I see posts talking about good BIFL items but I don’t hear much about the other side of products that are bad or products you bought but don’t even use.
I read somewhere that GoPros and other action cameras are one of the least used purchases, so I figured “that should mean there’s plenty on eBay”. So grabbed up second hand bargain, played around with it for a couple of weeks, bought some extra batteries and other accessories, and since then it’s sat in the cupboard except for a single occasion.
Turns out you don’t need an action cam if you’re not getting any action.
I have the same thing with a drone
Many lemmy users have the same thing with a wife
ha ha women objectification funny
The good thing is GoPros are still good years later. Most of the action my GoPro 4 has seen was in the last 2-3 years after sitting for a really long time.
I had one that must’ve fallen out of my pocket when I got out of the car, because a few days later I found it half embedded in the dirt driveway after getting ran over. It was scuffed and scratched, but still worked! I don’t think the battery holds a charge anymore, but it is like 10 years old now
Oh damn I totally forgot about that one. My dad bought a go pro and I could’ve used it to film my scuba diving event but we couldn’t figure out where to mount it.
Dick mount.
Do people actually use those to—erm—document the proceedings?
I’ve seen it done!
I won one at an office Christmas party, took a time lapse of my chia pet, put it in a drawer for a year and felt guilty, then sold it to a ski instructor. It’s kind of like taking a video of fireworks or a concert. Unless you’re doing some wild extreme sports, who’s editing and rewatching that kind of video?
My dental aligners :(
I’ve been trying to get braces since I was a teenager, so long that I kind of lost sight of why I wanted braces. I was almost 30 when I finally took my savings to an orthodontist and told him I wanted braces, and he told me that the aligners would work better than braces.
And he was right. That’s not the problem. I got so caught up with the general idea of braces that I’d forgotten that my goal as a kid was to fix my jaw, not my teeth. Even braces won’t do that at my age. Those savings would have been better spent on surgery.
It was years ago, but it was an unbranded, generic portable CD player. It was awful. It kept skipping forward and backward on the track whenever it wasn’t still, so basically “portable” was false advertising because it was only usable when sat still on a table. Since then, whatever I buy, I make sure it’s from a recognised brand that has some reputation to lose.
A Leap-Motion
ooooohhhh isn’t that the cool hand sensor that sits on your desk and was supposed to change the way we interact with our computers ?
Yup. Thing is, touch less interaction is very awkward, anything with any kind of feedback is much better (including touchscreen). It never stood a chance
A desk cycle. My keyboard is on a low pull-out shelf (more ergonomic) which got in the way of any meaningful cycling while I was trying to work.
The good news is that I eventually did get off my ass and started running for exercise, first on the treadmill at home and now I do it outside. Still have the desk cycle in the basement.
Same thing here.
I bought a Valve Index two years ago, had fun with it for a couple weeks, then never used it again :-\
me too! i stuck with mine quite a bit longer, but it ended up in the box all the same. there are very few good vr games that don’t have that tech demo-y format lots of early titles had. and valve’s promises of linux support were quite exaggerated, which made playing the couple games i kept coming back to even less convenient or just a worse experience. i stopped playing half life alyx halfway through, and came back and i couldn’t get it to run on my linux pc anymore - like, thats the single game/hardware combo valve promised would 100% work on linux.
its kinda sad because i really believed in consumer vr back then, but seeing how the industry has stagnated has shown that either it isn’t possible or we aren’t ready for cheap, good, open vr. nobody is making good vr games because there are no users and there are no users because its too expensive to get a good vr rig and there are no games.
I wanna get one for bear saber. That game looks fun. Also, vr chat with an actual vr headset would be cool
My husband got an Oculus before they were bought out only to find out he gets motion sick with most games. I don’t get motion sick ever so he was excited to see me try out his library of cool starship and fighter games and all I ever play on it is beat saber, lol. The custom map scene is where it’s at!
Mine is basically a Beat Saber machine; it’s great.
There are a lot of fun games, but it’s more like a mini game experience a lot of the time.
I’ve been on the vr train since 2016, i eveb did dev work for a few vr companies. imo I think there are 2 problems with vr this time around. 1st is movement, joystick style movement makes half the userbase sick to their stomach, teleport feels terrible to the other half, supporting both invariably breaks game balance. There are hardware solutions but they are still in their infancy and are huge and expensive for the most part. The result is an already small userbase fracturing even more.
Second problem is less serious, there are games with fun mechanics, there are games with good, long stories and progression. There are very very few games that have both. This makes all the games feel like demos.
