I see posts talking about good BIFL items but I don’t hear much about the other side of products that are bad or products you bought but don’t even use.
Sonos speaker. I have Google Home speakers around the house and we use them to play music. Sonos almost never get used
What don’t you like about them? I’ve just gotten a set for my TV and really look forward to expanding to the rest of the house.
They’re expensive, but they sound amazing and they’re so easy to use.
I have a small standalone speaker, not good for TV. I doesn’t want to link with my Google profile, so no voice control from Assistant. So the only way to use it is from their app, or maybe casting
Not the original commenter but for me it was that they didn’t integrate well into my multi-device management platform and instead required you to use Sonos’s platform and products to play on multiple devices. The sound was decent but I only had one and it didn’t work with my other speakers so it rarely got used.
Yeah, the thing about the Sonos system is that they’re made to work together with other Sonos speakers. You either go all in or not at all.
Our family is an Apple family and I’ve found the Sonos works quite well with AirPlay… just cast to everything in the house and the Sonos and the
AirPodsHomePods all work together seamlessly.Also the Google speakers are usually good enough, and way cheaper.
A cellphone in like 1995. Had if for a few days before realizing I didn’t have anyone to call. Returned it not long after.
Same time plus minus one for me. Not only did nobody have a reason to call me (at school). Literally nobody else had a mobile phone.
So many untouched videogames.
My ab roller.
The 1kg bag of brown rice I bought to be healthier.
Amazon Prime.
A fake olive tree that sits in my living room.
I inherited a blender. I thought I’d absolutely use it. Nope. Food processor on the other hand is amazing and I want a better one someday
I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef’s knife that I’ll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I’ve dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don’t need and won’t benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.
Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn’t that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I’m not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I’m not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I’m not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.
My headphone pads on a pair of Sony MD7506 were fraying apart, so I bought a pair of $3 replacement pads online. While I was buying those, I noticed a nice looking $30 pair made of sheepskin leather. I bought those, too and figured I’d just use the $3 pair until they inevitably wore out, and then switch to the nice ones. Well, it’s been some time now and the $3 pair are apparently far more robust than their forebears. The sheepskin remain in their packaging untouched. One day…
Seriously. Don’t let the sunken cost fallacy keep you from enjoying something premium that you bought
I bought an Instant Pot back in 2017. I’ve never used it.
Lol me too. Only because it uses just enough wattage to blow the fuse in my tiny apartment.
I bought a Wii U. Nintendo only made like ten games for it.
Honestly, I got so much fun out of Homebrewing my WiiU. Getting free games, modding them
If it’s an actual question and not sarcasm: Programs developed at home by hobby developers. Not strictly necessary though.
Something like Minecraft and Portal ported to 3DS etc or actually original games created for the platform of choice.
And almost all of them were ported to the Switch. Except Xenoblade X, which is the only WiiU exclusive I actually want to play.
Play it on an emulator like Cemu
That’s my plan.
Good plan.
Bialetti Venus coffee maker, it’s too fragile and needs a full 3 spoons of coffee to make half as much as my mug that I filled to the top with a paper filter while using just 2 spoons.
It changed color on the outside after a week, and you need to disassemble to store it so it takes a ton of space even though it’s so small, also needs medium coffee and I can’t find a good medium one in my area, my favorite is a fine ground.
Btw, a Zojirusha coffee maker is absolutely worth it, they make excellent coffee, the precise water heat maintenance thing and the pre bloom, steel insulated carafe are a big part. My first one stood up to living in a semi truck sleeper for three years, and 2 years so far in my kitchen. The second I bought for my business.
this never happens to me because I’m poor
I’ve done it with paying for dental insurance but not going to the dentist because I can’t afford it.
nice
I bought a Valve Index two years ago, had fun with it for a couple weeks, then never used it again :-\
I wanna get one for beat saber. That game looks fun. Also, vr chat with an actual vr headset would be cool
There are a lot of fun games, but it’s more like a mini game experience a lot of the time.
My husband got an Oculus before they were bought out only to find out he gets motion sick with most games. I don’t get motion sick ever so he was excited to see me try out his library of cool starship and fighter games and all I ever play on it is beat saber, lol. The custom map scene is where it’s at!
me too! i stuck with mine quite a bit longer, but it ended up in the box all the same. there are very few good vr games that don’t have that tech demo-y format lots of early titles had. and valve’s promises of linux support were quite exaggerated, which made playing the couple games i kept coming back to even less convenient or just a worse experience. i stopped playing half life alyx halfway through, and came back and i couldn’t get it to run on my linux pc anymore - like, thats the single game/hardware combo valve promised would 100% work on linux.
its kinda sad because i really believed in consumer vr back then, but seeing how the industry has stagnated has shown that either it isn’t possible or we aren’t ready for cheap, good, open vr. nobody is making good vr games because there are no users and there are no users because its too expensive to get a good vr rig and there are no games.
I’ve been on the vr train since 2016, i eveb did dev work for a few vr companies. imo I think there are 2 problems with vr this time around. 1st is movement, joystick style movement makes half the userbase sick to their stomach, teleport feels terrible to the other half, supporting both invariably breaks game balance. There are hardware solutions but they are still in their infancy and are huge and expensive for the most part. The result is an already small userbase fracturing even more.
Second problem is less serious, there are games with fun mechanics, there are games with good, long stories and progression. There are very very few games that have both. This makes all the games feel like demos.
I love the potential of vr games, but there just isn’t enough content out there to make it worth.
