I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.
Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.
Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.
Sony really knows how to fuck up an experience and shove their own consumer around
Sell it, dude
That’s why I only buy collector’s edition blurays. At least it has the extra stuff that’s worth the money.
First edition, first run of the three Lord of the Rings books.
I can’t bring myself to open them up and mess with the pages.
The duality of book owning.
I mean, yeah. The point of collectibles like that is in owning the thing, not using the thing. Read the ebook instead.
Or the BBC radio play, which is the best version of LotR ever, including the original books and films, and I’ll die on that hill.
But you bought a reading copy as well, right?
Right?
I have one, but it’s not the same as the original.
I have posted pictures of the books for people who want to see the original maps included in the books.
A pool. It came with the house, but damn is it expensive to maintain. I say I’ve never gotten full use out of it because I spend way more time and energy maintaining it, than I do using it.
Rent it out for parties like Airbnb for pools and you can recoup the cost.
I believe there was someone on Shark Tank trying to get funding for an app to let people do that. If I remember correctly he did not get funded.
I would also assume there are some legal obligations with that. Like having to have lifeguards or other safety measures a public pool is required, that a house would not have.
Plus people are gross. I’m sure this would only increase the amount of cleaning I would need to do.
Sounds like you need to invest in fixing it up. Big short term cost vs death by a thousand cuts
It’s not really that it needs to be fixed up. The chemicals and supplies are outrageously overpriced. Then there always seems to be some major issue every year or two. I’ve lived in the house for 7 years and have had to replace the control board and the pump. I had to replace $2,500 worth of piping after Texas cut my power for 3 days during freezing temperatures. Then last summer it was so hot the ground shifted and it broke two return lines that had to be repaired through the concrete deck. And I know by next year it will be due for resurfacing.
Our house used to have a hot tub and still has the concrete pad, electrical hookup, and other equipment necessary to run the hot tub. I have never been interested in maintaining it. Can’t even do naked hot tubbing because the neighbor’s house looks right over the hot tub pad.
Why not invest in a canopy?
This was my criteria for buying a house : no pool !
Smart man. My wife convinced me to get it swearing she would take care of it. Apparently her idea of taking care of it was to hire someone for $350 a month. And that price didn’t include the chemicals.
On the other hand I did took care of a pool for a while, it was in a villa that my in laws owned.
We did a few things that helped lowering the maintenance cost and the pool was pristine.
First thing is a salt chlorinator. It keeps a constant (low) chlorine level so the pool stays clean, there is no more chlorine smell and you only need to top up salt after too much rain.
Then we were using hardware store muriatic acid to bring the pH up and baking soda to control alkalinity. We still went to the pool store to get productd for the calcium hardness and cyanuric acid.
The last thing is a bit more involved but this is what made the biggest difference on the bill is to replace the pump with a DC pump directly connected to refurbished solar panels, no batteries, no inverter. This way when there is a lot of sun the pump is running a lot, a little sun and the pump is running a little.
It’s perfect since the amount of algae development is proportional to the amount of sunlight. There is almost no electronic in the system, just a extremely reliable DC pump and solar panels that can last for decades, I found that to be a great low-tech solution.
However we were in a tropical country, I have no idea if this would apply in another climate.
3d printer
Get to it! Such a fun hobby
I have promised it to my brother as its a resin printer and he paints warhammer
not much use. mostly to rarely print a few bits and pieces when i need a repair or something very specific for a project.
As someone who has been in the 3d printing space for awhile, I am amazed at how cheap and featured the entry level printers are. For ~$150 you can get a printer with auto bed leveling and a magnetic bed. At $15/lb of filament, you only need a few projects to pay for itself.
For example, I printed the housing for a USB hub for a friend which is a clone for a ridiculously expensive one that fits Lovesac couches and he paid me $50. It cost ~$2 of filament and ended up printing a few more for others. That alone paid for the cost of the printer.
For anyone who is thinking about it, now is a great time to enter the hobby.
Which cad software do you use? I’ve been jumping from blender, openscad, and freecad
Depending on the complexity of the part either Fusion 360, Tinkercad, or even just 3d Builder. I usually can find something close already existing and just modify that.
Disclaimer - for people who aren’t from the developing countries. 150$ is not cheap by any means.
Probably 500+ bottles of expensive wine, more possibly even. Some of it was free, but most not, and it’s all crammed into a 2 bedroom apartment turning to vinegar because it’s improperly stored. Sometimes life circumstances mean you can’t drink much anymore. So it’s pretty much a waste and hugely embarrassing.
Never tie your finances to that of a crazy liar.
