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Ask HN: Best work-related purchase under $1000?

3 points by mittermayr ↗ HN
End of year is coming up, which aligns with the end of the tax year where I'm currently at. Tax regulations allow for sub $1,000 purchases to be written off immediately, and I have had an okay year, so I am wondering if there are any work-related purchases you made that turned out to be a fantastic decision, and/or something you can highly recommend.

Especially interested in things that turned out to be surprisingly worth the purchase.

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Things I've purchased that were absolutely worth it:

CalDigit TS3 Plus

A VESA monitor mount (even though the monitor came with a stand, it still made a huge difference having the flexible arm, and a clean desk underneath it).

The Sony XM4s are fantastic, I wish the mic would be video-call worthy, but it isn't.

The Awair air quality monitor (although I am hearing a lot of terrible things about the company and their misguided crypto sidequest).

An USB3 HDMI frame grabber off Amazon. I use this to plug in any kind of external device (incl. laptops with other operating systems on it) when I am teaching and need to share a workflow off a Windows PC or vice-versa.

A Magsafe puck (I was hell-bent never to buy one), combined with a desk-stand that houses it. It is actually insanely nice to just drop the phone onto this and pick it up and never worry about plugging in/out.

A super long (4-5m?, ~15 feet) USB-C cable. I bring this anywhere I go, it's so nice to plug in and not have to sit by the wall waiting for a charge-up.

Edit: Herman Miller Aeron. Even though I sometimes feel a bit annoyed by the chair forcing me how to sit a certain way when I want to sit in another way, I have sat on every single office chair I came across and within seconds realised that they're inferior to the Aeron.

Things I felt were okay, but didn't live up to my expectations:

Logitech Brio 4k (camera seems ok, software is a disaster and as soon as you go for manual exposure, the frame rate drops to about a frame a second).

Yubikey (this will cause some drama here), I should have bought two, only got one to try it out, but have never used it after setting it up. I worry too much (still) that I mess up and I lose access to important stuff. Still looking for a good top-tier use-case for it (not into crypto).

Sketchapp. This is a while back, but they kept pumping out new versions so quickly, I felt like it would've been better to go straight to Figma or similar at the time.

A medium-sized brightness/color-temp adjustable battery-operated light panel off Amazon for video calls. Wearing glasses, it's impossible to use as a direct light, so best I can do is illuminate a nearby white wall and use it as an indirect light. Battery life went from several hours to half an hour in less about a year, so not particularly happy with it.

Samsung Frame TV: This was mostly for my home, but I was hoping to use it for work occasionally. It's amazing to me just how poor the TV experience still is, in 2022. Crashes often, minimal configurability, the ambient/digital picture frame feature is so gimmicky, it's a joke, switching TV channels takes a good solid second of redrawing the screen, etc. etc.

Tile tags. I loved the concept, I felt bad when Apple almost literally ran them over recently, but I kept replacing batteries literally all the time and the app kept telling me within a few short weeks or months to replace the battery yet again. It's been more of a fleet-like-management issue than the concept itself.

4 comments

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bell-cot
I've not priced them recently, but do you have a good, ergonomic chair?
mittermayr
GREAT suggestion, forgot that on my list. I have the Herman Miller Aeron, the first one and recently upgraded to the remastered version. Biggest recommendation for those who are still looking for one would be to keep an eye on second-hand marketplaces. I got mine for a fraction of the price, once from someone who seems to have had no idea about it and just got it off of work, and another one from someone who got sent two from their company abroad and they didn't want it back. Also, much to my surprise, HM does participate in Black Friday sales, at least they did this year, and I think they took off about 15%, which was quite the surprise.
chiefalchemist
Re: Yubikey

I have multiple. A backup at home. Another at a friend's. My primary I wear around my neck at all times (sans a shower and working out).

Get a couple more, you'll worry 100x less. Money well spent (in peace of mind).

Other than that, a standing desk and/or a better quality chair.

mittermayr
Ah, interesting - genuinely curious:

Assumption: You're abroad, with your Yubikey, in some weird scenario you either lose or break your Yubikey. You're supposed to access your accounts for the rest of your stay, what is the solution here? Or do you bring multiple keys with you and just grab another one from your suitcase? I'm curious about a realistic (not extreme) scenario where a key breaks or gets lost, with the physical backup key not being within reach. Do the backup keys often need to be synced in some way and kept updated?

I use 1Password with a backup at a trusted location, that can be sent digitally to me (but it also in the cloud), and all I need to get into my accounts is the password to recover if my laptop gets stolen or breaks.

I wonder if what you say is the only way to make Yubikey work in a travel scenario, to just have multiples of them with you, or if I am grossly misunderstanding it, still.