A Fairphone when I have a fully functioning but old crappy Samsung phone.

Almost the exact same situation here. I got a running 92 f250 with the 460 for $1k to get me through winters since my little mazda will get stuck in the smallest amounts of snow. Ive since fallin in love with the truck and want to completely restomod it with modern parts but I have so much else I really should work on beforehand (including fixing up my mazda)

Buy a classical guitar.

I've been eyeing them for about ten years now but I don't play enough guitar to justify the cost just yet. At some point I'll probably just wake up one morning and buy one and play it plenty and wonder why I waited so long.

I've wanted to visit Italy for about 20 years now. Maybe some day. There's always some other need for the money and time.

Motorcycle. I had my previous one for 17 years and travelled many kilometers with it. However, it has worn down up to the point of the replacement parts being more valuable than what the bike would sell for. In other words, it was a write-off. As I ride my bicycle to work and I have too little leisure time already, I simply cannot justify buying my own motorcycle again.

Fortunately, my FIL has several and will lend me one if I want to.

Literally anything. Clothing. A bed. A UPS so I can safely update my six year out of date BIOS that is causing issues snd the constant, random power outages here don't make me feel safe enough to just do it whenever. A car. Insurance for a car. (Or being able to afford to live in a city with good public transit) Gender affirming care. A place to live. Privacy. Safety.

Oh yeah and my cancer meds that I am forced to live in poverty for and the threat of losing then dangles over my head if I lose my medicaid. Which is possible now.

Fuck you

I was about to buy ram last year. I wasted time trying to get thermal pillows that I'm not even fucking using.

THANKS SMART BUDGETING AND FINANCIAL MATURITY.

Ya same here. I really want the frame and I could afford it and all, but I'm saving up for actual milestone things that I simple can't afford to wait on. It really blows.

So many fountain pens.

Get something you like that can fit a JoWo #6 nib and just get a number of nibs and stick whatever nib type you need into said pen! That'll cover a lot!

I understand that you may be getting an unusual amount of rain down there this winter from the strong El Niño.

New front porch, ours is rapidly deteriorating.

Most of the most frustrating things I want are home renovations. I wish we could do them & get more years with them, but it's way out of reach at the moment.

A car.
I live a few kms away from the nearest town and drive a borrowed one (with a horrendous gas mileage...)

I'd kind of like to get a pen plotter that can use fountain pens.

The problem is that I don't really want to spend a lot of time callibrating and tinkering with it or deal with devices that phone home. Bantam Tools makes some, but they're substantially more expensive than similar devices.

And I'd kind of like to have one with a pressure sensor that can automatically callibrate draw height for a given run. And an automated tool switcher with some kind of standard attachment to stick on various pens. Not really commercial, off-the-shelf stuff for that. People engineering their own DIY stuff with 3D-printed parts, yes.

And I don't really know whether I'd use it much or if it'd just wind up gathering dust. In all honesty, I have three existing alternative options, all of which are cheaper:

• Write software to generate plot, get digital output. Doesn't have the neat look physical pens produce.

• Same, but print output. Same drawback.

• Generate image, print, manually trace with fountain pen using light tablet. Have done this, but it's tedious and time-consuming, and my human hands induce imperfections.

I certainly do not need one. But dammit, I'd like to play around with one.

EDIT: Oh, and one with an automated paper feeder would be cool too, but that immediately sharply limits options and increases price.

Home assistant setup.

We have a few Alexa and a ring camera, neither of which I trust but dont have the money or wherewithall to replace with something closed

Yeah. I am about to buy some tarps and staple them to my roof.

My experience from radio scanner use is that most of what hams actually do with their radios is talk with other hams about ham radios. :-)

In terms of covering visual arc, you can stick a smaller display closer.

I used to use a tiny laptop cantilevered out in front of my eyeballs.

Less power and less heat, besides being cheaper!

AC...$20k

If you don't have one already, a window AC unit is a whole lot cheaper than a whole-house AC unit, and it may be a sufficient solution to have a cool room. Most of a house doesn't get used much in terms of people spending time in it.

You have inherited the family home...

...payments.

Unfortunately I'm at the other end of the pen. I've got a dip pen with different nibs for that, just thicken the ink as needed.

I want to know how the different pens feel in my hand. I want to see their shiny lines on my desk. I want the magnetic click clack of a Monteverde Axis right next to the sleek and unique Pilot MYU.

A fighter jet would be really cool for bringing to the daycare

I have really been looking at trying to get one myself. I have an electric scooter which is great around town, but I want something that can take me farther (my dad lives about 30km / 19 miles from me and I hardly get out to see him).

Using a scanner all across the US during road trips, ham people have only 3 topics:

• radio equipment
• the weather
• what they did last weekend or plan to do next weekend

I love it

I recently bought a Takamine classical guitar for $200. Not to say that is affordable for everyone, but I think it was a good price and the guitar sounds great

I currently play in my living room and have my PC running to my TV. I had to learn the hard way (screen burn) tvs are not monitors.

I bought a Couch Master a couple years ago when I had a well paying job.