Some of that can sell at auction, I work on a house where the lady inherited about $300,000 of wine.
I would be hanging from a lamppost somewhere if I tried it.
I have a college degree I have never used. It wasn’t cheap even tho much of it was paid with grants.
Art?
Nah, gotta be music/sound related
Bachelor of Science! Recreation related.
Speaking on my wife’s behalf, an epipen. We’re both content with not having needed to use it.
My Switch. Just lost interest after playing a few games
Sell it and buy a steam deck. I’m over 40. The deck made me like gaming again. So many fun games and immediately being able to sleep the system while in a game and then waking it back up to be right where I left off is a huge benefit to me.
The terrible state of online play ruined everything nintendo for me.
My house. There has never been a point in time where there was not at least one room unusable due to ongoing renovation.
How do you keep having renovations? How do you even sustain that?
Bought a fixer-upper and my wife is a lot more aggressive about starting projects than she is about finishing them.
They might have bought a “project house” and went the DIY route. Especially big country house, etc. In France I knew folks that bought a super cheap “small” castle, and have been constantly renovating for years and years. For example when up keeping the windows, by the time they get to the last one they can already start over with the first one again.
Same. I bought a fixer upper and haven’t moved in yet due to the very messy renovations I’m doing slowly on evenings and weekends after my full-time job. I’m almost to the point I can move in though.
Bought a brand new truck for my in-laws. Only brand new vehicle I’ve ever bought in my life. I get to drive it for a month every couple of years.
Not a total loss…
I mean, they’ve gotten a lot of use out of it which is cool.
My mixing studio monitors, I haven’t properly gotten into mixing yet.
Years ago when I worked in audio production I would sometimes just sit in my studio to listen to music on my monitors. They’re technically not supposed to sound “better” but they certainly tend to sound more detailed. If you’re too busy to mix, you could at least do that. (Plus you’ll get a better frame of reference for the monitors/room.)
Yeah I think the idea is they sound more “accurate” as “better” is a subjective term. I do this too, I love them.
Yup! But in my experience that accuracy made them sound better. I’ve been out of the game for over a decade, but sometimes I dream of buying a decent set just for this sort of passive listening.
I just got a pair a Kali IN8 monitors last Friday. I play music, and have enough equipment to record, and want to, but I have spent hours just listening to music through them. The fidelity is insane, so if I only ever use them for listening to already produced music, they will still have been worth the money.
I’ve used my Genelec for over 25 years for everything from mixing/mastering to house parties and home listening. They are indestructible and sound amazing. Never selling.
Back in December I spent $550 on a refurbrished home theater projector. After actually thinking things through, I realized that in my current living situation, the whole idea isn’t going to work. I went back to watching movies on my TV and sometimes even my monitor.
I still haven’t taken the projector out of the plastic wrapping, and I’ve been contemplating re-selling it on eBay so I can at least get my money back…but I highly doubt that will happen.
I’ll give you $225 for it. ;)
I’ll go tree fiddy
can you use it in the backyard?
I bought some kit for running TTRPGs just before COVID hit: wet erase markers, Chessex mat, extra dice bags, DM screen, and some cheap minis. Then when COVID hit I adopted a Virtual tabletop (Foundry). Over the course of the pandemic, my gaming group evolved to include people from all over the province, and so now there’s not really any hope of playing an in-person session. Not to mention I switched to playing PF2E, which is really hard to run in-person because of how much crunchier it is. So now I have this stuff and don’t really know when I will get to use it.
As a lifelong customer of Dwarven Forge, I understand your pain.
My car’s extended warranty.
They finally tracked you down huh
Akai EWI Solo
My partner insisted on getting me one of these as a gift because I like playing music. It’s cool for sure, and I enjoyed the little bit I’ve played on it, but there’s just no time. So it’s left to gather dust now.
I paid around US$700-800 for a nice Neumann mic that I’d researched pretty well, but like a dumbass didn’t realise that it required power, meaning I couldn’t just hook in to my amp like your basic Shure.
So later on as a solution, I got myself a Focusrite powered amp-interface that has a bonus of being able to route guitar and mic input in to USB. Spent hours trying to get everything working and kept running in to problems. IIRC the USB signal was barely received by my computer, and the only way the amp received a signal is if the computer was powering the thing, which shouldn’t have been a requirement as it already had power.
I just went back to my Shure while that fancy stuff gathers dust. Similar thing with my Ableton.
I mean I could Google but what is it, what drew you to it
Not OP, but EWI is Electronic Wind Instrument. It’s basically a fancy MIDI controller/synthesizer in a clarinet-like format.
