Thought it would be fun to share useful things that I’ve bought for myself, as inspired by Andrew Connor, Alexey Guzey, Sam Bowman, Vitalik, and nudging from Vivek. Many other lists online are also quite comprehensive and I have taken many things from them. Most stuff is from Amazon or eBay, but I’ve linked to the cheapest place online I’ve found it.

This alive document will be updated every time I buy something incredible or use wonderful software.

Table of Contents

Household
Bathroom
Kitchen
Clothing
Sleep
Backpack
Travel
Fun
Software
Small PC Build
Things I Want

Household

Heated Mosquito Bite Healer - $25. This is probably the only mosquito treatment that works for me – it just applies extremely strong heat briefly, which seems to denature the protein in mosquito saliva and stops the itch.
Candle Warming Lamp - $15. Makes candles last a lot longer, but keeps the scent just as strong. You also don’t need to rummage for a match to start your candle.
Molly’s Suds Laundry Detergent - $20. Cheaper than tide pods, and uses cleaner ingredients without any noticable quality difference. Since I’m worried about normal detergent having caused allergies, I decided to move away from standard harsh detergent ingredients.
Chromecast - $30. Only really useful to keep TV on ambient mode, flipping through Google Photos albums of me and all of my friends.
Heated Japanese Kotatsu Table + 300W Adapter - $200. Imagine a table with a heater inside and a comforter around it, but a flat surface to work on. It’s incredibly warm and cozy, especially in the winter. Takes a few weeks to ship from Japan, but is totally worth it.
Straight Pull Up Bar - $25. I didn’t believe this stayed up, then used it myself and was convinced. Unlike the around-the-doorframe ones that might not find a good hook, this one fits in every single doorframe and works very well (though slightly damages the paint, same as any other pullup bar).

Bathroom

MUJI Nail Clipper with Case - $10. Has a plastic case to keep all your nails inside the clippers. I no longer use normal clippers.
UV Mune 400 by La Roche Posay - $32. Because the FDA is so slow to approve new ingredients, most sunscreen in the USA use endocrine disruptors and are actually extremely bad for you. Korean ones (like Anessa Sunscreen - $30, or Beauty of Joseon Sunscreen - $26) use new and way better ingredients, and I have both of these as well. The UV Mune 400 specifically has the broadest spectrum coverage of any sunscreen, doesn’t use endocrine disruptors, and is my top rec right now. Apparently TikTok went wild over Beauty of Joseon recently too. Good sunscreen daily drops UV exposure, which helps one of the biggest drivers of aging/wrinkles (UV hits you even through windows).
Aleavia Body Wash - $20. Most body wash has the very harmful SLS in it, but this one doesn’t and has a short ingredients list. I’m not convinced the prebiotics do anything if immediately washed away, but pretty sure they are not harmful.
Aleavia Body Lotion - $25. Most body lotion damages your skin microbiome, but this one has a very short natural ingredients list and claims to damage the microbiome less. Cerave is also decent, but has a worse smell and feel.
The Softest Bathroom Mats - $20. High pile and insanely soft and plush.
Double Line Floss Picks - $15. These make flossing fun and are useful on the go – it’s super easy to grab on your way out, and you can see all your tooth gunk stuck between the two strings. Normal floss cuts off circulation to my finger and so I never do it, and water flossers are too annoying to refill and carry around. Humble Co is the only PFAS-free one I found.
Mint Shampoo and Conditioner - $23. Spent way too long finding hair products that were SLS-free (not too harsh), EWG-approved (no bad ingredients), and smelled good.
Stannous Fluoride Toothpaste - $15. Stannous flouride and hydroxyapatite has repeatedly been shown to be more effective than normal toothpaste at cavity prevention. This Crest toothpaste is basically the same price and texture so should be a no-brainer toothpaste replacement. Thanks to Rob Wiblin for the rec.
Travel Toiletry Kit(Cheaper 3 Pack) - $15/$6. I dump shampoo/conditioner/bodywash in here before I travel, since I prefer to use my own.
Aluminum Shower Caddy with Tension Rod - $45. Most “rust free” products on Amazon are all made with stainless steel that does rust, and the reviews reflect that. Since this is all aluminum, it can’t rust, and all the reviews confirm that it actually never rusts.

