Akai EWI Solo
My partner insisted on getting me one of these as a gift because I like playing music. It’s cool for sure, and I enjoyed the little bit I’ve played on it, but there’s just no time. So it’s left to gather dust now.
I mean I could Google but what is it, what drew you to it
Not OP, but EWI is Electronic Wind Instrument. It’s basically a fancy MIDI controller/synthesizer in a clarinet-like format.
I paid around US$700-800 for a nice Neumann mic that I’d researched pretty well, but like a dumbass didn’t realise that it required power, meaning I couldn’t just hook in to my amp like your basic Shure.
So later on as a solution, I got myself a Focusrite powered amp-interface that has a bonus of being able to route guitar and mic input in to USB. Spent hours trying to get everything working and kept running in to problems. IIRC the USB signal was barely received by my computer, and the only way the amp received a signal is if the computer was powering the thing, which shouldn’t have been a requirement as it already had power.
I just went back to my Shure while that fancy stuff gathers dust. Similar thing with my Ableton.
90% of people here would have to say “my car”.
What would be some commonly unused features?
The 200hp engine to move the metal box at a speed of 15 kmh in city traffic from one red light to the next…
Driving it, believe it or not. Even a car that’s used to commute to work every day still sits parked most of the day.
100% agree on “car” and came to the comments with it in mind.
As much as it sits unused the majority of the time though, that isn’t what I was thinking - what I was thinking is how I’ve never get to “fully use” it, or any sports car I’ve owned for that matter, as to me fully using it would entail bringing it to a track, REALLY putting it through it’s paces, and pushing it to the limits it was actually designed for. While it is great fun to drive (safely) around town, and comfort and luxury were absolutely large parts of the engineering that went into it, it’s hardly living up to it’s full potential!
But, like, cats wear out by use, not time. (For the most part.)
A car is good for, say, 300,000 km. If you drive 300K in it, then you “fully used” the car.
That’s like saying a pad of paper isn’t used when it’s sitting on your shelf. Technically true, maybe, but the pad is used up when it’s out of sheets. It doesn’t make sense to measure the utilization time for a consumable, like paper or a car.
Well true, the engine may be good for 300k miles. But if it sits parked all the time, the body will rust long before you get to “fully use” it.
I bought some kit for running TTRPGs just before COVID hit, wet erase markers, Chessex mat, extra dice bags, DM screen, and some cheap minis. Then when COVID hit I adopted a Virtual tabletop (Foundry). Over the course of the pandemic, my gaming group evolved to include people from all over the province, and so now there’s not really any hope of playing an in-person session. Not to mention I switched to playing PF2E, which is really hard to run in-person because of how much crunchier it is. So now I have this stuff and don’t really know when I will get to use it.
3d printer
As someone who has been in the 3d printing space for awhile, I am amazed at how cheap and featured the entry level printers are. For ~$150 you can get a printer with auto bed leveling and a magnetic bed. At $15/lb of filament, you only need a few projects to pay for itself.
For example, I printed the housing for a USB hub for a friend which is a clone for a ridiculously expensive one that fits Lovesac couches and he paid me $50. It cost ~$2 of filament and ended up printing a few more for others. That alone paid for the cost of the printer.
For anyone who is thinking about it, now is a great time to enter the hobby.
Which cad software do you use? I’ve been jumping from blender, openscad, and freecad
Depending on the complexity of the part either Fusion 360, Tinkercad, or even just 3d Builder. I usually can find something close already existing and just modify that.
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Get to it! Such a fun hobby
I have promised it to my brother as its a resin printer and he paints warhammer
not much use. mostly to rarely print a few bits and pieces when i need a repair or something very specific for a project.
2020 Shelby Mustang GT350R. I paid $80k for it and then another $25k at Shelby American in Vegas for the signature edition package. Bought it new in 2020 and it now has about 1500 miles on it.
It was my dream car but I just never have the time to drive it.
Trust me, it will go up in value… In 2070.
My car’s extended warranty.
They finally tracked you down huh
Back in December I spent $550 on a refurbrished home theater projector. After actually thinking things through, I realized that in my current living situation, the whole idea isn’t going to work. I went back to watching movies on my TV and sometimes even my monitor.
I still haven’t taken the projector out of the plastic wrapping, and I’ve been contemplating re-selling it on eBay so I can at least get my money back…but I highly doubt that will happen.
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I’ll go tree fiddy
can you use it in the backyard?
I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.
Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.
Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.
Sell it, dude
That’s why I only buy collector’s edition blurays. At least it has the extra stuff that’s worth the money.
Sony really knows how to fuck up an experience and shove their own consumer around
Wanted to re-watched something I couldn’t find on torrents in good quality, so I bought a cheap Blu-ray player and holy shit it was painful.
I’d forgotten how annoying all the warnings and menus were; JUST PLAY THE BLOODY SHOW!
As great as just playing the show is, I actually really like DVD/Blu-ray menus because of the little extras you get on some of them. It makes the disk feel more special compared to straight up video files on a storage device. The warnings can be a little annoying, but otherwise I don’t mind as much.
Also, I’m lucky enough to have yet to find a DVD/Blu-ray that stutters or has audio glitches on the Vizio Blu-ray player I got at a thrift store, so I’m lucky.
The deleted scenes and commentary audio tracks were cool, but idk if I’d actually watch any of it now. I heard years ago that there’s a whole system for “MST3King” a movie manually with community commentary tracks that effectively do the same thing and I’ve never cared enough to figure out how to set it up and try one, so I don’t know if I’d ever actually watch a DVD commentary even if I had the option.
Maybe it would be cool for Taskmaster, since I’ve seen every episode so many times and continue to rewatch it? But I rarely re-watch anything anymore. And I don’t think TV shows got commentary tracks anyway.
