I bought a pocket sized mini keyboard the other day.
Here are some other good buys under $100
-Used graphics cards and computer hardware in general, sometimes you can get 1070s and 1080s for under 100 bucks and they still play most modern games just fine at highish settings. If you don’t have the budget to build a powerful new system.
-Some cool tool kits
-Mini projector that is pocket sized.
-Pocket sized arm computer consoles. Made for emulation. Most run android which is a big downside but a surprisingly capable little computer if your cell phone isn’t enough.
-Accessories, necklaces, wristbands, earrings, etc. Never a bad time to improve your looks.
-Buying shirts on eBay, it’s a good place to find actually cool shirts.
-Rotary cutter and high quality scissors - good for modifying clothing to get a style you like, crop your own shirts to turn guy shirts into girl shirts, i got into this when I transitioned. Looking nice really helps with being trans.
-A large battery or battery case for your phone.
-Some used phones which have open bootloaders, which greatly increases the utility of your device. Be careful about devices which require signing. I made this mistake with buying a moto G. The unlockable bootloader on the moto G is mostly false advertising.
-Smart lights, led strips.
-Wifi mesh extender.
-A good set of Bluetooth headphones. I like brands like Sony.
-A wireless Xbox controller. You need stupid windows to update the firmware to make it work on Bluetooth often times, but it’s nice to have a wireless controller to play PC games with.
-Old laptops to throw Linux on
-Microcontrollers with gpio, probably has enough processing power to get you to the moon and back if you are clever. A cool way to learn a bit about electronics.
-A nice high quality blanket, I spent 120 on a blanket many years ago, and it’s amazing in the cold. Improves sleep quality significantly.
-Colored/RP contact lenses, upgrade your cosplay.
-Greek drachma coin, carry a bit of silver history in your pocket from 2000 years ago. Can be useful against the undead
-Handheld audio recorder. In many states you are allowed to record conversations and can use these in courts to force companies to honor their promises and verbal contracts. Phone companies have tried to make it impossible to record these conversations with corporations, but you can still do it.
-An old MP3 player.
-.22 revolver. Good for hunting and ammo is cheapish and lightweight.
-Folding chair/portable hammock - never be without a chair or bed!
-nice backpack, there are some cool ones with built in solar panels that can put out a few watts, when coupled with a power bank or two then you can always have a bit of portable power for charging your devices.
-used handheld ham radio, always a useful tool to have in uncertain economic and political times.
-Scout hat/ranger hat/sunscreen - take care of your skin if you work in the sun alot. Mineral based sunscreens are the least invasive even if they are kind of gross sometimes.
-Pinetime watch - cool little smart watch for 20 bucks that is open source, and you can easily write your own apps for
-cheap impact drill + adapter bits - once you use an impact with bits to fit all your sockets and screwdriver bits, you will hardly ever have to use screw drivers and sockets again, you will cut all of your repair times in multiples, go from a 1 hour repair to a 10 minute repair. Wallmart has some cheap ones that are plenty good for light duty use and will last many years.
-VPN subscription - Make it harder for people to spy on you, steal your keys, and censor you. Protect your IP from snoops.
-A domain + cheap webhosting - create your own website and buy at least a year if webhosting, you can find some cheap options for under $5 a month. Have a off-site cheap little virtual server that you can use for many things. Storing files, hosting websites, reverse proxy and reverse ssh behind bad routers.
-A good toothbrush
-Rechargable AA batteries - make sure they are 1.5v and not 1.2 v
-Pepper spray and/or a nice knife.
-Youtube premium subscription - more then 100 a year but get your time back with no ads, offline playback, free music streaming, and support creators more than ads do.
-ChatGPT+ - more expensive than 100 a year but nearly invaluable as a resource. The chatGPT5 model is excellent for many tasks and is significantly smarter and more aware of context than the free models. Use it for anything from helping you write scripts and bash, to understanding Linux. Use it to research and educate yourself.
-Better pillow, you spend 1/3 of your life sleeping, don’t cheap out on it.
-Nice coat/shoes/gloves/etc - you spend 2/3rds of your life wearing clothes, don’t cheap out on them.
-Reusable razor, clippers, maybe a waxing kit - Again, looks are important, how you look has a significant effect on how people treat you and effects nearly every aspect of your life and happiness.
-Old books, knowledge is increasingly being erased and manipulated by current regimes, don’t rely on the internet for all your knowledge, pick up old reference books from thrift stores, medical, language, engineering, history, and anything else.
-Medkit, and then expand it, get stuff to do emergency surgeries. Keep a notebook in it with notes and also references for common things and instructions to use them safely. So e good emergency recipes to have are lidocaine from aspirin, a local anesthetic, and chloroform for emergency surgeries, dangerous but potentially life saving in some situations. Keep some extra stuff in there if you come across it, opiates, wide spectrum antibiotics, antipsychotics, benzos, iodine tablets whatever. Gauge and medical tape, stitches, Tylenol, alcohol, and other useful things.
