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.
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).
What password manager do you use? I use Keeper, but I wonder if there’s a cheaper alternative that’s just as good that I haven’t looked into. I never hear of anyone using this one on Lemmy.
The best is Keepass. The easiest is Bitwarden. Both are free :)
How do they make money?
From people like me who pay for Bitwarden.
Well I like free and I really need to tighten my budget with how expensive everything is getting. Thanks for the recommendations! Now for the hard part of figuring how to change all my passwords from one manager to another lol.
You should be able to export them in an appropriate format from your current pw manager and then import them into keepass or bitwarden. Unless your current manager has a proprietary format for vendor lock-in. I’ve transitioned google > bitwarden > keepass and it was fine. Consider making a donation if you find them useful.
I might have to do this too
Keepass + Syncthing
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Why do you hate to admit that? GPT and LLM’s are tools
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Yeah I wouldn’t feel guilty in the least my friend, highly competent people are using LLM’s to improve their efficiency. People have an unfounded fear (for now) that AI is going to replace them and their job, but the reality is that someone who is efficiently using AI is going to take their job if they’re not
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You’re not crazy.
Think of Alfred Nobel: inventor of dynamite and exasperated that it was used for evil, not just for good. Founded the Nobel Peace Prize to make amends.
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.
Autohotkey
Limitless custom hot keys on my computer. Each one saves me a few seconds, adding up to hours and hours saved, especially having stuff automated so I can save the headspace
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.
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What’s your flavor? My brain is going mushy, and I stress myself out constantly by worrying about missing appointments/deadlines.
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Ah, that’s fair. I guess I just need to commit to one path and just start developing habits. Thanks!
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.
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 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”.
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 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.
A battery voltage tester was pretty cheap and I was surprised by how often I use it.
