I don’t know what it’s called, but I chord you put around your neck, goes down to the belly with a metal hook at the end? Used to keep backstage/security passes visible, but I keep my keys on there instead.
Keys always end up at the bottom of my bag, and it can be frustrating and even painful to dig them out. I don’t always have pockets suitable for keys. I have a place for them at home, but still misplace them constantly.
With this chord I can keep my keys around my neck when in use, like at work or going to the store, and even if I put them in my bag I can loop the keys around a handle and down through their own chord and they’ll hang there to be pulled out when I need them.
The chord is long and colourful and way easier to find than just the keys, and often hang visible out of a bag when I haven’t put the keys in their place.
It’s great. I have different colours for different sets of keys, one colour is home+bicycle, other is work. Other keys I add only when I need them. It gets annoying having too many keys on at once.
Lanyard?
What an odd little word…So unspecific; could never have guessed it. But yes, that’s it, thanks!
A roll of really heavy duty velcro. The kind that can, for example, stick a sledge hammer to a wall. It’s about $12 for 5 feet or so, and about a 1" piece is sufficient for most tasks, so it lasts a very long time. I use it for all kinds of stuff; it’s amazing how many uses for it you find when you have it.
Just in case you havent seen it: Don’t call it velcro
That’s pretty funny. Unfortunately for them, I and probably almost everyone else don’t really care about their brand identity, so I’ll keep calling it all velcro. I’ll also keep call all tissues Kleenex, and all adhesive bandages Band-Aids, and all the others that have become synonymous with their product. That’s what they get for being too successful, I guess.
Less syllables always wins.
Last time I did install work we used double sided Velcro for cable management. I snagged a roll and made a jig to split it in half with a box knife to get twice as much and I’ve still got a ton left over a decade later. It’s really handy stuff to have around and better than zip ties in most applications I use it for.
What kind of uses did you have for it?
I have a IKEA pergola on my backyard and I’ve been trying to come up with a way to attach some plastic paneling on top of it without drilling. This might be it.
Most common adhesives will be less effective under hot (ie sunlight) conditions.
If you don’t need it to come off, 3Ms GPH (General Purpose High-temp) VHB tape. 50% of your car is probably held together by it.
He stuck a sledgehammer to his wall.
Something every kobold needs.
A lot of small things. I have some velcro on the wall in few rooms that I can stick a tablet to, for example. I’ve got velcro holding down a few items on my desk - a USB hub, speakers and the like, that I want to move sometimes, but that were commonly getting knocked off (by the cat). I’ve got a small whiteboard and a few places I can stick it, so I can use it to sketch something up and take it with me to our workbench, for example, and not have to precariously balance it.
All things that could be solved with other solutions, obviously, but the heavy duty velcro just happens to be a one-size-fits-all solution that leaves no permanent marks and is very convenient to set up.
How do you get the velcro to stick to the wall so you don’t rip it off if it’s so strong? (And no, don’t just say more velcro!)
It’s velcro all the way down!
It sticks with adhesive, and I don’t doubt it would rip wallpaper right off, but using adhesive remover before trying to pull it off lets you work it off slowly and not cause damage to paint or surfaces.
Wireless phone charger. I’ll be stuck somewhere looking at my low battery life, and suddenly remember it’s in my purse. It isn’t the fastest charge but it is useful.
Or called powerbank
Or that yeah.
Small drafting table I got at Goodwill for $4. I’ve used it for actual drawing, and it has an adjustable tilt so it can be flat to use as a plain table.
An ezel. You know, the kind that artists use to put their cavvas on.
I’m a digital artist, so I have a display drawing tablet. Eventually having the tablet completely horizontally flat got annoying to draw on. I ended up sitting cross-legged and awkwardly perching the table on the edge of my desk on my lap to get some sort of comfortable angle on it. However that was annoying too.
I went and looked what a tablet stand costed for my tablet model and… It damn near costed the same as my tablet! The. I had an idea. There’s this cheap ass hardware store called Harald Nyborg in Denmark, maybe they have cheap ezel?
Lo and behold they do. Made from the crappiest cheap wood available, it serves its purpose perfectly! I’ve had it for a few years now and never needed to think about getting that dedicated stand for my tablet.
I have a friend who does digital art as a side gig, always complaining about his back. Maybe I’ll suggest he get an easel.
Easel. But we understood. 😀
A Victorinox Swiss army knife. Bought it used for 10€, and it has everything from a very good blade to screwdrivers, a bottle opener, pen and tweezers. Always in my pocket in case I need it.
