Probably it doesn’t quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it’s much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.
wow that’s amazing. so it’s connected to all other PCs in the house? did you have to buy a lot of new storage?
I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven’t run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.
The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.
What benefits do you see in navidrome compared to having your music in Jellyfin? I’m just starting out with jellyfin and added some music to it. I listen to it with findroid on my phone and so far it seems to work okay.
I’m not the guy you replied to.
I originally stored my music in Plex and used Plexamp. I have a large playlist downloaded from youtube which caused horrible performance issues in Plexamp. Navidrome is pretty much a read-only service. It can only read metadata from the files, not add any or manage them. For me this feels safer to expose to the internet since my docker container only has read-only access to all of my files. Even if someone broke into the service for some reason, they couldn’t do anything to my files.
I don’t know if jellyfin has similar performance issues with large playlists since I already had navidrome set up by then.
Thanks! I don’t have too much music on it yet, I guess, so not sure on the performance. I do like that read only approach, though. Currently I’m running just the regular jellyfin app on my Mac. What made you use it in docker? It sounds like in Linux it’s a safeguard to prevent dependency issues but I don’t think that’s really a factor on mac
Mostly ease of management. I have a server on which I run multiple applications. If I don’t need something anymore, I can just purge the container. The directories used by that container are clearly listed in my docker-compose file so I never have to wonder whether I purged everything that is now unnecessary.
It also makes it very easy to deploy a new service.
I bought a cheap low power minipc. Don’t know the numbers but having a 10yo desktop powered 27/7 can’t be that great for your power consumption.
The one I bought is an Intel Alder Lake N100 Quad Core up to 3.4GHZ, 16GB DDR5 512GB for €160.
I recently picked up a 13 year old dell inspiron to run my instance of home assistant and Plex. It was an upgrade from a shitty old Linux laptop that was literally falling apart. All I had to do was add ram (it only had 6gb and it wasn’t stable, so I maxed it out with 16gb) and I swapped the old slow HDD for a crucial SATA SSD and it’s been perfect. It probably pulls more wattage than necessary but it’s exactly what I need for now.
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.
Similar here: Anbernic RG280V. Fits in a pocket. Plays everything up through PSX. I use it all the time!
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
Sony wishing they didn’t make the vita is a double edged sword, because it also means you can be a completely obvious hacker, and Sony doesn’t give a singular fuck. And they still ban people for hacking on ps3, so it isn’t just age.
Yeah i have a modded psvita, scene is suprsingly active. You got ensō?
I have whatever I set up with when I hacked it tbh. I don’t really do much beyond transfer games onto it at this point
Have had mine for 10 years and it still going. The screen edges are a bit yellow but not a big deal.
I just got one so reading this makes me hopeful. Fallen out of love with gaming a bit in recent years
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
Almost all my gaming is on my SD now. Love this thing.
deleted by creator
It’s hand crafted in Ukraine and it has a steel sculpture of Thors face adorned on the front.
deleted by creator
Bitchin’
Now that is a B1tchin’ cane.
I’ve been struggling with gout in my knee and ankle off and on. When it gets bad I’m almost immobile and I broke down and finally bought a cane to help me hobble around when it’s at its worst.
Mine also came from Ukraine and like you I wanted something with personality. I got an oak, ball top style stained cherry and I love it!
I got one made of holly, with a phoenix feather core. It’s very nice and supple.
did you pick it or did it pick you?
deleted by creator
Physical Therapy! Do the exercises/stretches. If you need to go back and ask a doctor for another round, do it. I get it though.
Sometimes KT tape can do wonders, but it really really depends. Personally, the best was with knees and arms. I wear a different kind of brace for my ankle, a Trilok, but there are apparently a whole bunch of similar ones now.
Other times you just suffer in silence…
deleted by creator
Dude do it. I dealt with chronic pain for way too long and just accepted it as hopeless. I had tried stretches and exercises on my own with no luck so I wrote physical therapy off as pointless.
Eventually I gave in and 6 weeks in to physical therapy my pain is like 80% gone. I started noticing improvements after a week.
Bidet for sure. A good one in the $300-400 range. It is such a gamechanger to always have a clean ass. And without TP, the toilet never clogs and you aren’t spending extra on TP. Also helps with hemorrhoids if/when you get those, as TP is really rough on your asshole/not good for you.
