Ask Lemmy

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. ❤️

Cd bruner in the early 90s.

I paid 600$ cash for a 4 speed cd burner.

I made my money back in 6 weeks.

Everything after that was pure profit.

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 :)

The Louisiana.

The paid version of Sync for Reddit. I paid $1 and used it for 13 years.

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

A cheap pendrive I already used to install four ISOs, two of them pirated.

$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.

Commuting bike instead of car

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.

Probably my PC

Toothbrush

A car.

Freedom of mobility is huge. Not worrying about how to get groceries home. Being able to go to a doctor when necessary.

Recreational aspects, took a drive through Washington State, up the Olympic Penninsula and down through Seattle and Everett.

My $500 PC, i made more than 2000 ROM builds with it.

$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.

My doggo

My dry herb vaporizer, used to spend 0.3-0.5g on a spliff joint and now I'm using 0.05-0.15g per bowl while getting great effects, flavour, and level of convenience, and ofc.. I stopped combusting, so it's better for my health too. Returned it's value after few weeks tops.

A $5 stick-on hook. (Command brand)

It’s a place to hang my pants at night, so they’re not on the floor. Makes my whole routine better.

My toaster oven. By far it is the one small appliance that sees use nearly everyday for something.

Sometimes I'm reheating pizza, toasting a bagel, using it as a small oven when I don't feel like waiting for my big oven to preheat. It's so versatile I don't know if I could live without it.

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.

Monster Hunter World. 80$, 1600 hours and counting. I'll finish it one day. Yes, I know I'm playing it wrong.