301–310 of 853 posts
I have a heating pad under my keyboard which keeps my hands warm in the winter. Was like $20 on amazon, and I can't even begin to describe how amazing it is, since I was really tired of always having a mug of hot water / tea / coffee to hold and didn't want to keep the heat on my house super high when I could just wear a sweatshirt and be fine except my fingers.
UPS that can run my PC, monitors, USB hub for 10-30 minutes. I rarely have power outages, but when I do have one it's a non-event Cheap boom arm for the webcam. Stream Deck makes it was to quickly control audio and lights and aps Tourbox makes it easy to edit video Elgato Keylight Airs for video calls Neumi powered speakers. Corsair K100 keyboard. I love the feel and being able to disabled the capslock key Logitech M…
I was kinda amazed when I plugged in the UPS to my M1 Mac Mini with USB and macOS just detected it without any software. It just shows up as a battery just like on a laptop with all the same options.
But once I moved from XFCE/xubuntu to KDE (on gentoo, later opensuse), I noticed I don't need it anymore. Bluetooth switching works automatically and NetworkManager has nice widget, SMB/SFTP works out of box.
Now it become a toy space rocket control panel for my kids.
Cheap gaming microphones, like my HyperX Solocast, is massive change from those. It's probably the best bang for the buck of all other accessories that I bought so far.
::: NOISE-CANCELLING USB MIC DONGLE ::: sometimes my work environment can be very noisy and nothing I can do about it. In those cases I plug my mic into Asus Noise Canceling adapter - and instantly all the noises are gone: https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Noise-Canceling-Artificial-Intel...
At $35, it's an absolute steal.
Unfortunately it only accepts 3.5 mm jack as input - so no joy for the USB mics.
::: EARPHONE ::: when I'm mobile or need to use my Asus Noise Canceling dongle above - I use Apple Earpods.
It's light, it's very comfortable inside my ear for prolonged periods, it sounds amazing, even better than some of my expensive wireless headphones, and it include mic as well, a good quality one too.
At $16, it's a steal: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-EarPods-3-5mm-Headphone-Plug/dp...
::: WEBCAM ::: at first I was like the others, and use Logitech's webcam.
Soon I found out that even its most expensive one suffer from stupid AF (autofocus) problem - it kept making my face out of focus at random times, it's so embarrassing.
So after checking many reviews; I bought Nexigo N60 - and I still can't believe a webcam this cheap actually produces better picture than my previous more expensive webcam, wow. And no more stupid AF. And it works straight away in Linux.
It also claim to have noise-canceling mic, but I haven't tested it yet.
https://www.amazon.com/Microphone-NexiGo-Computer-110-degree...
::: PORTRAIT MONITOR ::: I bought a cheap HP E190i monitor - which can be turned into a portrait monitor.
Suddenly editing documents, Terminal/SSH, etc become much, much more comfortable.
::: Ultrawide Screen Monitor ::: it's a game changer - bought LG ultrawide monitor, and it's so comfortable.
I can put 2 portrait document side-by-side, and quickly compare them, or reference from each other, etc.
Not to mention editing those wide spreadsheets is becoming so much more bearable now.
It's also so much nicer watching movie and playing games using it.
::: GAS-SPRING MONITOR MOUNT::: use it to mount the ultrawide monitor above ; and it's even more comfortably positioned + frees up so much desk space.
::: VACUUM-COOLER ::: my brand-new laptop used to suddenly slowed down to a crawl at times, not only puzzling but of course also, very, frustrating.
Turned out it's unable to expel heat efficiently. Damn this thin laptops.
So I plugged a vacuum cooler on its exhaust port - and instantly it no longer throttled the CPU at random times, yay.
It's now able to consistently run at its peak frequency.
When gaming though it still overheats. I've bought a Carbonaut pad, from Thermal Grizzly. It's supposed to conduct heat about 5 times better than a thermal paste, so hopefully it'll help.
A split ortho homebrew keyboard (helix) that I can program with qmk so that I have shift esc enter space and special keys on other layers right where I want them. Or a dedicated Ctrl-a key for tmux. It virtually eliminated my pain. The OLED screens are useless though and I retrospect I should just have skipped them. I should also have put the two arduinos in it on sockets right away because that USB port will of course break and it’s a pain to desolder it.
A “clearly superior technology” (CST) trackball in the middle of the split keyboard that I try and use most with my left hand to give my right hand a break. It’s chunky, well made, uses standard pool balls as the trackball, and can be easily taken apart for cleaning or servicing. Wasn’t cheap though.
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This. Never had any issue with my wireless headphones, but Teams insists on picking random outputs and inputs even from one call to the next. The only logic I've found is that it prefers devices that handle both input and output. So, it works OK with my combined headphones + mic, but if I want to use my external dedicated mic + headphones without mic, I have to fiddle with the settings whenever I join a new call.
Teams and Goole Meet have the worst UX for switching inputs and outputs. Dunno why they still insist on not doing in properly. On Zoom changing either is literally a click away. AND you can test your mic while already on a call so you can listen while you fix your setup.
In Teams, I may have "custom setup" selected, but it'll go right ahead and pick whatever it wants.
A Shure SM-58 microphone, with a XLR soundcard to go with it. I always wanted to get a good microphone for voice calls, thankfully a friend of mine had more than a dozen of them, of all styles: dynamic, condenser, long range, cheap, expensive, etc... We spent a couple of hours trying them. First thing: condenser microphones are great... in a studio. You are probably not in a studio, so if you use one of them, people…
You also fail to mention that, presumably, if you ever need to assert yourself in a meeting you can use proximity effect to sound like a movie trailer ;-)