A proper fit and we’ll designed headset is also very important and often neglected. For instance the valve index is almost twice the weight of the vive, but most agree the index feels lighter. Getting a good fit is the difference between your neck hurting in 15min vs 2hrs+.
Nevermind the walled garden problem. We’ve got potentially great content locked behind different storefronts requiring different hardware for each.
In the quest for dominance, everyone is losing.
Like, I understand Valve’s “no exclusive content” stance, but they really should consider pumping publishing money into vr software studios, but with an open platform clause. A healthy ecosystem of software will enable VR to thrive. Either that or engage in negotiations with the other players to create a VR collective agreement. It’ll never happen, but one can dream.
My 50" TV. I use it everyday, but I could have invested the money in a berrer place. Like mutual funds, or buying new hardware for my homeserver.
A Leap-Motion
ooooohhhh isn’t that the cool hand sensor that sits on your desk and was supposed to change the way we interact with our computers ?
Yup. Thing is, touch less interaction is very awkward, anything with any kind of feedback is much better (including touchscreen). It never stood a chance
I bought a new netbook last year to watch stuff on as my old one from like 10 years ago finally fell apart.
I fucking hate the new Windows so much and I’m not techy enough to change the operating system to something better, so I barely use it as watching stuff on my phone is easier.
If you’re interested, Linux Mint Debian Edition is pretty easy to setup and use.
I recommend using the debian edition image and not the ubuntu version.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/b0EBueufP0o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Someone mentioned turning a PC into a Chromebook above and it’s not a bad idea. You can probably install Android apps on it for streaming services too. All you need is a flash drive. I probably wouldn’t mess with it though if it’s your only device if you aren’t that tech savvy.
You’re probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don’t need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.
Cast Iron Pan - I don’t cook enough to justify it. Girlfriend at the time thought it was a good idea, and she used it a bunch, but now it’s just in the cabinet probably rusting up.
Humidifier - It gets really dry in here and it was recommended as a solution to my dry eyes. But it’s a pain to clean and refill, so it mostly just sits there.
Robo vacuum - It wasn’t great at navigating the apartment, so I didn’t use its auto schedule thing. Then the cat hair overwhelmed it. It is languishing in the closet. I got some use out of it, at least, driving it around like an RC Car, but I ended up buying a more robust manual vacuum cleaner
Damn I’d ask if you are me but I absolutely love my cast iron skillet cause it’s the most nonstick pan in my house and I cook plenty. I have 2.
Humidifier, I found it easier to have one of those old school plastic water pitchers next to my humidifier that I can use to fill it up or keep a refill immediately nearby if I know I’m gonna use it all day and a little splash of bleach every now and again actually does a lot for cleaning it out on its own. But it sits empty a lot still.
Shark robo vacuum and Anker’s Eufy lines can die by fire. Both suck for completely different reasons and I have wasted so much money and I so wish I hadn’t accidentally lit on fire the like 3rd gen iRobot my grandmother gifted me because it was so “dumb” it was the only one that worked.
Confirmed here too. I HATE my shark vac bot. So many reasons and I have two of them unfortunately, each with different problems.
It’s insane how full of problems they are and yet how insistent they are that problems are somehow rare.
About the bleach, wouldn’t it just evaporates into the air and be toxic/bad for your health?
I’m also sick of cleaning my humidifier.
I’m planning to buy an evaporative humidifier, dump a kilo of sea salt in it so nothing can grow. As the water vaporize, all the salt will be remain for the next refill (as salt doesn’t evaporate with the water). I wonder if it would work as I can’t find anything on Google.
About the bleach, wouldn’t it just evaporates into the air
Nope, bleach is Sodium hypochlorite, if left to dry only the water it’s diluted in will evaporate leaving behind bleach crystals. Over time it will decompose into table salt. That doesn’t sound the best for the humidifier, but it won’t be a danger to the air.
Well if you have ever been to a pool you are breathing in a pretty heavy dose of chloramine and depending on where you live there is likely chlorine in your tap water. I’ve even had to wash my veggies and fruits in bleach water because of parasites. It’s not exactly healthy for you but it’s not exactly harmful as long as you don’t do anything stupid. It’s a cleaning agent.
I’m using about a teaspoon for a gallon of water and actually settled on using a pre-diluted mixture in a spray bottle and just spray some in when I see it getting moldy again. Which is to say I also only do it like once a month to 2 weeks and try to do it before leaving the room or house for a bit to let it run without me immediately breathing in.
The other recommendation would be hydrogen peroxide since it breaks down a lot faster into just water anyways but it’s slightly less effective and less easy to just have on hand.
Salt seems like a terrible idea. I have super duper soft water with nothing in it but some basic calcium… Calcium powder is always settled all around my humidifier. And nearby glass surfaces. It will carry some salt with it, guaranteed. Plus I see it clogging important mechanisms or pores.
I use a little splash of vinegar. Keeps it nice and clean without the whole chlorine gas part.
(I don’t know if bleach produces chlorine gas. Talking out my ass on that part)
I tried using vinegar. My entire house smells vinegar for like a week.
Oh, I mean, I still love stainless steel and it’s all my other cookware because it’s the only other perfect answer.
Non stick. Can be scrubbed clean, can be thrown in an oven at insane temps if you don’t have any plastic or other materials on it. Silicone can still be at like 450.
Seriously, the plain boring non fancy stuff is the stuff that lasts forever and does the same result every time.
