I adopted a defective lizard from a breeder for a 20$ fee. This particular defect often results in culling the animal, as it is often too expensive and time-consuming to care for. Because of this, not much is known about its care.
I now am one of the most prominent "experts" on caring for this particular subset of creature. Though no one but the most experienced keepers should own one, I am still happy to give information to folks who may have to care for one, either from rescue or purchasing one before knowing exactly what they're getting into.
Aside from being able to give advice on keeping these creatures alive, that's not all the value: the real value is my stupid lizard. I got him literally just a couple of weeks before the pandemic & lockdowns started. He's an absolute angel who has brought me so much joy in my darkest times. He's sweet, gentle, goofy, and is a wonderful companion animal. He now has complete freedom in the front of my home (when he's not in his vivarium) with his own heatlamp, ramp, and a view of the road where he love watching all the cars go by.
I love my stupid lizard. ❤️
A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn't be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.
I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write
.batfiles and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblaster drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS's includedDEBUGtool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and then I learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.
By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C. (then later on math ironically won me over, so ended up formally pursuing applied math with a tiny bit of computer science because I just didn't need it and the whole exposure to programming at a very young age helped me a lot)
All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.
I’ll say right off the bat that my roomba i7 self emptying vacuum cleaner has been a game changer for me. 2 big ass dogs and the dirt/fur that comes with it made me loathe sweeping/manually vacuuming. $700 well spent.
End of 2008 start of 2009 I bought a house. It was VERY risky move for me at the time.
Not only has it been a temp house for others that needed help. But with the wild costs of apartments these days I simply don't understand how people haven't just flat out started a revolution over it. There's an apartment complex that opened in my town very recently. The units are much smaller than my house but cost more than double my mortgage. And that's just for where they actually list the price, there's some I'm guessing are so expensive they don't list the price they just say "contact us".
A subscription to the now defunct children's magazine 3-2-1 Contact. That magazine would sometimes include the code for simple BASIC computer programs. Eventually I figured out they would run on the (then common) Apple II classroom computer at school, tried one (a simple guess the number game with a preset answer), figured out how to change the answer and tweak the code, and got hooked.
Ultimately this led to a degree in software engineering and a job in IT that I quite enjoy, especially when writing scripts or working with code.
For me, my Steam Deck. I have been having a lot of mental health issues and it allows me to have an outlet for anxiety and stress while still spending time with my family. I use is most days and have enjoyed a good chunk of my extensive Steam catalog to boot. Honestly, the most bang for my buck I have ever gotten.
My playstation 4, I've had it who knows how many years. Not only do I have countless hours of gaming, but it's also my primary media device.
Have an original N64 from like 98, no idea how many hours of enjoyment I've gotten out of that.
Ceramic skateboard bearings I bought in 2001, as well as a pair of grind king trucks from maybe 97 that I still ride.
Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I'm working on, I'm not going to be very productive.
For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it's beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn't help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.
Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS... And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare... we have to remote into some "copy machine" on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the "copy machine" via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that's like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it's win10 on a 40gb drive. It's insane.
My woodshop of 220v saws. They paid for themselves remodeling my house and building most of the furniture and all the cabinets in it. So, now they paid for themselves and I can make whatever I want. Saw brrrr noises are my therapy. I think I'm slowly becoming Nick Offerman.
The price of hardwoods is too damn high.
Community Rec center membership. For a one time fee of $10; it's easily the best $10 I've ever spent and is a great city perk. I've gotten in great shape since going there.
I bought a Bethany Homes Lefse griddle. It's cast aluminum, gets up to 500 Fahrenheit, and is the closest thing you can get to a restaurant flat top without rewiring your kitchen. I've saved my wife and I so much money cooking at home. I've owned griddles before, but nothing this high quality, high temp, and easy to clean. I now prefer my homemade smash burgers to eating out and by the time my patties are done resting, I've already cleaned the griddle.
I bought counterstrike source way back in like 2008/2009 when I got a computer fast enough to play it. Steam was pushing garrysmod as a 5 dollar bundle purchase with counterstrike, and I bought that too on a whim.
I liked garrysmod more than cs:s, and played it a bunch. Eventually I figured out how to add wiremod to the game, which also involved using svn (a source control precursor to git)
I learned basic digital circuits and boolean logic by making bases with elevators and fancy alarm systems that would shoot intruders with turrents and stuff.
