What is something really stupid you purchased that turned out far better than expected?
I bought a piece of 1.5 inch stiff foam to try to fix a sag in a bed. It didn’t work but having that thick piece of solid foam around has been a life saver.
Need something flat to put a laptop on? Throw it on the foam. Going to be doing something that requires you to be on your knees for a while? Get the foam!
It went from stupid purchase to something I’d gladly replace if it broke.
Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.
Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.
The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.
I love the concept, tried some and would be willing to pay good money for a kick scooter that folds small enough to fit inside or hang off a big backpack, made of some super light material like carbon fibre
I’ve lost hours searching for such a thing online and the closest one is the Valor scooter. but unfortunately it’s ugly and they only make it for kids and I’m a big guy :/
Unfortunately I think we’re not there yet. My one folds into a meter-long bundle of a metal plank with wheels and a metal pipe and while it;s still light and handy it won’t fit in any backpack.
I feel it’s a lack of appetite. very few adults actually want non-electric. I’ve seen a much wider range of electrics, including small form, experimental ones and more :/
The wheel turns out to be a pretty good invention for multiplying by pi. For example, bicycling is about pi times faster than walking, with the same amount of effort.
The lightest from Decathlon which is large enough to hold someone over 12 yrs of age. They may or may not still have them on offer as it was a few years ago.
Altough it is not really stupid, I bought the game Witcher 3 expecting I would’nt like it much. Turned out it is the best game I’ve played and bought the expansions too
Our house has all gold colored fixtures and normal knobs.
I got really fed up with having to drop everything to open the garage door that I purchased a black lever type knob so now can open the door with my elbow/foot/bags
Doesn’t match anything else in the house right now but it’s my single favorite change I’ve made to our house
A Raspberry Pi. I bought it out of a whim and now I use it as a portable desktop computer, I can use Alpine Linux with my files and my setup on virtually any system that doesn’t whitelist MAC addresses.
Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software, I feel like I’m breaking the law.
Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software
What…
Well it’s a good thing that Microsoft has embedded linux + its userspace in windows via WSL 2. That means using Linux + its userspace in Alpine is completely Koscher as long as you rename the root Alpine project to be “OceaneAlpine”, right?
Do you realize that calling it “Koscher” implies that any billionaire would secretly be a Jew? It’s antisemitic propaganda.
Anyway, I don’t think you got me. I implied that I was plugging peripherals on my Raspberry Pi, working on my university campus with better ergonomics than on a laptop.
Bought some stainless steel wire rope over day, like 500’ of it for 25 bucks. I’ve used that shit for everything. Stringing garlic up, strong lights up, garden trellis, hanging anything and everything. Still got a good 100’ left 8 years later.
info not a ton of people know; most wall corners in your house/apartment whatever, have a metal bracket holding the sides of the drywall together. that means with a strong enough magnet to make it comfortably tight against the paint, you can hang stuff on almost every outside corner in your house.
I bought a sample pack of super strong neodymium dudes and there’s kid stuff, schedules, notes, doodles etc hanging all over the place.
Bed sheet suspenders. Dumb problem, stupidly cheap, horribly made, and ABSOLUTELY fixed the friggin sheets being yanked off the corner of the bed twice a night by my tumble-dry-medium sleeper of a spouse.
When they finally broke after almost 2 years I sewed some that’ll last 10 years and I don’t regret them at all.
This one I can absolutely agree with. Takes an extra couple seconds when you’re changing sheets but you will never have to redo the corners ever again.
However, I haven’t been needing them since I started using Threshold sheets from Target. The corners are deep and have a ton of stretch. Of course I keep the suspenders around for when I need them because they’re so small that the footprint is negligible.
Hello, I am the tumble dry spouse and the number of times I’ve been thwapped in the face with elastic in the middle of the night is too damn high. I’m going to get some of these. Do you have a tutorial or explanation of how you sewed some?
There are 2 types of people in this world. The ones that like crocs and the ones that do not like crocs. I think it’s a very very clear definition into the psyche of humans
I bought them on purpose. For jobs you spend all day on your feet and are able to get away with crocs, they’re godsends. I used to spend 8 hours on my feet and finish without an ache. Nowadays I spend very little time on my feet, but still rock a pair of crocs when i’m walking about the house, garden, or to the shops.
I used to say that I would never have a pair of those goofy looking shoes on my feet. My step-daughter came over one day and left hers by the door. I had to go to the mailbox, so I joked, “ha ha, I’m stealing your crocs!” By the time I got back from the mailbox, I was looking up a pair to purchase online. Yeah, they’re goofy looking, but good gravy Marie they’re comfortable!
