I'm looking for things that help more than expected or in ways you wouldn't expect. It could be a second monitor, a really good mouse or even a microplane.
A 2560x1440 monitor running at its 1:1 native resolution. The screen real estate improvement over 1080p is substantial. You get so much more vertical space and you can easily fit 4 side by side code windows at 80 chars. At 24" or 25" the PPI is also quite nice for reading text.
I wrote up a very big monitor selection guide at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo..., I try to keep it up to date by supplying alternatives to the ones I've purchased. Some of the monitors I recommended were $330 when I bought them but are now $500-700, although sometimes they come back in stock at $350ish.
I made the switch around 5-6 years ago and still think it was one of the biggest upgrades for general quality of life improvements when using a computer.
The only reason I haven't gone 4k is because using one at 100% scaling at 27" or less isn't really feasible due to how small the text is and using a 36" one to be able to comfortably view it at 100% scaling feels too big for using it in a normal desk environment. Personally I'd rather have the flexibility of 2x 24-25" 2560x1440 monitors, plus 120hz / 144hz 2560x1440 monitors are very abundant if you're into games (although you can make a strong case that 120hz+ is very noticeable and useful for general usage too).
I've tried a lot of different monitor setups for productivity - ranging from three 24" 4k displays to a single 49" ultrawide, and ultimately have found the best setup for me is dual 27" 4ks, each running at a "scaled" 2560x1440.
MacOS in particular does an excellent job of rendering 2560x1440 to a 4K screen, and the increased DPI over a regular 1440p 27" screen is very noticeable.
Another option if you're not a fan of 27" displays is a pair of 24/25" 4k screens which can be run at a scaled 2304x1296 resolution. This still provides a decent amount of space without text being too tiny. Alas, 4k monitors <27" are increasingly rare these days.
> MacOS in particular does an excellent job of rendering 2560x1440 to a 4K screen, and the increased DPI over a regular 1440p 27" screen is very noticeable.
MacOS in particular gets amazingly slow when you don't use a 1:1 or 2:1 scaling. I too have have two 27" 4k screens and they made the machine unbearably slow. It got so bad that I now treat them as 1440p screens and let the screens do the scaling. It's not pretty and slightly hazy, but at least the machine is usable.
macOS has secret modes that disable the 8x upscaling dance that happens in this situation. You access them by holding the option key while switching to scaled resolution from native. The text quality is very slightly worse but the performance is very significantly better.
There is a strange bug I've seen a couple of times where graphics, even simple things like scrolling a web page, get really slow even though it's supposedly using the GPU. Rebooting or logging out and in again seemed to fix the issue.
Also sometimes the virtual memory subsystem seems to get confused or overcommitted (e.g. after running a bunch of large VMs in VMware) and from that point on everything is just slow, even if you shut down every VM to relieve the memory pressure. It may be related to macOS's use of memory compression.
Then there are various background daemons (mdworker, syspolicyd, photoanalysisd, etc.) that occasionally wake up and decide to eat all of your CPU while simultaneously hammering your file system. The only effective response, short of disabling the offending service (which is much harder than it is on Windows or Linux, due to SIP) seems to be to let them run their course as they decide to scan every file they can find for the 100th time.
And when your laptop heats up, then macOS starts throttling the system via kernel_task processes that appear to be using all of your CPU.
My work laptop is a 2019 i7 MBP, it struggles with my 4k monitor regardless of scaling. I bought the cheapest mac mini last year to see what the M1 fuss was about, and it has no problem with the 4k screen, even with scaling.
Other OS's? Windows is passable until you start transitioning in and out of full screen. Linux...
My Windows games run at higher frame rates at 4k under Linux (Proton) than on Windows natively. I only had to set up the scaling once - just like I had to with Mac OS for the same monitor. Linux display issues are greatly exaggerated, IMO.
I was gonna say "Linux... what?" I have the least issues with any hardware on Linux compared to other systems. Monitors are no exception. And if something doesn't work out of the box, you have options, rather than just being SOL with other systems.
I've a 2019 16" MBP that I use for work, and it handles it fine as well; probably due to the discrete GPU kicking in once an external monitor is connected. Likewise, my M1 air sees no issues.
Maybe the M1s are better. I have a 2019 MacBook Pro. And two external screens, maybe that makes a difference. It was especially bad after upgrading to Monterey.
I don't "parrot" the claim. I've experienced the problem. It's day and night. After installing Monterey I couldn't run MS Teams on the external monitors anymore. It more or less locked up and I couldn't move the window back to the laptop screen. This was repeatable.
The whole problem went away when I selected 1440p (the "low resolution" one). It's fugly, but at least I can actually use my other monitors.
I also have the 2019 MacBook Pro and it's been a dumpster fire. I'm running 3x 4K monitors and it's completely unusable with the dedicated GPU (the 5500M).
I spent months trying everything I could think of: downgrading to Catalina, turning off transparency/shadows, running as few background services as possible, and not using scaling at all (which was the most effective solution). And this was only with 2x 4K monitors; I added a 3rd more recently.
Nothing worked. Thermal throttling and insufficient sustained power were two problems I was able to identify (the 96W adapter is not sufficient for the system's peak power load, so it uses the battery to get over 96W of draw).
Eventually, I broke down and bought an eGPU (Blackmagic eGPU) which solved the problem. For about ~$700, I'm now able to use my machine without a hiccup. Not a great or affordable solution, but it has made my $3,100 machine usable again.
I have an i9 2019 MBP 16” at work and also don’t notice a slow down when I bring it home. Maybe it’s a GPU bug?
I’m pretty sure my i9 model has the lower end 5300M.
Another question: what are you using to connect the monitor to your laptop? USB-C to DisplayPort, here. I formerly used HDMI off of a USB-C hub but it was a bummer.
Myself and my cofounder can reproduce the exact same issue every time with each of our MBP 2019 5500’s. Another team member with a 5400 running the exact same dev environment as me has never had the issue, so there’s something funky on that model.
It’s pretty bad the Apple still denies any issue, not being able to use an external monitor at all through covid suuuuucked
On windows , I have used over 25 different monitors over the years, I have found these two sizes to be the best:
32” at 4k (native res, 1:1)
30” 2560-by-1600 (native res, 1:1)
( few monitors support this physically, but two are my goto: old 30” apple studio displays , and a 30” old dell monitor. Both can be found on eBay at very low cost , but do use 2 to 4x the power draw as modern monitors)
Totally agree with this, I have mine(2x27" 4K) running in the same scaled way and I really miss it when I go back to the office with a crappy three screen 1080p setup.