Eventually wiremod added a programming language called expression2, which was a mashup of c and lua. I basically taught myself coding because of a video game.
This lead me to get into computer programming, and eventually computer security, which ended up being a lucrative career path.... So thanks Garry for your mod, and thanks Gabe for pushing said mod to kids that just wanted to shoot virtual terrorists. That 5 dollar game is responsible for a good chunk of my life :)
Probably the SawStop cabinet saw I bought a few weeks ago. It's way easier/less sketchy than my job site table saw when cutting large panels, and the peace of mind it gives me from a general safety perspective is priceless. I have been doing a lot of projects with full sheets of plywood since I bought it, which has been an aspect of woodworking that I dreaded before. No more crawling around with a circular saw or precariously balancing between a job site saw and an extra table
Form me personally, I'd have to say my automated espresso machine. For context; I was buying 1-2 coffees from a shop per day (let's say 10/week on average).
Cost me $700 on a sale. Grinds & presses the beans by itself, then pushes boiling water through to give me espresso shots. It paid for itself in 6 months of ownership by weening me off the local shops, and it's lasted for over 6 years so far.
Instead of ~$4.50 per coffee, it's like $24 for a bulk bag of beans at Costco that lasts me 3 weeks, and a carton of half-and-half that lasts me like a month. That's like $180/mo → $35/mo
The Louisiana.
I paid $120 for a year of PS+ Premium in January.
If I add the cost of every game I played for 4+ hours I got off that service, it would total over $1000. Even more if I include shit I installed, played for 10 minutes and didn't like.
Even with the recent price changes going up by a whopping $60 for the tier I am at, that's still worth it; assuming they continue to add new shit at the same rate.
With how often I see people bemoaning subscription services, there are still some that are very worth the cost if you're actually utilizing the service often.
Wireless devices. 📡📶📺📻
Everything on my desktop looks so clean now. ✨
My passport
Bose QC35 headphones for me.
They felt extravagently expensive at $300. But I've had them for 7 years now, wear them a few hours each day, and they still work like new. They sound amazing and the noise cancellation has had a tremendous positive effect on my sanity as an apartment-dweller.
Every year I buy a replacement set of earcups for like $15. I'll keep using them until they poop out.
A subscription to a specific podcast. Each episode is at least two hours long, sometimes up to four. I don't care. I love it and eat it up. There are barely 5000 subscriptions to the podcast and while I wish the podcast was bigger so the host's could get the recognition they deserve, the community built around it currently is great.
Also, it seems like $700 is the limit to a purchase being great for people. That's interesting.
Probably Rocket League. Bought it for 20 bucks in '15 and I have about 1500hrs of total playtime.
Toothbrush
My cold brew coffee pot.
It makes about 2.2 US quarts of cold brew in a batch. It’s plastic, but I’ve used it consistently for over 6 or 7 years now.
It has a center sleeve/filter for putting grounds in. They should be coarse ground, but I’ve used Cafe Bustelo (espresso ground brick) and had good results.
Just let it soak for a day or two in cold water.
Now, I don’t use it per the instructions. After it has appropriately steeped, I pull out the filter, empty it, rinse it, and put the empty filter in a 2qt pitcher, and run the coffee from the brew pitcher into it. This leaves a little extra which goes right into my cup.
I then immediately prepare a new brew pitcher and drink out of the 2qt.
That cost me $30 back then, and I brew 2-3 pitchers per week. I don’t know what that works out to in Large Dunkin’s, but I’m sure it has paid for itself, several times over.
Probably my PC
$100 (probably around $120 now) Hakko soldering iron and good solder/flux.
I had cheap irons for years and thought I sucked at soldering. The Hakko heats up in seconds and melts solder like magic.
Got it for rc hobby stuff, but I've also fixed countless toys, bluetooth speakers, light fixtures, etc. I've even done some jewelry repairs with silver solder.
Fixed my Nintendo, Sega, Sega CD, Atari, and Gameboy from when I was a kid. Still need to get around to fixing my OG XBOX.
My house. Boring but true.
$5k on a car like 6 years ago, still running as perfect as the day I got it. Can't imagine the amount of money I've saved with these things. I'd be in debt with car payments otherwise.
An Elk Rotary™ lawn mower. It's easier to use than my old lawn mower and it makes the lawn look so much better. The time and money that I spent repairing the old mower that I now save have more than paid for the Elk Rotary™.