One of those tiny sd ones? I have a couple and love them. I carry a skeletool cx now but if I had to carry only the little victorinox I wouldn’t complain.
It’s a Climber, a 91mm model. Just small and sleak enough to be bearable on my keychain. The small ones are missing screwdrivers which I use quite often
It’s weird, but despite owning a couple of nice pocket knives, I almost never have actual use for them. My tactical torch though, is freaking amazing, and given my shitty old eyesight, I use it every day.
I’d be lost without my pocket knife. I use it daily, I’ve even gutted a moose with it.
Oh yeah a torch is also one of those things that you’ll never catch me without. Though mine is quite a bit over the $20 mark.
A mini pen I keep on my lanyard.
Cost me like $2.50, I thought it was too expensive for what I was getting but it works. Now when those bitches lose the pens, I can still write instead of dancing a pat-everything-pat-myself-look-for-pen-everywhere
$20 bread maker I found at at a thrift store. There’s no telling how many hundreds of loaves of healthy, fresh baked wheat bread I’ve churned out of that thing over the past two years, especially now that we’re grinding our own wheat too.
I got a bread maker for free. I asked my coworkers and THREE different people said they had a bread maker that’s just sitting there, unused as gifts that they don’t want.
I’m one of those who gave my bread maker away. The problem was when I was making bread with it, it was so good I’d quickly eat it all up and kept gaining weight, so I stopped using it.
I loved my breadmaker back in the day. I’m in an apartment these days though, so no room for a new one after the last one broke.
Did you try getting rid of the old one and putting the new one in its former place?
My pocket stun gun was $19.99. Decided I needed a defense mechanism I could conceal after an encounter with a scary aggressive homeless man.
Also has a flashlight.
Be careful with a stungun. It requires close range confrontation, and It’s not effective if the assailant is drugged up or heavily drunk and ignores the shocks.
Mace gives good distance, and pepper in the eyes doesn’t care about the stimulants in your blood stream.
Also practice with it. A large number of people carry self defense tools and choke under pressure/fail to use it correctly during situations.
I tested it on myself.
It works fine.
lol, you completely missed all that advice.
Stun guns are useless.
Always appreciate when people offer their opinion with a YT video. I’m definitely going to watch it. Thank you.
Make sure you also test it while drunk or heavily drugged up.
Isn’t that the time most people would think of testing it on themselves?
That does sound like a fun Friday night
This has been “useful” to you? I hope mostly the flashlight and not the tazing homeless people part.
Go judge someone else. It wasn’t my decision to turn whole cities into mental institutions. It was Ronald Reagan’s.
Hahaha. Who said I was judging you? I hope you don’t need to be using a tazer often because it doesn’t sound like a fun existence. It sucks that we have homeless people in the richest country in the world, but that doesn’t mean homeless people can’t be dangerous. Take a chill pill please.
Apologies.
Every time I mention I had a run-in with a homeless person, some self-righteous SJW discounts my experience and infers that I must have been in the wrong, though I was just sitting on a bus minding my own business on the way to work. My city has fare-free buses, so we end up having a lot of close encounters with untreated homeless people. (Also why I carry a stun-gun instead of mace, so if I have to use it there’s no chance of friendly fire.)
So I figured you were another one here to cast aspersions, and I have a short fuse with it for sure. My mistake.
All good. Stay safe out there. It’s a wild world we live in.
Metal Chopsticks $9 https://www.amazon.com/BamLue-Stainless-Chopsticks-Dishwasher-Restaurant/dp/B07RTNWLM1 These are no longer for sale. They are not just for eating. Great for deseeding jalapenos, tomatos. Mixing small sauces. Too many uses to list. They are super durable. Very ‘buy it for life’ vibes. The tip texture is the most helpful. Not to be used as Ninja weapons.
I always have metal chopsticks on me.
Chopsticks are also nice to mix fluids in a bottle because for some they are long enough
I also started eating potato chips with them, can reach deeper in + clean handsI’m gonna leave this right here…
SNACTIV LITE Finger Chopsticks… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXG8ZTNG
Rolling my eyes hard.
…and then I saw the pic of the PS controller. I’m now reconsidering everything I know.
eating chips with chopsticks also slows me down and some times prevent me from overeating chips
You’ll get better over time, so it’s a time limited benefit.
I do those things as well. I have some metal deep frying ones, they are about 14" long. I use them a lot when stirring deep soup pots. And when they are dirty, I use the fat end to swish the dish sponge around in deep containers that my had can’t fit in.
Ooh, I’ll try to remember this next time I’m having chips!