An option that I think might be interesting is 3 displays side by side, but with the center display in portrait mode rather than landscape mode giving overall an inverted T shape to your combined display space.
When I am using 24" displays, I put one in landscape directly in front of me and one in portrait off to one side. Upper/lower half of the portrait monitor works well for terminals / email / chat. Entire portrait for reading documentation. Full-screen landscape for everything else.
I find this works well for the "adjustable height desk" systems one puts on top of a regular desk. They usually aren't wide enough to have two monitors with one directly in front of the user. The portrait monitor, if the cables are long enough, stays on the fixed-height desk.
I'm unable to use two monitors side-by-side anymore. Working for hours with my head always turned to one side gives me headaches.
---
Edited to add note on desk-placed "adjustable height" systems.
How does this work? Will it just upscale or is e.g. text still rendered at 4K? Rendering not at native resolution results always in blurred edges in my experience.
Very well, in my experience. Apple has been doing what it calls "retina" display for a while now, whereby it keeps the display's actual resolution at a high native level but scales everything it renders so the screen is effectively a lower resolution... but really smooth because of it.
Here's an album with a pair of screenshots from my own 4k display: https://imgur.com/a/7AHZZZv -- the scaled one is how I normally use it.
It's sharp enough but when compared to a native 1x/2x scaling, it still looks blurry, and it's only seen physically for me. Currently I run my M1 MBA at native 2560*1600 (BetterDummy, non hiDpi), and my 27" 4k at native. Set default zoom on chrome to be 125/150%, and VSCode also at "zoomed". I mostly use Chrome and Electron based apps (Spotify), so the increase in text sharpness is worth it. Native apps (Pritunl, etc) UI becomes too small, but again it's worth it for me.
In macOS, the entire display is rendered at 4K no matter what you pick from the resolution box. Most apps have learned to provide 2x-3x “retina” icons so that their bitmap resources look crisp alongside the system UI resources at user-selected “resolutions”.
The Windows UI scaling slider behaves in exactly the same way, though fewer apps include 2x or 3x bitmap resources.
> In macOS, the entire display is rendered at 4K no matter what you pick from the resolution box.
This makes it sound as if macOS upscales a 4K render when displaying to (for example) 5K monitors, but on a 5K monitor everything is ultimately rendered at a full physical resolution of 5120x2880. But in the Displays Preference Pane, the logical resolution is set by default to 2560x1440 (2:1). One can choose a logical resolution of 5120x2880 (1:1), but I can't imagine anyone working like that.
Correct, in the 5K case the entire display is rendered at 5K, and ditto 2K etc. (I believe the internal canvas caps at 32K, but I don’t have the tools to find out for sure.)
Whatever-sized display viewports are just crop windows into it, and the crop window in internal canvas terms is scaled as necessary, and then it renders the vector canvas onto the raster viewport.
You're mentioning "Panel Lotto" in your blog post in relation to reviews being for IPS panels but then sending customers TN panels instead of IPS panels. I don't think that is what is commonly referred to as "Panel Lotto" (I'd call that straight up fraud and I'm sure most courts would be on your side).
"Panel Lotto" (as I know it at least) refers to the company's policy regarding returning a panel that had dead pixels on arrival. Some policies don't allow customers to return those displays even if it has a dead pixel, as it wouldn't count as a defect. That's why it's a "lotto", it's pure chance if you'll receive a perfect display or not, and if you do you have no recourse.
I'm not sure how it works out in practice, I've never received any display with dead-pixels on arrival.
It's called a lotto because what you get could be left to chance. This was a pretty common to have happen in the past and some tech news sites covered it too. I'm not sure if it's still happening a lot nowadays but it was certainly a real thing 10 years ago. Current day monitor manufacturers still do very questionable things like rating a 4k monitor at 120hz in its primary tagline / description / on the box but there's fine print that says "only when running at 1080p". It's taking advantage of folks who don't know a lot or do a bunch of research beforehand in order to sell more units.
To a lesser degree the "lotto" idea happens with CPUs too in terms of overclockability potential. Certain serial numbers performed better, it became a lotto unless you went out of your way to purchase specific ones. This feels a lot less wrong than the panel lotto aspect tho.
You are right in that it feels criminal, it's not even the same product.
I've come across models being swapped out (where only a letter is difference but the panel changed) in the wild before, or misleading marketing. But since you can overcome that by doing research, its no longer a "lotto", like overclockability with CPUs or the possibility of getting dead-pixel on arrival.
> Panel Lotto" (as I know it at least) refers to the company's policy regarding returning a panel that had dead pixels on arrival.
Like the Nintendo 3DS back than? Where you couldn't figure out, which screen(s) you would get pre-purchasing or Lenovo with their display panel and keyboard lotto?
Wait till you get a 32 inch 4k one. I am shocked a lot of IT professionals still use 1080p when the above can be found for as low as 250 usd with discounts
I have four 4K screens, and it is heaven. I got spoiled early in my career by a Unix system that had a greyscale newspaper layout monitor in the early 90's. That monitor could crispy display an unfolded two page newspaper layout with space on the left and right for tool/editing interfaces. For a while, 4K monitors were landing right near US $300, so I got 4 over a period of months. Simply being able to array references around my work, with space to spare for communication and music interfaces. It is lovely to hit stride and before I know it the day is over, and a ton of work accomplished.
It was a Sony News Workstation, with an IBM branded grey scale monitor displaying 16 grey levels at 150 pixels an inch. Total display was about 1900x3600, a bit larger than an opened two-page newspaper spread. It was a CRT monitor, requiring two feet behind the screen for the back of the monitor and quite thick cabling. It was a Unix workstation, used to author R&D CD ROMs, back when the CD ROM itself was R&D.
I have the slightly better version of this. The only major difference is the stand AFAIK - but if you have multiple monitors you might as well get a good VESA mount to arrange them while keeping your desk clear.
I'm using a 43" 4K TV as a monitor now, and I really like it. It does take some getting use to at first, but with a tiling window manager I can split it up how I like and have the benefit of being able to use the whole screen at once for games and movies. Higher pixel density would be nice, because I still need subpixel text rendering to make the text look nice. But with 8K TVs coming out and getting cheaper, that would make a good combination of workspace size and decent enough pixel density.
> The only reason I haven't gone 4k is because using one at 100% scaling at 27" or less isn't really feasible due to how small the text is
People keep saying this but I don't.. see.. it. Everything scales great on my setup. I could make one letter cover the entire screen if I wanted to - the DPI is not really relevant in that sense. You still have to set size up to your liking. And I do not have great eyesight (contacts/glasses).