-Survival seed banks, water filters.
-An offline battery device configured with offline AI models, can be useful for looking up information, even if it’s really slow. Good for conversions, medical advice, and just general knowledge.
-Geiger counter - always a useful tool to have around, just to be sure, it also detects Radeon gas emmisions usually.
-Good quality pen, sketchpads, charcoal, erasers, colored pencils.
-Flute - make sure it’s well designed
-Sex toys - life is too short for shame, be happy and practice good hygiene and don’t do things you wouldn’t want others to do to you, like touch your things after they have been weird.
-Good quality sunglass
-OBD reader - very useful for working on cars
-Serial bus to USB - If you are inclined to white hat hacking.
-A few high quality tools if you have the money to spend, get a good high quality set of magnetic screw drivers and some decent rachet wrenches but don’t break them! Have a set of regular wrenches for breaking bolts first. Other useful tools are things like, magnetic parts bowl, mechanic gloves, safety glasses, extendable magnet.
-Nonplastic eating utensils, cut down on micro plastics!
-Glass bowl pipe - I don’t smoke weed anymore, but when I did I always preferred a fine glass bowl to keep exposure to plastic and metal low
-A good quality belt or two
-Logic analyzer/good quality multimeter
-Mini vacuum - upgrade your cleaning
-flags - hang a flag to represent!
-Mini statue of Athena or whatever you choose - Improve your aesthetics, while making little offerings and prayers
-Compass, humidity detector, barometer - Never get lost if you can’t remember the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and predict the weather yourself, low pressure and higher humidity, and higher temps means its more likely to rain, high pressure, low humidity, lower temps on average means your weather is likely to be more stable.
-Laser carpentry level, used surveying level, be careful that it’s calibrated - can be useful to have various levels for any construction tasks.
-Political pamphlets - hand out pamphlets to people to inform them that they have voted consistently for years to fund mass surveillance and genocide and brainwashing, hand out pamphlets at the courthouse to inform people about their right to nullify unethical legal proceedings as a juror, even in the face of jury intimidation and manipulation by the state. Make sure they know that the state belongs to the people, not billionaires, not stuck up moralists, not corporations, not to foreigners, it belongs to us, the citizens who work and build this land, and pay taxes, and are not corrupted by power.
-Old moniters or tvs from thrift stores - often damaged or has dead pixels but you can find some gems occasionally
-USB long range WiFi adapter - improve your life when using Far away internet.
-Laundry baskets/higher quality trash cans/storage containers - little micro optimizations add up over time to improve your happiness and time efficiency.
-Portable SSD - much faster than SD cards especially for random read and write.
-High quality large thumb drive - through a very well built Linux distro on it, perhaps hirens boot CD for windows repairs, some disk images, a few Linux distros, reference material, ebooks, documentation, old video games that are small so you can pack many on there, emulators with roms, offline copy of Wikipedia, AI models, if you have the space or multiple drives then make copies so your data doesn’t get corrupted.
Didnt read the whole list, stopped at microcontrollers:
Absolutely recommend everyone and their brother get an arduino learning kit or something similar. Being able to make your own devices is liberating. Learning to make custom IOT devices is even moreso.
The rapid prototyping/learning kit it less than $100, once you’ve prototyped your projects and want to move them to a soldered breadboard or a PCB the microcontroller itself is about $3 on digikey. Cheap cheap cheap stuff considering what you can do with it. Obviously parts can add up but, c’mon Michael, there’s always money in the banana stand.
A 10,000 mAh power bank with attachments to jump start your car or charge your phone. Also has a built in flashlight. It’s come in handy on a few occasions now.
I understand that there are new ones now that also have a built in air compressor for pumping up your car tires, but I don’t know how good they are.
I always have a compressor, but not really for the car tires. Ive had three blowouts in my life and they were blowouts: nothing a compressor can help with. I’ve occasionally had a tire with a slow leak but could usually get to a gas station to fill it up. Portable compressors can’t really handle the volume: they take forever and overheat. They’re just not useful.
From time to time i run into an inflatable or bicycle tire or sports equipment, and the compressor is much more practical for these. It’s important to have all the adapters and that it can push sufficient pressure for bicycle tires
Portable compressors can’t really handle the volume: they take forever and overheat.
Do you specifically mean battery powered compressors? I have a portable one that plugs into the lighter socket and works fine. I end up using it periodically when the weather turns cold and the pressure in the tires naturally drops. I’ve never tried putting more than a five or six pounds of pressure in though.
No I’ve always had ones that plug in to the cigar lighter, and always get ones that claim higher specs
I’ve probably tried with more volume though. Same goes for inflatables: the compressor gets really hot by the time it inflates an air mattress. I used to have inflatable kids toys tha would take multiple sessions to give the compressor time to cool
A leatherman multitool.
There are really nice ones over $100, but they also make versions under that price as well. I’ve used them in a pinch on cars or other random projects.
