Makita Brushless 5amp drill combo set. I have used a wide variety of battery powered drills and drivers for decades. If you do a lot of home projects building things, you will use these tools often. Never was dissatisfied with other brands (Ryobi, Bosch), but decided to treat myself one year as I believe Makita Brushless is top of the line today and I wanted more powerful batteries. Best decision ever. So much power, the 5 amp batteries last so long. I have driven 1/2 x 6 inch lag bolts into fence posts with the driver and it did not complain. Just an amazing upgrade (notably because of the 5 amp batteries). If you are starting out building a tool set, splurge and get these. Just remember to store them in your house not the garage as heat/cold cycles can really reduce the batteries cycle count. Only negative is that the driver is so powerful one must be careful when driving smaller screws. Also, spend the extra money to get a good set of bits. I went with Makita for this as well, and the bits are very, very good relative to the many, many others I have used (Dewalt, Milwaukie, etc.) Links (I bought the drill/driver set at a good price thru Amazon with the smaller/lighter drill which proved a very good decision for me):
https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/XT269T
https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/E-01644
Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
141–150 of 592 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#142Make your own giant, the entire wall, whiteboard for practically nothing. Go to your local lumber, home building supply store and purchase "laminated particle board, shower wall panels". Last time I did this, they were about US $23 for a 6'x9' panel. Two of these completely cover an ordinary single bed sized room from wall to wall. I just drill the thing right into the wall, and grab white-board markers. I showed the building maintenance manager this trick at an animation studio I worked, and in a week the entire studio's walls, every wall, became a whiteboard. Scribbling ideas, any idea, on one's wall is liberating.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#143A 43" monitor from Dell. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-43-4k-usb-c-.... It's wide enough that you can comfortably have three panes of code side by side and also tall enough that you can see a lot all at once. It's 4k, but it's so big you don't need much scaling to be comfortable.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#144In no particular order: Trackball, mechanical keyboard, IPS display, SSD, coffee bean grinder, e-ink reader, nifty fifty lens, electret XLR mic, DAC for stereo system.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#145The Amazon Kindle has completely transformed the way I read for pleasure.
It is not as satisfactory for technical books, or anything with a lot of illustrations, but for standard novels it was a real game-changer.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#146The switch from a mechanical HDD to a SDD was the biggest gain in performance I've seen from any piece of hardware. I still remember the time when HDDs were the norm and the agony of waiting on loading/accessing something from disk was real.
I cannot agree more. This switch breathed new life into my home ( Windows 10 ) computer.
If only i did it with a larger drove though... Im atruggling through my system drive on a 90gb ssd...
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#147A floor heating pad. $30 and my feet will never be cold at the computer again!
This was gonna be my answer. I got one a few weeks ago after using a kotatsu heated table at a traditional hotel in the mountains here in Japan.
There's life before one has experienced a kotatsu, and life after.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#148A 2560x1440 monitor running at its 1:1 native resolution. The screen real estate improvement over 1080p is substantial. You get so much more vertical space and you can easily fit 4 side by side code windows at 80 chars. At 24" or 25" the PPI is also quite nice for reading text. I wrote up a very big monitor selection guide at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo... , I try to keep it up to dat…
Amen to that. I recently bought a cheap Westinghouse display off Newegg that was 1440p@144hz, and it makes for an incredible primary display. I'm not exactly sold on "retina" pixel density, but having the extra screen real-estate is pretty lovely for productivity purposes. I'll definitely be considering a 4k display over the next few months, if I can get the kind of GPU to drive it reliably.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe tangential, but would most folks be likely to discern the difference vs. a glass French press? Most drip coffeemakers I’ve used are both more expensive and make worse coffee (not to mention harder to clean), so I’ve largely given up on the category, but admittedly haven’t done proper research in quite a while.
Usually manual coffee making can be just as good or better than a machine, or at least much cheaper for the same quality. You can make very very good coffee with a $40 pour-over or french press. French press doesn't really have a machine equivalent that I can think of though, it's sort of in its own category of coffee. IMO a good burr grinder is good to have no matter how you make your coffee. If you don't already bu…
It depends on the flavor you like. The espresso flavor is much more mellow in my opinion. Drip can be great but you need to have a preference for that style
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#150Probably my split keyboard running QMK. It's a Sofle I built from a kit. It forced me to learn to touch type, and after taking some time to setup layers I can now reliably type code at 65+ wpm. That's a big improvement for me, and more importantly I can now type without the interruption of having to look at the keyboard.