Admittedly, DPI does play a part when you have multiple monitors with different resolutions. I have solved that by wrapping my launcher with a script that detects the screen, reads the DPI and scales accordingly. Which, to be fair, is not something you should expect people to do :p
My desktop uses an LG-27GL850 and an LG-27GN950. One is 1440p, the other is 4k. Both are 144hz. I first bought the 1440p, which is great, then I bought the 4k one. I wanted to keep the 1440p one for gaming, but as it turns out, I don't game, so I regret not getting two 4ks.
I did extensive research before getting these, and after a year with them side by side, I can for sure see the difference when I read text. The fonts (and everything) just pop more.
I would be completely fine with 1440p, that looks great as well, but since I am at my computer for the better part of my life, a few extra dollars was (and still is) worth it for me.
PS: 144hz was almost weird at first - the cursor and scrolling is so instant. Highly recommended.
It will probably be obscenely overpriced, but I'll probably get a few for work for people who don't like their curved ultrawides.
The 39" 4K I've been using since 2014 has spent many a year in pillarbox attempting to preserve my neck and eyes, but it's still ultimately too large. I'd love to replace it with some smaller high res non-widescreen panels.
I read your monitor selection guide and one thing that stood out to me was the distance you need to have from you monitor. Completely overlooked that one when I made my first upgrade to a larger monitor and it definitely lowered my use of that monitor. Sometimes i found myself using my second, older monitor more since the distance was more comfortable.
Which sizes were used there? I prefer 24” by a wide margin. Whatever resolution I have to accept at that size I will. I find myself moving my head around and moving my eyes around the screen too much with 27”+.
I cannot remember of the top of my head what the size was, but the problem was that it was around an arms length away from me and I had to move my head/eyes too much when using it. After that, checking how much space i have for my desktop became something I was much more conscious about. Before that it was just: this new monitor me like, me buy.
I've made the switch to the 2560x1440 monitors (27") about the same time as you and totally agreed about your observation. For TV and video I think Full HD at 1080p is the cut-off but for text reading and editing 2560x1440 is really a game changer. Everytime you go back to 1080p even for smaller 13" screen it's a very annoyingly noticeable with the jagged lines around the texts and is a bummer.
Amen to that. I recently bought a cheap Westinghouse display off Newegg that was 1440p@144hz, and it makes for an incredible primary display. I'm not exactly sold on "retina" pixel density, but having the extra screen real-estate is pretty lovely for productivity purposes. I'll definitely be considering a 4k display over the next few months, if I can get the kind of GPU to drive it reliably.
I have a 4k 32" monitor that I use at 1:1. Maybe not for everyone, but I find myself unwilling to work on smaller screens now. Only problem is it can be find to hard 144hz refresh rates in this size/resolution range, but the smoothness isn't worth the sacrifice in screen real estate.
Yeah...I tried using a 4k display, and I found the pixels too small. And programs ran slower because they had to render so many pixels. And using scaling didn't play well when moving windows between my other two regular monitors.
The switch from a mechanical HDD to a SDD was the biggest gain in performance I've seen from any piece of hardware. I still remember the time when HDDs were the norm and the agony of waiting on loading/accessing something from disk was real.
Good solid-state storage has been the biggest quality of life improvement you can make to a single-disk device for the past decade.
I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases:
The hard drive, RAM, and CPU are like the fridge, the prep table, and the stove. In the days of high storage latency and low throughput mechanical storage, it took a few weeks to gather ingredients from the fridge and bring them back to your prep table, so it made sense to buy the largest prep table you could afford to save yourself the trip. However, your stove only had one or two burners, so you were still waiting around for one thing to finish cooking one thing so you could move on to another.
Today, high bandwidth, low latency storage like NVMe means you have an always-on instantaneous portal to the ingredients realm so there's no real need for the extra-large prep table. It's usually better to spend the money on more burners for the stove so you can keep it as busy as possible and get the most work out.
It's a vast over simplification, but I can't help but sigh when someone says they literally cannot do their job without 64GB of RAM and then choose a quad-core or some low-power series laptop.
> I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases:
Industry dependent, of course. Desktop processers are getting more and more parallel, and more cores requires more ram. I have a 32 core Threadripper in my workstation with 128GB RAM, and on full compiles I still OOM. My next upgrade to this machine will be 192GB.
Can I ask you which motherboard do you have? I'm thinking on building a PC, but the last time I did that was twenty years ago, so my knowledge is slightly obsolete.
I use pcpartpicker. It has a pretty good hardware compatibility matrix and pulls prices from a variety of stores online. Doesn't do a perfect job with packing hardware in small cases, but it warns you that it can't guarantee a fit. Your skills from 20 years ago will serve you well: download the manuals for the motherboard; they're more accurate than the specs listed on any other website.
Thanks for the advice, I'll check pcpartpicker out.
> Your skills from 20 years ago will serve you well: download the manuals for the motherboard; they're more accurate than the specs listed on any other website.
In ye olde times we didn't even had google, and the web was pretty empty. I had to buy the parts by shopping around in my neighborhood.
I've got an asus rog zenith ii extreme. I had an MSI board before that had trouble with the RAM and had a back and forth with MSI on before just sending it bacj.
As the other commenter pointed out, pcpartpicker is the way to go. My method was to find the CPU, chassis and amount of ram I wanted, enter them into pcpartpicker and pick out the test of the components with their help for compatibility except ram. When it came to ram, the motherboard providers have a list of "officially supported" sticks, down to the model number. I went through that list checking reviews and availability and ended up with some g skill ram.
I do a lot of work with virtual machines at <dayjob>, and don’t have enough room on the internal ssd to hold them all. I usually swap them in and out as I work on different projects, but every once in a while I’ll boot one direct from an external usb3 HDD. I can’t believe we used to work that way. I couldn’t imagine going back. An SSD can breathe new life into a 10+ year old system easily, too.
What OS are you running inside the VM's? I was quite late with upgrading to an SSD, and Windows 10 was unusably slow, while Linux was quite usable. Sure, it still got quite a bit faster with an SSD, but it was far from as life-changing as it was for Windows.
SSDs gave my laptops longer effective life. Turns out that the main reason my laptops felt so slow after a few years wasn't software bloat. It was cruft in the file system.
I resisted getting one for years because the one I had growing up was pretty bad. Nothing would dry, items would come out dirty all the time and it was loud and would "chug" for hours.
However, a good (not even fancy, just mid-range from a competent manufacturer) modern dishwasher is night and day. Doesn't even need special tablets, it just gets things clean, even on the eco mode, which is the only one I use. Its not the quietest on the market by a dB or two, but its basically not noticeable.
