What's one product––under $250––that's changed your life?

Barbecue Pit Controller. Controls a temp sensor and fan on a smoker to maintain temp. I do embedded HW all day and just kept thinking, why buy this I can make this.

But I never made one. So I finally bought one and it was the best value for money for anything I've ever purchased.

With this I no longer have to keep a close watch on the smoker. I can't sleep with out checking it in the middle of the night, I can run errands during the day. This lets me run the smoker more often and in weather I normally wouldn't.

I can and occasionally do still control the temp manually. It still makes for a great lazy day, but I no longer have to get the same results.

Last year I bought a Garmin Forerunner 245 smartwatch. I have notifications totally disabled, I don’t really use it as an actual smartwatch. But I’ve found its measurements of my heart rate and stress levels (via heart rate variability) really interesting and useful for planning when to exercise, working out why I can’t get to sleep, and monitoring illness. I had an incident involving significant blood loss over a several week period and it was very useful having such detailed heart rate data throughout.

I can beat that by 3 orders of magnitude. My father told me I owe my life to a broken $0.25 condom. So I gave him a quarter.

Perhaps we ought to think about all the things we don't need instead. We have too much stuff already that hardly improves out lives.

Zagg keyboard for my iPad Air. It slides onto the edge and turns the iPad into a small usable laptop. Backlight keyboard makes it usable in any lighting condition. It also works well for bed reading propped on my chest. From 2014-2020 I went through just 4 of these keyboards. Switched to Air2 and still using them today. They are just wonderful.

Fancy ricecooker with a keep warm function. It's really convenient to be able to prepare a ton at once and then having it available at the drop of a hat for the next 2 days. It has even led to a decent reduction in my fast food consumption.

Multifocal Contact Lenses