I dont understand how people eat with metal or plastic chopsticks. Wood? Sure, it practically holds itself
Yeah rice is impossible for me with anything but wooden chopsticks
One way window heat shield. Reflects 85‰ of the UV back out. Sticks to the window using only water.
Noticeable difference in temperature for any sun-facing windows
Somewhere i worked had that. (Edit: but more for privacy)
It was so funny seeing passerbys using it as a mirror.
Absolutly funny 10/10I added these last summer too. Roughly a hundred bucks to cover three patio sliding doors. Huge difference.
Are you using these on double glazed windows? I’ve read this film could get them to crack under the heat.
Yeah double glazed, and no hasn’t been an issue by my reckoning
Thanks that’s good to know!
Window film is so glorious. I have my bedroom windows blacked out with it, easier to sleep, and yes, always cool temperatures in there.
Probably you mean 85% of infrared, not 85 parts per thousand (or 8.5%) of ultraviolet?
I did this at my last House and it was fantastic.
Just need to remember that once it’s dark outside the reflective side “switches” and everyone can see clearly into the house.
wait really? and isn’t that always the case with any window?
That’s just how a normal window works
Yes but the film has a one-way mirror effect and most people don’t put 2 and 2 together and think the window is opaque when is not.
How easy are they to cut to size, or if you need to use multiple to cover a window how does the gap/seam look? Have been thinking of getting them, but we also want to replace our windows at some point. I assume you can’t just reuse them?
At least in home depot, some of them come with a specific blade tool, or one that’s not too much more expensive. It’s hard/sharp enough to seamlessly cut through the tints, but not scratch your window.
Pretty easy to cut, but of course it’s never be perfect, and it’s better to cut smaller than larger since it sticks to the window using water, and needs a complete seal, so any corners that overlap a frame will just slowly force the whole thing to peel off.
Very easy to re-use, it sticks using water and requires a flat piece of card (e.g. an old credit card) to spread it out over the window
Is that the static type then that are reused and just need water, with adhesive backed ones being single application only?
Huh, never heard of the adhesive type. I’ve used the static/water ones for ~4 years without any issues
Wool poncho. I’ve used it to stay warm, stay cool, as a groundcloth under my sleeping bag, as a blanket, as a pillow, as a decorative throw, as a cat bed, as a picnic blanket, as a beach blanket. It’s incredibly useful and versatile.
Same! I always keep my emergency wool cloak in my car. Saved me tons of times
There is no way you got that for $20. I keep meaning to get one since I love my wool coat I got at a thrift store but they are never that cheap.
I mean, this was in, like, 2003. That’s probably $50 in today money.
Oh 2003? Nah $20 stretched hard back then, especially if it was a thrift store. Man even as a kid I could get so much stuff with $5 at a thrift store, I think I literally got a PC and a DVD player for like $10. Nobody was trying to maximize profit on every thing cause more was on the way.
Hasbrown at McDonald’s were .80¢, they are now $2.70. That $20 was more like $67.50 in actual purchase power.
- Knife sharpening steel
- squeezing bidet (made me realize how gross using toilet paper is)
- caffeine pills (extremely cheap compared to coffee and great if you’re in a hurry)
- Raspberry Pi Zero (tiny single board computer)
+1 for caffeine pills, although 200mg is a bit too much for me. I prefer 100mg
Tesa outdoor double sided tape.
That stuff is basically magic. It will stick anything to everything and you can remove it from almost any surface without leaving a mark. I used to stick a dashcam to my car window, a birdbath to my brick wall, a remote LED lamp to the ceiling (felt iffy, works great!). It’s even holding a metal plate from the doorknob in place because the door is more hole than wood by now.
It beats basically every other kind of tape of multipurpose glue, and it’s removable. It’s kinda thick though, so you might see it, but that’s also a feature when sticking rough textures to eachother.
I’m seeing lots of different tapes from Tesa. Is it PET? PVC?
It’s this stuff: https://www.tesa.com/nl-nl/consument/tesa-powerbond-outdoor-ean-4042448843432.html
Or your local version of it, but this website refuses to turn to other languages for me.
Thanks!
3M VHB tape sounds similar to what he’s describing. Very strong bond, slightly thick so it can bond to uneven/rough surfaces. It’s good stuff.
Does that also remove easily without leaving a mark? The VHB tape says it’s not for sensitive surfaces.
Ahh, not sure about sensitive surfaces… it can be removed, with some work, solvents may help in that department. But I’ve only really ever used it on hard surfaces, and I think unpainted. But if that’s your use case, I’ve not found anything stronger!
A dry erase notebook. $2. The marker that came with it is crap so that was another $12 for a pack of 4.