I love the potential of vr games, but there just isn’t enough content out there to make it worth.
the main reason i have avoided vr is it feels uncomfortable as fuck to have a brick on my face imo…
tho i saw some recently on a utube video that used micro oleds and were more like goggles than a brick. looked a lot lighter and more comfortable. still not really tempted to buy one tho
Nevermind the walled garden problem. We’ve got potentially great content locked behind different storefronts requiring different hardware for each.
In the quest for dominance, everyone is losing.
Like, I understand Valve’s “no exclusive content” stance, but they really should consider pumping publishing money into vr software studios, but with an open platform clause. A healthy ecosystem of software will enable VR to thrive. Either that or engage in negotiations with the other players to create a VR collective agreement. It’ll never happen, but one can dream.
So many untouched videogames.
My ab roller.
The 1kg bag of brown rice I bought to be healthier.
Amazon Prime.
A fake olive tree that sits in my living room.
A Nintendo Switch. A Steam Deck would probably be a better purchase.
Hotdogger. Doesn’t work as advertised.
I bought an immersion blender on like prime day or black Friday with grandiose plans of using it for all kinds of things. 3 years later, and it’s still in the box
Split pea soup
Refried beans, or short burst to thicken bean pot
Protein shakes
A bread machine. Had good reviews. I used it like 3 or 4 times. The mixing things are too small to mix the dough properly, and having to fish them out of the bread after it was done was a huge hassle. The bread was not great… Shell was too hard, and the top side didn’t cook properly. Then I realized, I could basically do the same with a planetary mixer that can mix the dough and the normal oven, and the end result was far better.
There are good bread machines. I stopped eating bread so I gave one away that made awesome bread, especially French bread.
It was also nice for make pizza dough. Stopped eating that too.
That’s a shame. When I wasn’t sure whether we’d actually make use of a bread machine, I picked up an entry level one for like $100 (Canadian).
Since then, we’ve made probably 100+ loaves, saving money and reducing both food waste and plastic. It’s been one of our best kitchen purchases.
I’d suggest trying a different recipe. It can make a huge difference to the end result.
Surprised I had to scroll to see bread machine.
I bought a rather expensive machine… used it 3 times, bread is not very good.
Then I went down the homemade sourdough rabbit hole, now I am making artisan loafs with my homemade starter… super enjoyable process and the bread is amazing!
I use bread machines for mixing the dough and resting and stuff and then bake in the oven on a pan. Am I crazy for that?
Same here, I did make some amount of bread as a sort of novelty, but after a month most of my use came down to having it make my pizza dough for me. Did that for years.
I just use a planetary mixer that can mix the dough. It uses a lot less space, and it can be used for multiple purposes. For resting, rising, i will just transfer it over to the pan and put it somewhere warm, like next to the radiator or in the oven on a very low setting.
Honestly it’s easier to do small batch of bread by hand than machine, you’ll have to clean a lot more thing afterward with machine mixing. These day there’s autolyse to help cut out the kneading.
I bought an Instant Pot back in 2017. I’ve never used it.
Games on Steam sales.
Using the Steam refund system more actively has helped me a lot in this regard. At this point I refund about 80% of my purchases - simply because a lot of the games do not engage me after the first 40 minutes.
I bought so many games on sale after I got my first grown-up job, that just ended up sitting in my library while I played the same 3 games. I bought a Steam Deck 6 months ago and it’s been great for clearing out my backlog. I love being able to play games sitting in the recliner instead of at a desk.
Back in the early 10’s I paid $200 for a year subscription license to Adobe Flash Pro, as I had convinced myself I was gonna learn to use it to produce sprite animations like the ones I grew up enjoying on Newgrounds. Never booted it once.
Flash as an embedded media platform was a blight on browser security. But strictly as an animation tool, it was pretty nifty. You can even use tools like Swivel to render Flash animations to video.
In the year of our lord 2024 there are probably way better tools than Flash ever was to do this sort of thing. But back in circa 2011 it was the best tool of its kind I knew of.
I’ve still yet to find a vector tool that works as well and easily as the one in flash. It was amazing. Ignoring the security, it was really way ahead of its time.
If you’re still up for some animation practice, Blender’s grease pencil is fantastic, free, and integrates with the rest of Blender very well
Blender has got to be one of the most hilariously vertically integrated apps I’ve ever seen. Next thing I’ll hear is it can file my taxes.
For a free piece of software it has no right being as good and as easy to use as it is.
I inherited a blender. I thought I’d absolutely use it. Nope. Food processor on the other hand is amazing and I want a better one someday
