1L water bottle, especially if it’s insulated. Keeps your drink cool, but also makes it so I don’t have to get up to get more drinks when I run out.
We had some in a car during a trip to Wonderland during the summer. A Gatorade bottle was disgustingly hot while the insulated bottles still had ice in them.
5/7 would recommend
A coffee cup warmer. No more getting up from my desk to nuke cold coffee.
Those are stupid cheap at the thrift stores and there’s always one there.
$20 can buy many peanuts.
Explain.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services
Explain
A high quality mechanical pencil that takes girthy lead. I use a staedtler 925 2mm and it’s absolutely wonderful for taking notes and writing and has served me through high school, college, and work. It writes similar to a regular wood pencil but sharpening is optional
I use so-called “eternal pencils” now. They come in various “hardness” ratings (like pencils: B, HB, H, 2H, etc.) but even my “softest” (read: darkest with broadest tip) has been in use now for a couple of years without noticeable wear on the tip. That one is guaranteed to be usable for a decade. My hardest will likely stop working when the sun dies in four billion years or so.
Mini Swiss army knife. I don’t know how to live life without this on my keychain
Swiss Army Classic for those shopping. eBay has tons, take you time, hundreds of cool designs.
Cool trick: search “TSA lot” and you can get knives by the pound. I got 50 one time, fixed, polished, sharpen, etc., gave them away for Christmas at the office.
$20 total or per day? If total, then a dumb stylus for my phone. If per day, then junk food. As an American my retirement plan is to die from heart disease.
Oestrogen (joking but also serious)
On a more serious note, a raspberry pi to run pihole and gobble up all the ads for all devices on my home network
2kg of cookies
I like the way you think
A small USB-C hub. It has a USB-C out on one end then HDMI, 2 USB-A ports and another USB-C in on the other. I use it as my travel dock for my switch and steam deck, I’ve used it as a USB A to C converter, and I’ll use it to test inputs on various TVs. I’ve gotten so much more mileage out of this $15 Amazon purchase than I ever would have expected
I carry an arch lighter everywhere. It cost me $15 but saves me a ton in lighter fuel, and you’d be surprised by the number of every day situations that a controlled burst of plasma solves. Opening packages, lighting candles, kills mosquitos in the dark, and it’s a fantastic taking piece as mine slots into a zippo.
Only downside is I can’t use my zippo for light on the off chance I get trapped in a dark tunnel.
arch lighter
sudo pacman -S lighterbtw
Converting $20 to local currency, I’d probably go with this:
This is so-called “Liubao Tea”, a kissing cousin to pu’er tea. I did a review of my first batch(es) and it has rapidly (literally with one round of brews) reached the top of my circulation in teas.
The depicted tea is one aged from 1991 (the one I reviewed was tea stems from 2003) and is of one of the higher grades. A 100g package will set you back about $15 or so at today’s exchange rate. 100g is about 15-20 servings, and each serving can be brewed multiple times (even my tea stems can be brewed four times without loss of flavour), so it’s quite the bargain.
Save it for a time when you really need something warm, rich, and comforting. It will last forever as long as you store it in a cool, dry, dark space. And personally I think it’s a bargain at 15 bucks.
Also, if you haven’t tried it, loose leaf pu’er tea really is excellent. I get mine in tins from the local Chinese grocery store, and the one time they didn’t have any I drove around all afternoon trying to find a store that had some in stock.
I’ve tried them. I still prefer the compressed ones, but they’re pretty good, yes.
A beard trimmer. Shaving sucks and irritates my skin, plus I look like a baby without facial hair. But that’s only one benefit.
I have been using a beard trimmer to cut my own hair for the last 10 years which has saved me probably $2000 worth of haircuts (estimating a $25 haircut + tip every 2 months). Not to mention saving about 1 hour waiting at the barber every time. I only messed up once and had to do a buzz cut.
Agreed with almost every single part of your post. I have done the same thing for last few years. BUT I’m growing my hair out now that I’m retired and I am gonna be a hippie. Still use the beard trimmer daily tho!
An electric ‘coffee grinder’ just for grinding up spices / seeds. Don’t use the regular coffee grinder, or your coffee drinking housemates will get super annoyed. The flavor, and nutrition is so much better when you cook with freshly ground spices.
May I suggest a mortar and pestle, then you don’t have build up of contaminants in the burr, and blending of particulate from past grinds
Try grinding 60ml of flax, sesame, cumin, black cumin, and fenugreek in a mortar /pestle. It’s too much work. I’m a tool using primate, and I like powertools. For 5ml, even 20ml hand power is fine. The Chinese developed a thing called a “Brass Boat” for grinding up larger quantities, “manually”, actually by foot/ leg power. Alas, I can’t seem to find an image for ya.
Bidet attachment.
For 20 bucks really? Is it a handpump model you dip directly into the toilet water?
Aww damn. Prices went up since I bought mine, but it was $20 when I got something similar to this one :
Please use URL Check to de-spy your links
What is it? Why?
https://www.amazon.com/SAMODRA-Ultra-Slim-Minimalist-Non-Electric-Adjustable/dp/B08QHTVDM3
That’s the link. Everything after the ‘?’ is information encoded in key=value pairs separated by an ampersand (&). It’s harmless on its own and it’s useful for rendering pages. But big corpos now attach extra info about your browsing session for analytics and advertisements and who knows what else. TikTok, Facebook and Amazon are the most notorious for abusing this. In FB, for example, they use an “fbid=” parameter associated with your account and YouTube uses “si=” so they can track who gets the link from whom.
As a rule of thumb, if the link is obnoxiously long, it’s tracking something.
Wow that’s crazy thanks
You’re welcome! Sorry, I had to edit for clarity. Hopefully it’s better explained now and less wordy.