Kitchen

Clear Whey - $44. Released on the market just this year (and invented ~4 years ago), this clear whey perfectly dissolves into water and has very little taste (a tinge of sour, but nowhere near as strong or thick as whey). Incredible.
Kitchen Torch + Fuel - $16. Way more fun than a lighter or matchbox for all things fire. The Hacksmith minisaber also works here if you want to shell out an additional $30 for better aesthetics.
Water Bottle Cleaning Tablets - $8. Put into your water bottle for 15 min to clean out the gunk.
Electric Dish Wand - $15. Makes it fun to handwash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I previously recommended a $4 handheld dishwand.
Gooseneck Kettle - $35. All-metal kettle that sparks joy (we hate microplastics).
Ramen Bowls - $40. Sparks joy, useful for most soupy foods.
Wilde Chips - $6. These are made with chicken not potatos, and so have a great taste and insane macros on protein.
Brita Longlast Filters - $35 for 2. Little known scam is that the white Brita filters are just for taste and only filter microplastics not metals, you need to get the blue ones. Lab testing report explained here.

I also use Omega 3 + Vitamin D each morning, Magnesium Glycinate each night (it helps me sleep ~30 min less per night roughly), and dissolvable Psyllium Husk ideally daily to help with fiber for cholesterol and gut health. I use Cookunity for meal delivery but I’ve heard Locale is better and will switch to it soon.

Sleep

Oura Ring Gen 3 - $300 new or ~$75 used, + $72/year. I bought the Oura to feel comfortable consuming caffeine; I don’t want to lose access to my own body’s tiredness signals, but Oura’s recommendations for sleep substitute them well. Oura’s sleep staging is research-level accurate. My one issue is I wish their timezone tracking was better; it often screws up data when flying, which is when I most want the data. I’d recommend to get a used Gen 3 off of eBay for ~$75; Gen 4 has marginal improvements. The Superhuman Air has poor quality data and terrible reviews on Reddit and I wouldn’t recommend it. Additional notes in footnotes¹.
Super Soft Sleep Mask - $20. I’ve used dozens of different sleep masks and these are the best combination of soft + blackout.
Mattress Protector - $20: Waterproof cover between you and the mattress.
Microwavable Heated Eye Mask, Single Eye - $15. I can alternate my eyes with this and keep working, and warm comrpess is very useful to prevent dry eye when looking at screens. I don’t actually use it for sleep, but alternate eyes during the day while I work, max 20 min/eye/day. This company has real tech to make it feel moist which is great.
Three-Layer Eye Drops - $30: Your eye has a mucus layer, a lipid (oil) layer, and an aqueous (water) layer. Most eye drops are just water, but this gives all 3 so is healthier + more comfortable. I use these in the mornings and carry them for dry days.
Disposable Warm Compress Eye Mask - $15: Starts as soon as you open the package and are surprisingly moist. Useful when I’m travelling.
Moisture Chamber Eye Seals - $45. My dry eye doctor recommended that when I’m on the computer a lot, to browse with these instead to maintain eye moisture. You can also just use goggles, but these result in notably more moisture for me. My only wish is that they were better-fitting.

Backpack

Portable Charger with Cables + Outlet Built In - $25. The same price and capacity as the Anker equivalent, but comes with cables and an outlet built-in so no auxilliary things to carry around. I initially recommended a $15 cable-only one from Sam Bowman.
Laptop + Phone Charging Brick that Stores Power - $70. This is pricier than other USB-C/USB to wall outlets, but incredibly convenient – it charges itself while its in the wall, so you can keep using it even without an outlet around! Outputs 65W to quickly charge a Mac as well (but only when it’s plugged in, which is annoying but probably still state-of-the-art charging tech). Original rec from Andrew Connor.
Osprey Talon 22 - $160. Backpacking backpack that I use everyday. It has a few key straps that make the weight feel a lot lighter, especially above-the-shoulder and hip straps that make the weight fall on your hips and chest, not back. One disadvantage is that there’s no dedicated laptop pocket, so I use a tablet sleeve to separate it from my other things.
Sidecar iPad Mount for Laptop - $35. Lets you mount your iPad on the side of your laptop as an extended display. Useful for traveling without a monitor. Shoutout to Vivek for the rec.
Portable Credit Card Charger - $60. This is about 3 credit cards thick, and so fits in my wallet and charges my phone to 30% pretty quick. Useful backup to always have around.
EarOS One Concert Earplugs - $40. Developed with the MIT Acoustic Lab, this gives far higher quality audio than jamming foam earplugs into my ears. The crowd agrees with me, and one-off reviews say it’s better than the popular alternatives.
90° Prism Glasses - $15. Let you look forwards and see downwards, making using your phone much less taxing on your neck.
Mini Sim + Cable Box - $10. Has a SIM switcher, and small adapters nicely laid out. I carry this with a few USB to USB C adapters seperately.
Contoured Ear Plugs - $18. Normal earplugs don’t fit me that well and usually fall out when I sleep. These don’t, are super cheap, and are softer than normal earplugs. I stopped needing melatonin to sleep after starting to use these.
Beaded Laptop Wrist Rest - $20. More comfortable for wrists on laptop + useful for carpal tunnel (before I cured myself with Sarno), and now I can’t type without them.
Cheap Apple Pencil 2 - $30. You give up variable pressure detection but and pay 5x less, still magnetically charges. Useful as a backup for my iPad.
Bose 700 Noise Cancelling Headphones - $200. Can pair to my phone and laptop at once, USB-C charging, excellent active noise cancellation. The one issue is that on-headphone taps are sometimes either too sensitive or not sensitive enough, but I don’t use them much anyways. Bought on eBay for a 66% discount, I love the Eclipse colorway.
Airtag Card Holder - $8. Shaped like a card, with a circle in the middle to hold airtags. I use it to ensure airtags don’t fall out of my passport cover and are easier to locate in my wallet + backpack.

