Ask Lemmy

My Lumix S5 camera, it feels great to go from a micro43 camera to a full frame camera, though I am allready looking at the Sony A7 IV as a complement to my S5 due to it's superior autofocus....

Dehumidifier - 5 years and counting drying laundry indoors overnight with no risk of rain or wind!

My Ampler E-Bike I bought 2 years ago. More than 5000 km later I still love it to bits.

I don't think I could ever go back to a single monitor setup. Screen real estate is ALWAYS at a premium. I feel so constrained when forced to use just one.

Going from Sega Megadrive to PlayStation back in the nineties. True 3d graphics on a home console blew my little teenage mind. Lara Croft. Wipeout. Metal Gear Solid! Good times.

Electric whisks. I'm never stirring a drink with a spoon in my life.

When I got my first HD tv. I had previously been playing oblivion on Xbox 360 on an crt tv and when I setup the HD I was absolutely blown away by the clarity. I remember my stupid fucking ex-wife trying to tell me there was no difference between the two.

Setting up my own NAS and offside backup.

Big project for sure, but being in control of my vital backups was important for me. Additionally the up front costs is lower than the subscriptions I would have needed.

GPS was life-changing. (Yes, I am that old.) It used to be necessary to find printed maps of wherever you were going, which wasn't always easy. Then you had to figure out a route. The hardest part was often the last bit of the trip, since you weren't likely to have a detailed map of your destination city. An if you got lost, figuring out where you were was sometimes quite difficult.

People tend to think of it as mostly affecting longer trips, but finding new addresses in a city was at least as much of an issue. When I lived in the bay area I had a Thomas guide that was 3/4" of an inch thick, just for finding my way around town.

Google Home did when it first came out. Unfortunately, the quality has been consistently tanking since inception

Beetlecrab Audio Tempera is the most inspiring electronic musical instrument I own. I got it in April, and I'm still finding new ways to use it. It does so much.

Oxi One really is the hardware sequencer to rule them all. Though I'm sure you could get by with a Hapax or Deluge if you don't mind spending twice as much.

Not a purchase, but Csound has always been an invaluable companion to my music making process. It's also entirely free and open-source.

Bought a dishwasher.

Life changing improvement. Don't be afraid to use the pots and pans setting for everything.

You don't need fancy soap and remember to top up the rinse aid.

(Also every 6 months run a special cleaner through it)

For me, it was a Quest 3. The first VR headset to cross my personal threshold. My main requirement was that when I wasn't playing actual VR games, the headset was worth using as a virtual computer monitor from the comfort of my recliner. While Quest 3 doesn't quite have enough pixels to truly display my 4k screen at a 1:1 ratio, it is close enough that with the perceived clarity boost from the micromovements of your head meaning the same set of pixels is never sampled twice in a row and the headset running at 120hz, my 60hz real life 4k screen looks exactly as clear in real life as on the headset.

I also have a supplemental completely fabricated virtual 4k 120hz screen in the headset that I use for any games that are easier to run and benefit more from framerate than perfect individual frame clarity. The screens are 20 feet away, but each take up 80 degrees of field of view, twice what is considered comfortable, but I have always preferred what I guess in that context can only be classified as "intimate?" distance from my screens. I only use one screen at a time, the other is stored just out of sight up above. I can still look at it comfortably, and there is a button to swap the monitor locations when I want to change which one is being primarily used.

I also have my real world surroundings in the headset. So the screens are just floating within reality. I can still engage with my family, and thanks to the clarity of the passthrough cameras, I can watch TV with them too. Clearly enough to read the closed captions. The TV screen is about 30-40 degrees of my field of view, and is thus only represented as about a 720p screen, but with that same "temporal antialiasing" the clarity is boosted up to about 1080p level.

So, with all that, I spend about 14 hours a day in my VR headset now. Wirelessly, with a magnetic battery swap every 2 hours. Sometimes standing up and playing real VR games, sometimes reclining in a super comfortable chair playing desktop games. With the bobovr system, or whichever option you prefer, the headset is comfortable to wear for an infinite amount of time. And when I visit my real computer monitor now, I just leave my sit/stand desk in stand mode and no longer have a computer chair.

It has basically replaced every other screen in my life, except my phone. Which is still a main sticking point of VR. They will concievably replace the phone too eventually, but there is alot of software and hardware infrastructure needed to get there. At least Quest 3 is finally a headset clear enough to use your phone without taking it off or peeking through gaps. But only just, a phone tends to take up about 20 degrees of your field of view when used comfortably, even holding it twice as close as that is only 720p(temporally upsampled to 1080p) so holding the phone closer is still only about half the resolution of your phone. Assuming you run your phone in 4k normally. It's probably fine for people without a gaming phone that likely already only run it at 1080p, then they might have text large enough to resolve at a comfortable distance in VR. But anyway. It's not too bad now, so hopefully next headset is enough to completely solve that too, while we wait for it to not even be necessary eventually.