5 years ago, I'd be out every night systematically removing flock cameras. I have the skills, the tools, and the experience avoiding getting caught. Instead I told myself these things weren't going to happen and these skills will ever bring me joy. So I cleaned up, got married, finally went to college. I have a career I'm dedicated to and it isn't even dubiously legal.

I see why we aren't out burning things in the streets now. I can't drive 5 over without worrying that a traffic stop will land my wife in alligator Auschwitz for being the wrong color. I can finally afford to buy food for my kid and it's subject to the whim of people who want my kind dead. I don't care about everyone else enough to risk what little I actually have.

I've been eyeing a Cordoba C9 or Yamaha GC12C for awhile. Kind of figure I'd save it to treat myself, celebrate a promotion or something.

I thought about getting something more affordable like you've described just to scratch the itch, and maybe that'd be better than depriving myself this long. But I guess having a luxury to look forward to has a positive psychological effect on me.

Depending on the model you probably got a great deal on that Takamine too

The new Framework Desktop with 192GB unified memory, specifically for LLM inference. I've looked at the numbers and there's no scenario for me in which it's economically sensible to upgrade from 20GB gpu vram + rent EU API inference for larger models. Even if the tokens became more expensive by factor of 10 overnight, by the time the hardware paid for itself it would already long be obsolete.

It's an impressive machine, but I just can't justify the purchase.

Once you get into fingerstyle, it's hard to come back !

Oh hundreds of things.

Is there not some kind of regulation that limits the topics that can be discussed over amateur radio ? Iirc its restricted to, well the radio equipment and other hobby stuff

Double strapped and reinforced tie downs

IIRC they can't use it for commercial use, and I think that they may not be able to encrypt it. But in theory, they could talk about pretty much anything. Like, it could span everything that you might see on Reddit or something like that. But...when you get a lot of people together whose common factor is that they're all interested in ham radios, they tend to talk about ham radios. :-)

I was supposed to take my first real vacation with my wife. We had a honeymoon, but it was mostly going to the US for her to meet my family in person. I am almost certainly losing my job, so even a hot bath (many in Japan take one every night) and heat/AC have become a luxury now. The problem is, I need the vacation because my mental state is bad, but I can't take it because I need to save all of the money I can to hopefully not lose the house. If I lose the house, I die.

You can do this with most Lamy pens, too, which is where I wound up apparently by sheer happenstance. Do I have a $12 steel nib shoved into my Dialog right now beacuse Reasons? Why, yes I do. (If I sold its stock nib, which is currently safely tucked away in a box, I could probably use that to finance four or five new pens.)

I'm sensing a pattern, here.

frame

Wanted a steam frame, but I guess I'm keeping my OG HTC Vive at this rate

I have been putting off buying new SSDs to replace internal HDDs that I've had for at least 5 years. They're starting to fill up with crap I've been hoarding over the years and quite frankly, I don't want to pay x3 or x4 times the amount for something I know doesn't cost that much.

It's all just flash NAND. That shit is everywhere. They can't tell me it costs $400 to make one 4TB 'cause I know it doesn't. That's utter BS price fixing.

I'm praying to Primus that my HDDs can outlast this hell hole we're in rn and at least give me the chance to replace just one of them.

Don't even get my started on NAS like Synology. That's a whole different rage bait.

To: Santa

A VR headset, an AMD GPU for my PC, a 4TB SSD, an electric car, my own house, a clothes dryer, a dishwasher machine, a recumbent exercise kit, a pull up bar, new shoes that aren't falling apart and don't hurt my feet, a bedframe for my floor mattress, an electric blanket for winter, my $700 per month medications I had to give up, and a partner (they love me).

Kind Regards, Zarobi

Solar everything.

Are highway-capable electrics with reasonable range cheap yet?

Hospitals tend to have uninterrupted power supplies.

Also motorbikes are cheaper and cooler than cars.

Then again if your health isn't great maybe a bike is a bad idea.

Hospitals tend to have uninterrupted power supplies.

...what does this have to do with anything?

A camera for bird watching, a new PC for playing games and VR, a second pad for stepmania, and more thing I can't think of right now.

The thing is that it is not as much that I can't justify those expenses as that the older I get, I realise that I'm fine without them, I don't need any of those things, so I keep postponing them.

😭 i want so bad but these times it makes no sense

I put off buy new hard drives for my NAS. I have an 8 bay and slowly filled it over the years with 6tb drives since they were about $200 at that time. Now that I ran out of that space I started replacing the 6tb one by one with 12tb which at the time was around $200 as well. Ive needed a new HD for years now but couldnt really afford it, but now I really need a new one and I REALLY can't afford it... this hobby is essentially dead at these prices. Ill continue to purge data and hope in a few years some miracle happens and prices drop again. I also hope these current drives hold out without issues...

You can bring your PC there to update the bios if its portable enough.

Can I do that and not have kids

Certain games, for example, Metaphor ReFantazio. Expensive even on sale and the whole "you do not own it despite paying for it" thing. Books and manga; I truly want to purchase a lot of books and manga, but it is just so expensive. Even on sale or secondhand. For example, I would love to purchase: No Game No Life, Smoking Behind the Supermarket, Witch Hat Atelier, and Hey Boy! Let's take a break? Manga/light novels.