headphones with noise cancellation (Bose).
Remarkable 2. For reading and drawing stuff e.g. new kitchen arrangement.
Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
471–480 of 592 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#472Small passively cooled home server with loads of RAM and a hypervisor on it. The amount of practical learning that has enabled has been so worth it. (Think ansible, gitlab ci/cd etc).
I use a dedicated M1 Mac Mini for this - media, storage, Docker, gitlab, etc. For me, it’s the perfect solution (Docker on Apple Silicon growing pains notwithstanding). Silent, powerful, frugal.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases: Industry dependent, of course. Desktop processers are getting more and more parallel, and more cores requires more ram. I have a 32 core Threadripper in my workstation with 128GB RAM, and on full co…
Can I ask you which motherboard do you have? I'm thinking on building a PC, but the last time I did that was twenty years ago, so my knowledge is slightly obsolete.
I use pcpartpicker. It has a pretty good hardware compatibility matrix and pulls prices from a variety of stores online. Doesn't do a perfect job with packing hardware in small cases, but it warns you that it can't guarantee a fit. Your skills from 20 years ago will serve you well: download the manuals for the motherboard; they're more accurate than the specs listed on any other website.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#474- a wrist support brace: no more wrist pain when using a keyboard/mouse
Any recommendations?
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#475Reading glasses.
An ergonomic Anker mouse that stops me getting RSI
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#476learning to build your own stuff.
its the only way to get quality when it comes to certain items.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#477I've spent a long time engineering, and adapting my workspace. It's at the point now that going to an office is a horrible experience, compared to my home office. Here's my setup * Ikea Standing desk (I never sit). I know plenty of people who use these for sitting, simply because the height of the desk is finally suited to their specific frame. * As many monitors as will make you happy (to each their own, but I'm hap…
+1 to having physical whiteboards around. They're super handy. I have three permanently mounted to the wall and a small magnetic one that I keep on my fridge.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MacOS in particular does an excellent job of rendering 2560x1440 to a 4K screen, and the increased DPI over a regular 1440p 27" screen is very noticeable. MacOS in particular gets amazingly slow when you don't use a 1:1 or 2:1 scaling. I too have have two 27" 4k screens and they made the machine unbearably slow. It got so bad that I now treat them as 1440p screens and let the screens do the scaling. It's not pretty…
My Mac is unusably slow sometimes. I think this is the reason. I will try using native sizes and see if it improves. Thank you for this tip
There is a strange bug I've seen a couple of times where graphics, even simple things like scrolling a web page, get really slow even though it's supposedly using the GPU. Rebooting or logging out and in again seemed to fix the issue.
Also sometimes the virtual memory subsystem seems to get confused or overcommitted (e.g. after running a bunch of large VMs in VMware) and from that point on everything is just slow, even if you shut down every VM to relieve the memory pressure. It may be related to macOS's use of memory compression.
Then there are various background daemons (mdworker, syspolicyd, photoanalysisd, etc.) that occasionally wake up and decide to eat all of your CPU while simultaneously hammering your file system. The only effective response, short of disabling the offending service (which is much harder than it is on Windows or Linux, due to SIP) seems to be to let them run their course as they decide to scan every file they can find for the 100th time.
And when your laptop heats up, then macOS starts throttling the system via kernel_task processes that appear to be using all of your CPU.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tablets have nothing fancy in them other than some dyes, they are just soap at a mark-up. Even the cheapy store brand stuff does just as good of a job. Additionally, depending on the hardness of your water you may need less detergent than the tablets have in them which could leave a white residue on your dishes. Finally, with the powdered detergent you may need to sprinkle a little in the door for a pre-rinse whi…
Since first lockdown in my country, when dishwasher tabs went missing in stores, I got used to use 1/2 a tab for each wash. Turns out dishes were just as clean as with a full tab. To this day I keep using 1/2 tab per wash.
To push your example even further, I once forgot to load anything and Imagine my surprise when I opened the dishwasher and everything was really clean, maybe except one plate.
Re: Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?
#480Tennis balls.
I get a lot of shoulder and neck pain and I don’t know how I managed before I discovered tennis balls for working out knots in my upper back. I lay on one, and move it around until I find the knots causing muscle strain in my neck. They have just the right firmness to give ratio to really work on tough knots near my shoulder blade that I used to use wall corners to try to work out.