I have always hated bath mats. Especially being in a fairly large family, by early afternoon it seems like the bath mat is always saturated and useless; slipping around the floor if you’re trying to use it to dry your feet, or soaking your socks if you happen to step on it in the course of other bathroom business.
I recently got a bath stone made of diatomaceous earth and it has erased all of the annoyance. It pulls the water right off you so I always feel safe stepping onto my tile floor after just a few steps on the bath stone, and it dries freakishly fast, like basically in front of your eyes.
I’ve only had it a month so I don’t know how durable it is over the long term, but so far it has been $40 well spent.
I’ve never understood why more people don’t dry themselves in the shower, and dry their feet on the way out. Why use the bath mat as a special communal foot sole towel? It’s much nicer when it’s just a comfortable dry mat for standing on with bare feet.
It came up in a work lunchtime conversation and there were two of us out of a dozen who do it, and most people thought we were weird and bathmats were supposed to be cold wet rags.
I recently moved to a new place surrounded by leafy trees and realized I’ll actually have to rake the yard, for the first time in a very long time.
But I also just bought a small leaf blower to clear the driveway after mowing… and you made me realize that it’s… well… a leaf blower. I hope it’s powerful enough, but I bet it’ll still speed things up regardless
Yeah, it should help some. It was taking my wife and I a fair amount of time to clean it all up, every weekend during the fall. Now, I can blow it into a huge pile in about 15-20 minutes. Then I can mulch it, add it to the compost, or just send it to the yard debris container. It was a bit pricey, but has saved me countless hours.
I have a gas one. But I also work from home, so I use much less gas than the average person to begin with. I plan to replace it with an electric unit when this one quits.
I mostly clean them off the driveway, paths, and grass since they get slick as it’s quite rainy here. I usually will try to mulch them and add them back to the flower beds, or compost most of what I clean up. I uave a few areas where I don’t clean them at all. But the drive and paths are a must.
I want to eventually convert the front grass to a native habitat and am in the process of getting certified, but that takes time and we just started recently. Once it’s mostly converted, I won’t need to leaf blow that area any longer.
Building and running my own server for self hosting multiple tools for my home.
Bitwarden Password manager, now sharing logins/passwords for stuff my fiance and I both use is easy, and every single website we use has its own unique randomly generated password so when one site gets breached, our logins aren’t compromised anywhere else
Plex, it’s like your own self hosted Netflix. My file copies of any movies/TV shows go on here and it parses em all, keeps it all grouped together, streams in 4k.
Shinobi, for my security cameras. Self hosted free CRTV application, works with any open spec cameras. Has movement detection and tonnes of other open source options for plug-ins.
Deluge, handy UI for downloading torrents onto my server. Conviently added presets to it that let me download to the very folders Plex scans… cough cough.
Kavita, self hosted server for books/pdfs. Some e-readers can even connect to it. A couple popular manga reading apps also work with it. Can also just use its own browser web interface as an e-reader, it has multiple options for styles (infinite scroll, page swiping, left/right click, and even supports right to left mode for manga!)
Nextcloud, pictures/document storage. Sort of like a selfhosted filesshare/file backup. Has a mobile app that can automatically backup every picture/video you take on your phone!
Gogs, open source super lightweight git repo. Has only the bare minimum of features, basic web hook, authorization, permissions, simple web ui to edit. It does the job I need it to and that’s good enough.
OpenVPN, self hosted VPN so I can securely access all the above stuff without exposing it to the internet.
Also I host my own websites on it, publicly exposed. Blog, a writing project, nothing terribly fancy.
Eventually I plan to add some more stuff to it. Migrate my smart home dependencies over to Z wave and install Home Assistant, so I don’t have to rely on sending my info to google/amazon/etc to do basic smart home stuff.
I personally would never recommend someone to self host a password manager. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and any number of them could cause you to lose your passwords or at least access to them when you need them. There’s a lot of value in paying $10/yr for Bitwarden, to have a clear mind, and know that your information is safe, and accessible.
