I bought one of these for my Mum
for collage etc.
8 Likes
So after much waiting i have received my dumb Yeti bottle, and frankly. I love it
And yes, i have a posable crab figurine. I’m an adult. Maybe
15 Likes
It’s not dumb! I like it and I’m not even particularly fond of crabs. Take your joy where you can find it 
12 Likes
One of my fave indie shops is having a black friday sale.
Here’s a pin of theirs i liked 
6 Likes
I am incredibly impressed with my new bottle for cold coffee at the office. So easy to take apart and clean and really pretty. It isn’t emerald. Too much blue. It’s one of those colors some people will see as green and some blue with a nice sparkle. It is beautiful
Edit for picture
9 Likes
I know that zojirushi tends to rank pretty well for quality in their bottles so I’m not surprised. But really happy to know it fits your needs perfectly
7 Likes
Keychron came up in another thread, so I thought I’d drop this here:
Woot has discounted Keychron keyboards until 2025-02-01T06:00:00Z
https://computers.woot.com/plus/keychron-mechanical-keyboards-8
Woot is owned by Amazon, so take that for what it’s worth.
5 Likes
Since there isn’t a dedicated Lego thread i think this is the next best place 
Price is outside of my means but it looks amazing
8 Likes
After literally years of hemming and hawing over getting an e-paper tablet, I finally bought a Note Air 4C and I think I’m in love.
I decided to jump since I wanted to get it before tariffs cause the price to creep any higher. (So far they are holding steady, actually, but the site is warning about impending price increases.)
Quick bullet point review:
I like:
- It has a front light!
- Google Play Store enabled is a plus.
- The handwriting recognition is incredible, probably 95%+ accuracy on my chicken scratch. It even translated some of my wife’s indecipherable scrawl with perfect accuracy.
- Pen is super responsive, lag is almost imperceptible.
- I thought I wouldn’t be into the color, the palette of which is quite muted, but graphic novels look great on it.
- Incredibly fast refresh rates, acceptable ghosting, plus lots of features for configuring full refreshes and app-specific quality settings.
- The OS has lots of configuraiton options and it’s pretty easy (once you figure out your way around) to configure the settings to your taste.
- Calibre recognizes it and manages ebook loading/unloading with ease.
- The built-in reader app is great.
- Form factor is big enough to read PDFs without too much squinting, but not so big as to be ginormous.
- Clever cover design supports both portrait and landscape stand-up modes.
- Great battery life.
Not so great:
- Color e-ink screens are quite dark. Unless you’re basically in full sun you will probably want at least a little frontlight on all the time.
- The magnets on the cover are adequate for regular use but if you do anything a bit outside the ordinary (e.g. fold up the cover in “stand” mode and use that to hold the tablet) the device might pop out.
- The pen’s magnet could be stronger and there’s not a great alternative mechanism to hold it. It’s in your hand or (somewhat precariously) on the magnet mount.
- A smidgen heavy for extended one-handed holding (e.g. in bed).
- Pen/brush selection for drawing is a little limited.
Seriously, though, I’m really digging hard for cons. If you’re on the fence about an e-paper device and you value versatility, this is a good choice, especially if you think you’ll use the pen features. The other Boox options all have some compromises (different form factors, no frontlight, not pen-enabled) but this one really hits the sweet spot for me. And the configuration flexibility that you get between the OS’s built-in configurability and the Play Store access means that it beats out Remarkable and Supernote easily (for me, anyway). If you want absolute minimalism as a requirement, one of those competing products might be more to your taste, but it’s pretty easy to configure the Note Air to be as minimalist (or maximalist) as you want.
12 Likes
Lately i’ve been mulling over an Android tablet over e-Ink. Anyone here have an android tablet? What’s the experience like? What do you use it for? What do you dislike about it?
I can primarily see myself using it for light browsing (videos and reading manga/ebooks). Lowkey interested if ones that have good pen support for drawing and note taking but is not a requirement.
7 Likes
Oooh, yes! I’ve had a (refurbished) Samsung Tab S4 for years now, and I absolutely adore it. It comes with the S Pen, which uses Wacom technology for great accuracy in drawing and artwork-- that’s the main reason I chose it when shopping for a tablet. You can add a microSD card to boost its storage capacity, the Super Amoled screen display is absolutely beautiful, and you can get a case with a keyboard for more comfortable typing (or you can connect a portable keyboard using Bluetooth, and those are a lot less expensive.) Light browsing is a breeze with it.
Since it’s older than current models, it doesn’t have the biggest RAM memory, so if you’re shopping, I’d go with a newer version. Samsung offers a variety of specs and configurations so you can find something that best suits your needs. Another drawback is what I call Android bloat; as far as I understand it, the OS makes invisible backup files that will eventually eat up space on the main drive. I’m experiencing that now on my tablet (after over 5 years of use) and I’m not sure how to fix it myself. I may need to start calling around to phone-fix-it stores to see if they can handle it without doing a factory reset.
