does stealing it count? because that would be a boxed copy of redhat linux from best buy in the late 90s/early 2000s. yes, i found a way to steal linux
Thid guy has the power of God
Bicycle. No gas expenses, no tabs, no loan, free parking. I understand how it works and can mostly fix it myself for very little money. I can take quiet side streets and arrive in a much better mood, plus my fat lazy ass gets some exercise.
It also transformed my feelings about winter, which is long, gray and mostly charmless here excepting the occasional blizzard, but commuting by bike warms me and gets me fresh air and exercise. It makes it much more tolerable. I actually enjoy my commute and look forward to it.
So many people I work with insist biking is unappealing or borderline impossible while complaining almost daily about their commute. Obviously for some people and some commutes it really is impossible, but I’m not talking about those situations.
That thing that transformed winter for me was skiing and winter hiking. Now that we’re getting into shoulder season I can’t wait to hit the trails/slopes!
It used to also be so for me, but every year I realise this is becoming a dying sport reserved for the extra wealthy.
Where do you live?
I wish there was infrastructure for them where I live, I hate driving and I like cycling
You’d be very surprised at the impact one person showing uo to every town hall to complain or even just frequent letters can make. I know that can be harder than it sounds, but it is super worth it.
I’ll add on and say upgrading to an ebike (and specifically a cargo ebike) really made the difference to me. One would think that it would reduce the exercise, but for me the fact that it allows me to use it in far far more situations meant that I actually get more exercise overall. I consider the faster acceleration to be a safety feature for when the bike lanes run out, and it makes red lights, heavy loads and steep hills less of a mood killer.
Absolutely life changing once you get one and go!
Smart vacuum cleaner. You pay once for not needing to vacuum your house anymore - best deal ever.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 14•9 months ago
If it’s so smart, why does it clean for you?
I passed an Intelligence check and outsmarted it.
I love my airfryer and may upgrade it to a larger one. I’ve started making my own food again instead of eating fast food every day (depression sucks).
I almost bought an air fryer, but ended up with a convection toaster oven. Does everything an air fryer does and much more. I bought the Gourmia one from Costco and would buy it again in a heartbeat.
What are some food recipes you recommend?!
Any subs you posted on or learned from that you would advise others to follow, curious.
Thank you!
Not OP, but we make roasted carrots with garlic, Italian spices, and parm cheese sprinkled on top.
Be sure to use avocado oil instead of olive.
They’re fucking delicious.
Edit: 325 for about 18-20 minutes. Just check for tenderness that you prefer.
Awesome!
Always great when we come together as a people to share recipes!
I bought a Philips device and installed the companion app (Kitchen+). It has a decent selection of recipes that you can filter by appliance and other stuff. You can add your own recipes too.
We have two different Ninja air fryers. One that’s the bin/grill style and the flip version that can be used as a toaster oven as well.
They get used in one form or another almost daily.
Glasses.
Now I’m addicted.
I went through a glasses addiction myself as well lol. I found an eye-care clinic where they would cut the lenses and have them ready within 3 hours.
I would go to garage sales, thrift stores, and swap meets to find glasses to put lenses on. They were like $60 for the lenses and I never spent more than $10 on frames.
I ended up with 3 seeing glasses and 4 sun glasses before I realized it was going to be unsustainable to get new lenses for my new prescription every year.
A house. My mortgage is cheaper than rent, and now I get to actually address annoyances with my living conditions.
It’s almost 100 years old, and a bit of an fixer upper, but the important stuff is solid. Last summer I invested in proper drainage around the foundation so that I can start making the basement livable. This year I invested in a proper bathroom. Next year it’s a new kitchen. And if time allows I’ll start rebuilding the basement mainly for one extra bed room and an office.
God I wish my mortgage was cheaper than rent lol.
Depends on market. In Vancouver existing rentals are controlled until you move, the house sells, or you are reno-evicted. This involves evicting the tenant to “fix up the suite” and then renting it out at a much higher rate.
There is also the move to evict for a " family member" to move in but often this is abused to get low paying tenants out.
New mortgages are much more than existing rent here. As much as renters go through credit checks, I think landlords should too as you don’t want to rent a place where they can’t afford the interest rate increases. Often they cheap out on repairs and usually sees the place being sold or one of the above abuses of the evictions to get a higher paying tenant in.
The market is really tight in places like Vancouver and Toronto. The interest rate hikes will eventually catch up to most renters as properties are moved/sold.
This is a good one. I finally teamed up with family to invest in a house last year. I’ve found a lot of issues that I’ve since fixed, especially with the electrical. There’s still a lot to fix, but I’m elated that I can actually take action to fix stuff.
While renting, my hands were severely tied. The only benefit with renting was that if anything was literally broken, it would be fixed by the landlord, free to me. “Fixed” is subjective, usually done as cheaply as possible, which is often making things less convenient.
Now I can have things fixed correctly, making things more convenient overall for me and my family.