So much better than having a huge pile of dishes taking up the entire draining rack until dry enough to put away, getting splashed with more water every time the sink is used (and the water is medium-hard so that makes a mess, but the dishwasher has a water softener).
I always ran my dishwasher on the three hour power wash program because nothing would get clean otherwise. Then I watched this video and started using powder. Now the normal program works fine every time.
I only watched the first video, but I really can't see the difference between his experiment (with the soap at the beginning) and his control. I'm not convinced.
He addresses your concerns in the 2nd video. But aside from that, logically, you should be convinced by the fact that using tablets results in there being no soap soap in the first wash cycle.
The video pretty much says “use detergent in both pre-wash and wash receptacles”. Using the pods makes this hard. Using powder lets you do this easily yourself.
TLDW
Tablets aren’t bad but if you don’t fill your prewash compartment with detergent you’ll get worse cleaning. The prewash compartments are meant for loose powder or gel so might as well just use that detergent for both compartments
What are people washing that it doesn't wash off?! Or maybe it's just cheap machines that are that sensitive?
The only time things ever come out dirty for me is when the rotor is obstructed and half the dishes don't get any water (or detergent) on them, and that's on eco mode.
The tablets have nothing fancy in them other than some dyes, they are just soap at a mark-up. Even the cheapy store brand stuff does just as good of a job.
Additionally, depending on the hardness of your water you may need less detergent than the tablets have in them which could leave a white residue on your dishes.
Finally, with the powdered detergent you may need to sprinkle a little in the door for a pre-rinse which you can't due with the pods. Check your washer instructions.
Since first lockdown in my country, when dishwasher tabs went missing in stores, I got used to use 1/2 a tab for each wash. Turns out dishes were just as clean as with a full tab. To this day I keep using 1/2 tab per wash.
To push your example even further, I once forgot to load anything and Imagine my surprise when I opened the dishwasher and everything was really clean, maybe except one plate.
My mum has a Miele washing machine that is almost 30 years old. As far as I know, it's never needed a repair.
Which is probably just as well as Mieles can always be repaired, but the cost of parts is, let's say, dramatic.
My fridge has a broken egg tray lid and a dent in the door. Replacing the former is £35, a freezer door is almost £300 (nearly half the cost of the whole fridge freezer). The fridge door is almost £700, as much as the whole thing!
The egg tray lid is particularly annoying as the plastic part is actually not well-designed and clearly has obvious weak points where a modest redesign would both make a breakage less likely in the first place, and allow the most obvious failure mode to be repaired with a small sacrificial part (that, moreover can be shared amongst all fridge models, so it's not even a major SKU count increase) rather than the whole lid.
Bought a new fridge in 2020, relative decent one, around $2200. Works fine but the plastic shelf parts inside are just unbelievably cheap and shitty. And the replacement parts if you would happen to break one are correspondingly expensive. Meh.
The shelf is mostly used for butter in my fridge, actually, but the flappy lid thing is still useful as there's not much front lip on that shelf. That said, if I couldn't have fixed it with glue and stainless steel wire, I'd not be paying £35 for a new one!
Eggs indeed don't usually go in the fridge: in the UK, eggs aren't washed before sale, so the natural protective layer is still present. I hear that in the US, eggs must be washed, the layer is therefore lost and eggs required to be washed, the layer is lost and eggs need to be refrigerated.
Ditto. I was astounded when I read consumer reports’ test regimen for dishwashers - I recall a test that expected the dishwasher to clean out baked on brownie batter. No dishwasher I used until way too far into adulthood could do that or the equivalent.
The kitchen appliance that surprised me - my current house had a double oven when we moved in. The small top oven is just perfect - it pre heats as fast as a toaster oven and can fit a whole half sheet. It can toast just about anything in toast mode but takes up no counter space. We use it constantly. I would never have just bought one, because I would have focused on the two-oven aspect, which seems like an extravagance that would only come in handy at the holidays.
About 5 years or so. It's probably done well over 1000 cycles since then. It's had one breakage, which was a heat pump, which was repaired with a part from ebay. Other than that, its going strong.
It was meant to be a Moleskine replacement. I draw a lot but I can't carry all sorts of pencils with me.
I made it a dedicated drawing and reading device. No notifications, no emails, etc.
Holy moly is it good. Procreate and Notability are incredible apps. Having different pens, layers and an undo button is fantastic. It replaced the paper pad next to my computer, as well as my Moleskine.
The size is perfect. I carry that thing everywhere. I rarely leave the house without it.
The best part is that it asks nothing of me. It never bothers me or does things worse than what it replaces.
Oh and fully committing to USB-C. It saves a lot of luggage space, and everything is a power bank.
I use the latest iPad Air similarly. Got it and an Apple Pencil as a more-capable replacement for my reMarkable tablet and my Kindle, turned off all notifications and did not install any distractions. It's a great device. For me the main apps are Bear and Concepts.
Trying my friend's iPad Air is what sold me. I just went "oh".
I tried a Surface, thinking that I could also replace my laptop and pack lighter (I travel by motorcycle a lot), but it was unusable as a tablet, and... well as annoying as any Windows laptop. The Photoshop-like UI and the open-edit-save workflow (can't close an app without messing with the file dialogs) was so pathetic compared to Procrate and Notability. Then it locked itself up for 3 hours to install more Bing shortcuts on the task bar. That's when I returned it.
The new amount of control Apple gives you over notifications in the latest iOS'es is a game-changer. I literally just discovered I could bundle all notifications from certain apps and have them notify me at certain times of the day en masse, which is AMAZING.
I recently discovered a device ... weights just one gram, foldable, biodegradable, battery holds for 1yr+, costs 2 cents. Stylus is replaceable and costs $1/dozen.
It has a cloud option but it requires a lighter accessory and a flame install. Luckily there are no known bugs, but without a proper firewall you may experience total data lose of unconnected devices.
An Intel Optane NVME SSD. <10µs latency for both reads and writes even at low queue depths. There are newer NVME SSDs with more IOPS, but only at high queue depths, and their latency is a lot worse. If you put your swap on your Optane drive, you can use hundreds of gigs of swap without making your machine unresponsive. Makes a great place to put a database too.
See where it says “avio 3.53µs” and “avq 0.61”? That’s 284,000 IOPS even with nothing queued up. With any other drive you would be lucky to get a tenth of that at QD1. Even better, this is a mixed read and write workload; most drives are fastest when you are only reading or only writing.
I had an Intel nVME SSD. It failed catastrophically after only a year.
I posted about it, and somebody from Intel said, not surprising, that model was crap. Apparently the only products Intel goes to any effort to make reliable are the ones meant for data centers. So, no more Intel for me.
