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Notes -
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.)
Unironically, my wooden spoons. They cost me something like $10-20 for the 4 I have, and I've had them for something like 17 years now. They aren't flashy but I use them all the time and the cost per time is insanely low.
I'll counter with "(heat-safe) silicone cooking utensils", the ideal material for a house full of semi-competent cooks. All my stuff is 15 or 20 years old, and over that length of time everything eventually gets accidentally left on a hot pan, where wood surfaces turn to char, nylon and other plastics turn to goo and poison-smoke, and good silicone just shrugs it off and stays good-as-new.
Plus I'm too lazy to hand-wash (much less oil) wooden spoons like I do with my wooden cutting board, and I've noticed that wood tends to get gradually ruined by automatic dishwashing.
Oh trust me, I don't hand wash my wooden spoons. They go in the dishwasher with everything else. They're still going strong (honestly, people baby wooden spoons too much from what I've seen online), but even if they got ruined one of these days I'm not going to be upset. They were cheap as hell, so I'll just go buy another $20 pack of spoons that will last me for a decade or more.
I do have silicone spatulas and I agree they are excellent. My only complaint is that they have no rigidity at all so they don't pick stuff up or scrape particularly well. But I have other tools for that (including some metal and plastic utensils for the right situation).
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