I still have some TP for guests, but with the dryer built in, it really isn’t needed.
Also, a bidet is a lifesaver if you like extreme hotsauces. Basically, it’s the only piece of daily furniture that makes me go “God, I’m so glad I bought this” for literal years since I got it in the pandemic. No cold toilet seat during winter. Heated seat that doesn’t slam. Hot water. Hot air blow dryer. Self-cleaning.
Came to say bidet, but I have the poor man version … 25 at Amazon. I suffer Everytime I have to go back to only tp when not at home. I feel like a savage caveman without one. Smearing poop is just nasty and uncivilized to me. I have used the fancy ones in Japan but really did not like the warm water. I prefer the shocking cold glaciar feeling of butt refreshes. To anyone reading this…get a bidet, ANY KIND… Try cleaning up peanutbutter from your arm with just paper to experience what we talking about .
How well do they self-clean? How often do you need to clean it manually?
I’ve cleaned it twice just to feel good about it, but it’s been sparkling aside from some hard water deposits, which came off pretty easily. It always runs water over it after use, and the nozzle angle is so steep, it doesn’t get poo on it. I have a toto one. (I’ve had mine since about mid 2021)
I still clean the toilet seat and the underside of the seat though, which can get a bit of pee on it if you’re a guy. I’m a bit of a clean freak too, so when I say clean, I mean clean, lol.
Well, you can spend 300-400 or you can buy a “portable bidet bottle” and clean your asshole with warm water. You’ll still need to use some toilet paper (or maybe a towel) to dry, but you’ll be spending $15 more or less and you can carry it with you when you travel.
Have you ever used one of these? I thought about getting one for backpacking trips; TP becomes a major consideration on those, and - frankly - I often have all the time in the world to wait, and airdry, and enjoy the view. At least, on summer trips. But I’ve wondered how well they work in practice.
I’ve been using a 0.5L one for years now. Usually it’s enough, but there are times that when I dry (with toilet paper) I see that I need a little more cleaning and then I either finish with the paper or refill the bottle and try again.
i have a backpacking bidet (culo clean specifically) and I would say it gives mixed results. basically, you need to practice and develop a technique to “get the most” out of it in terms of water usage, how clean you can get, etc. I don’t have a normal bidet so i have nothing to compare it with and maybe my technique isnt so good. mine gets me mostly clean but i still need a square of toilet paper to make sure in almost every case. better than not having it, but not the results I was hoping for.
This one seems silly, but one really useful cheap thing I bought that I use much more than I thought I would is an electric kettle. (I should point out I’m in the US) I use it to make iced tea, my wife uses it for hot tea, and we both use it for boiling water for whatever cooking project needs it. We have a gas stove, and it takes about twice as long to heat up a liter of water as this kettle. It uses a normal US 120v outlet and I think it draws 1,000w. (Edit: I looked it up and it’s 1,100 watts)
Seconding an electric kettle, even a cheap one was a game changer over not having one at all. Crazy how 99.99% of people I know as an American don’t own one
Why does America look like poor Poland villages. But even poor Poland Villages have electric kettles.
Dear god, I won’t even look at a kettle that’s less than 2200w.
In fact ours gets so much use I just ordered one that I can shout at across the room to switch on
plus one and I use it for a lot of non cooking where you want water of a specific temperature. Unclogging drains and filling the carpet cleaner comes to mind… Its like I want 135 degree water. Oh also nasal irrigation water. Its great for it to have a wide temperature setting.
Last time I needed new headphones for going out, I bought a Shockz bone conducting headphone.
While the specific one I bought was the wrong choice (the Run I got is slick but needs a proprietary charging cable instead of the USB-C the Move uses, and they sound 100% the same), overall the concept is really good. I enjoy hearing people around me, for someone who more listens to podcasts and radio shows not music the quality is perfect, and I can wear these on my bicycle without having to worry I won’t hear something.
Also, since they don’t sit in the ear not enclose it it’s easy to semi-forget them there as they’re so comfortable, no stuffed feeling or sweaty ears. I sometimes just use them at home instead of shifting a podcast onto the sonos speakers. Just easier.
