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Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

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Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#401

Post by subsequentmask »

GuB-42 wrote: post #246

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…

I recently just got my self an SM7B. I love the thing. I don't do WFH so my work mates won't ever get to hear my wonderful voice on it but oh well, eventually they will! I love it. You do need a beefy interface to power it, I have an Elgato Wave XLR.

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#402

Post by fnomnom »

mikesholiu wrote: post #242
modeless wrote: post #237

Gaming wireless headphones, not for gaming but for videoconferencing. Bluetooth headphones are universally terrible for videoconferencing because the Bluetooth standard sucks and requires downgrading to telephone audio quality whenever the mic is enabled. Plus terrible latency. Gaming wireless headphones that come with their own dongle completely fix these issues and are perfect for videoconferencing. Someday the Blu…

do you have a recommended brand/model?

logitech g pro x wireless

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#403

Post by bobwaycott »

dottedmag wrote: post #325
entropicgravity wrote: post #267

Mx Ergo (by Logitech) is far and away the best "mouse" for me and probably for you. It only takes about two hours to transfer your motor skills of regular mouse to the Mx Ergo. Because this "thumb ball" mouse only involves your thumb to work the mouse you won't get the full wrist, shoulder and neck pain that you can get from a normal mouse. If you have any kind of arm pain then check this out.

Have you got the precision of the regular mouse with this trackball? I have tried a number of trackballs, and haven't been able to reach the precision of a regular mouse from any — after a week of usage of each of several trackballs I only got to the convenience/precision of trackpoint or bad touchpad. Moving in straight lines, predictable directions and moving just a few pixels was the biggest issue.

There’s a dedicated button right at your thumb that increases precision on demand. :)

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#404

Post by Aardwolf »

bbsimonbb wrote: post #387
Aardwolf wrote: post #356

A Big Knob Passive (not powered), which can toggle audio independently between two inputs (laptop and pc), and two outputs (speakers, and bluetooth transmitter) using tactile toggle buttons with immediate response, and it also has a big volume knob, and a button to turn stereo into mono which has turned out useful for some badly encoded videos having audio in only one channel. The Bluetooth transmitter is used with s…

Is this a big knob you can buy?

Yes, Big Knob Passive is literally its product name, you can search for it (edited original post to capitalize it)

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#405

Post by victorbjorklund »

cal85 wrote: post #399
haunter wrote: post #378

An Elgato Stream Deck but for general purposes https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 Basically imagine having 15 physical buttons to use with any kind of actions, shortcuts, macros etc. but you have a visual feedback too. It’s pretty great! I know there are alternatives like the Adafruit RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128 but the visual knobs make the Stream Deck much better imo.

I bought one of these a couple of years ago with plans to use it for macros, shortcuts etc, but gave up using it because I found the system for writing your own plugins and generally configuring it was beyond awful, it felt like a designed-by-committee horror show. The complexity to just just set the button image and make it run a bash script when pressed was insane. But I really wanted it to work, I can think of ton…

Are you using a mac? If so then the perfect combo is streamdeck + keyboard maestro. There are several great plugins for streamdeck that makes it easy to run keyboard maestro automations

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#406

Post by bobwaycott »

entropicgravity wrote: post #267

Mx Ergo (by Logitech) is far and away the best "mouse" for me and probably for you. It only takes about two hours to transfer your motor skills of regular mouse to the Mx Ergo. Because this "thumb ball" mouse only involves your thumb to work the mouse you won't get the full wrist, shoulder and neck pain that you can get from a normal mouse. If you have any kind of arm pain then check this out.

Huge fan of the Ergo. I pair mine with the keyboard in the same family, both of which allow you to connect to and switch between multiple computers. It’s just perfect.

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#408

Post by BunnyOSteele »

spoiler wrote: post #385
haunter wrote: post #378

An Elgato Stream Deck but for general purposes https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 Basically imagine having 15 physical buttons to use with any kind of actions, shortcuts, macros etc. but you have a visual feedback too. It’s pretty great! I know there are alternatives like the Adafruit RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128 but the visual knobs make the Stream Deck much better imo.

I was thinking of doing something similar, but was never sure what to use that many keys for. Can you provide a photo or list a few examples of what you're doing with yours? Thanks!

I use the JIRA Plugin to have various open issues/tasks/bugs visible. With API Plugins you can send requests, integrate Gitlab/Github. Have a look at https://apps.elgato.com/plugins?categories=com.elgato.develo... for Developer Tools. With the bunch of plugins from BarRaider you can control window layout etc.

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#409

Post by kukkeliskuu »

haunter wrote: post #378

An Elgato Stream Deck but for general purposes https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 Basically imagine having 15 physical buttons to use with any kind of actions, shortcuts, macros etc. but you have a visual feedback too. It’s pretty great! I know there are alternatives like the Adafruit RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128 but the visual knobs make the Stream Deck much better imo.

I got Stream Deck mainly to control Teams on my work computer, which is Windows 10. Teams does not have global hotkey for mute and video toggle (or on/off) and that would be compatible with the status. (You can use Windows global mute and control video, but that status is not updated if you use Teams mute). The Teams video conference must be active for the mute button to work. The whole point of seperate keyboard is that I don't need to switch to the application. So I never got this to work well enough.

Re: Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?

#410

Post by IYasha »

Moru wrote: post #266
stn_za wrote: post #219

I have a mouse cable bungee. Particularly useful for twitch based FPS shooters such as Counter Strike, but overall ensures never to get the cable in your way. PS: You don't use wireless for competitive shooters. LAN Cable, cable mouse, etc. See: https://www.amazon.com/Glorious-PC-Gaming-Race-Bungee/dp/B07...

Long before the FPS shooters started showing up I had the problem with mouse cables pulling on my hand and causing pain in the wrist. The solution was to use cable ties to fix the mouse cable to the keyboard cable so the mouse cable does a little loop up in the air and leaves enough space to move the mouse everywhere. Extra useful when you accidentally knock the mouse down because you are using an ergonomic mouse tha…

Yeah, reduces the free-hanging cable weight. Been doing this too for decades.
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