I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets
I used to love it, but have had very annoying connection issues of late. Also shuts off and restarts during some use. I had to switch it over to 2.4Ghz recently which I think did it in, which I had to do for connection of home devices with "dumb smart" plugs.
The Kinesis Advantage keyboard [1]. The height of the keys in each column are different because, well, the length of each of our fingers is different. It’s so naturally comfortable that it goes unnoticed and one’s fingers just fall into the right position. Placing one’s fingers offset left or right is so obviously uncomfortable that it’s basically impossible to have off-by-one typos. There is a lot of subtly well-des…
I'll go a game route: Mario Kart. It's just so perfect. All of them from the SNES to the Switch. I've played countless hours and never get bored. The level designs are all so interesting and unique I find myself discovering something new every time. It's social and I've seen it dominate dinner parties.
I'd offer Pokemon as a contender, though I love both games. Not to mention the switch itself, the gameboy color, GBA, so many things
Really the note here is Nintendo know how to design.
Shopify pay (I think that's the name) that texts a code to complete the checkout at web stores I think is a great friction reducer. Modern tents that just have a couple of elastic cord connected structural members the tent hangs off that go up in seconds. Anyone who put up a tent 25 years ago must see how much innovation there has been. Almost everything about cars - if you think of the conditions and amount of use t…
+1 to Shopify. I wanted to hate it, but it's just that good.
I’m a great fan of my reMarkable 2. I’m also a great fan of my (Japanese) unit bathroom control panels. I can set the shower and bath temperature to a specific number, automatically fill my bath to a specified level with the press of a button, have it keep the bath at temperature, let me know when it’s full when I’m in the living room. It’s glorious. Every time I’m staying anywhere overseas I cannot believe I’m back…
Are these Japanese control panels available in the us?
I loved the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip players I owned during past years. They needed to be reflashed with the RockBox firmware (but tbh pretty much every portable player firmware is inferior to RockBox) however hardware wise they were fantastic: light, well shaped, buttons in the right places, very readable display despite the small size, audio was excellent, FM reception too, battery lasted hours and hours. I brought them on the beach and kept them running for hours while sunbathing or walking like 1 meter above sea level, and they worked for years. I had to ditch them eventually when the headphone jack began to fail, but that happened when the battery had already became old and other buttons unreliable, so repair which was often destructive was out of question. Unfortunately SanDisk cut corners in later models (less RAM, smaller CPU etc.) and RockBox became harder or impossible to install, so I got a much cheaper Agptek player, which can't run RockBox as well but costs a fraction, and that's it.
I second this. I picked up one second hand a while back. The placard indicates it was built in 1997. It needed a good cleaning and had clearly seen a lot of use, but is perfectly functional. The shower arm was showing slight signs of rust around the hole but getting replacement parts is trivial as the design hasn't changed in decades.
If you split your own firewood by hand, a Fiskars splitting axe is insanely better than any standard splitting maul you'd find in a typical hardware store: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/
Absolutely. I started felling trees and splitting wood recently, and I went through a few axes. The Fiskars have been amazing.
Coming from a developing country, I was very impressed that you could get drinking water straight from the tap in some countries. My wife, a civil engineer, couldn't believe it either. There's just so much complexity involved in it, including storage, which can have rats and rust. Normally we just filter the stuff between the tap and cup. And as a kid, we had to boil and store it, and just learned to tolerate the met…
> This was when soda peaked. Somehow I never put the international explosion of Coke and Pepsi in this context. The things late-20th century Americans took for granted!
A local I knew in Mexico told me that the water in his town was safe to drink, and that the theory of unsafe tap water was a disinformation campaign by gringos/Coca-Cola. Spoiler: Was not safe to drink the water.