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  • Depends on what someone thinks of as expensive.

    But I had been saving up for a new digital SLR.

    I had bought an okay point and shoot years ago, and couldn't justify replacing it just because. Then the thing disappeared. Tore the house apart looking for it. Nada. Nobody has been in the house where it was stored at all, so my best guess is that I did something like loan it to someone while half asleep, or otherwise go brain dead and shove it somewhere weird.

    Anyway, looked at my budget, guesstimated what I could afford, what I'd need to take the kind of pictures I wanted, and bloody well picked up a decent enough Canon. More camera than I need, but that also means I can use it until it falls apart and be plenty satisfied with anything I shoot. I mostly take pics of my chickens. But they're good pics.

    Makes me wish I'd done it ages ago. Not that the pics the previous one took are bad, these are just better.

  • I got a new RC airplane. A SIG Kadet LT-40 ARF (Almost Ready to Fly). It's a trainer with a 70" wingspan (~1.8 meters)

    A lot of RC airplanes these days come ready to go... almost everything is pre-installed including the electric motor, ESC (electronic speed controller), servos, control surface hinges, you name it. The problem is they're all made out of styrofoam, and while they work and fly well enough, they don't appeal to me as much as a balsa and plywood model where you pick all of the components yourself.

    To me it's like the difference between buying a prebuilt computer that comes with Windows on it vs building my own computer.

    This one is an ARF, which means the major components are pre-built, but there is some final gluing and assembly to do.

    The Kadet LT-40 is a trainer, and I only got it so I can teach other people how to fly should the need arise. All in, I've spent about $950 on it. I bought good quality stuff which increases the cost, plus I even bought a 2nd transmitter to use as a buddy box during training. The student will use one transmitter, and I'll have my transmitter in hand ready to take over before they crash.

    With cheaper components I could have reduced the cost by $200 at least. To me it's worth the extra in order to have stuff that I know is good quality.

    Was it worth it? I think it will be, yes. I've been flying RC planes on and off for 20 years, and even if I don't have any students, this will be fun for me to fly.

  • Kindle Scribe 2022 discounted to something like €250. My old e-reader was dog slow and I’ve been going through many pages of physical notebooks lately so it looked like it would solve many of my issues. Software is shit but can be worked around and the hardware is just 👌. Very happy with the thing for this price.

    • On the opposite end of the size spectrum, I bought a Boox Palma (smartphone-sized) a little over a year ago, and $300 felt like a lot for a small e-reader... I had originally bought it as a "companion" device to my dumb-phone, since it runs Android and has google play services, but I found that even that small single layer of friction to use smart-apps (starting up hotspot on my phone, taking out the Palma, disabling airplane mode) made it extremely easy to just quit cold turkey, and I have pretty much only read on it.

      I have found that I read SO much more at this form factor. I slip it in my pocket and take it with me when I go for aimless walks around town, to the cafe in the mornings on the weekend, to work every day to read during lunch... I never took my Kindle Oasis nearly that many places, as it necessitated some kind of bag to hold it. Definitely worth it, even if I am only utilizing like 10% of its "features".

      I also spent $350 on a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses last summer before a trip to Hawaii, and I can honestly say that even though I was initially sickened by the price, I do not regret it one bit, and I still love them. They're so much better than any random $100 pair I've had in the past. It was one of those things where I walked into a store last minute and very uninformed to try and find a new pair because I extremely inconveniently broke my only good pair 2 weeks before the trip and the company didn't repair them or sell spare lenses. Picked up a pair of MJ's without knowing how much they cost, put them on, absolutely LOVED them, then saw the price and was like "well fuck... I really want these", waffled it over for a week and 3 days, then rushed back to the store the day before my flight and bought them)

  • Had to get PC upgraded bcus old one don't work any more . Has enough VRAM for local image generation , ftmp don't hafta deal with limitations of online generation services anymore !

56 comments