And deleted scenes could probably just be found on YouTube, I assume? I don’t know because I haven’t cared enough to search, lol.
I haven’t watched the extra content in years, just don’t care, Matrix was probably the last time I watched that stuff.
A pool. It came with the house, but damn is it expensive to maintain. I say I’ve never gotten full use out of it because I spend way more time and energy maintaining it, than I do using it.
Our house used to have a hot tub and still has the concrete pad, electrical hookup, and other equipment necessary to run the hot tub. I have never been interested in maintaining it. Can’t even do naked hot tubbing because the neighbor’s house looks right over the hot tub pad.
Sounds like you need to invest in fixing it up. Big short term cost vs death by a thousand cuts
It’s not really that it needs to be fixed up. The chemicals and supplies are outrageously overpriced. Then there always seems to be some major issue every year or two. I’ve lived in the house for 7 years and have had to replace the control board and the pump. I had to replace $2,500 worth of piping after Texas cut my power for 3 days during freezing temperatures. Then last summer it was so hot the ground shifted and it broke two return lines that had to be repaired through the concrete deck. And I know by next year it will be due for resurfacing.
Rent it out for parties like Airbnb for pools and you can recoup the cost.
I believe there was someone on Shark Tank trying to get funding for an app to let people do that. If I remember correctly he did not get funded.
I would also assume there are some legal obligations with that. Like having to have lifeguards or other safety measures a public pool is required, that a house would not have.
Plus people are gross. I’m sure this would only increase the amount of cleaning I would need to do.
This was my criteria for buying a house : no pool !
Smart man. My wife convinced me to get it swearing she would take care of it. Apparently her idea of taking care of it was to hire someone for $350 a month. And that price didn’t include the chemicals.
On the other hand I did took care of a pool for a while, it was in a villa that my in laws owned.
We did a few things that helped lowering the maintenance cost and the pool was pristine.
First thing is a salt chlorinator. It keeps a constant (low) chlorine level so the pool stays clean, there is no more chlorine smell and you only need to top up salt after too much rain.
Then we were using hardware store muriatic acid to bring the pH up and baking soda to control alkalinity. We still went to the pool store to get productd for the calcium hardness and cyanuric acid.
The last thing is a bit more involved but this is what made the biggest difference on the bill is to replace the pump with a DC pump directly connected to refurbished solar panels, no batteries, no inverter. This way when there is a lot of sun the pump is running a lot, a little sun and the pump is running a little.
It’s perfect since the amount of algae development is proportional to the amount of sunlight. There is almost no electronic in the system, just a extremely reliable DC pump and solar panels that can last for decades, I found that to be a great low-tech solution.
However we were in a tropical country, I have no idea if this would apply in another climate.
My Les Paul. I go in fits and spurts with learning to play the guitar, and haven’t gotten around to figuring out the effects of all combinations of the volume & control knobs.
Why buy a Les Paul of all things if you’re still learning?
It was on sale, and prior to that I had a shitty acoustic which was zero fun to play, so I wanted something nicer that would last me a long time.
I would 100% recommend taking lessons. I waited 25 years to start lessons and wish I’d done it much sooner. It’s amazing how much you can improve in 6 months. And even professional touring musicians in really big bands still take lessons. It’s only theoretically possible to self teach yourself, but practically very hard, especially if you have no musical background. If nothing else it gives you a motivation to practice whatever you’ve been set the previous 1 or 2 weeks.
Just play it, my dude. I bought a fancy PRS because it fit my hands right, and it had a ding on the neck so the guy didn’t want it.
I straight up suck at guitar and can only play shitty 90’s alt and some pentatonic stuff, but it’s still fun.
If you want to get better at just making stuff up on the guitar, learn the pentatonic scale, pick four to six notes, and just jam with those notes. I like (2) 4-6, (3) 4-6, and (4) 4-6. You can bounce around between those and sound pretty cool.
This is helpful, thanks! I’ve been using Justin Guitar to learn, and have only learned one pentatonic so far, but I’m interested to learn others. Cheers!
I have a college degree I have never used. It wasn’t cheap even tho much of it was paid with grants.
Art?
Nah, gotta be music/sound related
Bachelor of Science! Recreation related.
First edition, first run of the three Lord of the Rings books.
I can’t bring myself to open them up and mess with the pages.
I mean, yeah. The point of collectibles like that is in owning the thing, not using the thing. Read the ebook instead.
Or the BBC radio play, which is the best version of LotR ever, including the original books and films, and I’ll die on that hill.
The duality of book owning.
But you bought a reading copy as well, right?
Right?
I have one, but it’s not the same as the original.
I have posted pictures of the books for people who want to see the original maps included in the books.
I suppose the anti cat gate. Got it because new kitten wasn’t getting along with adult cat. Kitten continued to not get along despite doing everything and asking the vet for more advice.
Kitten is with my mother and her cats and he gets along with both of them.
The anti cat gate stands there, expensively.
The anti cat gate stands there, expensively.
Lol I’m feeling the stare from here
My house. There has never been a point in time where there was not at least one room unusable due to ongoing renovation.
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How do you keep having renovations? How do you even sustain that?
They might have bought a “project house” and went the DIY route. Especially big country house, etc. In France I knew folks that bought a super cheap “small” castle, and have been constantly renovating for years and years. For example when up keeping the windows, by the time they get to the last one they can already start over with the first one again.
Bought a fixer-upper and my wife is a lot more aggressive about starting projects than she is about finishing them.
An ecoflow battery generator. Granted, it’s a small-ish one but I got this itch to purchase one after seeing one in action while car camping (“I can use my hot water kettle while camping, how cool!”) and when our city was warning us about widespread power outages from an upcoming winter storm (“to keep our devices powered up”).