Probably very favorably. I’ve never used that particular SSD, but if you have one you could measure the latency and IOPS under a similar work load and find out for sure.
This might not be what you want to hear (i.e. too little tech), but here's a list from Bruce Sterling's talk at Reboot 11 (2009) [1] that stuck with me:
* Number one, a bed. You're spending a third of your life in the thing.
* Get a chair. I shouldn't have to tell people who work with computers to get a chair.
* (things that go on your skin like clothes and cosmetics)
* Apart from that, beautiful things, emotional things, tools.
His (minimalist) message is to get rid of everything else.
When I bought it, I was just looking for a sleeker and more ergonomic keyboard with a split design, but the ability to easily reconfigure every key on the layout brought a new meaning to the word "ergonomic" for me.
It means that when a particular motion or shortcut that I frequently use is puts too much strain on my hands, I can simply change the layout to make the keys more natural too use. And it's just an overall incredibly well made product.
I'd recommend a split keyboard to anybody who has their fingers on keys for more than a couple hours a day. My shoulders and upper back feel so much better, and I swear I even look better because my posture has improved. Much less tendon pain as well.
Furthermore, I'd recommend the EZ or the Moonlander to anybody who can spend the money. I'm sure you get a large part of the benefit from a cheaper split board, but the thumb clusters and custom keybinds are really really nice.
I had UHK and build Ergodox EZ since I wanted to try thumb clusters and vertically staggered layout. Honestly after UHK the Ergodox was too big. I am not able to reach most keys without pulling my hand. Even from 6 thumb cluster keys I was using only 2. Though I liked thumb clusters and vertically staggered layout hence switched to custom built Kyria split keyboard instead.
Just F2, but I had to get used to that already with my previous keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt). But I let all F keys bound to the Layer 2 as per the ZSA defaults.
And Alt + F4 is bound to a double tap of the right red thumb key :D
I tried with the Ergodox-EZ for 6+ months, but I struggled with using the Jetbrains software
They (PyCharm, PHPStorm, etc) use a load of multi-key shortcuts which include use of the function keys and it became a real pig to use and ultimately I gave up (expensive - I'd bought 2; one for home, one for work...).
How do others manage this? Have another layer with all the usual keys but replace numbers with function keys? I don't fancy remapping all the shortcuts.
Personally, I replaced caps lock with ctrl when you type and esc when you tap. ctrl, shift and alt are all vertically aligned that way so shortcuts are really easy in general.
I just don't use F keys, but for number I have a left thumb key that transform the right side into a num pad. You could do the same with functions keys. Or do what I did for any number and permanently remap the normal number positions to f keys as you said.
But the nice part is you get to adapt the keyboard to your own needs. If you only use one or two function keys, you could give them decicated buttons on the may layer. You can even have one button do the whole combo. For example I have one that does shift+insert so I can more easily copy into terminals.
Air purifiers and air monitors. It is shocking and disgusting how much dust and particles these air purifiers suck out of the air. The air monitors detect when to open windows for CO2, among other things.
My allergies no longer exist.
Edit: A few people have asked for recommendations. I recommend the Coway Airmega AP-1512HH for larger spaces and Blueair Blue Pure 411 for smaller spaces. For the air monitor I have the Qingping.
While air purifiers are a great idea I just want to put a warning out there about the current state of air monitors.
The current summary is that most of them are wildly inaccurate with false positives and you might just be better off checking your outdoor air quality from the EPA using their app.
Would love for someone to provide a better recommendation.
>The current summary is that most of them are wildly inaccurate with false positives and you might just be better off checking your outdoor air quality from the EPA using their app.
That's partially missing the point of air monitors. In most western countries the risk is less outside smog etc and more what you get up to. Fry some bacon and suddenly you're at 20x the recommended values.
A warning: the cheap air monitors don't monitor particle count, just CO2. If you're allergic to pollen you expose yourself to it by opening windows. I've had to help a couple friends who used this and ended up sneezing and sniffling like crazy.
You really don't need a 270 usd device for particle count.
A PM2.5 particle count sensor is like 25 bucks and temp/humidity/pressure another 10, so you can DIY this quite cheaply with a raspberry if so inclined.
I have both the Dylos and other sensors. The Dylos is a very sensitive instrument that reports raw counts every second. There is no smoothing, no translation to PM2.5 scale. For the paranoid type it works REALLY WELL for providing direct feedback on the impact of an air filter- or on the impact even of minor contractor work. PM 2.5 sensors- quality ones- have their place. But the difference is kind of like the difference between reading labels and following FDA guidelines on nutrient intake vs getting a blood screen. Sometimes you want the blood screen. Dylos is a good device for that.
I'd imagine the Dylos will have better components and better calibration, so should provide superior accuracy.
Not convinced they're all that different though - both laser based particle counters, and results correlate pretty well in studies [0].
Certainly wouldn't trust a cheap SDS011 sensor for anything that really matters, but wouldn't characterize it as nutritional label vs blood screen either.
> raw counts every second. There is no smoothing, no translation to PM2.5 scale.
Slightly confused as to what you mean by this. Particle measurements via laser are by necessity over time and thus smoothed. I guess you could look at raw counts in a given time, but people use per millions because its more meaningful...else you'd need to consider fan speed to make it comparable and manually adjust air pressure/temp yourself.
As a quick solution, rent a commercial grade ozone generator.
Run it while you’re not in the house as in the concentrations they can put out it is damaging to lung tissue.
This is how hotels clear out smoke smells in rooms for instance.
Once you run it for a few hours, you can open things up and air it all out and the smells should mostly be gone unless there’s an active source of smell.
I did it while restoring an old house previously occupied by a smoker and hoarder. Would just run it at night when nobody was there and open the house in the morning when ready to get back to work on renovations.
Can second that - I have four of them, they run 24/7 on medium and pull ~8 watts at the wall each, assuming my meter is accurate. Picked them up after the last big discussion on air quality here a few months back. They are the Wirecutter pick, I believe.
I keep an agent that monitors amazon pricing on the filters, and just buy a bunch when they dip abnormally low. Have you found any other ways to minimize cost on them? I have only used the ones sold by coway, as my pal tried some 3rd party and they were jenky.
Depending on where you live, filters are a once/twice a year expense, I believe (I’m only a few months in). Honestly my advice would be: just be diligent about maintaining them. I vacuum out the filter and charcoal screen once every couple of weeks. Takes a few minutes, pretty painless. Amazing how much dust they pick up in normal operation.
Incidentally, which agent are you using for Amazon?
Missed this reply--I use camelcamelcamel for Amazon. I'm not sure if they are able to handle the click-to-get-discount check boxes, though. I also don't know how timely they are.