Electric air compression gun.
Good for cleaning and for cooling down after a workout
Some whole ago I bought an USB rechargeable fan/unduster thing which is surprisingly powerful.
It didn’t have a particular need, you can use your lungs to blow air after all, or fall back to physical. The low price got me interested and to buy.
I bought a smart watch for 12 €, which I wouldn’t have bought over 15 or 20 because I had no need or particular want.
More than checking time it tracks my pulse, steps, and sleep.
Got ex-lease pc workstation and rebuilt it into a Linux media centre/MAME box
Where
Silk pillowcase. Absolute game changer for my hair and face.
A set of precision screwdrivers.
Goes from like 4 dollars to 40 dollars
No more jamming in a knife and stripping the screw for changing batteries etc.
You can even go all out and get the tamper proof torx ones as well.
A bidet
I should really get one. Blasting my ass with water sounds cool.
It’s refreshing on a hot day in the summer
What about a cold day in the winter?
Yes
A portable power bank.
My work gave me one a few years ago, and while I only end up using it a few times a year, when you’re in an airport or on the road somewhere and you need to charge a device, it is glorious to have. Cheap and exceedingly useful.
I’m actually planning to get a bigger portable generator, just as planning for climate change, as I expect more outages in the future and want to have access to power regardless.
I have one with 65W USB-PD and it’s a lifesaver for work travel. But lately I’m hesitant to take it anywhere outside of the US even though it’s under 100Wh, airlines are cracking down significantly on power banks particularly in Asia.
Last time I was in China I noticed many power banks have integrated video game systems on one side (a basic NES/GBC emulator). I wonder if that’s to get around the difficulty of travelling with them?
I have one with a solar panel on the side, very useful to keep in the bag if you need a charge. I’ve found out that some lights will also charge it, having a power bank you can borrow juice from a plant light is quite handy
Would you mind sending me an order link for this item? I’d like to research it further.
Thanks!
The flashlight and compass are rather handy in the woods too.
I also got one of these recently, and I also charge it with my plant light. It’s great.
I bought an LED customizable marquee nametag for $30 at a convention. It makes sense for a con; but it also works at any function where you’d have a nametag even better than those stickers since it can cycle through 8 messages (it holds up to 4097 bytes) and can even display images (though it is only a monochrome display so B&W pixel art works best) in a myriad of patterns as well as flash.
Two things, maybe together over 100, but 1) a German made quality safety razor holder, and 2) a good badger bristle shaving brush. You can use and bar soap, or a little shampoo and a drop of conditioner in your palm to make shaving cream. Drastically lowers your plastic footprint from Big Soap disposable. I buy Japanese razors blades (Feather brand) = 1 week of shaves = about seven cents per shave. (Yes, I know about electric razors. Nothing like a blade for closeness.)
I second this, with the caveats that it doesn’t need to be German made (I’m quite happy with my Rockwell), and the brush doesn’t need to be badger. I prefer the stiffer horsehair, and I hear synthetic brushes have gotten quite good.
As a man I’ve no idea what a shaving brush is for.
I used to just shave with a safety razor and warm water.
Now I have a beard so I just shave my neck and cheeks along with my head,
I’ll also use the same razor for like 2 months before I change it.
Never understood all the steps
Actually, warm soapy water is a lubricant. There is a barber theory about the shaving brush: The bristles push water against the beard which keeps it wet and therefore the hairs stay softer and easier to cut. Can’t swear there’s any science to this theory, LOL. Just do what works, eh?
I don’t use it either, I use an electric razor, but
The foam will moisturize and add fat to your skin. It reduces skin irritation when using a razor - physical razor force which can irritate skin to various degrees.
If you don’t have any skin issues with just water, lucky I guess, must be very moist/fatted or robust skin, or very sharp razor with good technique. :)
The brush is for working up a lather with the bar soap. You can achieve the texture of shaving cream just using bar soap and a brush (and water obviously).
But what’s the soap for?
The soap is the source of the lather. Shaving cream is literally a soap lather/foam. Loads and loads of microscopic bubbles.
But why, what’s its purpose? I’ve never used anything like that. Just water and haven’t had any issues
It lubricates the skin for a smoother shave!
…or else it gets the hose again!
Rope.
Buy some rope, like 3 different sizes: 1-2mm, 4-6mm and 10-12mm. Watch a few rope videos and then throw the ropes in some drawer. Every now and again you will have an issue that the ropes can fix.
As a kid I once got a 15mm*40m rope for my birthday from my uncle, I thought it was the weirdest thing, but over the years I used it so much that these days I consider it to be one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. And as long as you don’t need them for anything related to safety, they basically cant expire.
That’s why there is a rope issue part of a standard adventurer’s kit in dnd.
Head lamp with both red and white light, a game changer for walking the dogs. Red light preserves night vision
Yeah and if you’re camping or anything a red light is awesome you don’t need to blind everyone to go get wood or chuck a piss etc