Long term, we’re planning on renovating and adding another kitchen and bathroom, possibly another entrance and I’m considering splitting the HVAC for one portion of the place and almost splitting it into two independent homes that are conjoined.
Same, cut my monthly housing cost by almost $1000 two years ago. So many good things have happened as a result as well, because it was a move between regions and opened up alternative employment options not previously available. As a result I also doubled my income.
My mortgage is cheaper than Rest
That doesn’t make any sense. Unless the market at your country is completly broken, that simply does not happen.
Australia checking in: mortgage repayments are absolutely cheaper than rents. Especially if you bought pre-pandemic.
This only talks about rent. And when rent increases, so does the value of the property, because you can get more money as rents are higher.
If you now consider the amount of work you have to invest into owning property and the associated risk of owning a house or flat, in an ideal market its simply not possible.
And while the housing market is imperfect due to the high burden for entrance, I have never seen a proper calculation where mortage, insurance and maintanance comes out lower than renting.
And, as a matter of fact, it doesnt even in your own example Sydney: https://www.smh.com.au/money/saving/as-costs-soar-is-it-cheaper-to-rent-or-buy-20230407-p5cywp.html
I’m not going to doxx myself by giving the exact address, but my landlady in 2019 wanted to sell the house we were in. She first offered the place to us for $430,000 - which would have been a discount because she wouldn’t have needed an agent etc.
Assuming we had the 20% deposit to borrow $344,000 and taken her up on that offer, our current repayments would have been about $464 per week. Even without the discount, repayments would have been under $500.
Instead, she eventually sold the property and we had to move to a smaller house where we are now paying $650 per week. Going from a 4 bedroom house with a yard to a 3 bedroom townhouse sharing the block with two other residences. No yard. Admittedly, we moved a suburb closer to the CBD.
Take a look at Real estate for a 3+ bedroom house within 10km of any Australian city, you’ll see that $650 is not extravagant by any means.
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The 20 % deposit has to be taken into the calculation as well.
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You are completly neglecting insurance.
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You are negleticing maintanance.
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You are comparing two different properties.
- The 20% deposit is the entire point. It’s the barrier of entry to home ownership that keeps people renting. Of course I factored it in, it’s why I spoke of a mortgage of $344k and not $430k.
- What does insurance have to do with anything? We are comparing rent to repayments. We have renter’s insurance now. We’d be changing that.
- Are you saying you spend over $100 per week, every week on maintenance?
- True. We’ve downsized from a four bedroom house to a three bedroom townhouse. You’ll just have to take my word for it that 4 bedroom houses in the next suburb go for about the same as the place we have because I’ve already told Lemmy enough about where I live.
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Often rent covers the owner’s mortgage plus their benefit, so yes, it’s easy for your mortgage to be cheaper than rent.
Mortgage cheaper than rent here - just outside of Washington DC. (Only true when comparing like for like living spaces, same bedrooms, square feet, etc)
I have always hated bath mats. Especially being in a fairly large family, by early afternoon it seems like the bath mat is always saturated and useless; slipping around the floor if you’re trying to use it to dry your feet, or soaking your socks if you happen to step on it in the course of other bathroom business.
I recently got a bath stone made of diatomaceous earth and it has erased all of the annoyance. It pulls the water right off you so I always feel safe stepping onto my tile floor after just a few steps on the bath stone, and it dries freakishly fast, like basically in front of your eyes.
I’ve only had it a month so I don’t know how durable it is over the long term, but so far it has been $40 well spent.
I’ve never understood why more people don’t dry themselves in the shower, and dry their feet on the way out. Why use the bath mat as a special communal foot sole towel? It’s much nicer when it’s just a comfortable dry mat for standing on with bare feet.
Chemotherapy absolutely changed my life, does that count?
If you are alive and well, it does
An E-reader. There’s no more space in my house for book shelves. I’ve a ton of books stored inappropriately in a bunch of cabinets and on top of furniture, that I hope to find new homes for before irreparable damage is done to their spine.
Having an e-reader also helped me in the gym. Instead of doomscrolling on lemmy or tiktok, I read between sets. Helped me regain my reading habit and kick my social media habit. Also, helped my social anxiety of having to rest longer than half a minute when other people might want to use the iron I’m using.
What? You bring your ereader to the gym and read between sets? That’s a new one…
Massive chad energy right there tbh, supersetting with brain reps
Don’t knock it! I know it’s weird, but if you need to improve your reading, it really helps.
This is a great shout. Since I stopped commuting 6yrs ago my reading is almost entirely non existent. Doing it between sets means I can give my brain a workout while the guns get one :D
First place, aSmartwatch.
I all but stopped checking every fcking notification, my life has become peacefull and tranquil.
Second place, my 4yo daughter. Achieved the exact opposite.
How does a smartwatch get you to stop looking at notifications?
Before, I picked up my phone at every ping or vibrate.
When I wear the watch, all phone notifications are automatically muted and the watch is set to only notify a few apps (Whatsapp, phone calls, calendar). No emails, no kik, no games nothing.
That’s a very smart idea!
