Not a purchase, but Home Assistant is easily them most enjoyable gadget and piece of tech I’ve had in years. It’s ridiculously flexible and can do just about anything you can imagine.

I’ve been able to automate dumb devices (like an old top-of-the-line receiver) and give them smart features rather than spending thousands to replace them. Occupancy detection saves energy by changing thermostat settings when people aren’t home, and lights come on when we’re 60’ from the front door after a walk. Multiple leak detectors and a temperature sensor in the fridge let us know when something’s wrong before damage occurs. We get notifications when the dryer and washer cycles are complete allowing us to complete the laundry in one day instead of two.

The system is configured to change change interior light brightness and hue based on time of day so at 7PM we have bright room lighting and at 2AM it’s very dim. We get immediate notifications of package deliveries. Firewall settings are dynamically changed so devices that require Internet access only have it when they are actually in use. Integrations exist for VLC, Spotify, Jellyfin, Paperless, Apple, TVs, alarm systems, solar power systems, routers, automobiles, and hundreds of other brands and devices.

Yes, much of the same can be done with connected appliances, lights, and other smart devices, but what’s different about Home Assistant is all control and storage can be local. We have no cloud or corporate services involved for any of this. Google, Apple, Amazon and Samsung can’t one day decide to pull the plug on things we’ve already paid for.

The big problem with Home Assistant is there are so many uses you can easily end up spending way too much time tinkering and never get anything else done.

Comma 3x it’s a module that adds sensors and compute to turn your car into a level 2 self driving vehicle.

Glinet travel router. I always have both wifi and hardline with me wherever I go, whether or not I have either.

Sabrent thunderbolt dock. It has NVME drives inside of it so I can have my laptop be mobile then come home and have all my games ready to go.

Dockcase dongle. Most dongles suck, this does 100 watt pass through charging, gigabit, 4k 120hz and 20gb transfers on the ports.

Yamaha Reface CS. A remake of 70s analog synthesizer. Even if I don’t make music professionaly, I enjoy playing melodies I’ve learned, fooling around with sound, and every time I catch a sight of it, it sparks joy in me. I own it for more than 2 years.

Also it’s fairly cheap for synthesizer, 370 euro, but definitely it’s not a toy, but rather a full blown instrument.

I have a set of Logitech 2.1 thx computer speakers that are probably close to 20 years old. Never faltered, unbelievable sound quality and has survived 5 or so moves.

This led me to my other joy, a legit home theater setup. I spent too much but I do not regret it. I’m sad because my current space doesn’t allow for the full size towers and massive sub, but hopefully I can get them out of storage early next year. I miss having the full blown atmos setup.

Denon DJ SC LIVE 4.

I originally wanted an Pioneer/AlphaTheta turntable system since I started on Rekordbox, but after some research I found out that the SC LIVE 4 has what a (nearly) equivalent $3000 Pioneer model has at a more reasonable $1300.

Steam Deck, hands down. It rules being able to play PC games in bed with my partner by my side.

Noise cancelling headphones are incredible, using them in a noisy airport eliminated 80% of the discomfort of travelling

My Fairphone 5, because it has allowed me to break free from Google and other big tech companies by letting me install whatever I want on it.

And my good old Thinkpad.

Either my Kobo or my 55" LG OLED.

I’ve owned a bunch of TVs over the years, starting with a 12" Panasonic “portable” that just about fit on a shelf in my bedroom. But none of them can hold a candle in just how impressive they look to that LG. Even my first LCD, a 32" Sony (which I still have) impressed me to begin with, but ultimately it just became a TV to look at. But I’ve had this LG for a year and it still blows me away when I watch something that’s letterboxed and the black bars are so black that you can’t tell where they end and the (extremely thin) bezel begins. And it only cost me £800.

The software updates piss me off though, so I’ve revoked its internet privileges.

But I don’t think a bit of tech has brought me quite as much joy as my Kobo Clara HD still does, some six years after I bought it.

A had a Kindle for a year before, and while it was fine, it annoyed me how much I felt I owed to Amazon with it. Loading books from not-Amazon was a pain in the arse. Calibre could do it, but only certain formats were allowed to have cover art. Then it went tits up, so I replaced it with my Kobo and it was like breathing clean air for the first time in my life.

The Kobo couldn’t give a shit where the books came from, it treats them all equally. The battery still lasts for weeks, even after six years, and just a couple of weeks ago I worked out how to sync it with Grimmory, running on my home server, so I don’t even need to plug it in to copy books to it anymore. Just upload them to Grimmory, which automatically puts them onto the Kobo shelf, so when it syncs overnight it downloads them. And it has Instapaper built in now, so I can save articles to read on that nice, clear screen.

And all in something that cost me about £90.

Yeah, if you enjoy reading and are on the fence about an e-reader, get a Kobo. The old Clara HD is perfectly good, and probably quite cheap now.

My old casio watch works after a decade of use.

My old kindle just got a new battery but its over 14+ years old.

And my CPAP is probably the thing that does the most work for me.

Steam Deck OLED has been pretty great. Also the HTC Vive VR headset, back in 2016.

Framework laptop - they took the best parts of the MacBook, made it repairable and fully support Linux. Priced fairly, with the option to separately purchase RAM and SSD. And they’ve even provided free replacement parts years after the warranty expired!

I’m having a hard time defining “best”, so I’ll put out a few categories:\

• Most used: my rooted Samsung Galaxy S23, which I use for listening to HiFi music (Tidal + Android USB Audio Player + AudioQuest DrangFly Cobalt DAC + Sennheiser IE 900).\
• Most fun tinkering with: used Lenovo ThinPad T480, on which I swapped out the storage, RAM and wireless network module {1TB, 32GB, WiFi 6e}. I also learned Arch Linux and some C programming on it.\
• Bringing it with me everywhere and is not my phone: my rooted Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ and my Deltaco WK90b keyboard, a form factor which they have stopped making, which is bonkers. I bring these two to local coffee shops and libraries and learn coding on Termux.\
• Having own the longest: my sound mixer Notepad 8fx by Soundcraft, 42 inch 4K Philips TV and Adam A5X studio monitors. The studio monitors, I have had for more than ten years. The mixer and TV, for about seven. This is my media setup for consuming video and audio. I play video on the above mentioned Lenovo laptop, streamed from my Linux ISO torrenting rig and audio I mostly play from my vinyl player. This also used to be me karaoke setup when I still had a Nintendo Switch and when I still was happy.

AMD stock apparently 😂😂

My 2012 MacBook Pro is still going strong, still my primary home computer, still does everything I need. Maxed out the memory and upgraded to a SSD hard drive years ago and it runs great.