Yes. I prefer the Lite. I don’t have any testing data about the accuracy, but it seems to react identically to my air purifiers. For example, if I light a match or blow out a candle my air purifier will turn on and the air monitor will go ballistic. Likewise with CO2 if I sleep with the door closed it will slowly ramp up overnight.
I've spent a long time engineering, and adapting my workspace. It's at the point now that going to an office is a horrible experience, compared to my home office. Here's my setup
* Ikea Standing desk (I never sit). I know plenty of people who use these for sitting, simply because the height of the desk is finally suited to their specific frame.
* As many monitors as will make you happy (to each their own, but I'm happy with 2)
* Kinesys Freestyle 2 keyboard (wired, I hate wireless things, I never want to think about batteries)
* A laptop stand to lift my laptop - it turns out this made an enormous impact to my neck
* Monitor stands - most monitors are stationary, but the wrong height, even when compared with arm layout in an ergonomic setup.
* Kensington Expert Mouse
* Wacom One tablet - Now I can draw on digital whiteboards in Zoom, or even on shared websites and it's significantly better than the mouse experience.
* Sony WX-1000XM3 headphones - I use it for both music and the noise cancelling. Just having in on an cancelling noise has been an incredible improvement
* Whiteboard - This is by far the most important one in this list.
> wired, I hate wireless things, I never want to think about batteries
It's funny, I feel exactly the same. When friends have asked me to explain why, I struggle to justify it. It's just a minor feeling of security -- one less thing to maintain.
The only piece of hardware I've considered moving to wireless is a headset for gaming with friends, but it hasn't happened thus far. Maybe if the End Times come and my ATH-M50x stop working.
To be fair, batteries for Logitech wireless keyboard (K270, non-fancy one, without backlight) last for years. Same for their Marathon mouse. Battery is not the reason to skip these devices. Connectivity might be, I had some interference with multiple sets nearby. But if you're solo they work very reliably.
My keyboard is never further away from my machine than the length of the cable, so I see absolutely no reason to complicate things by adding batteries to the equation.
My M50x's sit quietly awaiting the short spots where I use them for intense focus work.
There's two things I've made wireless on my desk: mouse and headphones.
I use trackballs, and the sheer donveni of being able to shift and adjust without worrying about a lead is mind boggling.
As for the headset: if you can swing it, pick up either the Arctis 7+ or Arctis 9 from Steelseries.
I have the 9 and absolutely make use of the split between normal audio and chat audio during calls. There is a quality of life improvement from my being able to walk in circles while I hear conversations go in circles.
+1 for Ikea standing desk. I'm using it sitting but now I know which exact height suits me. Btw. I only recently found out that in my case chair's armrests should be above the table. When they're below I quickly develop forearm pain from table's edge, except if table has round edges. And these are very rare around here, edges are usually sharp.
Ikea's other non-standing desks are also often adjustable, but with tools. So not good if you want to experiment with height, but if you know your preference they have better price/quality ratio.
I really like this approach! Some people want more, some people want less. There is no universal right answer! But monitors are so relativity inexpensive (when compared to their potential performance/quality-of-life increase) that if you work on a computer a significant part of they day, they are a no-brainer for optimization!
> Wacom One tablet - Now I can draw on digital whiteboards in Zoom, or even on shared websites and it's significantly better than the mouse experience.
Except there's no scroll wheel to zoom in/out. Which makes it difficult to use in programs like Inkscape and KiCAD.
Does anybody have a good alternative (external scrollwheel perhaps?)
The last time I used a Wacom pad, you could use pinch actions with your fingers to not only zoom in and out, but rotate and scroll. It differentiated between finger and pen actions quite cleanly.
> * Kinesys Freestyle 2 keyboard (wired, I hate wireless things, I never want to think about batteries)
I very much second that choice in keyboard, I had the freestyle 2, and now I also have the new mechanical version of it. I have really long arms, seemingly and most keyboards, even ergonomic split ones mean I either have to push my elbows together, or angle my wrists weirdly, or sit really far away.
With the Kinesis Freestyle, I can just arrange the halves wherever it feels right for them to be. And I tend to move them around relative to each other over the day, which apparently is a good thing, since it causes me to hold my wrists and elbows differently across the day, just like a dynamic sitting or standing posture.
+1 to having physical whiteboards around. They're super handy. I have three permanently mounted to the wall and a small magnetic one that I keep on my fridge.
That's MIDI devices as-in devices with MIDI port (like synthesizers), right?
The video looks interesting, haven't seen joysticks/controllers being used in such a fashion. What kind of devices (brands/models) do you use if you don't mind sharing?
At least in linux, midi devices can be read just like any other character device. It's not a ton of work to read the midi data and translate it to keypresses or whatever else you want.
I used to have a Griffin Powermate and did something similar with it. It was a ton of fun.
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked up some devices, but all of them cater to musicians -- obviously -- and therefore don't have many different types of input. Korg nanokontrol and nanokontrol studio seem to be the best ones in this regard. I wish there was a device made for hackers with small and large knobs and buttons, horizontal and vertical sliders, touch panels, etc.
For Mac users, BetterTouchTool [0] allows assigning system-wide actions to MIDI inputs. I haven't used its MIDI capabilities, but I happily use its other features.
They cater to musicians because that's what midi was invented for. At the end of the day it's just a protocol and you can interpret it however you like. Any random midi controller will work great.
My relatively cheap keyboard has midi over USB and I was able to dump raw midi into a terminal after five minutes of googling.
I've played a little with a Behringer X-TOUCH MINI for controlling Darktable (I think midi support is now in stable), was pretty cool altering the exposure etc. with the wheels.
If a microplane counts as "hardware", then I can't not bring up my whetstone!
Cost all of around $40, is a genuine joy to use, and keeps all of my knives sharper-than-sharp.
I started out with a very expensive knife (Wusthof classic 8", around US$150 or so at the time) but nothing to sharpen it with, and this was a mistake.
If I could do it again I'd recommend young cooks on a budget start out with a $20 IKEA knife and a stone to keep it sharp. You'll get better long term results than you would with an expensive knife on its own any day of the week.
America's Test Kitchen recommends the Victorinox knives for every skill level and budget, including professional chefs. It's just a damn good knife, and it happens to be cheap at around $50. Go with this rather than Ikea if it's in the budget :)
My first Sous Chef gave me his Victorinox from when he went to Culinary Institute of America. I still use it even though I've since bought a Wusthof. I like how it is thinner, it holds an edge well and has good ergonomics.
> start out with a $20 IKEA knife and a stone to keep it sharp. You'll get better long term results than you would with an expensive knife on its own any day of the week.
