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What's the best bang for your buck (in terms of QOL) purchase you've ever made? The cheaper the better.
I'd say in-ear earphones with solid ANC are up there. I'm sitting outside the arrivals section of a busy international airport, and I felt mildly annoyed by the honking and general noise with earphones on and ANC engaged. Then I took them off to check and was practically deafened. Yup, they're cutting down 90% of the cacophony.
I own a pair of Galaxy Buds 3 Pros, purchased at about £130. I think they sound great, the ANC isn't quite as good as the Airpods I bought my brother on his birthday, but it's clearly a cut above my older Buds 2 Pro (Plus?). I happen to prefer the sound quality, and unless you've got an iPhone, they're about the best you can get on an Android device that isn't rooted and running Libre Pods. In fact, good ANC tends to improve sound quality overall in my experience, as it preserves bass by changing the acoustic impedance.
(The default Android kernel has a buggy, non-compliant Bluetooth stack. Until Google upstreams a patch, you need the root to get actual standards compliance and the ability to make use of all the Airpods' features.)
I'm really happy with this soldering iron. Yes, I also have a standard weller rework station for serious work (which cost nearly three times used what this did new), but 95% of the stuff I do it's completely sufficient, the thing's easily luggable, I've ended up needing to solder in the field more often than I'd like to admit, and it's just an absolute joy to work with. There's still occasional situations where everything's so tightly spaced that I needed to haul out the old benzomatics, so I wouldn't complain if someone manufactured a version with a built-in battery, but being able to switch from wall power to a cheap usb battery pack and back is way more convenient most of the time.
These toolkits. They're not good -- the magnet inside the driver is held in by hope and prayer, the spadgers are about as strong as toothpicks, and the suction cup is aspirational -- but they cover pretty much any small electronics situation you're going to run into, and when someone inevitably loses the 5.5mm or the tweezers, it's just not that big a deal.
A good, quality, canvas satchel ('messenger bag') or hard-shell briefcase. Daily usage sorta thing, and extremely high-variance: I've seen mediocre bags in the 300+USD range, and 'classy' ones can get ridiculous (and I don't trust real leather to survive what I put mine through), but the low-end is crap that falls apart into plastic flakes in months if not weeks. And then there's also surprisingly good options in the 40-80 USD space. The ones I've been happiest with so far are Rothcos. They're not perfect. As you'd expect from a Chinese clone brand, there's some awkward design decisions, and I'd recommend hitting the shoulder straps with some reinforcement stitching. But compared to how floppy anything cheaper and canvas gets, or how quickly anything pleather degrades, it's a great sweet spot.
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