What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?
What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?
I have to say it’s my virtual assistant I’ve made. It saves me a lot of time with making reminders and such alarms for meetings or interviews, music etc.
I'm pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it's expectations. It's also kind of wasteful to wash clothes too often.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations.
Wouldn't it simple revert to the class based system of cleanliness we had before?
My dryer was down for a bit so I had to hang clothes to dry. Slight inconvenience that really made me appreciate having a washing machine that still worked.
Massive respect to people (most often women) around the world who have washed clothes by hand. The cleaning of the clothes is bad enough but there's also the fetching of (or travelling to) a lot of water.
mechanized laundry is second only to modern medicine, imo
followed closely by indoor plumbing and dishwashers
Indoor plumbing wins all of them for me, for one my washing machine wouldn't be worth it without, and for another it'd be hard to access clean water to rinse wounds and drink medicine.
Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.
I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.
My refrigerator/freezer. Lets me buy food at ideal times (sales etc) and keep it fresh until it is conveneient for me, sometimes months later in the case of the freezer.
Water infrastructure.
Be it indoor plumbing or a flushable toilet or a water treatment plant, without water infrastructure modern civilization would be impossible.
Password manager (saves time typing passwords) and adblocker (saves time wasted on ads and of course malicious content).
Air fryer. Honestly, this thing just makes cooking easier. I don't need to stand in front of the oven or grill to make something. Just bung stuff in and come back in 15 mins.
My urine bottles. Standing up to go to the toilet is too hard for me.
Edit: Also my phone is great because it enables me to call my wife (or my caretaker if he is approved) to give me food or new urine bottles.
Google Maps. On the day before a long weekend, my drive home can turn into a two-hour slog. I keep Google Maps open and there's nothing better than hearing that "Ping! We've found you a faster route."
@spittingimage Google is pretty good at its job, I can say that.
Waze. It really is exceptional at avoiding traffic. I know it's dependent on higher user volume, but, in my area it is very popular with a lot of input.
I also love the user warnings. I've dodged many things I'd rather not run over in my car. From dead skunks to a ladder in middle of the highway.
Yes, Waze is amazing! Works really hard well, especially when there's unusual traffic. Love it.
I don’t know if it saves time or not, but all the ad-busting plug-ins and PiHole I have installed. I set up a VPN that I can connect to with my phone that sends the connection through the PiHole so I get to enjoy less ads on the mobile, too.
I really despise the “open” unfiltered internet. It’s become a cesspool of ads. Mobile sites that leave you with an inch to view the site as the top and bottom become cluttered with banners, autoplay ads, cookie demands, all with super tiny “x” that are designed to not register or deliberately mis-tap to open the ad. Desktop sites with full-screen ads, autoplay, etc.
Yeah. I don’t know about “can’t live without”, but ad-scrubbing and blocking is a huge necessity just to get things done and not have to deal with all the garbage being inserted between you and what you need to do.
Yes it saves time. More than you know.
And while you could live with out it, you shouldn't - ad block has become the one of the first layers of internet security. You can't download more ram if you don't see the link.
My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.
At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.
I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script".
Water heater.
Also washing machine and dish washer. As someone living alone, this is the tits.
A dishwasher is a luxury for sure, but it's also more economical when it comes to water and electricity than your sink is. Plus it saves quite a bit of time.
My kindle changes the books I read into OpenDyslexic font, which allows me to read much faster and with less fatigue.
Does every model have that?
I mean, "tech wise" is incredibly generic. Electricity itself is pretty much essential and something I'd have a hard time living without.
As for more recent tech, the internet. I can "live without", but a lot of stuff I do for entertainment and self education needs it. There's also the discovery, finding out about new stuff that interests me, that'd be much harder without the internet.
Even if you removed several sites, if the 'net was something like it was back in 1994, there'd still be enough content and people around to get good amounts of information back and forth, plus file sharing.
As for time saved, just think about trying to discover, not even acquire or read, just know about, some 2 or 3 books in an "obscure" subject, something that your circle of contacts is unlikely to know anything about, that local book stores probably won't have. Same applies for games or media that said circle of contacts are unlikely to know about. Basically, you have to take the dive and explore and, depending on what you were looking for, you'd come empty handed, or have to contend with a "better than nothing" alternative.
What I can learn in 10 minutes courtesy of the internet is staggering.
Even if I was at a library, standing in front of the card catalog, it would take longer to even find a book/periodical to even start a search on a subject.
Add my pocket computer (yea, we call them smart phones) with note-taking apps, and what I can study/learn and keep in a searchable personal DB of sorts is just amazing. It's something that was talked about before personal computers were even ubiquitous, and it arrived incredibly quickly since then.
Electricity itself is pretty much essential and something I'd have a hard time living without.
Let me agree with you 100% here!
The taming of electromagnetism should be right up there with the taming of fire, agriculture, the alphabet and the printing press, as one of the most significant milestones in human history. And it is still an ongoing process.
This is stupid but I was just using it so it is on my mind: a calculator. Saves so much time and paper.
I don't know if it saves me time but my white noise machine. I literally cannot sleep without it.
My youngest had been falling asleep to "the sound of rain" that Google Assistant plays on request, I fear for the day when it goes away.
If that particular rain sound is your sons favorite, just record it. Don't let the whims of google take away things you like!
(Because its google, Chances are somebody already did and its on YouTube.)
There are so many rain sound videos on YouTube. I also have them on Spotify.
Smartphone with internet connection.
Rice cooker. Easily my favorite appliance.
A battery voltage tester was pretty cheap and I was surprised by how often I use it.
Any and all fixtures in my bathroom
A google map
I wish there was a viable alternative...the ones I've tried based on Open Map don't cut it.
A gas cooker. Same prob goes for electric. I cooked on solid fuels for an extended period of time and it is a very tough gig.
Most other technologies just seem to beget more time use. Even a simple light bulb requires the installation and maintenance of an electricity system, which is non-trivial and only results in you being able to stay awake longer, finding pointless things to do when you should be asleep or having sex.
I know people are going to come for me for this one, but definitely Notion. I know I don't own my data and what not, really would love to switch to Obsidian at some point, but I have trouble with markdown and I really prefer "What you see is what you get" editors. I have Notion databases for keeping track of physical video games I own, I write all of my notes for D&D campaigns in there, I have a reminders and to-do page. It's slow, it's not very privacy focused, but it's a dead simple and very feature packed tool to organize virtually anything.
As someone who loves both apps, you might be surprised with the functionality in Obsidian's plugin platform. I have to-dos, kanban boards, book reviews, media embeds. You can even use JavaScript to code with your files and their properties (not that everyone needs to do that of course).
I use Notion at work still, but Obsidian has come really far since I first heard of it. I will say though migrating has not been an easy process.
Thanks for letting me know, the few times I had tried Obsidian in the past I was unaware of plugins. Sounds like some of them might be adding the functionality I'm looking for! I'll definitely check it out again soon!