Headphones. I don’t wanna listen to your tik toks on a bus.
I would add that a pair of good ones is a world of difference for everything you might use them for - music, gaming, movies. Now good != expensive, good headphones can be had for under 50 bucks, great headphones for around 100-200, anything beyond that you are venturing into audiophile waters with very diminishing returns.
For the cheaper end, Koss is a great point to jump on, KSC 75, Porta Pro (these are my go to for moving around, including running in the rain) and Kph 30i are all great options. Worth noting that these will not provide much in the way of isolation, they are relatively open.
There are also pretty good cheap in-ear options (IEM), but i will not comment on these as I absolutely despise this form factor, personally.
For a potential endgame, with a price bump, you can look to something like Sennheiser HD560s. These are what I use at home, they are a great all-rounder, by reproducing the sound spatially very well, which is amazing for gaming, but also immersive for music and movies. For music (well, sound in general, of course) they are what is known as neutral, so they do not excentuate particularly any part of the frequency curve, they reproduce music roughly as-mixed, with great resolution of individual instruments, in my experience they really make the vocals pop.
Not necessarily! they are great for at home, especially if you have a kid or grandparent you have to be able to hear. Not so much for the bus though
Since we’re on Lemmy, USB jump drive so they can reinstall a new distro of Linux every ~3 months
Do it with Ventoy https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
Ventoy is great. I have a bunch of useful Windows ISOs like win 10 and 11. I also have a bunch of useless ones like Win XP and 7.
I have many useful Linux ISOs and I also have an Android ISO for some reason.
A great tool 🔥
WinXP isn’t compatible with ventoy. At least, it always BSODed for me. Did you have any luck?
I use ventoy all the time! But not all ISOs are compatible with it, I’ve found. Fedora, for example, and OpenSuse are not compatible with ventoy.
Wdym? Fedora 38 server and workstation worked fine for me. Might be your drive?
Keyboard. It’s got hotkeys for the most used characters. It’s so much faster than manually drawing each character in Paint.
You don’t have to use every shortcut you know.
People need to think too, and the less repetitive one’s workflow, the less time one has to think.
Time efficiency gains assume practically infinite cognitive resources. Normal human workflow is think/execute/think/execute. Jobs that are only think/think/think/think are unnatural and fuck up your brain. Especially if you think of reality as a sort of test suite you can run against new neural patterns to weed out the ones built on unreliable patterns.
So you do you bro. You take your time on those precious chars. I do recommend you learn chinese in that case though, or Egyptian heiroglyphics. You get a lot more information out of each bmp file that way.
A good chair. I know it’s not technically a gadget but if you’re spending half of your day on the computer you should spend on a good chair with proper lumbar support. Your back will thank you.
Just don’t fall for those “gamer” chairs. They’re designed to look pretty, not to be comfortable.
When I was last shopping for a chair, a “gamer” chair was, by far, the best chair that I could find for my size (average height, but stocky and overweight). None of the chairs at my local office store went up far enough for my knees and the arm rests did not support my elbows at table level.
I am sure that their are high end office chairs that would fit me, but I did not want to do much research. I had just read a good overview of gaming chairs from Ars Technica and just went off of that.
Every chair I have had at work has the same problem. At one job, they had ergonomics experts come in to help set up our desks at a new office. The expert sat me down, fiddled with my chair, and apologized because it was hopeless.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, they’re pretty comfortable if I say so myself
The issue is, yeah they’re comfortable, but they’re not comfortable in a good way for your body. You slouch and fuck your spine up. Also you look like a teenager, do you have a racecar bed too?
It’s not just about comfort, it’s about it not messing up your back long-term.
A bean bag is pretty comfy, but if you work in one 40h a week, your spine will be dust within a year.
Unfortunately the best chairs are even more expensive than gaming chairs. As an example, Herman Miller’s Aeron has been rated as one of the best designed chairs for over 2 decades and costs over a grand. Imagine that with gamer tax added to it: basically no one would buy it. So they simply don’t make chairs of that quality level to sell to that target demographic, it would not make economic sense to.
Buy a used Aeron chair on Craigslist or something. I’ve gotten 2 of them like this and love them. They last forever and are extremely comfortable.
A Mira works well too and doesn’t get as much attention as the Aeron, so will be cheaper.
External hard drive big enough to hold more than the entire memory of the computer. Keep everything you find valuable at least, or better yet back up the entire computer on there and update it regularly. Leave it unplugged from the computer between updates.
In other words, an offline backup of everything on your main computer.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different mediums (second HDD + thumb drive, DVD-R, tape if you’re nerdy, etc) and 1 offsite (cloud, VPN tunnel to someone else’s NAS, etc)
“if it doesn’t exist in 3 places, it doesn’t exist at all” is an adage I do my best to abide by. I lost a 500mb hard drive in the 90s (oh no…all my funny Sound Recorder clips and funny pics!!) and have been paranoid ever since.
Digital storage is just too cheap nowadays to risk it. Cloud storage, too
What are you all backing up? My SSD is just my OS, some programs and Steam, a fresh install without a backup has me back up and running in about 2 hours.
Oh goodness… 60,000+ pictures I’ve taken with my camera, my collection of flac files, movies, shows, photoshopped images, screenshots, and random files that might stop existing on the internet!
When I was younger, heaps of hentai. Many heaps.
Some people have families and like to keep pictures and videos of said family around. Also, legal documents, academic papers, career and work related documents. Other deranged individuals have collections of rare stuff like music, games and movies that aren’t available on digital platforms anymore. Wild concept, I know.
I have 16 TBs of photos/books/comics/movies/shows/games/etc. That’s not even that much compared to some people.
The important things for me to back up include:
- photographs and family videos (literally irreplaceable)
- legal documents and other such paperwork (can be replaced, but it would be a pain)
- various notes on how to accomplish occasional tasks (not too hard to figure out again, but it is convenient to spend 1 minute copying a command out of a text file instead of spending 15 minutes to find all the correct command line arguments)
