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An impulse buy of a $20 micro wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Holy shit. Rock-solid design, ludicrously long battery life, excellent signal transmission, a replaceable battery with the option to use AAAs, a usable trackpad with sensitivity settings. I cannot stress enough how impressed I am with this device as an electrical engineer.

Now I can actually get real work/play done when I'm too depressed to get out of bed. It's also really useful for working with a Raspberry Pi. That plus a cheap LCD means I can just use it like an ordinary desktop.

If anyone is interested in this product, ask for a link and I'll post it in the comments.

A long shoe horn.

I got it cause my formal shoes are a tight fight. It has been a game changer, it is a whole new experience wearing shoes, even the normal ones.

Pizza Scissors. Great for frozen pizzas so you can cut it up right out of the oven without waiting for the cheese to cool off. It's also great for cutting dough and just having a 2nd pair of kitchen shears if your normal pair was used to cut raw meat.

Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.

Whereas Twitter isn't meant for most people's use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what's happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.

A Potato Ricer. My wife thought it was dumb as hell, until she made the best mashed potatoes we've ever had. It's like a massive garlic press for potatoes

I wanted to buy a small silicone spatula for specific uses, but they were only sold in a set of 5. I was like what am I going to do with that many spatulas but they're super useful and are amazing at scraping and I love having extras so I don't have to constantly wash them.

ANTAGEN dishbrush. I was at IKEA and saw they had dish brushes for less than a dollar a piece, so I stocked up on a few.

They last forever as far as dish brushes are concerned. It did clean-up for 2 large meals every single day for over a year before it started getting worn out. We'd throw it in the dishwasher at night to clean and sterilize it.

An Aeropress Go.

I'm far from a coffee snob, but figured I'd give this $25 piece of plastic a try because a good friend was raving about it. In the year since, it's been my favorite way to make myself a cup of coffee-- the ritual of it helps me structure my Saturday morning, the coffee tastes better than I thought coffee could taste, and I'm more excited to look at the flavors and whatnot from locally ground coffee.

Ember mug. I saw James Hoffmann’s review and went, “how good could it be?”

It’s the only mug I can drink from now.

Rechargeable AA and AAA batteries. I really didn't think much of it at the time but I have been very happy to have them at hand especially once I made a system to keep track of the ones that needed recharging and the ones that were fully charged.

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