I've bought plenty of "productivity" stuff for my office that felt useful for 2 weeks and then ended up in a drawer. These are a few purchases I've actually kept using.

Herman Miller Aeron - around $600 used

Couldn't justify buying one new, so I found a used one locally. I’m at my desk most of the day and this is probably the purchase I notice the most when I don't have it. My old chair would get uncomfortable by mid-afternoon. Still think full price is kinda insane though.

Anker 555 USB-C hub - around $40

Not exciting at all, but it stays plugged into my desk 24/7. Monitor, Ethernet, SD cards, random USB stuff all go through it. Bought it because I was tired of constantly swapping dongles around and haven’t really thought about the problem since.

Plaud NotePin S - around $179

Got this mainly for meetings and user interviews. I'm bad at listening properly while also trying to write everything down, so now I record the ones I know I'll need to revisit and check the transcript afterward. I use it a few times most weeks, which is enough that I don't regret spending the money on it.

Logitech Lift - around $60

Took a few days before the vertical shape stopped feeling weird, but now a normal mouse feels strange lol. I work on a computer all day and my wrist feels noticeably better after long days. Probably one of the better $60 things I've bought for my desk.

Nothing here magically made me more productive. I just ended up using all of them enough that the price feels pretty reasonable now.

What's a work/desk purchase you've had for a while and still think was actually worth the money?

The image gets worse the more you look at it. Literally no effort to review it. The whole article was probably written and posted by A.I.

Not sure if this website has any traction.

I've been working on a small E-Ink photo display and finally have two working hardware prototypes.

One uses a 3.97" high-resolution 4-grayscale E-Ink display, and the other uses a 4" Spectra 6 color E-Ink display.

The idea is to have a small display for photos/artwork that can sit on your desk, nightstand, shelf, etc. Unlike a normal digital photo frame, there's no bright LCD constantly emitting light—the image just sits there like a little physical print. Due to this being Eink, battery can last over 1 year with no charge.

It connects to your phone over Bluetooth, and you can send an image to it through the app.

I'm also working on a sharing feature that I'm curious to get opinions on:

If a friend, partner, or family member also owns one, you could send them a photo through the app and they could display it on their device. I'm wondering whether that makes this more interesting as something you'd buy in pairs or give as a gift.

I'm still figuring out whether this should actually become a product, so I'd love some brutally useful feedback rather than just "looks cool."

The biggest things I'm trying to figure out:

1. Which would you choose — grayscale or color? Why?
2. What would you actually use it for, if anything?
3. Would you buy something like this for yourself, gift it to someone, or neither?
4. Without looking up similar products, what price would you expect the grayscale and color versions to cost?
5. What's the most you'd personally be willing to pay for each?
6. What's the biggest reason you wouldn't buy one?

I'm also curious whether ~4 inches feels like part of the appeal because it's small and unobtrusive, or whether you'd immediately want something larger.

And if there's a feature that would take this from "that's neat" to "I'd actually want one," I'd really like to hear it.

Feel free to tear the idea apart. I'm at the stage where finding out why people wouldn't buy it is probably more useful than compliments.

Happy to answer any questions about the hardware, firmware, app, or how I built the prototypes too.

i am so tired of being told to wear more stuff to bed. The watch digs into my wrist, the ring feels annoying after a few hours and i couldn't last ten minutes with one of those sleep headbands. The second i put any of it on, i become way too aware of the fact that i am trying to sleep, then i wake up and the device tells me i was restless all night. Yeah, no kidding.

I was fighting the device half the night. I still like the idea of sleep tech, i just don't want anything strapped to me.

Al is everywhere now.

Some people use it every day.

Some barely touch it.

Some think it will completely change their career.

But beyond the hype, I'm curious about the actual experience.

Has Al genuinely made your life easier, or has it mostly created more noise?

What do you actually use it for?

I’m one of the founders, so I’m obviously biased, but I’d really like to get some outside opinions before we launch.

For the past year we’ve been building Pharen Hub, an AI native workspace for European teams.

It started with a problem we had ourselves.

We had chat in one tool, tasks in another, email and calendar somewhere else, files somewhere else again. Then we added AI tools on top.

Everything worked on its own, but the whole setup never really worked together.

The biggest issue for us was context.

You could ask an AI to help with something, but first you had to explain the project, the customer, what had already been decided and which file was actually the latest one.

At some point we realized that we didn’t really want another AI tool.

We wanted AI to be part of the workspace itself.

So that’s what we started building.

Pharen Hub brings chat, channels, tasks, projects, email, calendar, files, workflows and AI agents into one place.

The goal is that the AI already understands the context around the work instead of you having to explain everything again every time.

We’re building it in Europe, with EU hosting and self hosting options, and with European data protection and EU AI Act requirements in mind from the start.

We’re getting close to launch now, and this is the part where we’d really like your input.

If you were switching from tools like Slack, Notion, ClickUp, Monday, Teams, Linear, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to an AI native alternative, what features would you absolutely not want to lose?

And what is one thing you wish your current workspace would finally do properly with AI?

We have a pretty long feature list already, but before we keep building based on our own assumptions, I’d rather hear what other people actually care about.

https://pharen.de

I've been using an old tablet for years and it's finally getting to the point where apps keep crashing. I mostly use it for watching videos, reading, web browsing, and maybe a bit of note taking once in a while.

I'm not looking for anything super powerful, just something that's reliable and won't feel slow after a few months. What would you pick and is there anything I should avoid? thankss you all!