I also have an iPad Air + Tablet Sleeve for notes and extra pockets, and a Kindle Paperwhite Kids for distraction-free books. I use Calibre on my laptop to format and load in arbitrary epubs and mobis from online. I also have an M3 Air laptop.

Travel

Portable Stool - $18. Fits in a large pocket or under your jacket, and folds out into a full stool that is very useful at concerts, in trains, or any other useful long travel where you might want to sit.
Portable Jump Starter - $20. I keep this in my car trunk for in case I need to jump start my car, and also to charge my phone/laptop if I’m in a pinch.
Foldable Bed Mosquito Net - $35. Goes over your bed, and you sleep inside – mosquitos can’t get you at night, and when you wake up they will all be on the surface and you can eliminate them from inside. Also folds to be roughly the size of a single pair of pants.
Car Phone Charging Mount - $20. Goes on your car AC vent, and the USB port plugs into the mount itself so that your phone can wirelessly charge; no more fiddling with wires when driving.
Switch-compatible USB-C <> HDMI Hub - $15. This HDMI/USB hub for your USB C port also doubles as a dock-less way to mirror a Nintendo Switch to a projector without a dock (which isn’t possible with most adapters).

Fun

Proxmark 3 RFID Cloner - $75. Designed by the veritable and prolific Samy Kamkar. Quick to setup and it clones basically all cards I throw at it. The popular Flipper is substantially worse at accurately cloning and emulating cards.
Glass Pixelator - $40. A small piece of glass that when you look through it, pixelates naturally whatever’s on the other side. You can find a cheaper plastic one for $30 on Aliexpress that worked fine for me.
Olfactory Water Bottle - $25 + $6/15L. Emits a smell near your nose, so that it feels like you’re having flavored water. Actually works well for me, but worried about how it came with heat warnings about using its plastic bottle outdoors.
RFID Ring - $30. Clone any card onto this, then just tap with your finger to use it. Rumor is Oura Gen 4 will have this.
Colored Flame Birthday Candles - $7. Cheap, simple, and cool on birthdays. You can also get them for bonfires.
Joycon Controller Grips- $10. Turn each Nintendo Switch joycon into a mini controller for cheap.
Stained Glass Umbrella - $20. Makes a cool pattern in light sun.
Kava powder - $20. An alternative kickback substance that does not have the same GAB-B receptor binding as alcohol, so does not cause hangovers.
3Blue1Brown Sugar Demo - $40. With this 1.5ft vase and these two polarizers with a bike flashlight, you can recreate the beautiful light spiral from his video.
Extremely Small Wallet Pen - $7. This ~1mm wide, ~4 inch pen fits in my wallet and is useful in a pinch or when geocaching.
Under the Door Tool - $35. Open any door. Useful to retrofit with a hook from a clotheshanger so it works on all handles.
UV Coverage Mirror - $40. Use to see where UV damage on your skin is (only if you have light skin) and if you applied sunscreen well enough.

My favorite board games are Decrypto (a word game that’s about communication, that’s way deeper than Codenames), Smallworld (vaguely like Risk, but way more dynamic and fun), Cascadia (a surprisingly complex wildlife placing game), and Hanabi (team communication game). Fort is also great. I’ve been recommended Paleo, Terraforming Mars, Forbidden Desert, and 7 Wonders but haven’t tried them.

