Though I haven't actually found good bluetooth headphones for sub $100. My favorite so far were the Senheiser PXC550 (I think thats it). But mine have gotten chewed by a dog :(. I liked the audio quality, didn't love the touch controls, but the cheap headphones I've gotten to replace them just sound awful.
I know people like air fryers, but I personally would recommend a NuWave. I know As Seen On TV, but it can be an air fryer from what I can tell, but is also just a really easy to use convection oven that's reasonably cheap (though it is over $100), and everything that is going to be touched by food or it's drippings can go in the dishwasher!
The phone flashlight is barely adequate for some uses, but like a lot of stuff on a phone has some serious compromises. YMMV if that matters to you. For me, I find it's really hard to hold a phone when I need a flashlight and hit where I need the light, whereas a more traditional flashlight doesn't take up an entire hand exactly - you can grip it with like 2 fingers or in your teeth, or under your arm etc. Hard to describe but try it without getting the phone to thing you're trying to turn the flashlight off. (I might suck at using smartphones though).
But worst than that, it's got a really short throw and isn't that bright. It might be me just getting older, but I've found a "real flashlight" like a "real camera" makes a world of difference. I have some cheap Anker one I got as a gift which is like 10 times brighter and throws probably 100 times as far as my smartphone. I have to imagine new "high end" ones are much better.
I also recently got a "improved phone light" off of tech dirt and I probably overpaid, look on Temu to save money. But it clips to my SAK, or keys, it's a lot brighter, it has a fold out stand and a magnet and is pretty tiny.
Again - if you don't ever curse out your phone as a flashlight, then you don't need any of this, but if you regularly do (or just want to save your phones battery for something other than being a flashlight) - check some of these out.
I was going to say, a Swiss Army Knife. Lifechanging. I use it quite a lot. It's small for men's pockets, and you can get smaller ones too (mine is a cybertool, so on the middle-large size of SAKs). I also have a SwissTool that's huge and just tool porn and fun to use as a fidget device, but way too big for me to EDC, and way overkill for what I'd end up needing it for. Also the SwissTool is over $100. The Cybertool was at $99, and there's plenty of less specialized SAKs going down to like $30.
If only there was actually a good car dashcam, but every time I go down that rabbit hole I give up frustrated. The quality (build, mounting, video, whatever) is shit in pretty much all of them, and the "passable" ones look like a web cam from 2005 still.
Really only if you eat a lot of rice. For once a year or so, a pot on the stove works just fine. The actual benefit I've see for ricecookers is how well they can hold the rice for hours ready to go, but that's more of a commercial benefit I think.
I swear that companies are really misunderstanding how most people interact with brands, or I am. But given recent events, I think it's the companies. On another topic, for reasons I cannot fathom, Schwans home frozen food delivery is re-branding from Schwans' (which is hard for me to spell, but easy to say) that it's been since the 1950s and is widely understood and recognized. What are they re-branding to? It sounds like they got right up to date with mid 90s Internet company branding, going with Yelloh! (I think). No one wants to say Yelloh!. It looks stupid, and somehow more out of fashion than their old logo.
We've got whatever the heck is going on with Twitter/X, we've got this (Yea, no one recognizes HBO, that's OLD./s)
The Great Courses Plus renamed Wondrium (which is again, giving up a rather well known brand in some niches with an obvious idea that it's slightly different as a subscription). At least this doesn't entirely sound / look stupid, and they added content when doing it, but still.
I probably could go on, but just... why? IDK - have you ever looked at an existing brand and thought - oh, that's too dated? Usually companies pull this stuff to "trick" people into thinking it's a different company, like when Blackwater became whatever, or Jeep etc became Stellantis. Such self owns.
Yea, I have found by far the biggest effect for me (and I have to imagine most people) is the speakers / headphones, not the digital processing or even the audio converters.
The problem is just we have to use the sites. There's no real choice ( we have some of this for work too). I'm not losing my job or impacting my medical care for a browser war. If I can fool the site with an extension or something, then if I know that I'll do it. But this idea that you can just avoid browsers when you need a website is not really true. I will say - I very rarely see these problems compared to back in the day. But I have contacted tech support and they just say use the working browser. I can't report a bug, they don't even understand why I'm being a PITA.
I mean, does it? Presumably the idea (that Tesla had anyway) is to try and mimic what humans do, and we don't need mapping data to drive "safely" (for a given value of safe). Of course, humans also get lost, but again, the GPS updates is basically free at this point for the mapping help humans need. (Garmin stopped charging yearly long ago, Open Maps and Google Maps and Wayze all are "free").
Never used Chrome, and strongly suggest to other people not to use Chrome. However, I've not had the hate for chromium browsers (so far, the killing of extensions might drive me away) - I've really enjoyed Vivaldi for a lot more features and having the engine that works on websites (yes this sucks). My mom OTOH is a Firefox person, and I just had to help her get onto her insurance website - she had tech support on the phone, and Firefox just would not let her set a password and just kept looping and using up the reset link. Finally I tried in Vivaldi (Chromium) and it worked first try. Of course, I've had the same experience in the opposite direction. So I have to keep using both.
Also, Vivaldi anyway has a much better UI IMHO for what I want than Firefox does, and is faster. As an IT person, I much prefer semantic versioning which Vivaldi also has.
Anyway, at this point Chromium is like IE was - you can't not have access to your health insurance website, and they don't apparently test in Firefox so it doesn't work. You can't drop your provider cause you don't pick it, your work does. The upshot of Chromium is that there are rebuilds and it runs on other platforms than Windows - so... there's that at least.
Honestly, I'd like to see someone fork Chromium and keep web extensions etc, but no one wants to write a browser engine anymore - even Vivaldi, which was the old Opera team that wrote 2 browser engines over the history of the browser through v12 - can't afford to make their own engine. What I don't get is why so many browser makers have chosen chromium vs gecko - almost no one wraps gecko in the last 10 years. (Maybe Firefox is different now? I know it in some ways started getting crappy wrt extensions back in v28? whenever Pale Moon forked.)
For context, we were recovering all VMs from a failed storage array. It seemed logical at the time to restore all VMs from the last DR Image. I see now for DCs that is not the case, and you should always do a force removal (which I thought was a last resort, but seems to actually be the first resort unless you're doing a scheduled migration), and rebuild. This took longer than bringing the VM back up, but we did manage to rebuild from scratch and it did resolve the issue (obviously).
Irc clients don't need to be in a web browser, and personally I don't want persistent chat saved forever. I also just want text much of the time.
That said, I do find some of the features in discord (and hence in matrix) nice. I just currently have only a support for lemmy in Matrix and haven't seen groups use those servers yet. Discord hasn't yet caused a migration.
People do suggest there are liberal echo chambers, and there are conspiracy theories that liberals are brainwashed. Not sure if that's the same. Right now the stuff I could see misinformation against liberals could do might not be that useful to anyone inclined to push misinformation. I guess democrats are just generally less in lockstep anyway so you're picking one or another fringe but maybe not enough to accomplish much.
The only thing currently uniting liberals that's not probably just how the world is might be just DEI stuff, which I don't actually think is that disruptive yet.
Though I haven't actually found good bluetooth headphones for sub $100. My favorite so far were the Senheiser PXC550 (I think thats it). But mine have gotten chewed by a dog :(. I liked the audio quality, didn't love the touch controls, but the cheap headphones I've gotten to replace them just sound awful.