The issue he/she is taking about is reliability of personal infrastructure. Its never run a password manager without HA, and since I’m not going to run servers in HA, I suppose we’re back to me hosting a private and encrypted git repo on my server with a offline copy.
I’ve used Keepass along with dropbox/onedrive/nextcloud (changed over the years) for a decade now and never had a problem. I keep a backup copy of my database on a flash drive in case I somehow lose all my devices. Takes like 5 minutes to set up.
I would not self host a password manager, simply because I don’t want running something like that on a 24/7 online server.
Still, if I needed to run a password manager on a server, I would rather self host it than use a hosted service from someone else.
In my opinion, running such a service commercially is a much harder problem than self hosting it and has a much bigger attack surface.
This is IMHO what many people do not understand about hosting as a service vs. self hosting: The full time DevOps/Admins etc. people who work at the hosting service are hopefully better than me at hosting stuff. At the same time the problem they have to solve is so much harder than self hosting, that even if they are 10x as good as me, running my own little service with a firewall, rate limiting and monitoring should at least not be less secure.
In my opinion the risk of something killing my server and wiping my passwords out is much much scarier than the prospect than a semi competent company hosting them getting hacked. Like several orders of magnitude scarier.
My solution is much simpler and more redundant: A KeepassXC file backed up to different physical locations and 2 different cloud providers.
If I ever forget my password, I am totally screwed. :-P … but OTOH an event which would lead to the deletion of all of my backups at the same time would be extinction - level. ;-)
I havent had any issues with Plex so far, so I continue to use it. Ive definitely looked into jellyfin and it doesnt seem painful to swap over, but at the moment there hasnt been a compelling reason to make the switch.
I put media in my folder, plex scans it by the time I sit on my couch, I click button, show plays. No issues to speak of so far.
While Plex has moved towards the “free” content, it still does remarkably well with apps on all devices. It also makes user management extremely easy without having to manage yourself. Password resets aren’t your problem if you share with others.
It has its limitations and it’s development budget isn’t in the self hosting space as much. But for what it is, it’s still a good value.
A house. My mortgage is cheaper than rent, and now I get to actually address annoyances with my living conditions.
It’s almost 100 years old, and a bit of an fixer upper, but the important stuff is solid. Last summer I invested in proper drainage around the foundation so that I can start making the basement livable. This year I invested in a proper bathroom. Next year it’s a new kitchen. And if time allows I’ll start rebuilding the basement mainly for one extra bed room and an office.
This is a good one. I finally teamed up with family to invest in a house last year. I’ve found a lot of issues that I’ve since fixed, especially with the electrical. There’s still a lot to fix, but I’m elated that I can actually take action to fix stuff.
While renting, my hands were severely tied. The only benefit with renting was that if anything was literally broken, it would be fixed by the landlord, free to me. “Fixed” is subjective, usually done as cheaply as possible, which is often making things less convenient.
Now I can have things fixed correctly, making things more convenient overall for me and my family.
Long term, we’re planning on renovating and adding another kitchen and bathroom, possibly another entrance and I’m considering splitting the HVAC for one portion of the place and almost splitting it into two independent homes that are conjoined.
Depends on market. In Vancouver existing rentals are controlled until you move, the house sells, or you are reno-evicted. This involves evicting the tenant to “fix up the suite” and then renting it out at a much higher rate.
There is also the move to evict for a " family member" to move in but often this is abused to get low paying tenants out.
New mortgages are much more than existing rent here. As much as renters go through credit checks, I think landlords should too as you don’t want to rent a place where they can’t afford the interest rate increases. Often they cheap out on repairs and usually sees the place being sold or one of the above abuses of the evictions to get a higher paying tenant in.
The market is really tight in places like Vancouver and Toronto. The interest rate hikes will eventually catch up to most renters as properties are moved/sold.
Same, cut my monthly housing cost by almost $1000 two years ago. So many good things have happened as a result as well, because it was a move between regions and opened up alternative employment options not previously available. As a result I also doubled my income.
This only talks about rent. And when rent increases, so does the value of the property, because you can get more money as rents are higher.
If you now consider the amount of work you have to invest into owning property and the associated risk of owning a house or flat, in an ideal market its simply not possible.