I'm basically retired, built up a big enough money ball that my passive income from it slowly increases, so this is the rest of my life. Slowly getting better and better VR. And while it started at Oculus DK2 for me, all the headsets before Quest 3 were only fun toys that I played with alot. Steadily increasing in capability, but not crossing the threshold into permanent screen replacement. Quest 3 did it, it crossed over that line. While the size of screen I use to represent my 4k TV is only actually physically covered by about 1440p worth of pixels, the free temporal upsampling makes it as good as 4k(2160p).

Though it will take double the current resolution for people that want a 4k screen at 40 degrees of field of view, for now people that like that distance (most people) would have to make due with it looking 1080p. Which might be fine for most people, it is still the most widely used screen resolution.

Edit for plugs for anyone that wants to do this too:

Outside of the Quest 3 itself, I use the third party comfort and runtime mod "M3 pro" from BoBoVR(dumb name, quality company), and Virtual Desktop software to stream my computer screen and create the better supplemental virtual screen out of thin air. I also use Virtual desktop to play my PCVR games when not just running something natively on the headset. Having a good network setup is pretty important too, especially in my case where the aforementioned recliner is on a different floor of my house than my computer. I have a background in networking, so in my case I'm able to setup my router in such a way that I can comfortably stream VR while we have 50 other devices on the router. But for most people, either a second dedicated router or specific VR streamer is going to be a better route. My router was 600 dollars, these bespoke units can be as little as 100 dollars and give you almost the same experience. Plus they are pre-configured specifically for VR streaming. Otherwise there can be alot of configuration changes needed.

I apologize for my verbosity, I hate to leave any details out, even though someone could just ask if I forgot to cover something. I am, unsurprisingly, Autistic. Communicating clearly is a common problem for us. Never know what knowledge I have that isn't common and needs to be conveyed. And I don't change mental gears well, so I like to get everything out once, if possible, to reduce the likelihood of having to get back into this mental space again later.

iPhone 3G. I’ll never forget the day I put the internet in my pocket

A good docking station plus KVM for a good work & home setup since the pandemic hit.

I can dock my work laptop when I work from home and have my two screens, ergonomic keyboard, mouse, webcam etc all attached in one go, then a single button on my desk to toggle to my gaming desktop and start playing without having to disconnect anything, reducing wear and tear on the connectors.

My Thinkpad T440p, its a reliable laptop that works amazingly. It may not be the most powerful but the keyboard is amazing and the build quality is better then any modern laptop.

induction cooktop? I'd say dishwasher but that's probably more plumbing and pumps than "technology".

With all the other gadgets, I'm not so sure. I've had computers, laptops, phones for ages. Of course my first everything back in the 90s or 00s was a big thing. But since then it's just the newest generation, a bit faster and with more extras, but noting substancially different.

Not very high tech, but I love it: a projector clock (an alarm clock that can project the time on a ceiling or wall).

Not having to turn over to see the time is extremely nice when I’m cozy in bed. I didn’t even ask for it - it was given to me as a gift. If you get one, be sure that the angle and orientation are highly adjustable.

I got a microwave with an inverter magnetron.

When you set your microwave to, let's say, 20% power, a typical microwave will cycle the magnetron, so that it runs at 100% power for 20% of the cooking time and is off in between. With an inverter, the actual power output of the magnetron can vary, so it's actual 20% power for the whole time. It does an excellent job of gently reheating things like sandwiches and cooked rice without drying them out or scorching. Also, if something has instructions written for a lower wattage microwave, I can just turn the power down until it's close to that wattage instead of doing calculations to modify the time.

Going full homelab with a rack, battery backups, and 2.5gb backhaul on my home network. Absolutely game changing from an appliance management standpoint where any one node can go down for any reason and there’s a backup and replacement on hand in minutes with built in redundancy. Not to mention the learning and experience opportunities when setting up hardware and software services. Sure is sweet to have data redundancy and protections!

Noise cancelling headphones. I wish I could wear them 24/7.

The best recent one was a Faraday bag for my phone.

I use it as a step counter but didn't want to be checking it often nor tracked all the time, and the faraday bag blocks signals from the outside and minimizes my phone as a nuisance AND helps curb the urge to check it all the time while still counting my steps.

Overall, though, I'd say a USB powerbank. I've had it for three years and only used it a handful of times, but when I'm in an airport or road tripping, it's nice to have an easy way to recharge my devices.