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.

  • JasonHears@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    When I worked at a small startup, we were moving to a new office and I was asked to help with the buildout. I engaged with the flooring vendor, and he came by one day to drop off a carpet sample. He put it on my desk where my mouse was. It was a rectangle sample of tight knit office carpet, about 18”x22”. When I got back to my desk, I just put my mouse on top of it and started using it as a mouse pad. That was 15 years and 3 companies ago, and I still use it as my mousepad. It’s perfect for the mouse to glide on, soft enough for my wrist to rest on, absorbent of sweat or drink condensation, and large enough I never hit the edge. I will never not use it. It is my mouse carpet, and I love it.

  • Dathknight@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    A 3D-Printer, I thought I just play around with it and get bored, but you discover so many things that you can do!

    The handle on the fridge broke? Print new ones. Need a Flowerpot? Just print one. The router needs a wallmount? I have one ready in a few Hours.

    Also I can watch it print for hours, very fascinating and calming.

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    1 year ago

    Got a bidet as a joke gift for Christmas a few years ago, it has been an absolute game changer. Hate pooping anywhere but home now, I actually feel clean, and use much less toilet paper.

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          1 year ago

          A significant portion of the world uses water to clean after doing their business! It’s just us westerners that are odd about it.

          I’m curious what the history behind it is, because I never feel clean if I only wipe. Like if you handled faeces with your hands (for whatever reason) would you be OK with just wiping it off with a paper towel? I sure wouldn’t!

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            1 year ago

            If it wasnt for China, Westerners would also still scratch their asses with shells and stones.

            So middle east gave them bidet and China gave them paper. They are so lucky

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              1 year ago

              Hahaha, I had no clue about the shells. You piqued my interest, so I went down the toilet paper history rabbit hole.

              I knew that the Romans used communal sponges, I didn’t know they were called tersorium though. Shockingly they spread disease.

              Apparently here in the north, the vikings used animal bones, rags, and oyster shells! I’m not surprised we didn’t use paper though, since we didn’t really get paper until the Christians came and brought paper with them, and even then it was only for the educated Christian elite for hundreds of years, up until around the 1200-1300 or so, a good 700 years after people in China wiped their butts with paper!

              Toilet paper started being produced here in Sweden in 1882, and the first factory stayed producing until sometime in the early 2000s.

              Until the 1900s common folk often used leaves, grass, or the bottom hem of their skirt to clean themselves.

              That last bit sounds really gross by modern standards, but given that skirts came in layers, and were really long, they were already covered with the muck of the outside ground so in the grand scheme of things I don’t think it made a very big difference.

              According to the manufacturer, the first toilet paper (in Sweden) without wood chips and splinters was released in 1935.

              My bidet butt could never handle scraping with oysters or splinterful toilet paper; I’d just scrape my anus off. I can barely use regular toilet paper as it is. People of old were built different hahahaha.

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              1 year ago

              Va bene! That’s not so much the case here in Sweden.

              It kind of boggles the mind though. Setting aside the fact that paper only can’t possibly clean enough, isn’t it also more environmentally friendly to use water? I mean obviously if you pour a bathtub over your butt every time you do your business, then probably not so much, but no one uses that much water.

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              1 year ago

              Some cursory googling for this turned up a value by researcher Alex Crumbie, though I didn’t find any papers about it. According to them however 30% of the world uses toilet paper, the majority consumer being China. The remaining 70% of the world finds other solutions.

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              1 year ago

              Given that Muslims wash as a religious requirement and are 1.8 billion…

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            1 year ago

            (FYI, “there are dozens of us” is an Arrested Development quote. Your questions are definitely valid, but I’m not sure the poster of the comment actually meant much by it, besides the joke.)

  • AThing4String@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

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    1 year ago

    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.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Here’s an odd one my wife and I were just talking about. Some years ago, we were redoing our kitchen and the contractor told us to go buy the kitchen faucet we wanted. We went off, looked at several, and picked the one we thought looked the best with what we were doing.

    When the contractor went to install it, he opened the box and a battery pack fell out. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a faucet would need batteries. It turned out that you can turn it on and off by touching it anywhere (handle, faucet itself, whatever), you just leave the physical handle open and set where you want it, then you can touch on and off. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and we’d never use it.

    Flash Forward to now and it’s one of the most used conveniences we’ve ever bought. All those times your hands are covered in raw meat or other cooking mess? Just touch the faucet with your elbow. Rinsing a bunch of veggies one at a time? Tap on, tap off. It works flawlessly, unlike those touchless ones at the airport: no delay and works every time. We will never have a kitchen sink without it - my wife wants them for the bathroom.

  • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Monitor mounting arms that connect to the back of the desk. I have 3 times as much room on my desk now. It’s amazing how much room monitor stands really take up. It’s not just the actual stand but really the surrounding area because you can’t really set any large objects in the vicinity. It really is a game changer to gain a lot of desk space.

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    1 year ago

    I got the glasses with 90 degree prisms in them so you can read while laying down. The person on the product page looked like an idiot and thought it would be funny, but I’m on my 3rd pair now

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    1 year ago

    An oversized poncho cape from the local Goodwill. It was woven in different shades of blue and while I’d never wear it outside, I’ve used it as a wearable blanket at home for a few years now.

    I found out it was actually hand made, and costs 300+ USD from the original shop. Bonus points, I feel like a wizard when I wear it

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    1 year ago

    Bug zapper flyswatter. Like you can buy at Harbor Freight for a few bucks. It might not be a terribly effective solution to the overall fly population, but in terms of grim-bloody-vengeance-per-dollar, it’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made.

    • gorillakitty@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I bought like 10 of these at Habitat for Humanity and gave them out during a fly outbreak. Some of the neighbors looked at me weird (granted it was the first time I met them) but I’ll swear by these things. I hate killing bugs but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

  • oceane@jlai.lu
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Camzing@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A bidet off of Amazon, cheap and easy to install. I wasn’t sure that I would like it but I like to only go at home now. Wife loves it.

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    1 year ago

    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!