And while the housing market is imperfect due to the high burden for entrance, I have never seen a proper calculation where mortage, insurance and maintanance comes out lower than renting.
I’m not going to doxx myself by giving the exact address, but my landlady in 2019 wanted to sell the house we were in. She first offered the place to us for $430,000 - which would have been a discount because she wouldn’t have needed an agent etc.
Assuming we had the 20% deposit to borrow $344,000 and taken her up on that offer, our current repayments would have been about $464 per week. Even without the discount, repayments would have been under $500.
Instead, she eventually sold the property and we had to move to a smaller house where we are now paying $650 per week. Going from a 4 bedroom house with a yard to a 3 bedroom townhouse sharing the block with two other residences. No yard. Admittedly, we moved a suburb closer to the CBD.
Take a look at Real estate for a 3+ bedroom house within 10km of any Australian city, you’ll see that $650 is not extravagant by any means.
The 20% deposit is the entire point. It’s the barrier of entry to home ownership that keeps people renting. Of course I factored it in, it’s why I spoke of a mortgage of $344k and not $430k.
What does insurance have to do with anything? We are comparing rent to repayments. We have renter’s insurance now. We’d be changing that.
Are you saying you spend over $100 per week, every week on maintenance?
True. We’ve downsized from a four bedroom house to a three bedroom townhouse. You’ll just have to take my word for it that 4 bedroom houses in the next suburb go for about the same as the place we have because I’ve already told Lemmy enough about where I live.
Mortgage cheaper than rent here - just outside of Washington DC. (Only true when comparing like for like living spaces, same bedrooms, square feet, etc)
I went through a glasses addiction myself as well lol. I found an eye-care clinic where they would cut the lenses and have them ready within 3 hours.
I would go to garage sales, thrift stores, and swap meets to find glasses to put lenses on. They were like $60 for the lenses and I never spent more than $10 on frames.
I ended up with 3 seeing glasses and 4 sun glasses before I realized it was going to be unsustainable to get new lenses for my new prescription every year.
A memory foam mattress topper. Mine is 8cm (3") thick and an absolute game changer. It goes on top of your existing mattress and under the fitted sheet.
One of those stupid expensive real down feather pillows. I spoiled myself one year for my birthday and only wish I had done it sooner. I go to bed every night and thank myself for getting that pillow.
Just curious, what is “stupidly expensive”? Because I’m allergic to down/feathers/something related to it, and got a really expensive foam pillow that I’m… moderately OK with.
An E-reader. There’s no more space in my house for book shelves. I’ve a ton of books stored inappropriately in a bunch of cabinets and on top of furniture, that I hope to find new homes for before irreparable damage is done to their spine.
Having an e-reader also helped me in the gym. Instead of doomscrolling on lemmy or tiktok, I read between sets. Helped me regain my reading habit and kick my social media habit. Also, helped my social anxiety of having to rest longer than half a minute when other people might want to use the iron I’m using.
This is a great shout. Since I stopped commuting 6yrs ago my reading is almost entirely non existent. Doing it between sets means I can give my brain a workout while the guns get one :D
No connoisseur here either, but I am in dire need of a new one for work, as my current one is falling apart. I’m keeping my eyes open, in case I find one that matches these specs:
Durable as hell
1x compartment that can fit two 15" laptops. Chargers can go in a different compartment.
1x general purpose compartment for misc cables, SFP modules, connectors and other work related junk
1x compartment for a change of clothes
2x easy access pockets for things I might need to reach while on the go
2x zippable easy access compartment for things such as keys, battery bank, etc
must be small enough to count as carry-on with most airlines
I’m leaning towards getting one of those pilot backpack, as they’re built for people who are on the go.
The reason I’m an Osprey fan is because of the lifetime warranty for any reason, which impressively I’ve never had to use. And I abuse my gear outdoors.
But I’d imagine if you are doing tech carrying over everything else, you want something more specialized/padded. I try to find lighter gear.
When I have loads or large hardware I usually check in a pelicase or two. The backpack is mostly for short-term in-transit stuff plus bits and pieces I usually need for short stays.