Yes. I love mine. I originally got some bone-conduction headphones to use at my job because I work in a high noise environment and they still work while you’re wearing earplugs, but I use them pretty much constantly now. It’s really nice to have my music or podcasts and still be able to hear when someone asks me a question, or to be able to hear traffic coming if I’m out walking or jogging.
I’ve had a couple pairs of them now and weirdly bone-conduction headphones seem to be the one electronic device that under promises on its battery life. I don’t know if maybe I just got lucky, but the cheap no name set I got off Amazon promised 5 hours, but even after a year still regularly lasts 8 or 9. My Shokz Open Run Pros promise 10 hours, and I routinely get 15 or 16 hours. So that’s nice.
Out of curiosity: did you ever test noise cancelling headsets in that high noise environment? I’d think that in-ear and over-ear nc headphones should work quite well too.
No, because active noise cancellation doesn’t offer any hearing protection. It doesn’t make the noise go away, it works by sending out an extra soundwave which is a mirror inversion of noise to be cancelled, sends out peaks where there were troughs and troughs where there were peaks, and they cancel each other out as far as your brain is concerned. But to work the destructive soundwave has to be as loud as the sound it’s cancelling, and now you have two sound waves blasting away, still moving air and putting pressure on your eardrums, and it’s that pressure causes the damage to your hearing.
Proper PPE has a passive barrier that physically blocks the bulk of the vibration from reaching your eardrums in the first place. Active noise cancellation does kind of the opposite of that.
I’ve heard of these for a while and general question for you and anyone else who’s looked. What are the red flags? Nothing comes without risks and years of research has shown the hearing damage from traditional headphones. There has to be a rub with these. What are the negative rumblings of using these style of headphones. They have to be there. We just don’t have the decades of research yet.
If I now say that your premise is wrong (headphones don’t cause hearing loss, loud noises do, independent of the source), does that automatically answer your question? 😛
Now to dig a bit deeper into that, there is a lot of research into MIHL from using PLDs, and the key thing is always people turning up the volume higher than they normally would, usually due to the context of where they are. That is, we use our little headphones in noisy environments, and to drown out the noise we turn them up too much and start damaging our ears over time.
In that regard, bone conduction headsets are worse. They are intentionally fully open, and don’t in the slightest bit try to reduce ambient noise. That is, if anything you’d be tempted to crank them up even higher.
I will however say that the models I’ve used all came with an interesting “safety” in this regard that stems from the way they work: At a certain and not that loud noise level, they start vibrating physicially off the skin during playback, in turn plateauing the achievable volume. I suspect however that this level is already beyond healthy.
So, in other words:
If you’re concerned about hearing loss, keep the volume in sane reaches. If you also need to ignore outside noise while listening, this means getting enclosing and/or noise-cancelling headphones, not open ones like bone conducting. However, if keeping the volume low, say during listening at home, bone conduction is no different from other forms of receiving audio, both still stimulate the hearing canal hairs.Agreed 100%.
Before I got my noise cancelling headphones, I was very aware of the volume that I have set when trying to watch a movie in a plane. After I got the noise cancelling headphones, I no longer have to set it that loud anymore.
That said, some airlines need to relook their volumes of their PA system. Some of them are shockingly louder than necessary. Lol
Yeah, I love my ANC earbuds. In pass-through mode, I can hear ambient sounds almost better than I can without them, especially on a bike where I can tune them to blank wind noise but allow voices and bells. And you’re right about not needing high volume to hear music well. They have great sound quality, and the ANC is indispensible on airplanes.
The downside is cost; GP’s bone-conducting headset is $90, and the other pair they mention is $60. A good pair of ANC earbuds starts around $200, and some of the better pairs are upwards of $300.
Worth the money, IMO, but if $60 is all you can afford, GP’s might be the better bet than super sketchy-quality cheap ANC earbuds.
What’s the frequency response like on those? Can you hear low-end bass in a way that sounds good?
Robot vacuum. Autistic and ADHD and could never keep on top of keeping my floor clean. But I can now!
Been looking at these for a while but I can’t seem to decide on one, any suggestions?
I’ve had a look, not purchased, but watched a lot of review videos and I’d recommend you to do the same as no one here is going to have really tried all the different models available.