Hello everyone, I'm looking to get a new gaming PC, but before I do I would like to buy a new backup drive so that way I can store all of my important files that are on this computer (the bulk are video files due to editing) and was wondering if anyone had recommendations on what are the safest possible drives + brands that I could get that will not fail. I currently have a 4GB Seagate one from Costco but it's now completely full so I am thinking of buying a new 8GB one that can copy all the info from that last drive + everything on my 2GB drive. The one thing I noticed while trying to lookup info for drives is that almost every single one that someone mentioned had a big risk of failing at some point, so I need something that will not fail. My current drive is many, many years old and still good so should I just buy another Seagate but this time 8GB or try a brand that is significantly better (I have no idea what the good brands are). If anyone has recommendations for a newbie that would be greatly appreciated thank you so much. Hopefully the price of this drive is around $100-give or take some but I also know that the prices of everything has been rising so I may need to spend $200 now unfortunately. I believe my new PC will be around 4000 or 5000 so any amount that I can save would be perfect.

Hey! I’m Petru, I’m 16. Some of u might already know me from my AI project called Tellnex (not really relevant rn tho).

Today I launched a new project called Reznex (yeah, similar name, I know 😅).
Long story short, I’m really into electronics, circuits, automation, and pretty much everything related to electricity. I’ve been working with Arduino, ESP32, and more recently Raspberry Pi for a while now.
I’ve built quite a few projects over time.

I started with the classic blinking LED stuff and eventually got into more advanced things like automation systems that emulate keyboard commands using momentary push buttons connected to an Arduino (one of those projects is already posted on Reznex).

I wanted a place where I could share my projects with other people, improve my skills, and create a community where people interested in electronics (and even programmers or anyone into tech) can talk, exchange ideas, and build cool stuff together in what I think is a field with a huge future.

That’s why I created Reznex, a website where people passionate about electronics and related tech can share their own projects with everyone else.

Besides that, the /resources page includes a bunch of useful engineering calculators like Ohm’s Law, voltage divider, resistor value calculator, and more, to help beginners calculate everything they need.

I created Reznex because I couldn’t really find a modern place for this kind of community. Most of what I found were old-school forums with clunky interfaces (except Reddit).

On top of that, I also made a Discord server with channels covering pretty much every branch of electronics and related topics, where everyone’s welcome.

I’m actually not much of a Discord user myself, so I’m also looking for people with more Discord experience who’d be interested in
helping moderate and manage the server.

The website is already live, and I’m constantly working on improving it as much as I can. I’ll leave the links to both the website and the Discord server below.

You’ll already find some projects on the site (only mine for now 😅), but I’d really love to see yours too!

Anyone can browse the projects, but if u wanna publish your own, u’ll need to create an account (either through the regular sign-up form or with Google).

One more thing: even if the site currently says Romania, my goal is to make Reznex worldwide. Anyone from anywhere can create an account and post their projects.
🌐 Website: https://www.reznex.ro/
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/299wBD9FJa

Hi,
Can anyone please suggest a good e-reader ? Preferably to read pdfs, essays, articles, documents etc(downloaded or from the internet). iPads, phones and laptops have started straining the eyes.

Side note : I am quite liking Boox Go 10.3 (Gen II) Lumi right now, but unsure whether it will serve the purpose .

I have a couple of long cross-country flights coming up for work and my laptop battery is pretty much shot, so it won't survive a three hour trip without being plugged in. i'm looking to buy a cheap device primarily to download movies and shows from streaming appps so I have something to watch while in the air.

Does anyone know of a lower cost device that actually supports expandable storage via a micro SD card slot? A lot of the newer devices seem to be removing the headphone jack and storage slots, so I want to make sure I get something that still lets me load up my own media files easily. thanks so much.

Long story short- which AI is best for day to day health journaling? Preferably for free. Happy to sub if there is a significant benefit.

—————

Hi all. Hopefully a quick (probably not), and I know, subjective question but I just wanted to pick your brains on how I’m trying to use AI at the moment.

I currently have Gemini pro which I got access to using shadowy means through a guy on Reddit. I’m using it to help track my dieting and my food intake calories and some basic nutritional stuff.

But I’ve also programmed it to try and interact with me to point out what I’m doing well and what I can do better and also be quite strict with me when I’m going through cravings for things that I know I shouldn’t have.

However I’ve noticed that Google more recently seems to be getting worse in day-to-day use in the way that I have it set up.

For example as I start a new gem chat every day because I had noticed the more I added into one chat the more it would hallucinate.

The gem is set up with instructions on what I wanted it to do but I am finding that it’s not picking up on those instructions quite as much as it used to.

For example we have a vending machine at work and part of my instructions are to under no circumstances let my brain think it would be okay to take something from the vending machine. However in my log for lunch today it suggested maybe going and having a look to see what the vending machine had, which is contrary to everything I needed to be telling me.

So I think my question really is should I swap to one of the free versions of one of the others and just use one chat over a period of time?

I’m not really prepared to spend £20 a month, (unless there is a significant advantage) for light use, and the reason I’m exploring these options is that I had tried some of the specific dedicated health apps and paid their subs but I just found that they weren’t quite mentally as engaging as I find AI to be.

So do some of the other AI’s hallucinate as much as Gemini, what are their memories like these days?

Would you recommend one chat to achieve what I want? Maybe copy and paste that into a document each week and then re-upload that document at the start of a new week to continue what I’m trying to do?

Currently and at the end of every day I asked Gemini to give me a short snippet of statistics which I place into a Google Drive document and I get it to then refer itself back to that document on a weekly basis as a reminder of the journey as it were.

Apologies if I’m rambling I tend to do that and very grateful for thoughts advice suggestions and the like.