Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 428 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#91

Post by quietbritishjim »

bxparks wrote: post #71

A Fujitsu S1500 ScanSnap, dual-sided, document scanner (now discontinued, replacement might be the iX1600). Completely changed how I manage my personal documents (e.g. financial, invoices, receipts, product manuals, medical info, business docs, recreation and hobby stuff, etc). Anything remotely important, I scan to PDF, which triggers automatic OCR that is reasonably accurate, then I upload the PDF to Google Drive,…

I have precisely that scanner! I totally agree, I love that it's double sided and comes with really good OCR (ABBYY FineReader). And that it's an auto sheet feeder – I have terrible memories of flat bed scanners from the 90's that took a minute to scan one page but this only takes a few seconds per page.

Like you I put the documents in a hierarchy of folders and mix with downloaded "official" PDFs, and I use yyyy-mm-dd in the filenames and folders. But, I must admit, a big part of my filing system is often a pile of physical papers stacked up next to the scanner that I haven't got around to yet... But I'd still recommend it.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#92

Post by TMWNN »

showerst wrote: post #22

I’ve used an $8 gerber shard keychain tool for over 10 years. It opens cardboard boxes, pries open covers, cuts strings, and drives the occasional screw. All without worrying about losing a Swiss army or leatherman, and it’s airport and government building friendly which is big for me.

For the same reason I keep a Swiss+Tech ST53100 Multitool on my keys. It's as long as a key, and like your tool it doesn't have a blade so is airport- and government building-safe.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#95

Post by criddell »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #35

Libby - I used to buy so many Kindle books and had an expensive Audible subscription a year ago but all that stopped when I discovered Libby. I can read ebooks and audiobooks right in the app using my local public library card for free and the entire UX of the app is just beyond awesome. I can now read/listen to 5-7 books a month using Libby.

Does this work with the eink Kindles?

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#96

Post by gtirloni »

wolfium3 wrote: post #85

Blue light blocking glasses. I work on computers a lot and usually ended up feeling fatigue by the middle of the day. When wearing blue light blocking glasses, I don't feel tired anymore :). I've had them for about a year and a half now.

Would you mind sharing which brand?

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#97

Post by gordon_freeman »

criddell wrote: post #95
gordon_freeman wrote: post #35

Libby - I used to buy so many Kindle books and had an expensive Audible subscription a year ago but all that stopped when I discovered Libby. I can read ebooks and audiobooks right in the app using my local public library card for free and the entire UX of the app is just beyond awesome. I can now read/listen to 5-7 books a month using Libby.

Does this work with the eink Kindles?

You can transfer your ebooks you borrowed from Libby to Kindle eReader for sure but you can't do that with Audiobooks though.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#98

Post by TMWNN »

Amazfit Bip watch. Consistently 23 +- 1 day of battery life, 20,000 watch faces at `amazfitwatchfaces.com`, shows me all my notifications, tracks my heart rate and sleep patterns, has GPS. I paid $60 for Bip in 2018, and after it broke after 2.5 years (design flaw fixed in later production units), I bought used Bip Lite as replacement since I always use the GPS on my phone, not on the watch itself.

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. I fall asleep while reading this in bed. Almost every US library offers Overdrive ebook service which is integrated into Kindle; basically, any book I see interesting, I can search for it, check it out (or put myself on the hold list), and have it auto-sent to Kindle, all within 30 seconds. I can't tell you how nice it is to always have the various books I'm currently reading at the moment on hand, and to be able to switch between them as I feel like it.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#99

Post by edanm »

kalev wrote: post #87
warent wrote: post #44

Food scale I got at Target for like $20. Over quarantine, I started getting fluffier than I'm comfortable with and reached my highest weight ever. I eat healthy, so my only guess was that I was eating too much. Simply adding a food scale made me cut 15 pounds in a couple months.

How do you know how much you should eat?

(Not OP, but went through a similar process)

The best way (for me at least) was to track my calories, using the food scale to weight things and nutritional labels (or looking things up in Google) to figure out the calories. MyFitnessPal for logging everything.

If you're asking how to know how many calories you need - search for TDEE calculator online, which will give you an estimate number of calories needed for maintenance, or how much for weight loss, given your height, bodyweight and activity level. But - these are just estimates! Track food intake for a month, see if you went down, if not, start targeting fewer calories (or more if you went down too quickly for your needs).

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#100

Post by tenfourwookie »

I buy high mileage Honda minivans for no more than $3000 because they're dependable and cheap at high mileage.

I generally get 100,000 miles out of them, so 4 mostly dependable vans and 400,000 miles for about $12,000. You'll lose $12K in depreciation alone just driving a new car off a lot.

I've lived in them safely and comfortably for a total of about 3 years, living all over the western US from New Mexico to Montana. Rent $0. Rent saved? $40,000.

(There are costs, fuel, tires, etc., but negligible compared to rent (i.e. paying someone else's American dream).

Post reply on HN