induction cooktop? I’d say dishwasher but that’s probably more plumbing and pumps than “technology”.
With all the other gadgets, I’m not so sure. I’ve had computers, laptops, phones for ages. Of course my first everything back in the 90s or 00s was a big thing. But since then it’s just the newest generation, a bit faster and with more extras, but noting substancially different.
Induction cooktop is a game changer. Water boils even faster than with gas, you have much more precise control over temperature, and you can still handle the metal cookware while it’s on the heat. Absolutely love it.
I have an induction cooktop as well and I do have one complaint about it. It uses capacitive touch to adjust the temperature instead of a knob so I spend far too long tapping it buttons to get the temperature set right whereas with a knob I could have just turned the knob.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t like touch buttons on devices like this either. Fortunately mine has temperature control knobs, but all the other buttons are capacitive. Still worth it imo, but definitely annoying.
Sure. I don’t know why they design most of them like that… I really can’t be bothered to tap nine times to turn it on. I went to quite some stores and decided on one with two capacitive slider fields. That’s perfectly fine. I just tap somewhere at that slider and it’ll be 1-9 (boost) depending on how far left or right I touch it. Or I swipe. Main thing being, it just takes one tap. Except if I use more than 2 pans, then I have to choose which plate the sliders apply to. Yeah and it’s still the same inconvenience as with every capacitive control field and you can’t place a box of pizzas or anything wet or metal on top of the controls or it’ll complain and start beeping. I learned to place things behind the controls, but guests regularly get scolded by the cooktop.
I’m… Skeptical. Mostly because I have a lot of cast iron and love it, and I’m not sure how well they’d work with induction burners. And also because I want to get a wok burner (yeah, the 100k+ BTU monstrosities) for doing stir-fry, and I’m not sure that the realistically affordable induction wok burners are going to manage that.
cast iron is pretty much perfect for induction.
for the wok: try it. Technology Connections did a video about them recently.
Basically: They should be fine. But it really depends on your stir fry style.
The somewhat good ones should be capable to get the heat into the wok. Keep in mind that a giant about of heat is getting lost on those burners. Not everything will heat the wok
Yeah, cast iron should work well. I also like the usual stainless steel or non-stick pans. I mean these get hot and cold almost immediately and I have good control over temperature. A heavy cast iron thing is made to store the heat and not do that. Depends on what someone is trying to achieve.
And something that doesn’t work are things that aren’t flat at the bottom. You just can’t have a wok that is completely round and put that on a flat surface. And also thin metals don’t work. So maybe use another cooktop for that. We own a wok that has a flattened bottom. But I don’t really like cooking with that thing. Not sure if it’s me or the wok.
Cast iron like everyone else says works very well with induction, it’s pretty much the ideal material. However, unlike with a steel pan, you want to start on the low side and warm the pan up. It likely won’t cause issues immediately but if you frequently go straight to hot with a cast iron pan it can ultimately lead to the pan warping.
Upgrading my computer’s primary storage from a hard disk (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds.
Buying my first cell phone, which was a Nokia smartphone, in 2003. Having email and useful applications in my pocket, including maps and web search.
I find that my M.2 SSD (with Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC) is weirdly slower at booting up than my SATA SSD (Win 10 Pro) was. I’m not sure why, since the hard drive itself should be faster. BIOS itself seems to be slower.
I also can’t currently get it to even start if I have a hard drive plugged into the power supply and any of the SATA slots on the motherboard. IDK why. It reads the hard drives when I have them plugged in to an external bay and connected with a USB cable. It’s super-frustrating. I’ll try a SATA SSD and see if I have the same problem. If so, then I guess I’m stuck using M.2 drives. :(
You may have an issue with the boot order in your bios. Might be worth looking into. Your bios may try to boot from every other device connected to it before it tries the M2 SSD.
There’s literally nothing else connected to it though; no USB drives, no other hard drives, etc. When I tried to plug in my old 2tb 7200rpm drives from my last computer, it wouldn’t even power on to boot up.
I feel like the sheer jump in performance from throwing an SSD into an old system was akin to what people would have expected from the “download more ram” scam ads of the 00s.
TBF, before win95 there was definitely legit software that you could buy (not download) that would compress memory, amongst other tricks, to effectively give you more RAM.
Really young folks on here have no idea how amazing it was for computers to go from taking minutes to start up to taking seconds
Pretty sure we don’t have such an young audience here on lemmy haha
A small vacuum and mop Roomba clone. Having two dogs leaving fur everywhere made vacuuming every day a necessary chore but now I only need to empty out their base every day and they take care of keeping the floors clean. I don’t have them connected to my Wi-Fi though so hopefully that helps mitigate any hacking attempts.
The Scooba? I was thinking about getting one of those. How do you like it?
The vacuum’s a Matrix Shark and the mop’s a Narwal something or other. Aside from them getting stuck in corners or entangled in wires once a week they work great! A little wire management and careful furniture placement lowered the chance of that happening again. One dog pretty much ignores it and the other eyes it with suspicion and wouldn’t be in the same room it’s running in but otherwise I haven’t had any big issues yet.
Smart lights. What a world of difference coming home to my lights being on either from them automatically triggering, or me turning them on remotely. Or, being able to take a shower knowing my lights will be able to turn themselves off on whatever timer I set. It’s been an excellent expereince
I’ve been looking into some smart lights!
But I’m a bit confused, what do you use them for in the shower?
Not “In the shower persay” I have the Phillips hue lights and I have a set of them in my bathroom With Alexa, or any app to access them, I can set timers on the lights meaning I could have a 30-minute timer while I’m in the shower or whatever else I’m doing. They turn themselves on, turn themselves off.
Light timers have been great. I feel having the ones in my bedroom work like a daylight alarm has been very helpful, and as you said, you never come home to a dark house, which is helpful if you’ve got arms full of groceries or such.
Also the smart thermostat in conjunction with smart outlets lets me turn on the room fans and AC when I’m on my way home.
Even having the ability to change color temp is nice so you can have harsh bright white if you need to see something you’re working on, but the majority of the time you can have nice warm or soft light.
I’ve been in the home automation business for over 25 years. Can confirm that smart lighting is the absolute best investment.
I’ve installed and programmed lighting systems for over $100k but have personally spent less than $250 for Ikea devices for my apartment. Just the ability to dim and set the color of the lights at certain times of day is key for me.
Controlled Lighting isn’t only about convenience, it’s about setting a mood. You can set a warm dim scene to be more calming or a bright white scene for cooking or cleaning.
I’m curous about these, how is the privacy on the apps? Having my data mined from my lightbulbs is my last consideration against taking the step tbh
RAM update. Doubling your RAM on most low/medium -end consumer PCs will noticeably improve responsiveness and multitasking.
I’ve literally never felt the need for more RAM, except on an old netbook that had 1GB and struggled with opening a website.
Clearly you haven’t had the joy of having 10 tabs on Firefox, a film playing on VLC, the torrent client running, and trying to open up a large Solidworks assembly file on a 16GB Windows 10 PC. It gets eaten up fairly quickly.
