Gadget Recommendations

Confessions from a lifetime of tech product obsessions

Every six months, men are overcome with an insatiable desire to buy a new gadget. It descends on us unexpectedly: the realization that our pour-over setup is incomplete; that we lack a slim wallet; that we really would work harder if we had a mechanical keyboard. In darker moments I’ve felt a hunger that could only be sated by a 6700 word Wirecutter electric toothbrush review.

This happens because it’s a joy to realize that some problem in your life is not a brute fact of the universe or an inherent flaw of your character, but awaits a technical solution. Often, this is cope. But when it isn’t– when a product genuinely removes a category of problem from your life that you thought you had to live with forever– the feeling is liberating.

In service to the public, I’d like to share the results of my obsessions over the years. These are products that I adore after much use and reflection. There’s a graveyard of half-interesting gadgets I returned or resold that didn’t make it here, but I hope you find some value in these.

Sleeping cool: The BedJet 3 Comfort System

My most bizarre gadget is the BedJet. As you can see in the above diagram (which has been ruthlessly mocked by my friends), it produces cold air for a more comfortable sleep. I ideally like to fall asleep at 68 degrees under a cozy blanket, but my wife prefers closer to 74. For years we went back and forth with one of us slightly uncomfortable depending on the season.

Marriage is about compromise– first about temperatures, but now about whether my “stupid bed fan thing” was worth buying. I think it’s great. My blanket airlock system lets me sleep cool and comfortable at night. I’ve genuinely noticed an improvement in my sleep quality, despite the absurdity of the product, and Daphne can set the thermostat.

BetJet’s website has endorsements from NFL Quarterbacks and Olympic medalists to prove that it’s still masculine to sleep with your special little bed fan. I imagine some people who buy it are steeped in a Bryan-Johnson-esque system of sleep optimization and wellness tracking. I offer you none of this: it is a decadent product designed for hedonistic comfort, but it works.

If you want a more DIY approach, near from twitter created a DIY bed cooling system using a fish tank cooler with some pumps and tubes. Their version cost $382 (more than the $220 I paid for my secondhand BedJet on Facebook marketplace) but near’s is more cyberpunk with a less bugman aesthetic, so I respect the move.

Sleeping painlessly: AcousticSheep SleepPhones

For about three years I slept with an Airpod in my ear to listen to podcasts while I fell asleep. This was a mistake. I would wake up a few times every night as I rolled over, crushing a piece of hard plastic into my ear. For some reason, it never even occurred to me that there might be a better way. I soldiered on through the pain.

My corner of the internet might call this a “low-agency” move. I wish that earlier on I had considered whether someone had already solved this problem… For example, by developing a soft Bluetooth headband that can play audio comfortably at night. I now enjoy the SleepPhones’ long battery life and decent sound quality. It can also double as an eye mask. My only gripe is that ~10% of the time the Bluetooth takes a few minutes to connect.

TofuXpress Tofu Press

Well pressed tofu is a completely different food than the wet mush that comes straight out of the container. Restaurants mostly get their delicious toothsome tofu by pressing it well. At first I thought the Xpress’ $50 price-tag was excessive, but after trying an alternative that uses elastic bands, or spending many nights propping pans or cans on tofu instead, I think you need the metal spring. In 20-30 minutes this one can reduce the size of tofu by about a third, and even a 5 minute press removes a lot of water.

The anti-meme: Tushy Ace Bidet Toilet Seat

Bidets are an anti-mimetic technology. No one wants to tell their friends how nice it is to spray themselves clean with warm water, or about the joys of not having to sit on a cold toilet seat. The result is that a few of us sheepishly hold on to secret knowledge about how to massively improve your quality of life. There is no efficient marketplace of ideas for butt spritzing.

I’ll be brave enough to say it: bidets are amazing. It’s insane that in 2025 most people in America’s solution to this… particular problem… is a wad of paper. I’ve had my Tushy Ace for four and a half years, and it still works great. It has moved to five different apartments with me at an estimated price of $0.24 per day of use so far. When I travel I’m reminded how the rest of you live and sadly shake my head. I’ll stop here, but just say that you should consider it.

🚨🚨🚨 GIVEWELL INTERLUDE 🚨🚨🚨

Now that I’ve confessed to the decadence of my cooled bed and heated bum, I want to briefly turn our attention to the world’s poorest people. For the price of all the items in this list ($2018), a donation to GiveWell’s top recommended charities could provide:

• A year of Vitamin A supplements (which mitigate one of the leading causes of childhood mortality in the developing world) to 1009 children, or;

• Preventative medicine for 228 children during malaria season, or;

• 338 bednets to families at risk of mosquito-borne illness, protecting them while they sleep for about two years each.

My donations through GiveWell are the most meaningful way I spend money. The gadgets in this article are fun, but improvements to my quality of life hit insanely diminishing returns. I have never gone without medical care. I have never been malnourished. If I looked a sickly child in the eyes and said “I’m sorry, my gadgets are 228 times more important than your malaria medicine,” I would be a sociopath.

It’s just so easy to forget how wealthy we are. If you have a post-tax income of $68,500, you are richer than 99% of people on earth. The global median income is $3,887 per year, and these figures are already purchasing-power adjusted. The world is full of preventable suffering and injustice.