Unfortunately, the price does seem to correlate with the quality and performance and the most expensive auto vacuums cost in the £300 region. They also will never be as powerful as a traditional upright, can’t do stairs and of course you still have to empty them and take them up and down the stairs to do the different floors of your house. But yh, the price is the biggest reason I’ve not gotten one myself.
yh
Dereference this?
It means “yeah”
Roborock S8+ with the dock is awesome. It’s a straight upgrade from the last gen flagship Roomba.
Way better mapping and battery life.
I had Neatos for years. They worked great until they didn’t; I always had to do a lot of troubleshooting. Now I have a Wyze vacuum, which I think is a rebrand of a larger Chinese brand. It doesn’t clean as well as the Neatos, but it’s had no problems so far, and it was much cheaper.
There’s plenty of reviews out there if you want to get into it, and it does seem like some of the more expensive ones out there have some really nice features. But if you’ve been on the fence for a while my advice is to pick a well reviewed affordable one and go for it.
Once you have something cleaning your floors you’ll have more time to research which one is the ultimate vacuum.
Get a Valetudo supported one. There’s no need to share your room layout with random strangers. I’d get one of newer ones from Dreame.
I have a Roomba j7+ and I love it. I also have a Braava Jet M6, so mopping is taken care of too. The mopping is slow, but it’s quiet and it’s not like I have to wait for it.
I personally like the Eufy brand ones. Bonus, they are in my experience very repairable and the company sells spare parts at reasonable prices 😊
These free up so much time. Love mine too. I cook a lot and mess around a lot in the open kitchen/living room area and had to sweep the floor daily…not anymore.
Y’all this sound crazy, but the Bug A Salt is fucking awesome.
It’s worth it if you can get a black Friday deal or something under 30$ because it’s just a little salt when you shoot it and there’s no guts on your wall, no dirty fly swatter, no chasing, no jumping, no reaching, and you feel like a sniper hitman.
Its not a toy. That shit hurts when you get hit lol
A home server. Originally a Dell R710, now a custom built desktop.
If I can possibly self host something now I will do that over using big tech proprietary services. I feel free.
Same. I’m almost completely off the cloud at this point and I love it.
Just don’t forget backups! I use Borgbackup for mine.
I know some people don’t want a home server because of the space it’d take up, but you can get pretty powerful mini PCs these days (look for ones with an i3-N305 processor) or buy cheap second-hand ex-office PCs on eBay.
For people that still don’t want to have a physical server at their house, you can do a lot of the same self-hosting stuff using a VPS. If you live in an area with expensive electricity (like California or Australia), you can usually get a VPS with a modern processor, ~8GB RAM, and a decent amount of NVMe disk space for $5/month or less, which is easily what it’d cost you just for the electricity usage of a home server.
Can you recommend a good VPS service? I’ve been meaning to get a Synology, but it’s out of my budget for now.
I like GreenCloudVPS, and they’ve got a “budget” line that’s very reasonably priced: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale. They’re currently running a promotion where if you pay for three years in advance, you get double the RAM. I think they’re sold out of their cheapest one ($15/year) at the moment though.
RackNerd is good too. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/182479/official-b-l-a-c-k-f-r-i-d-a-y-thread-community-endorsed-take-a-peek-racknerds-black-friday/
A lot of hosts had good Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales recently so it’s probably worth browsing LowEndTalk and seeing if any deals are still active.
How do you access it away from home. I’m able to access my NAS since Synology gives us a domain to use and we do everything using port forwarding. I would assume that if you set everything up by yourself, you would need to get your own domain and ssl certificates and everything?
I setup my own VPN using this on a raspberry pi. Using the ikev2. I like DietPi for the OS.
I have a domain name on cloudflare DNS, Let’s Encrypt certificates that auto renew and an Nginx reverse proxy pointing at the services I host. Port forwarding through the opnsense router for https.
It’s been a journey setting it up, but its basically been unchanged for about 5 years now and works well. If I need to I can VPN in too.
deleted by creator
Cordless vacuum was a costly one but certainly made that chore a lot more easy and kinda fun. I planned to store it in a closet but I’d take it out every few days so eventually I started leaving it on the floor, it’s not in the way there either.
On a similar note, robot vacuum. It cleans quite nicely, is surprisingly reliable, and as a bonus you keep the floor less cluttered to make sure it doesn’t run into stuff it shouldn’t.
