hot pan enclosed makes steam that makes them rise so well.
It’s easier to do than describe so ask anything.
They say you need to be home all day to make bread and now I see why! Lol
Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful response, we’ll try it out next weekend!
Once you are more familiar with the dough you can likely figure out an evening process, refrigerator all the next day and bake the next evening. Slap and fold is exciting and effective but messy, or if you have the big mixer, dough hook, rest, dough hook, one round of stretch and fold.
But that long slow cold process is the most reliable and gives it the good complex flavor.
Apple Watch
No longer would I have to get out my phone to pay for something, or pause music, or adjust the Temperature. The early models didn’t have health sensors but I still get excited every September for Apples announcement to see what sensor they add next
Even the first Apple Watch had the heart rate monitor, which is the main one people care about.
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.
noise canceling bluetooth headphones (Sony XM3s, in my case). They are always near me. Thousands of hours and I haven’t even changed the earpads yet. I don’t know how I lived without them.
Going to get roasted for this, but Alexa devices. The video versions play Netflix, YouTube, Hulu etc and have much better sound than the standard little speaker orb version. They all sync together so you can stream music in each room that has one like having a whole house stereo system.
Being able to verbally add something to the grocery list at any time is a game changer. People aren’t taking advantage of that feature as much as they should IMO.
Many have had big impacts. Piano, phone, computer.
RAM update. Doubling your RAM on most low/medium -end consumer PCs will noticeably improve responsiveness and multitasking.
I’ve literally never felt the need for more RAM, except on an old netbook that had 1GB and struggled with opening a website.
Clearly you haven’t had the joy of having 10 tabs on Firefox, a film playing on VLC, the torrent client running, and trying to open up a large Solidworks assembly file on a 16GB Windows 10 PC. It gets eaten up fairly quickly.
No. I can’t look at 10 browser tabs, a film, and a Solidworks assembly file at the same time, so doing that makes no sense to me.
Recently had my RAM died on me and bought a new pair. I had a 16gb and the 32gb ones were on sale. Really felt the difference lol
Steam deck finally got me working through my steam backlog again.
Might have played everything before I die now
Is it as good as they say? I really want one
As someone who buys a lot of gadgets and quite often barely uses them afterwards or has mild buyers remorse… I have never once regretted buying a Steam Deck. It really is an amazing piece of technology.
The Steam Deck often feels criminal to me.
I used to be into game console hacking, and because you were going outside the walled garden, everything was always unstable and your butthole would clench every time you did something new.
Then there’s the Deck, which is just. Not a walled garden. It’s a full computer that doesn’t antfuck over what you do with it. I’m finally playing a bunch of titles from my Steam Library, yes, and it IS neat that Steam Cloud synchs stuff back to my PC so I can alternate between machines effortlessly.
But I also have mods on my games. And I have a bunch of tiny games like fangames and one-person indie titles from itch on it. And I ALSO have all my emulation stuff on it. AND sometimes when out travelling I don’t take a laptop, just the deck and a keyboard/adapter.
And a part of me looks at it with its comfy console form factor and says “… This shouldn’t be allowed. It’s too good to be true.”
Aw man I’m definitely going to get one, this sounds like a dream
I don’t use mine super often but every time I do I’m glad I have it. It’s a very nifty machine, and you’ll find excuses to use it.
Yes!