(Edit to add: if art’s your thing, I should probably mention that most of the popular apps like Procreate are Apple-only right now, but there are some good low or no-cost alternatives available for Android like Sketchbook and Krita.)
11 Likes
I’ve had that the Tab S9 is a great, cheaper alternative to the S10. Based on your thoughts I might look into it
8 Likes
I have a Boox Max 3 e-ink tablet/monitor. I got it used and it was still expensive.
It’s black-and-white.
It’s a good e-reader for larger-format books, such as most roleplaying rules and adventures.
It’s a buggy monitor, though, at least with the Mac. In text mode, text ends up jagged and unreadable. In graphics mode, white backgrounds end up medium gray.
8 Likes
I’m looking for an accessible Linux-compatible laptop with an enormous solid-state drive.
I’m currently dual-booting macOS and Linux on a desktop. But that’s a pain if I can’t bring all the parts, can’t set up the monitor and all the disks, etc. I’d like something that’s easy to bring in the event of fires, or other fires.
Accessibility:
I’m sensitive to flashing lights, animation, bright screens, noise, etc. I’ve often struggled with screens which are just too ridiculously bright. I’m going to need to turn brightness down, and probably turn each color down too. Notebookcheck has data on some devices. I’m also going to need to avoid any 22 kHz squeal.
I’m going to need navigation keys such as home, page up, page down, and end. I’d like control and command/windows keys near the space bar, because remapping keys tends to break sticky keys and some diacritical marks.
I’m also going to need a Linux-compatible trackpad, which won’t require @#$% gestures.
There aren’t any local computer stores. And in the past, I’ve struggled with the pain bombardment in computer stores.
7 Likes
Between the tarriffs, and backup problems, I feel I ought to find something sooner rather than later.
Intel chipsets are supposed to be more reliable, and in my experience, they’ve been quieter than ARM ones. But they’re currently a lot more expensive, too.
Lenovo laptops are usually supposed to be relatively Linux-friendly. And judging by Notebookcheck tests, they are supposed to have relatively low minimum brightness.
I am considering either Cinnamon + Mint or KDE. I mostly prefer Cinnamon + Mint.
I can’t figure out how to stop animated kinetic scrolling in gtk apps; there are some old bug reports from other users, and apparently this is wontfix because people put work into adding the pain, and it’d be more work to include options to block the pain.
I can’t figure out how to stop animated app loading in KDE, or stop blinding bleeping animated cursor blinking bleep in Qt, apart from a few apps with their own settings.
I assume dual-booting Linux and Windows would be simpler than dual-booting Linux and MacOS. And being able to use Windows would work around some bugs from Wine. But if each system relies on an index of the same shared partition, e.g. to search and find documents, find within documents, etc., it’s easy to screw up that index.
Lenovo have a partial list of Linux-compatible models, but it’s hard to make sense of the list: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-for-personal-systems
Here are the Notebookcheck figures, sorted by minimum brightness: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Benchmarks-and-Test-Results.142793.0.html?&sort=b_illumination_illumination_min&model_class=0&month=36&archive=1&condensed=0&id=0&perfrating=0&search=intel&or=0&condensed=0&showCount=0&showBars=1&showPercent=0&test_illumination_illumination_min=1&model=1&cpu_name=1&gpu_name=1&memory_installed=1
6 Likes
I have a Samsung A8. Use it mostly for anime/streaming. Some light browsing and manga/graphic novels.
My kid also has one, locked down with Google Family Link. She uses it for a lot of games, music, and audiobooks.
I like them. We haven’t had any big issues except Apple Music app freezing the entire thing and doing odd things to the UI. Cleared up when we removed it.
We ditched Spotify (finally) when I figured out they had what amounts to hours of ticktok videos loaded as podcasts and no ability to turn off videos/podcasts in content control. When Spotify began to suggest these videos to our kid’s account. This is an issue for our 8 year old. The kids app is useful for only young toddlers. It’s terrible.
We’ve been trying out Tidal lately. Working so far and the only videos we need to worry about are music videos. A lot less tempting for an 8 year old to watch an inappropriate music video and a lot less of them in general.
7 Likes
Spotify sucks when it comes to podcasts and i’m pretty sure its by design. They don’t want people really having any level of control, otherwise people would block the podcasts they don’t want to see. Twice now the app has randomly for no discernible reason autoplayed a podcast coughjoerogancough even though i was in the middle of listening to something else. If i had the chance i would block it so fast. I should pivot to a different app for podcasts, i’ve just been lazy about it.
8 Likes
I DL 'em & just listen on the laptop w/VLC. Of course the ability to DL 'em is a big part of it.
3 Likes
Me too. I was going to buy a new computer this summer because Windows 11 won’t run on my current (ca. 2017) one. But with the tariff business I decided to order it right away. At least I’ll have a faster computer sooner.
8 Likes