would a raspberry pi count? i’ve been self-hosting a nextcloud instance and my RSS feed for a while now and i’ve really been enjoying it
Arduino in the same vein. There’s a great “30 Days Lost in Space” tutorial set, but even to play around with by yourself for cheap, you can get an off brand (the hardware is open source!) Arduino Mega for 20 bucks. All sorts of cool programming and electronics fun.
Heck yes. I never want to use the internet anywhere but my house because my husband installed a Pihole and it’s the best thing evaaaar.
AdGuard Home is better since it supports DNS over HTTPS, which prevents your internet provider from seeing and intercepting your DNS queries (which they can do even if you use a third-party DNS service like Google or Cloudflare). You can get DoH working on PiHole but it’s a lot of manual work.
The Panic Playdate. It’s just a really nice gaming console that is getting a lot of support from game devs. It’s one of the very few truly portable handhelds as it can easily fit in a pocket and the battery lasts forever too.
If it counts, definitely the Steam Deck. With that and emulators, it’s like having almost every game I’ve ever owned in one portable machine.
In a similar vein, I love my ps vita. Hacked, it’s an absolutely amazing console, and is able to boast the “actually fits in my pocket” award.
Such a cool console. Sony butchered it, but theres still so much fun to be had with it. We got a GTA san andreas port by the community ffs
I just got one so reading this makes me hopeful. Fallen out of love with gaming a bit in recent years
I got one recently too, and it’s already helping me with this. I hope you find joy in it :). I never buy myself anything so I was worried I’d regret it… but I really like it so far.
Omg same, but it’s been a rough year so this is my Christmas gift to myself I guess. Also glad to hear it’s helping you :)
Check out “Dave the diver”. I’ve fallen out of love with gaming as well and I’ve been dropping a lot of hours into this game on my steam deck. Super unique and easy to pick up and put down. Feels fresh.
Also just ordered mine. Since I started working fulltime remote a year ago, I found myself not wanting to spend more time on my desk after work. That translated into me almost giving up gaming even though I used to love it. Moving to a place where I can have a second desk would cost me one Steam Deck per month so I just went with a Steam Deck lol
Along these lines, i’m thrilled with the ps portal as well. was only $200, but the ps online streaming is so good. i used to use it on ps4 on my ipad with an external controller from 1200 miles away at legit decent frame rate and latency.
ps portal’s display is crisp and beautiful, it looks so much more gorgeous than the steam deck (because all the rendering is done on the ps5), and there are some games that i don’t even really want to play on the big screen format that the portal has made awesome because they’re wonderful on handheld format.
best gaming purchase i’ve made in a long while
A countertop water boiler. It turns out I go through just about 4L of tea a day and now I spend a lot less time boiling water. And when you refill it and it comes to temperature it plays Fur Elise
edit: typo
They’re a little different. Kettles are small (1-2 liters) will heat water until it’s boiling and then shut off(or have the user disconnect the heat source)
Water boilers hold a larger amount of water (3-5 liters) at a consistent temperature with a button to dispense it.
I upgraded from a kettle to a zojirushi water boiler and I’ve never looked back. The thing is incredible. Absolutely worth the price.
It’s because the USA power standards are not suitable for kettle life. The 110 voltage on their power means it takes ages to come to the boil. The idea of putting a few cups of water into a kettle, pushing a button and having boiling water inside a minute does not exist.
That’s why these tabletop things are useful: yes they take ages to initially boil, then they maintain that temperature. 110 volts is fine for that task.
There are 240v outlets in the USA, but they’re usually only used for things with heavy power draw (clothes dryers, EV chargers, electric hot water heaters, etc). Some areas have 208v instead of 240v though.
But yeah, boiling water is slow in the USA and a lot of people do it in the microwave (whereas I never saw anyone ever do that in Australia). We’ve got a Breville espresso machine that has instant hot water, which is useful for some of the use cases we’d use a kettle for.
This is kinda true and kinda not. Even on 110, an electric kettle is faster than a kettle on a gas stove. The real answer is that Americans just don’t drink much tea. My family is unusual in that regard.
And Zojirushi sells parts for their appliances! So instead of having to buy a brand new boiler, I just got a lid for my 15 year old boiler. I’ll always give business to companies that support their products like that
+rep for Zojirushi. My water boiler lid recently began chipping and pretty much disintigrating and on their website I saw they even have replacement parts for discontinued products. Very cool of them
Example: https://www.zojirushi.com/app/spare_parts/item/8-CDQ-P010
