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.
Be nice to Owen, ok, it’s been a hard life for him
I keep Owen locked in the basement. He keeps the fire burning.
So many women who want his alphabet leg. Poor guy can’t keep up.
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.
64gb of ram. 32 cores.
if you keep many chonky applications open it’s lovely.
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.
My dishwasher broke and for a year, our dishes got progressively ickier and ickier. Then we got a new one and everything felt clean again.
Maybe it was all mental. But the hot wash kills a lot.
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?
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.
The second part sounds like a thing phones should already be capable of, if it weren’t for trying to charge for something. Or snoop on me. Or something worse I just haven’t thought of.
Enshittification is such a downer. Oh, well, guillotines will fix it eventually, I guess.
I don’t know for sure, but we may as well try
The shopping list feature is the most used part of my Alexa, followed by morning weather report while I feed the animals, and then occasional music.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
QEMM was the shit!
himem.sys
With encryption it still takes a bit, but I love the silence.
Affordable solar panels and batteries. With this we were able to life off-grid surrounded by nature.
