tell me the last thing you bought for under $50 that radically improved your life.

@kevin a rice steamer

@TorqueSpec @kevin

Yeah this. Although I pay $70 / year for a meditation app that comes with sleepy time stories.

@NefariousAryq @kevin truly the most useful tool that I have in my kitchen.

@kevin A set of those little food-safe silicone lids you can put on a regular kitchen bowl to turn that into a tupperware. *Instant* dishwashing load/kitchen waste reduction/no more running out of glasslock containers and can prep meals ahead better for the week.

They were six dollars.

@kimu @kevin Actual game-changer. Can’t imagine not having one now.

@kevin An apple slicer that creates 16 beautiful thin slices. Love it!

@kevin not the last thing I’ve purchased but my aeropress coffee maker cost me $20 and has probably been my most stable relationship

@kevin Does Propranolol count haha.

@kevin
hair clippers

@kevin @SRLevine Hard to beat a really good vegetable peeler.

@kevin Tubi because it is free and it recreates, virtually, the feeling of going into a Blockbuster circa 1997.

@dylanre @kevin i) which restaurant? ii) do they count as restaurants in airports?

@slacy where do you live that it's so frequently dark? underground?

@montybrewster @kevin i) the whistler brewing bar in the domestic terminal and ii) it depends on how hungry you are.

@kevin common reading glasses from a department store https://www.hema.nl/search?q=leesbrillen

@kevin Wilderness permits for my kids and I to backpack 5 days in the Sierras before they went to college.

@kevin breadknife

@Abmart345

Mine cost me nearly $40 (you lucky stiff) but yeah, I keep coming back to it... I've had my Gen2 (safe plastic) 'Press for over a decade now, still going...

@kevin

@kevin I think they were _right at_ $50, but: Bicycle gloves, winter-style. They're almost mittens, but the index finger is free, so you can still do stuff like mess with your ebike's boost level, the other three fingers are together for warmth (and frankly, I haven't noticed my index finger being noticeably cooler), the "mitten" part is covered with SEE ME green on the back so folks behind me can easily see me signalling for a turn, and it means when I have to run out in a slushy mix to get meds for somebody who's sick, _I'm_ not frozen-handedly miserable at the end of the ride... Definite radical improvement.

Oh, along those lines: a GoreTex "cap" for my bike helmet. My helmet is _well ventilated_, as in summer months I get warm easily, but the rest of the year, I want to keep the wind and rain OUT... it just pops on the helmet like a shower cap. WARM. (Sometimes I'll take it off to go in the store, so the vents are open, and then pop it back on when I get back to the bike... it's that easy.)

And I'll second the emotion of (a) Aeropress and (b) kitchen scale... I've actually got two of the latter, a bigger gram-accurate scale for weighing bigger things (flour, rice, broth, tomatoes, the like) and a tenth-gram-accurate one for coffee, yeast, salt, etc... which also has a timer in it for brewing coffee... no faffing about with separate gadgets when trying to make one's brew... you _can_ spend way more than $50 for one of these things, fully-integrated Bluetooth webfangled whatchamacalits, but those folks are way more serious about their coffee than me...

@kevin an Auracast Bluetooth transmitter for £40. Now I can share the audio from my Chromebook with my family whilst watching videos on long train journeys.