This year, my partner and I traded our large “traditional” vacuum for a robot + cordless stick vacuum.
Honestly, a great decision. Robot vacuum runs once a weekday, house has never been cleaner. Anything it doesn’t get, we can quickly grab the cordless for.
Yeah I got one of those Samsung ones with the dock you set it in when not in use. It charges it up and empties the canister into it’s own built in vacuum. I use it all the time to pick up the loose cat litter and quick vacuum jobs on the floors.
I just got one too, pricier as you say, but removing the activation energy needed to lug around and plug in the old one means I might actually use it.
3D printer. At any moment in time I could just print something out and it would be ready by the time I finish eating. The possibilities are endless, plenty of free models online or just learn how to design yourself.
Edit: I currently use an Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro
What are some fun or useful things you print? I see a lot of prints online that are toys or action figures, and that’s pretty neat but I usually am not impressed with the quality.
I almost exclusively print functional things so here’s my list of things I’ve designed or printed:
- Tubular key to bypass paying for laundry
- Furniture leg extensions on almost all my furniture to give minimum 4" clearance for the robovac
- Custom mounting bracket / spacer for mounting road sign to the wall with command strips
- Tapestry mounting shim to clamp tapestry in binder clips to hang on the wall without ripping the tapestry
- Rubber band powered sandal holders that stick to the wall and clamp onto sandals which can be used without using your hands / while holding something (I needed to keep my basement sandals from being eaten by my old robovac and I needed to be able to put them on and put them back without needing to put down anything heavy I’m taking to/from the basement, and the space required it to be flat against the wall)
- Replacement shelf pegs for bathroom shelves which are normally only sold in 20 packs for >5$ when I only needed 1, the print cost like 1c instead
- Replacement D-slotted electrical box key since the one that came with the box broke
- Backyard lamp holder that attaches to the fence pole and provides a loop to hang a lamp
- Replacement side panel clip for my PC case which came with 1 broken - manufacturer doesn’t sell replacements
- Custom piece for 2 sectional couch legs to slot into which keeps the 2 halves of my couch from sliding apart causing someone to fall in between onto the floor
Some of this could have been bought online but having a 3D printer really reveals how overpriced plastic stuff is. I rarely print something that costs me more than a few dollars in filament - and that’s if it’s a very large object, it’s easily less than the shipping cost of an equivalent item alone, and small things can often only be found in large packs online while usually costing only a couple cents to print. And plenty of the stuff I print benefits from being able to be made custom and to the exact dimensions I need, for example the furniture leg extensions I made fit perfectly on the furniture legs and raise them up exactly as high as they need to be for my robovac to go under, not a centimeter more. A whiteboard marker caddy I made holds the exact number of markers I have / want to have and attaches under a light switch wall plate which I designed in order to avoid needing to attach it with command strips or screws (it gets clamped between the wall plate and the wall by the existing light switch screws). The first item I listed, the tubular key, was printed with the exact bitting needed for the lock (layer height of 0.05mm is enough vertical resolution for the key to work).
I would love to see your models. Do you have a printables, thingiverse or something?
Sure, most of them are posted here: https://www.printables.com/@StephenSmith
I dunno about other guy, but I came here to say 3d printer.
I’ve printed small plastic parts to fix the flush mechanism of a toilet for pennies. I’ve printed little utility items like hangers for parts to paint. Holders for dnd minis to make painting them easier. Storage boxes to organize small parts for various other hobbies. Giant realistic cock and balls turned into a trophy. Replacement parts for board games that have been lost or broken over the years. Custom dice towers and dice boxes for dnd dice sets. Etc.
The ability to see a need, take some measurements, and spend a few minutes in a cad software to have a replacement part that you otherwise can’t find (or can’t find by itself) is honestly amazing.
I just bought my first one, it’ll be here in 3 days, I’m excited!
I’ve recently been working on a cube tomato project. I have those models up on my Printables account. I’m planning on uploading more useful stuff I print up.
The simplest thing I printed is the one I’m most happy about, I had a power bar dangling beside my bed for all my chargers and I printed 2 small clips and it holds it great.