This is very, very smart advice.
The only thing I'd add is to learn proper knife techniques: how to hold food keeping your fingers away from the blade. Never take risks with a well sharped knife.
Cut with the claw or you'll be cutting with a claw.
Tuck your fingertips under and rest the flat of the blade against your knuckles. It should not be possible to reach the tip of a finger with your blade. Check some youtube videos and practice. Establishing good knife skills is not only good for safety but makes cooking faster and more pleasant.
The claw is such a simple but effective technique that I am sometimes surprised it's not more widespread. I can't remember the amount of times I saw people using knives looking like they are about to cut themselves with the next movement of the knife.
This is exactly what I have. An IKEA knife I’ve had for the past 20 years or so. I’ve always kept it sharp, but the game changer in the past few months was reading advice to sharpen it every time I use it. I do that now, just a little bit, and over time what you end up with is an insanely sharp knife. I also have a sharpening steel, like the kind used in commercial kitchens, but I much prefer the stone.
Agreed, I've had both the ceramic and diamond "steels" handy for the last decade, and basically every time I use a knife I spend 30 seconds running it over one of these, and my kitchen experience is better for it. Of course, I'm the only one in my household that does this, but I use them frequently enough that generally it keeps them pretty good.
Was recently prepping some food at someone else's house, and they didn't even have a sharpener. It was a terrible experience, even after using the bottom of a coffee cup to help the knife out.
I bought this Global Classic Flexible Boning Knife a few years ago, this one knife changed my whole game. I like to buy Chicken thighs, take the center bone out, keep the bones for some amazing stock and render the skin into schmaltz. It's a process that used to take quite a long time, but this knife has made it super quick.
I actually have a cheap King stone (the 1000/6000 combo), but parent is right.
1000 grit gets you more than sharp enough for daily use while still being coarse enough to fix up a well-maintained knife in about 20-30 strokes per side.
Higher grits make the knives too sharp, to the point where they're dangerous to handle, especially if you're cooking drunk/tired. (That's not to say I never use it, but it's always for fun at that point).
The Apple Watch surprised me in how much awareness of my health it generated - mainly how much and what quality sleep I was getting, but also other general signals. It helped me pay more attention and make some good health improvements. Presumably any other smart watch offers similar benefits.
Second this. I was highly skeptical of the watch until I received it as a gift for Christmas. It has made me more acutely aware of how sedentary I’ve been during a typical work day. Closing the rings is now an obsession and I’m better for it.
Mine too. I currently have a streak of 1004 consecutive days of closing all three rings going on.
> Closing the rings is now an obsession and I’m better for it
So far I've not become obsessed about it. It is more that I've changed my habits so that I'm more active.
There have been a few times where before the watch I might have skipped my morning walk due to something like waking up with a sore ankle, without even checking to see if it was a "you slept on it wrong and the soreness will go away when you move it a little" kind of soreness or a "OK you actually did hurt it yesterday and should just stay off you feet all day" kind of soreness. Now I check, and so far it has always been the former.
I'm thinking of intentionally taking a day off and missing closing all the rings just to keep from accidentally becoming obsessed over the length of the streak.
If you want to stay away from the Apple ecosystem, or just don't like the aesthetics of the Apple Watch, I've found Whoop to be great for tracking sleep quality and activity. There is a monthly fee but it's minimal if you're using the data it collects. Not worth it for something passive, or if you're sedentary outside of work.
There are also some good points raised in the comments. In particular, I like this comment:
> I’m probably biased because I’ve used Polar for 20 years and Whoop for over 4 years now. I like where Polar has got to on their new Vantage products in terms of activity load, sleep, recovery etc. I started using Whoop because I was frustrated with how far behind the curve that Polar were on the V800 and I liked what Whoop were trying to do.
> Fast forward 4 years and Polar results correlate the closest with how I feel and perform and also with other recovery measurements I use e.g. HRV4Training and Elite HRV. I find Whoop the least reliable in terms of accuracy of data and also correlation with how I actually feel. I like the way Whoop presents data but I have little faith in it due to the accuracy of the sensor etc. YMMV.
That said, I like wearing a mechanical watch, and I'm not a huge fan of wearing a smartwatch, so I'd much rather wear something like the Whoop than a Polar Vantage watch or an Apple Watch. So if someone here wants to defend the Whoop and convince me the data is decent enough, I'd love that :)
Same, I really like mechanical watches as well so that sort of limits what options I have :)
I have noticed a bit of a disconnect between how I feel and what the whoop says, but not so much that I'd think it's wrong. Just eyebrow raising every now and then. I've never tried a Polar though.
Yessss I have a Garmin Instinct and I love it, easily my favorite Smart watch. It's got just enough smart stuff that I'd use without a bunch of extras I'd never use.
And I charge it once a week if I'm biking a lot and using the GPS.
Yes it does. I found it pretty enlightening. It tracks almost perfectly with how I feel in the morning and helped me get a sense of how alcohol in particular affected me.
Could you get by if you just charged while in the shower? Also, do you think your current use is lower than normal due to COVID/WFH/lack of travel?
I've considered getting one but hate the idea of having to charge my watch every day. My Pebble still gives me what I need, so I'm holding onto it for as long as the battery is in decent shape.
Could you get by if you just charged while in the shower?
How long of a shower do you take? :-) A very related question is just how intensively will you use it. Here are some guidelines from Apple: https://www.apple.com/watch/battery/
My Series 6 watch is on my wrist for up to 23 hours a day. My battery is usually above 50% after a full day of use. I charge every day but for less than 30 minutes. (I usually take it off the charger before it is completely charged.)
Depending on your work and living arrangement (e.g. I'm mostly home) it's also so easy to drop onto the charger for just a few minutes. E.g. I can top-off the watch while I go into kitchen for a cup of coffee or a snack. So no need to devote a 30 minute continuous block of time.
I have low battery use because I mostly use the watch for notifications and activity tracking. I keep the display off by default (which is probably the main power draw).
The aluminum watch with sport loop is very light and comfortable. It's easy to forget you're wearing it.
Recommendations for apps to track sleep ? Preferably without subscription but just a one time payment. Petty Apple does not provide a sleep tracking app.
No matter how high end your headphones, bookshelf speakers, or studio monitors are, they will never be able to punch you in the chest in quite the same way as a decently sized dedicated subwoofer.
It's a night-and-day difference for listening to music and watching movies, or even just listening to human voices in youtube videos.
Just, be careful not to bother your neighbours with it.
The bothering other people bit is what i feel is mostly stopping me from using anything but a headset.