…and then I discovered that they make loafers that I could wear to work. 💸💸💸
Yeah super comfortable but ugly. The other issue is that because they are so puffy, I can’t drive standard with them. I need to put on “regular” shoes for that. But if I am just tooling around the yard, they are great.
I was as anti-croc as you can get until I tried a pair on. For house slippers, yard work, and grabbing the mail, they’re absolutely amazing. I won’t be caught dead in public with them though. If Croc made an insole they would sell like hotcakes. They’ve perfected their arch support and rebound.
I got foot pain by using crocks, according to my phisio, so now I am learning to walk bare footed at home or in tight fitting shoes outside. Also I need hard shoesoles because apparently I have been using my toes too much to walk
I do this all time! The powder coating on my toolbox causes nearly every sticker to not adhere correctly, the magnetic tape solves that problem every time. It’s great stuff.
I’m here in my van on a hot hot day doing ‘work’ (in this case a little browsing of lemmy).
cooling me down is a "arctic air’ USB fan with a little water reservoir providing a misting action. I think I said, “as seen on tv” like six times after buying it because how stupid can you get – but i needed a fan and this is what the local hardware store had that ran on USB.
Wow. I love it. Fast, quiet, low power, good air, and the misting function is awesome. I’d buy it again in a heartbeat. (assuming it doesn’t break within a week).
Years ago, I drunk purchased a microwavable sandwich press off Amazon… it was a genuine surprise when it showed up and I considered returning it, but didn’t. Brought it to work and now I use it three to five times a week; I genuinely recommend this thing to other people. It’s so convenient and works really well.
You really can’t believe you can put it in a microwave while holding it , but it is genuinely great. A bit long to heat up, but I can’t complain when you get a nice toasted sandwich in exchange.
10 lengths of 10 foot 1/2" copper pipe. when I bought it it was cheaper than now by a lot. I ended up never using it for plumbing because we went with a larger diameter and different material. Now I have the coolest patina curtain rods ever.
A while ago someone posted a picture on Reddit of an old cast iron rotary food grater/slicer and asked “what is this thing?”. A bunch of people said it was for grating things like cheese or slicing vegetables. Some people posted the original French or Italian names of it, which was difficult to find. Someone said look up “Rotary grater” and they’re all over Amazon for dirt cheap. I bought a cheap plastic one for like $20, figuring I’d use it a few times and forget about it.
I use the damn thing multiple times a week for grating blocks of cheese. It can grate a 1 pound block of cheese in like 30 seconds, 2-3 rotations usually gives me more than enough cheese for myself. It’s so much easier to use than a box grater, and no possibility of destroying your finger tips or knuckles!
My friend, let me introduce you do the MUCH better version that you don’t even have to plug in! The Temperfect Mug joeveo.com ~$50.00 and does not need anything plugged into it. Keeps my coffee at the right temp for HOURS. I am not joking even a little bit!
I honestly never got this. 1.5 hours charge brand new, 3-5 years all those cycles it will go through, and the manufacturer does not replace the batteries nor are they user replaceable. So it just becomes a normal mug, borderline e-waste. Not for me…
I got one as a gift. So dumb. Just what a I need in mug: IoT and a charger! /s Plus, I can just microwave a normal mug to heat it back up, but not this. And forget about the dishwasher.
…except now that I’ve used it. It’s pretty fucking nice not having to go over to the microwave when I inevitably forget about my drink. And if I use the charger as a coaster. That battery is always topped up. So, I understand its appeal.
Tl;dr: It’s dumb, but it’s also actually quite nice. I certainly wouldn’t buy myself one, but I enjoy using mine.
I’ve been bouncing back and forth between getting one, even though James and other people were initially like “this is dumb” but switched to “I love it”. I just can’t bring myself to spend $150 on a battery powered coffee mug, especially when I’m usually done with my coffee within a few minutes.
I am not sure about this one. $150 for the mug AND you have to install another app on your phone just to use it. If there was a way to just use the mug without the app I could see it.
My wife and I got Nextmugs, which have no app and one single button that switches between warm/hot/piping/off. I tend to drink hot coffee slowly over the course of a couple of hours, and this has been a significant quality-of-life improvement.
In my experience, you need the app if you use a valved filter (i.e. Clever Dripper) as being a little cooler, the Ember mug doesn’t trigger the heating, and you have to tell the app to increase the temperature manually until it realises there’s a hot drink in there.
It’s absolutely expensive, perhaps moreso than it’s worth. But the delight of being able to spend an hour sipping your coffee while working is just incredible. In fact, my one gripe with this is that the battery is only about 1.5h, so you need to finish your cup of coffee in that time. That sounds ridiculous, but I’ve run down the battery enough that I just wish it was longer.
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