Besides the other answers, it trivializes them while making you put forth the tiniest effort towards one you might care about while you can discard the rest. The trick with phones isn’t in picking it up to look, but rather on putting it back down.
With a smart watch (I’ve owned a few over the years) my phone has been on silent for years. No more dings, beeps, or rings especially in meetings or with other people. I set it to vibrate only for text and calls. Game changer. I wish those in sales would use them more.
Synology NAS (basically a hard drive always connected to the home network and internet) - has been amazing for auto-backing-up photos from the family phones and for running Plex run my own personal streaming service for the whole family around the world. Has been great for file transfer too. I can easily move files between my phone, PC, Steam Deck, etc and all the USB memory sticks I had have been sitting in a drawer ever since.
Exercise compression thermals - wear these is super comfortable and really warm. I wear them constantly at home and can have the heating off almost all winter (UK). Saves tons of energy and money.
Electric blanket - another great low energy purchase for relaxing under when watching TV or warming up the bed before sleeping. Gets super hot while hardly using any energy at all.
Split unit air con installation - this was expensive and I thought it would be unnecessary in the UK, but it seems to be used more and more every summer as we get more heatwaves and summers are becoming unbearable.
Safety razors - I have really thick facial hair and the multi-blade razors from big name brands would dull really quickly and cause tons of shaving rash. These razors are sharper, last longer, are recyclable and much better for my skin.
Liquid ink refillable rollerball pens - I tried fountain pens after seeing the online communities that are crazy about them, and really didn’t like them. I found rollerball pens I like that take fountain pen ink and have been super happy with them. I write a lot at work and this has gotten rid of the plastic waste of throwing away used disposable ballpoint refills every couple of weeks.
Hitbox controller - I’ve been playing Street Fighter 6 since release and I made a leverless controller box myself and I’ve loved using it to play SF6. Managed to make it for one third the price of what these things sell for and completely customised it.
I really need to finish building my NAS. You just reminded me of that.
And the other tips are good as well. Thanks.
More info on the homemade controller?
Yes please
See above comment
My DIY controller made from scratch. It has a built in USB c hub so when I use it with the Steam Deck I can connect the charger cable to the controller. If someone is playing locally with me their controller just plugs into the side of mine and works with the Steam Deck. Made the footprint as small as I could. It’s 21 x 15.3 x 3.6 cm Seimitsu buttons. Raspberry pi controller. 5 additional side buttons for navigation and shortcuts.
I made this post as well: https://lemm.ee/post/9700155
The whole collection: https://i.imgur.com/nB1Mfa9.png
There’s a community for this but it’s pretty dead: https://lemmy.world/c/arcadesticks
I can make a detailed guide if anyone is interested. And I’m looking to sell the black and white controller with the integrated hub. Maybe even the one with the keyboard buttons if I can fix the firmware annoyance in it.
In last 5 years for me:
- a pair of decent (second hand) speakers
- a cheap (blue switches ftw) mechanical keyboard
- a standing desk
- an ergonomic chair
(sorry it’s not single item…)
What keyboard did you get? I’m searching for a good ergonomic one that won’t break the bank
You might want to join the !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml
I personally haven’t tried the ergonomic keyboards yet, have been using Ducky One 2 for a few years and recently got KBDcraft Kit Adam (Lego keyboard) and I’m enjoying this one, super soft and nice sounding switches. From the ergonomic keyboards I’ve seen Keychron K11 Pro as an interesting one, but you’d have to see if it fits you, I can’t really recommend any myself.
Ooh a Lego keyboard? Nice! I’ll look into those, thanks!
i got a cheap gamer’s keyboard that happened to have blue switches, the cheapest i actually found with Cherry MX Blue (so, some mechanical keyboard nerds will say this is sh*t and they’ll probably be right). It’s an “HyperX Alloy”. it has these annoyingly red LED, but i don’t really care. I recommend it for the price though (I paid around 90 buck back then)
I’ll look into it, thanks!
A dishwasher… For a family, it saves a huge amount of time and water.
Self hosting. I’m still a beginner on this but Nextcloud and plex made me way richer than before both economically and mentally
You selling subscriptions to make up the difference? My server only cost me money so far lol
Nope only my family, friends and I are using it. But thanks to plex and all the arr apps I canceled all my streaming and cloud subscriptions. Server is an old dell business pc so it’s not that much power hungry.
Self hosting is awesome. I self host an email server, website, file transfer server, xmpp chat server, Nextcloud (for calendar and contact sync and video conferencing), and a search engine on a single VPS which costs me £4 per month. No previous background in web admin at all!
Sunglasses and UV-blocking clothes.
With the first I discovered that I have a high sensitivity to light, now I can see much more during the day.
And the second is very useful, protecting me from sun without the need to worry about sunscreen (except for the face)
I have the same issue with light, had prescription glasses and prescription sunglasses, and had to switch between the two frequently. Finally got prescription transitions and they’re incredible, I no longer have to think about my glasses at all. Just put them on and go.