Clothing

Vogmask Face Masks - $20. Aaron Collins independently tested thousands of face masks for filtration and comfort, and Vogmask is the best filtering cloth mask by a huge margin. Designed by burners for the Burning Man dust, it also maintains high filtration for a few washes. I used to recommend the Enro but it did very poorly on this independent testing. I use it in any place with asbestos risk as well; it’s not a cure-all but it’s better than any other mask for that.
Lactose Intolerance Fart Stopping Underwear or Shreddies - $50. These make lactose intolerance farts way less intense for others around me, but I found that the separate filters are more effective than the built-in filters. The Shreddies have a custom pocket so I can remove the filter when I wash it. I recommend to wear another pair of underwear inside so you don’t dirty the filters.
Prescription Glasses - $25 for 3 or EyeBuyDirect for $20 each: Turns out you can get prescription glasses (and sunglasses) super cheap on Amazon. These are a good fit for my slightly slimmer face. After my prescription became more complicated, I switched to EyeBuyDirect.
Elastic Laces - $10 for 2 pairs: These make it really easy to take off and put on shoes, and look identical to normal laces. Lifesaver for my sneakers.
Carsickness Glasses - $15. These look ridiculous and alien-like but it’s the only thing that works for two of my friends (and half of Tiktok apparently) swear that it works for bumpy car rides and carsickness, by aligning your sense of motion to your eyes.
Shirt Stays - $13. Connect your dress shirt to your socks. Critical for formal dress shirts for me, to avoid it bunching up and look bad.
Neck Gaiter - $15. Tighter and smaller than a scarf, super soft, and critical in cold weather.

Favorite brands include ASOS Collusion, AliExpress finds, and Emma Atterbury’s hats.

Software

Mullvad VPN: Cheap at $5/mo, and the VPN that all my privacy-conscious security expert friends use. They are committed to not logging data, and have successfully resisted search warrants in the past, and is the only such VPN with this kind of privacy record except for Proton.
Bitwarden: Free and open-source password manager. Has pretty good UI and integrations, and one-click switching from any other password manager. Has never been hacked.
Privacy.com: Make one-time burner credit cards with limits. I use this for automatically billing subscriptions, or sketchy sites that need credit cards for signup, since then I don’t need to remember to cancel.
Typio Reboot: Save form history in Chrome when a tab closes or refreshes.
Copyclip 1: Saves all clipboard history in an easy-to-copy place. I use it daily. Avoid the bloated newer version of the app.
Tempus: Timed Youtube Comments: Pop up a sidebar on your YouTube where comments with timestamps appear at that timestamp.
Bypass Paywalls Chrome Clean: Read paywalled articles.
Get Off Those Sites: You predict the expected time on your site and it’ll turn it black and white after that time, and also log the actual amount of time that you spend on that site.
Tactiq: Takes automatic transcripts of any Google Meet or Zoom meeting in browser along with AI actionables and summaries. No weird agent joins your calls or calendar meetings, it just messages the chat and is fully in the background.
ShareGPT: Share your ChatGPT conversations.
My List of Software Ideas: I put all my extra software ideas here, and currently pay bounties on each one from old internship money. Help donate to it via Github Sponsors or Venmo me! About 15/100 have been built so far.

I enable these chrome flags to name windows, fill PDF forms, and save passwords with two phase login.

chrome://flags/#window-naming
chrome://flags/#pdf-form-save
chrome://flags/#username-first-flow

I have various smaller bash settings, brew packages, and Chrome experimental flags that are really useful on my dev setup Github repo as well.

Small PC Build

32GB DDR5 RAM - $80. Standard RAM.
Mini ITX Motherboard - $200. This is what will determine if you have a small (ITX), medium (ATX) or big PC.
SF750 Power Supply - $165. Enough to comfortably run a high end GPU with everything else.
i5 12400F IBM CPU - $160. You are optimizing for heat; the bigger and later gen CPUs run hotter, and this is extremely fast, better than lower tier i7s, and doesn’t need any extra cooling.
2TB NVMe - $140. Fast and cheap SSD that directly attaches to your motherboard.

I also use a 4070 Super and a Dan A4 Case. Build video and more detailed part breakdowns here.

Things I Want

These are things I’ve stopped myself from buying so far, but they seem intriguing…
Space Saver Compression Bags - $13. These bags have a one way vent when you compress them, so are useful to tightly pack clothes in suitcases. Good gift for people who travel a lot.

Bad Things

These did not work for me.
Hair Clipper with a Vacuum - $40. I hate cleaning the sink every time I shave. Recommended by this post. It only vacuumed 30% of hair for me, was useless.
Vibrating Electric Toothbrush - $20. Lasts for 180 brushes per AA, doesn’t require traveling with a bulky toothbrush charger. Did not rotate like Oral-B, vibrated instead, which was more uncomfortable and not useful for cleaning.
Spiderman Webshooters - -$30. Magnetically grab your keys from your couch (after aimming poorly 4 times). Completely impractical but fun gift.
Pop-up Wallet with RFID Shielding - $42. Click a button, and up to 6 cards pop up in order. Pretty nifty (unfortunately I carry a lot of weird stuff in my wallet like earplugs etc so I don’t use it).
Masterworks - $500. Fractional investment into art pieces. This is fun but you should only buy on secondaries; there’s very little liquidity and the discount on secondaries is frequently 50%+. You will lose a lot of money.

These are Amazon reflinks, but I don’t let that influence my recommendations, and I will still link to a different site if it’s cheaper there.

Footnotes