I printed bookcase supports, an air filter and tons of custom boxes for electronics. I learned the basics of SolidWorks so I could design stuff for my printer (ender 3 S1)
Off the top of my head I made a ssd>hdd mounting adapter for my pc. A replacement clip to fix my headphones when they broke, a latch for a pet carrier, replacement part to fix a lamp to it’s base, and a mount for a bearing my mom used to make a lazy Suzan.
Geometric frames of the same size and thickness to make a 3 tiered windchime from upcycled glass!
I use my printer for making replacement parts for things, and for making simple stuff I need like tools, and also for prototyping.
An example: I used to have this motorcycle. The mount for the taillight broke. A new one was $100, and it would break again the same way. So I measured the socket in the fender, measured the bolt holes, and designed my own, which worked flawlessly the rest of the time I had the bike.
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
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.
It’s pretty easy to put unbound on with pihole.
It’s even easier with AdGuard Home though, since it uses DoH via Quad9 out-of-the-box. People usually use solutions like PiHole and AdGuard Home because they don’t want to mess with it at the command-line, just via the web UI.
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.
Ditto on the Arduino. I built a pickup winder for electric guitar, and it’s more than made up for its price in entertainment alone.
Mobile telephone. Does all kinds of fancy stuff, it’s even got a torch!
Bone conducting ear phones, I have tiny narrow ear canals and can’t get any type of ear bud to go in my ears, the bone conductors are a revelation for listening to audio books, radio and music when I’m out and about
Got a brand to recommend? Sounds awesome.
Shokz is a brand that makes them. I haven’t had a pair but a student of mine had them and liked them.
Shokz are awesome. I also have finicky and small ear holes that don’t like earbuds that much, along with piercings that can get annoyed depending on the style. Shockz solves all that plus I can hear my surroundings. Pro tip for camping…wear the shockz WITH earplugs and play white noise or sleep music. It was the only way I slept during a bass music festival with after parties going until dawn.
My wife was a bone conduction earphone candidate for multiple reasons and I convinced her to try some. Her first pair from Shokz died relatively quickly, but they sent her a replacement without much hassle. She likes them a lot. Every now and then I steal them for a bit. I call it the “voice of god” because when you play something through them it’s like telepathy. You can hear the outside unimpeded, but there’s also this extra sound being injected into your head. Would recommend.
I have been using them for years… reliability is questionable… but their warranty is hassle-free. Got 3 pairs in one year .very little questions asked.
This. Got 3 in a year but got tired of playing all the shenanigans customer support played, got an equivalent $35 at Amazon and if I’ve to buy it 4 times in a year I’m even. Can also run it first trough warranty and get another pair next dsy so I’m always connected. They use to be the best and break about the 20 month mark,.now is just another device waiting to die quick.
Shokz are awesome. I can’t have my hearing impared at work for safety and just practical reasons but the shokz don’t block my hearing so they’re fine. The battery on them can also easily last through a whole 12 hour shift. I’ve had mine for a couple of years now and only just recently one of the buttons has started to act up, otherwise I’ve had no problems with them.
Mine are Shokz, I’ve had them a couple of years now with no issues at all, the battery lasts for many hours, I’ve never had then run out for.my use case
Very late reply, but thanks a lot for this info! I’m actually kind of excited to try those now. You’ve opened a door for me with this.
Thanks again!
Its kind of silly, but VR. I like hanging out in vrchat with my internet friends and it makes me feel a lot closer to them. Even when we’re just talking and goin to cool worlds.
Was also gonna say this since expensive gadgets weren’t excluded. I played a bunch of VR minigolf over pandemic to socialize with my irl friends who I couldn’t hang out with and these days VR has been the center of more than half of the social gatherings at my place where I demo games and we pass the headset around for everyone to try different stuff. Seeing new people try VR for the first time never gets old.
Can you suggest what headset to get? Currently deciding between Quest and PSVR.
Not op but quest 2 is a great deal right now for cassual gaming. It works stand alone and with PC. I have also quest 3, but quest 2 is insanely cheap right now and will hold at least a couple of more years. The differences vs quest 3 do not justify the cost difference unless you are hardcore gamer. Imo
Valve Index kit is the best overall setup for the money. Quest headsets are for more casual gaming but the Index uses the power of your PC and its GPU for the graphics.
I got an older Vive Cosmos headset for like 300 dollars. The controllers kinda suck but its easy to use. Might upgrade tracking and get valve knuckles but its expensive to do so.
