What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?
I have to say it’s my virtual assistant I’ve made. It saves me a lot of time with making reminders and such alarms for meetings or interviews, music etc.
Google Maps. On the day before a long weekend, my drive home can turn into a two-hour slog. I keep Google Maps open and there’s nothing better than hearing that “Ping! We’ve found you a faster route.”
@spittingimage Google is pretty good at its job, I can say that.
Password manager (saves time typing passwords) and adblocker (saves time wasted on ads and of course malicious content).
What password manager do you use? I use Keeper, but I wonder if there’s a cheaper alternative that’s just as good that I haven’t looked into. I never hear of anyone using this one on Lemmy.
The best is Keepass. The easiest is Bitwarden. Both are free :)
How do they make money?
From people like me who pay for Bitwarden.
I might have to do this too
Well I like free and I really need to tighten my budget with how expensive everything is getting. Thanks for the recommendations! Now for the hard part of figuring how to change all my passwords from one manager to another lol.
You should be able to export them in an appropriate format from your current pw manager and then import them into keepass or bitwarden. Unless your current manager has a proprietary format for vendor lock-in. I’ve transitioned google > bitwarden > keepass and it was fine. Consider making a donation if you find them useful.
My kindle changes the books I read into OpenDyslexic font, which allows me to read much faster and with less fatigue.
Does every model have that?
I know people are going to come for me for this one, but definitely Notion. I know I don’t own my data and what not, really would love to switch to Obsidian at some point, but I have trouble with markdown and I really prefer “What you see is what you get” editors. I have Notion databases for keeping track of physical video games I own, I write all of my notes for D&D campaigns in there, I have a reminders and to-do page. It’s slow, it’s not very privacy focused, but it’s a dead simple and very feature packed tool to organize virtually anything.
As someone who loves both apps, you might be surprised with the functionality in Obsidian’s plugin platform. I have to-dos, kanban boards, book reviews, media embeds. You can even use JavaScript to code with your files and their properties (not that everyone needs to do that of course).
I use Notion at work still, but Obsidian has come really far since I first heard of it. I will say though migrating has not been an easy process.
Hey I decided to download Obsidian and give it another shot. Have you tried migrating any databases to the database plugin? How comparable is it to using them in Notion?
Hey there! Databases aren’t something I’ve done yet in Obsidian, although I’m at my computer right now so I took a quick peek and I think maybe https://dataloom.xyz/ is what you’re looking for. Seems to be angled specifically at Notion users.
Woah that seems really neat!! Thanks for telling me. Damn it’s moments like these I wish Lemmy had awards. So helpful. 🏅
Thanks for letting me know, the few times I had tried Obsidian in the past I was unaware of plugins. Sounds like some of them might be adding the functionality I’m looking for! I’ll definitely check it out again soon!
Shoes. House. Car.
Electricity.
A google map
A battery voltage tester was pretty cheap and I was surprised by how often I use it.
This is stupid but I was just using it so it is on my mind: a calculator. Saves so much time and paper.
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Why do you hate to admit that? GPT and LLM’s are tools
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Yeah I wouldn’t feel guilty in the least my friend, highly competent people are using LLM’s to improve their efficiency. People have an unfounded fear (for now) that AI is going to replace them and their job, but the reality is that someone who is efficiently using AI is going to take their job if they’re not
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You’re not crazy.
Think of Alfred Nobel: inventor of dynamite and exasperated that it was used for evil, not just for good. Founded the Nobel Peace Prize to make amends.
I don’t know if it saves time or not, but all the ad-busting plug-ins and PiHole I have installed. I set up a VPN that I can connect to with my phone that sends the connection through the PiHole so I get to enjoy less ads on the mobile, too.
I really despise the “open” unfiltered internet. It’s become a cesspool of ads. Mobile sites that leave you with an inch to view the site as the top and bottom become cluttered with banners, autoplay ads, cookie demands, all with super tiny “x” that are designed to not register or deliberately mis-tap to open the ad. Desktop sites with full-screen ads, autoplay, etc.
Yeah. I don’t know about “can’t live without”, but ad-scrubbing and blocking is a huge necessity just to get things done and not have to deal with all the garbage being inserted between you and what you need to do.
Yes it saves time. More than you know.
And while you could live with out it, you shouldn’t - ad block has become the one of the first layers of internet security. You can’t download more ram if you don’t see the link.
My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.
At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.
I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says “go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script”.
I’m pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations. It’s also kind of wasteful to wash clothes too often.
Yeah, every time a new timesaving invention becomes mainstream the “meta” of society adjusts and everything gets faster. And more chaotic and insane and crazy. Modern life is weird
Yeah, ‘living within your means’ works in both directions.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations.
Wouldn’t it simple revert to the class based system of cleanliness we had before?
- the rich would still have clean clothes with intricate designs and patterns that would be laborious to clean, but they have staff that clean their clothes
- the middle class would still have mostly clean cloths but would have much more simple to wash designs which are more durable, and a significant portion of household time would be spent on cleaning cloths
- the poor wouldn’t have clean cloths
Wouldn’t it simple revert to the
classwealth based system of cleanliness we had before?The problems you mention here comes from wealth inequality. We still have those problems when wealth inequality exists - people just find other things to differentiate themselves from the poor. I.e. instead of cleanliness, it is wearing the right (read: expensive) brand of clothing. Or owning an expensive car, or an expensive phone or an expensive anything.
Cleanliness used to be an expensive thing so the wealthy used that to show off their wealth. Nowadays, it is other things.
The solution to this problem is not to make things cheaper (again, there will just be other ways to show off status/wealth), but to reduce wealth inequality.
Basically the only point that needs to be made at the moment.
I think that counts as a kind of societal expectation adjustment
Makes me a bit glum to think about how this concept applies to other areas
mechanized laundry is second only to modern medicine, imo
followed closely by indoor plumbing and dishwashers
Indoor plumbing wins all of them for me, for one my washing machine wouldn’t be worth it without, and for another it’d be hard to access clean water to rinse wounds and drink medicine.
Massive respect to people (most often women) around the world who have washed clothes by hand. The cleaning of the clothes is bad enough but there’s also the fetching of (or travelling to) a lot of water.
My dryer was down for a bit so I had to hang clothes to dry. Slight inconvenience that really made me appreciate having a washing machine that still worked.
Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.
I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.
A gas cooker. Same prob goes for electric. I cooked on solid fuels for an extended period of time and it is a very tough gig.
Most other technologies just seem to beget more time use. Even a simple light bulb requires the installation and maintenance of an electricity system, which is non-trivial and only results in you being able to stay awake longer, finding pointless things to do when you should be asleep or having sex.
My refrigerator/freezer. Lets me buy food at ideal times (sales etc) and keep it fresh until it is conveneient for me, sometimes months later in the case of the freezer.
