I bought a piece of 1.5 inch stiff foam to try to fix a sag in a bed. It didn’t work but having that thick piece of solid foam around has been a life saver.
Need something flat to put a laptop on? Throw it on the foam. Going to be doing something that requires you to be on your knees for a while? Get the foam!
It went from stupid purchase to something I’d gladly replace if it broke.
Wireless headphones. The original goal was working out and I didn’t want to carry my cellphone on the hand. I never went to work out, but it turns out to be very convenient when my neighbors are being loud, since it has noise cancelling, and also for chores.
Also, some better clothes. For context, I’m FtM. My sister and mother are vain and buy chic clothes like every month, so I always had a surplus of hand-me-downs. I didn’t want to buy more clothes because I already have perfectly serviceable unisex clothes on my closet, but when I donated out all my feminine-cut clothes and shoes I found myself lacking clothes so, yeah, I went and bought the stupid clothes. I fucking love them and wear them on every opportunity I get. They make me feel so much better :)
Here’s an odd one my wife and I were just talking about. Some years ago, we were redoing our kitchen and the contractor told us to go buy the kitchen faucet we wanted. We went off, looked at several, and picked the one we thought looked the best with what we were doing.
When the contractor went to install it, he opened the box and a battery pack fell out. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a faucet would need batteries. It turned out that you can turn it on and off by touching it anywhere (handle, faucet itself, whatever), you just leave the physical handle open and set where you want it, then you can touch on and off. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and we’d never use it.
Flash Forward to now and it’s one of the most used conveniences we’ve ever bought. All those times your hands are covered in raw meat or other cooking mess? Just touch the faucet with your elbow. Rinsing a bunch of veggies one at a time? Tap on, tap off. It works flawlessly, unlike those touchless ones at the airport: no delay and works every time. We will never have a kitchen sink without it - my wife wants them for the bathroom.
I bought a house with these and didn’t realize it had this feature for like a year (batteries had died). Now I love it. I find myself taping every faucet it use and am annoyed when others don’t turn on.
I actually bought a handfree soap dispenser to go next to it, which is a great combo. Preparing meat or something, I can clean my hands and tap sink with elbow and not worry about cross contamination of everything.
They make wall plug adapters for them, no more batteries.
Not many people put electric outlets under their bathroom sinks
Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.
Whereas Twitter isn’t meant for most people’s use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what’s happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.
How in the world would your life be a mess because of Twitter? And how would emacs solve that?
Try spending 5-7 hours a day, for years, on a stupid website and you’ll figure it out.
I’m speechless with the way this community, not just you, has reacted – i.e. sure, I’m sorry for the leaps in my reasoning, but it precisely was the point.
This comment is weird? It reads like an ad lol.
It’s free software, funded by donations. Anyway, no, not where I live, and I’m autistic, you’re comparing the way I communicate with an ad.
It’s not the communication that is being critiqued, it’s the unsual leap of contextual logic made to connect Twitter to Emacs. The Enties don’t follow it, because they can’t see how the unusual comparison paired with a strong recommendation for Emacs could be anything other than an “ad”, and not just an enthusiastic personal endorsement for a thing you’re passionate about.
Edit: I never knew Emacs had a built-in IRC client! What a rad bit of software.
Hi, sorry I was logged out due to 2FA, and I didn’t really try to log back until now.
I agree about the “unusual leap of contextual logic made to connect Twitter to Emacs”. For my defense, repeating the same idea over and over is exhausting, and this is precisely how social media addicts use microblogging.
I don’t have the time to answer right now, I know from experience it would take several A4 pages, but thank you for the kind answer.