I do have experience with subwoofers and there is a certain joy when they hit you, but the thought of the whole neighbourhood hearing my excellent taste in music bothers me somewhat.
I am still at the design stage, but I am looking at something like:
- AuraSound AST-2B-4 Pro Bass Shaker Tactile Transducer
- Nobsound Mini Bluetooth 5.0 Power Amplifier
- TalentCell Rechargeable 12V 3000mAh Lithium ion Battery Pack
My biggest concerns are custom mounting of the transducer(s). Not sure where will give the best effect without damaging the chair.
My goal is for it to be wireless, splitting bluetooth audio into channels for AirPods Max and this receiver.
Concern there is I don't know what the latency will be like, or if I'll need to introduce delay into say the headphones channel. I have a few of the Rogue Amoeba tools, including Loopback that I'm planning to bring into the mix if necessary. Another idea is to separate the amp and BT receiver, getting something more professional like the Fiio BTR5.
The MVP should probably just be a wired connection to the chair, so maybe that can prove the mounting and potential first.
That's where I am at. But I have the same concerns as you, I don't want loud I have great headphones, just more immersion and more bass feel.
Oh yes, I also have a SubPac, which made me fall in love with tactile transducers aka. bass shakers.
I ended up attaching bass shakers to my chair too. Custom setup with two Reckhorn BS-200i, a cheap TDA7498E amplifier from AliExpress (more than powerful enough, and sound quality doesn't really matter), and EqualizerAPO for the software part. It cost me around $200 and a few hours for the full setup.
I can vouch it affects neighbours, I've gotten many complaints from neighbours in the apartment below me. Especially when watching a movie. Cue a helicopter flying into the scene.
A tiling window manager. I settled on dwm. It helps me utilize more of my monitor. Gone are the days of overlaying windows, everything is front and center, and on it's own virtual desktop.
A non-mechanical keyboard. I moved off of cherry style switches, and went with a topre clone. For me, the cherry mechanism makes too much noise when keys return back up. For me it was high pitched noise. A much more thocky keyboard actually keeps me from having noise induced headaches on heavy typing days.
Blue light reduction apps on phones, tablets, and monitor and blue light reduction coating on glasses. This removed a ton of eyestrain. Yes, my phone and iPad now have a reddish brown hue to them, but most of the time, I don't care. I hardly notice it anymore unless I use my partners device.
A color accurate monitor (with a good reader/blue light reduction mode). Having a monitor that wasn't close to having correct colors, even across the panel was maddening. Old LCD monitors are the worst. I don't need color correctness all the time, so the monitor needs a good mode to turn down the blueness. Having a setting in the monitor makes it a breeze to switch back and forth as needed.
Obligatory reply about linear (silent) cherry switches existing but mostly here to say I'm glad you found a keyboard you like.
I think that's the takeaway I try to give people on input devices. Just get something you like and don't worry about what everyone else likes.
Yeah I've found I care a lot more about the layout than the keys.
I've learned I just want ANSI 60. It's minimal enough, the cognitive load is low/all keys that are not first class are one layout/fn press away.
* Stadler Form George air washer. Not a full on humidifier, but does help keep humidity up in my dry bedroom. Also judging by the state of the water during my weekly cleaning it really does help to "clean" the air somewhat.
* More recently, a high quality drying rack (inspired by the drying rack article linked here a few weeks ago). Helps me keep humidity up in my apartment and prevents me from trying to hang partly-moist laundry on my doors. In general makes laundry day a lot more tolerable. Didn't realize it'd make such a difference to laundry satisfaction.
* A Roomba, currently S9 with the self-empty base that I've had for a couple of years.
* A Litter Robot. No more scooping, cats always have a fresh box.
On the topic of drying rack: I bought this ceiling-mounted drying rack[1] and it's been fantastic.
I live in an apartment with high ceilings (upwards 3 meters), so it worked out really well. It saves up the space a standard drying rack would otherwise occupy (both when used and unused/folded), and I installed it right above my washing machine so I don't need to carry the wet laundry around!
The one from the polish store[1] was the only cheap one I could find, all the others were upwards 200€[2]
That looks really nice. My ceilings aren't that high, but in a previous apartment I had a ceiling mounted one above the bathtub and it worked very well. The current one I have is just a foldout floor one.
I've only used it three times so far, but it's been able to hold full loads of laundry along with sheets with no problem. I also like how the top two platforms are angle-adjustable, so I can position them tilted up or down as convenient.
Links? I use drying racks, but I'm curious what you consider high quality? Mine are just target specials I've put lock tight on the screwsto keep them from falling apart.
Is the Litter Robot really good? Most reviews I've seen said all those auto-cleaning litter boxes are meh at best, but man this is one chore I could really do without.
The Litter Robot is (in my experience) the one auto-cleaning litter box that 100% lives up to the hype. Totally worth the (high) price to never have to scoop cat poop again.
For me, yes. The price tag is exorbitant, but for me worth it to never have to scoop and know that my cats (one of whom has had urinary problems) always have a perfectly fresh box to go into.
Doing a monthly or bimonthly deep clean can be a bit of a hassle with such a big item, but for me preferable to daily scooping.
The litter robot is great as long as you empty the tray every few days. It runs into issues (like many things) if you let it go too long.
I've owned two. Once you get past the sticker shock, it's quite convenient. I also used regular kitchen trash bags for the tray. Was perfectly serviceable.
Aside from the already great points made by others, I am trying to move away from the Amazon ecosystem a bit as both a reader and a writer, since I do not think Amazon is good for writers (in the long-term). Since I also plan to start publishing my fiction "wide" (ie on stores other than Amazon), it was a good time to get a non-Amazon reader to preview my books on.
I'm not the person you asked, but I switched from Kindle to Kobo when I realised I could get ebooks from my library on a Kobo. Now pretty much everything I read is from the library and I've not turned on my Kindle in well over a year.
I wrote up a very big monitor selection guide at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo..., I try to keep it up to date by supplying alternatives to the ones I've purchased. Some of the monitors I recommended were $330 when I bought them but are now $500-700, although sometimes they come back in stock at $350ish.
I made the switch around 5-6 years ago and still think it was one of the biggest upgrades for general quality of life improvements when using a computer.
The only reason I haven't gone 4k is because using one at 100% scaling at 27" or less isn't really feasible due to how small the text is and using a 36" one to be able to comfortably view it at 100% scaling feels too big for using it in a normal desk environment. Personally I'd rather have the flexibility of 2x 24-25" 2560x1440 monitors, plus 120hz / 144hz 2560x1440 monitors are very abundant if you're into games (although you can make a strong case that 120hz+ is very noticeable and useful for general usage too).