To reconcile this, I set up a monthly recurring donation through Giving What We Can. Since it goes out each month, I barely notice that it’s there. I suspect that trying this yourself and reflecting on what it means for others will bring you more joy than any item on this list. That said, back to the gadgets.

The time I was most wrong: Loop Engage 2 Earplugs

When my wife first told me about Loop earplugs, I thought they were ridiculous. They claim to block out background noise like loud music or crowds, but allow you to still hear the person speaking in front of you, all while being nearly invisible. I thought none of this would work. I thought it would just be harder to hear anything and that you’d look ridiculous wearing them.

I was dead wrong. A few days after trying my wife’s, I bought a pair of my own. They really do tune out the background noise and improve my ability to focus on the person I’m speaking with in a loud environment. Claude says this works by making a “tiny acoustic channel to achieve flat attenuation, reducing decibels evenly across the frequency spectrum so speech stays intelligible.” Apparently this works because of the “inverse square law,” where nearby voices hit your ears with more intensity than diffuse background noise. I have no idea if that’s why they work, but they do. The clear Loops (pictured above) are also small enough and see-through enough to be barely noticeable. I’ve spoken to people who didn’t realize I was wearing them.

I especially enjoy these because I live in Washington DC. DC is full of networking events where rich people pay thousands of dollars to get staffers in crowded rooms with free drinks saying “huh? I can’t hear you.” The Loops are a pretty nonchalant way to avoid the half-smile-nod you give someone when you’re embarrassed to admit you didn’t hear what they said about data center policy. If you’re frequently in this situation, or just want a chill vibe sometimes, I think you should try the Loops.

I also like that the Loops are kind of cyberpunk. Why do we all agree to put up with the ears evolution gave us? We stand around shouting to each other in loud bars, but this is a technical problem that we can try to solve. We aren’t bound to our faulty human capabilities. If you see me at a happy hour in DC, feel free to check if I’m wearing these.

My white whale: the insatiable quest for a perfect e-reader

For at least 8 years I have yearned for a high quality dedicated reading/writing device. I want one that is enjoyable to use, can effortlessly load books or take notes, and has a responsive enough word processor for long form writing. A more advanced civilization would have solved this problem in 2003, but I still haven’t found a perfect solution.

While my Kindle was exciting when I was a teenager discovering libgen, it’s too small for deep work and just too large to fit comfortably into a pocket. The Xteink X4 has gone viral on twitter as a partial solution to this, but I haven’t tried it. In college I had a second-hand Remarkable 2 that I used to read thousands of pages, grade student papers, and sketch rough notes, but the e-ink screen was too unresponsive for writing. It flashed sporadically and had UI frictions that were frustrating enough to make longform writing unworkable.

However, I’m currently writing this post on the Daylight Computer. The “DC-1” was highly praised in the AI world, but received colder reviews from mainstream critics. It’s an Android tablet with a “LivePaper” black and white display that runs apps like Google Docs and web browsing, but allows me to keep off Slack and emails. So far in my two weeks with it, I’ve had highs and lows. The plastic casing on mine is not sealed properly around the top and right sides, which causes it to make a creaking noise sometimes. The build quality feels cheap, and they don’t have a case for sale to overcome this yet.

That said, everything else about it is fantastic so far. It’s a joy to read on, easy to load papers or books onto, and because it’s not a full e-ink screen it’s extremely responsive. The orange light for night-time reading took some getting used to, but now I’ve been spending an hour reading before bed almost every night. It’s by far the most pleasant and paper-like device I’ve tried. There’s probably some recency bias here, but I’m finding it easier to do chunks of deep work on this device than anything else I’ve used before, including a MacBook.

Lastly, the prepper 80/20 essentials: a hand crank radio and LifeStraws

There are some items that you hope you’ll never need, but are probably worth it in expectation to keep around. For me, this is to keep an emergency weather radio that can be manually powered in a crisis while also serving as a flashlight and phone charger. Similarly, I find it hard to store the 14 gallons of water per person that FEMA recommends for an emergency, but a few gallons and a LifeStraw to easily filter outdoor water is comforting to keep around.

Conclusion: visions of a gadget future

In one sense, I know my gadget habit is ridiculous. Much of this spending is frivolous. At the margin, there are better ways to use money, like donating to the global poor through GiveWell. I wrote this post in part because I think you might get value out of these items, but also as an ad for the merits of charitable donations.

That said, I dream of a future where new technical solutions to our daily problems never stop. As we ride a wave of technological progress, I hope I live to see new gadgets solving problems I barely even realized I had. We may see home robotics alleviate the drudgery of daily life, or innovations that make childcare and nursing less burdensome for those who are eager to start a family. We should even solve deeper failures like the limitations of our teeth– it’s insane that we spend about a day and a half of time brushing, flossing, and going to the dentist every year.

If we make it, maybe one day we’ll live in a society like the Culture series’ where technology has freed us from tedious obligations and the hardest problem is deciding what to do with all our freedom. Or maybe we’ll make it to a bizarre digital Matrioshka brain utopia without limitations, like in Accelerando. Until then, I’ll keep trying out a little gadget every six months or so.